“Something feels off,” outstanding journalist Sharyl Attkisson posted on Twitter. She didn’t elaborate on what she meant. And yet we all share that sense that the wheels are coming off. The progress we once took for granted is in question. There’s too much going wrong at once. We feel powerless to do anything about it.
More than that, we’re guilt-tripped for seeking some kind of reversal.
What’s more, it all feels deliberate, like some people at the top intend this, for reasons we don’t quite follow. Inflation is a good case in point. It’s the single most preventable economic disease, yet the elites did nothing to prevent it. And now the only way they can think to fix it is by imposing more misery on the public.
Daily, we watch and listen to powerful elites and await some sign that they share our worry about the future even a slight bit. But it doesn’t happen. Instead, we’re bombarded with messages that the economy is healthy, only big media knows the truth, the government has our best interests at heart, the war on the virus was perfectly executed, and now the ruling classes will turn their awesome talents toward managing the global climate.
Things get stranger by the day. YouTube is suddenly filled with megastars teaching us how easy, fun, and delicious it is to eat bugs and spiders. It’s almost become a virtue signal to make such videos. The fashionable elites very easily migrated from Covidian hysteria—telling us to stay home and stay safe and then mask up when out and then get four shots—to a purely symbolic standing with Ukraine to now eating bugs.
Have they lost their minds? Those of us burning with curiosity make our way to the website of the World Economic Forum and discover that all of this is the new way we’re supposed to live.
This is all part of what Dr. Anthony Fauci has called for: “Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”
Fauci has been the single most influential public intellectual, probably the world over, in the past three years. No one ever voted for him. And yet he seems to be getting his way.
Do you object? Would you rather have your freedom, rights, and prosperity back? You’re on the wrong side of history, they keep telling us.
The trendline toward this new techno-primitivism by force isn’t entirely new. In the 1990s, many of us began to notice a strange feature of federal regulation on water, energy, and health. These are the sectors essential to life itself. Their well-functioning has long been a marker of higher civilization. Any society in history that innovated great water transport and sewage, energy production, and medical service, we consider to have achieved something great in overcoming the state of nature.
In the latter years of the 20th century, and continuing into the new century, regulations in the United States (and around the world) began to chip away at the ability of producers to deliver these services well. It began in a small way, with things such as regulations on showerheads, toilets, water, detergent, and the energy consumption of appliances. It gradually moved to water heaters. Later, there were regulatory attacks on coal and fossil fuels, all in the name of climate science.
Later, this regulatory push took after health care provision with ever more invasive controls that disabled choice and private provision. Getting health insurance became more difficult and expensive, and the packages became heavily controlled by central authority. They said it was all for our own good. But we couldn’t help but notice a pattern of degradation. The stuff in our homes didn’t work as well as it used to. Medical services became less responsive to individual needs. Even the lighting in our homes and offices became less humane because regulations controlled technological choices.
Putting it all together, I gained a scary picture of how these marks of civilization seemed to be under some kind of attack. No longer did politicians celebrate growth, prosperity, innovation, and expansion. There emerged a new romanticism associated with deprivation, austerity, and doing without. A new moralism emerged to condemn excessive production and consumption. A fundamental attack on the postulates of bourgeois civilization was coming from the highest levels.
Making sense of this trajectory is tricky, but it has something to do with how a civilization that seems to have it all ends up turning in on itself. The attack is led by intellectuals and elites, perhaps as a result of guilt, resentment, or the desire to control.
The great economist Ludwig von Mises called this trend “destructionism.” It’s the last stage of a failed central plan when the elites claim that all the messes they’ve caused were really intentional. We’re better off poor. A beautiful but impoverished utopia awaits on the other side of all this suffering. So they tell us.
It’s a painful thing to watch a once-great country and civilization be unraveled by force. We know that it’s happening. We know how and why it’s happening. Yet it seems as if we’re powerless to do anything about it.
Watching all this unfold gives me a tremendously great appreciation of the small band of intellectuals and activists who reversed the course of decline that began in the late 1970s. Their names loom large in my mind because I lived through the period of inflationary malaise and widespread misery of the times.
I watched as trends changed under the influence of George Gilder, David Stockman, Art Laffer, Julian Simon, Paul Craig Roberts, Robert Bartley, and Robert Mundell. They stood on the shoulders of a previous generation of intellectuals, such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. Yes, there were differences among them, but unity on the central idea: Progress is good and the means to achieve is the unleashing of the creative human spirit through freedom.
That’s it. It’s not complicated in principle. But getting there requires that extraordinary combination of intellectual activism, overcoming bureaucratic barriers, brave political leadership, and public support. We saw the fruits in the 1980s. It was a hinge of history. Despair turned to hope, poverty to prosperity, and despotism to emancipation, not just in the United States, but all over the world.
The period within the living memory of many of us should encourage us. We aren’t powerless. History isn’t riding on a fixed trajectory toward decline. Trends can change. But it only happens through a combination of public activism, alternative media, brave intellectuals and statesmen, and a deep and abiding culture-wide passion for change.
Sadly, I don’t think we’re near that point yet. But the days could be coming. The crucial thing is to have hope that change is possible.
Indeed, something does feel off because it is. It doesn’t have to stay that way.
