The past three years have been a demonstration project in tyranny. A mighty hegemon of government, media, tech corporations, and medical elite took charge of most nations, overriding the law, traditions, and civic rituals of billions of people. In the wake of this great experiment, all we see is catastrophe.
But that isn’t what they see. What they see is opportunity and a path to the future. That’s why there have been no apologies, no reforms, and no coming to terms. There have been some mild utterances to the effect that not everything has gone as planned. Even those have been few and far between.
In the sweep of history, the past three years have been the most successful exercise of power on a global scale ever seen—if by successful, we mean dramatically intensifying the wealth transfer from the peasants to elites and control of a ruling class over the whole population in the shortest possible amount of time.
In that, what began in disease panic has been more successful than any heresy hunt in the Middle Ages, sedition purge in the early modern era, or war in our times. It was brilliant and spectacularly effective. Therefore, of course, they will try it again, building from this episode to do ever more. Whatever victories we seem to have won—the rollback of vaccine mandates, the successful court cases, the opinion polls showing that people are angry—need to be understood in this light.
There will be more and they will be institutionalized. The World Health Organization is working right now to institutionalize and codify the worst of the lockdowns and mandates, adding global disease surveillance through technology. The world’s central banks are working on a digital currency for the sole purpose of controlling all finance and economics. The World Economic Forum is the open conspiracy to dismantle much of the progress of hundreds of years and replace it with a dystopian vision of universal despotism.
As a result, the distance between what we see and what they see has never been more vast. Back in the days of the Occupy Wall Street movement, protesters got some traction with the claim that most of the wealth in society is controlled by the 1 percent. The intuition was good but the specifics were wrong. The problem isn’t the wealth as such. It’s the power over our lives that the very rich have. The people and institutions that seek to control the world today—occupying our lives and liberties in every respect—are the real 1 percent.
Meanwhile, the victims, by which I mean the vast majority of humanity, are lacking in a path forward, much less a plan on how to get there. This is why Jordan Peterson is now experimenting with the creation of a new institution that’s forging a new path based on humane values and the old idea of freedom. It seems promising and we should all hope it moves fast.
The institutions on which we used to depend to defend our liberties and rights—nonprofits, courts, intellectuals, academia, tech, and media—have failed spectacularly. We had no idea just how many of them had long ago been already captured. We didn’t know that the feds were deeply embedded at Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We didn’t know that they'd already captured the news pages of The New York Times and so on. We thought that these institutions were merely ideologically biased. We didn’t know that they had become tools of the regime.
When the intellectuals and nonprofits went silent when lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates came along, we thought that they were merely afraid to speak. We hadn’t considered that their silence was evidence of a much deeper corruption. They were either being paid for silence or blackmailed into it. As a result, we were left to fend for ourselves and work to build up new and principled institutions such as The Epoch Times and Brownstone.
Sadly, the ambitions of the alternative institutions far outstrip current reach and robustness. But it’s a beginning. And, truly, we are at a beginning. The social order we had in place before lockdowns utterly failed, and so that highlights the need to build new things if we desire to retain civilization in the old use of that term.
The idea of freedom itself as the mother of what we call civilization dates back deep in our history. In the West, a decisive moment came in the 13th century with the Magna Carta. The message was clear: there are rights that are human rights that the government can’t abrogate no matter the excuse. That claim was fundamentally challenged over three years.
Most incredibly, the churches and other houses of worship were closed by government edict. Almost immediately, the media began a big campaign against singing. That should’ve told us everything we needed to know. Singing has profound metaphorical significance. The idea of the creation story is that God gave the first human life by breathing into him: the breath of life. Singing to God is the way humans give thanks back to God, using breath in praise. A government and media machinery that wages war on singing praise is warring against life itself.
Think too of the communities that resisted. They weren’t the secular elites much less the academy or corporations. They were religious communities: the Hasidim, the Amish, the Mormons, the traditionalist Catholics, and later, the Evangelicals. It turns out, just speaking empirically, holding to a hard faith and living in a community of others who also hold that faith turned out to be the greatest single mental and intellectual protection against infection from the myths that were being dished out daily by Leviathan.
What can we learn from this? It suggests that if we intend to resist the “Great Reset,” we need a worldview that’s deeply embedded in our hearts and souls, a structure of conviction that goes far deeper than merely making money and consuming. My humble suggestion, then, is that if you don’t have a faith, get one immediately. You need it to protect you against the lies of the secular elites, who are selling their own false version of religion.
Beyond that, we desperately need institutional reform and revolution. People talk about reforming the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Education, the National Institutes of Health, and the FBI. Forget it. These institutions need to be completely defunded and defanged. They’re corrupt to the core, to the point that there’s no hope. In addition, we need dramatic legal reform. The quarantine power needs to go away. We need reform of money to get it away from the hands of the Federal Reserve. We need education solely in the control of families and communities.
This is truly the emergency none of us wanted. But it’s here now and we must act on it. If you doubt it, spend some time reflecting on the events of the past three years. It wasn’t some accident, and it wasn’t some mistake. It was all a deliberate attempt to demoralize and dismantle everything you love. Seeing that and understanding that is the first step to inspiring action to stop this push to end the good life as we know it.
