Panic the peasants sufficiently, and you'll rule them for life
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fire and brimstone have always awaited the sinners on earth
Back in May, 2020, Joel Kotkin described what was coming in this article entitled, The Pandemic Road to Serfdom
Even before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, America, like most higher-income countries, was already heading toward a neo-feudal future: massive inequality, ever-greater concentrations of power, and increasingly widespread embrace of a uniform (albeit secular) religion. The pandemic, all too reminiscent of the great plagues of the Middle Ages, seems destined to accelerate this process.
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The oligarchic class now owns as much as 50% of world’s assets. Just five companies—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft—account for over 20% of the market capitalization of the entire S&P 500 index.
Today’s new oligarchs constitute a modern-day equivalent of the Medieval aristocracy. Like the barbarians who seized control of land during the demise of Rome, they seem well-positioned to benefit from the emerging social distance-driven recession. The dislocation caused by the pandemic has greatly expanded the financial assets of the country’s increasingly hegemonic giant banks. But the biggest long-term winners are the big tech firms that dominate digital pathways at a time when the analog world, already failing, now faces inexorable obliteration.
Today’s other ascendant class is what I call the clerisy, who today fulfill the role played by the clergy in the Middle Ages. Known as the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, the clerisy today is largely secular but consists of the key influencers in the media, academia, the upper bureaucracy and the ever-expanding “non-profit” sector. This new middle class enjoys something of a symbiosis with the oligarchic elites who mainly finance non-governmental organizations and the universities, and tends to a share a similarly progressive world view.
Kotkin’s article focuses on the pandemic hysteria and how it’s being employed to control the masses, but a greater game’s afoot, and the battle for freedom involves more than just a Chinese virus. The goal is control and power, and the panic is the tool being employed to achieve that. Who would have imagined, twenty-years back, that a population enjoying the world’s highest standard of living would willingly, nay, meekly, consent to giving it up in order to sink to a Third World life of poverty, cold, and starvation, but thanks to the global warming fraud foisted on the masses by the ruling clerisy, that’s what we’re doing. COVID’s only a proof of concept exercise, with the real fun just beginning.
I forget which reader posted this but if she’ll speak up, I’ll be happy to give her credit. It’s long: 21 minutes, but very instructive.
