After the Lockdown
Solzhenitsyn described the experience of being placed under arrest by the Soviet secret police “as an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state to another… a blinding flash and a blow which transforms the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality.” Has this not been the experience of billions in the past two months? From Madrid to Singapore, with government after government imposing extraordinary confinement measures by emergency decree, almost the whole world is now on lockdown: COVID-1984.
Enacted in a state of panic on the back of hyperbolic models, against a virus whose lethality now seems wildly exaggerated, the assumption is eventually the lockdown has to end. How will it end? What if this is the new normal, or a prototype of the new normal: a 5G prison planet, with entire generations growing up under the shadow of Corona, as in Ballard’s 1977 short story Intensive Care Unit, which depicts a contactless society organized around a telecoms technology called Zoom?
This crisis has been driven by political agendas from the start, as a nexus of political and economic interests initially motivated to dismiss the danger became incentivized to drastically exaggerate it: hospital administrators registering increased Federal payments for Corona fatalities; police forces taking advantage of an ambiguous legal environment to impose their own will to power, and democratic politicians, knee-deep in a sunk cost fallacy, compelled to keep extending lockdowns to avoid admitting their futility.
Just as the disease itself is almost powerless in the absence of old age or catalytic comorbidities, it was the immuno-compromised political condition of the West which unfolded the attack surface for contagion. Encountering a power from outside, an unprepared, dysfunctional society turns against itself, in a scrambling of intelligence and judgement, and sets the stage for a pandemic which is psychological as much as medical.
Man in general, as a opposed to certain individuals at certain times, is a timid, stupid animal, controlled by fear, especially the fear of death, and the desire to be loved: never has this tragic fact been clearer then in our era of Social Media Occupied Government (SMOG) as a clown managerial class jacked into a dopamine delivery matrix, who have reached their positions through surrender of self, call in experts to tell them what button to push.
The virus did not invent this situation but has ruthlessly revealed it; still, despite the tempting dreams of intellectuals from Bayle to Brecht, the exposure of the mechanism does not automatically destroy it, and depending on the situation may entrench it, as the joy of mass humiliation augments the power of the lie. Already, the credulous Left are running their new subliminal scripts, and attacking the new designated targets, whether the intransigent Agamben, or anti-lockdown protestors in Germany and the United States. Meanwhile, the narcissistic online right remains committed to a hollow claim to vindication without victory, and the ongoing evasion of their intellectual and moral responsibilities. Not for nothing has it been the more traditional Conservatives, whether Agamben (every Aristotelian is fundamentally a conservative, and vice-versa) or Peter Hitchens who have retained their judgement in the swirling pandemonium; as for America, despite the endless waves of propaganda ranged against it, the backbone of the nation will not be broken.
TOTALITARIAN REGIME OF QUANTITY
Evidently, the pandemic is the most spectacular global event since 9/11, but whereas 9/11 marked a one-way television spectacle, if not the apotheosis of the television spectacle, the virus transmits through social media, and also transmits it. The message is the medium, and inevitably, a virus is the most viral story cyberspace has ever hosted; the virus is the telos of the internet, and lockdown is what the internet wants, and has been screwing tight for years. Hence the folk epistemology of a link between the virus and 5G, this upgrade no one asked for, as parallel features of the same system of power.
“A computer makes a city seem almost unnecessary,” Vito Acconci once remarked. “If you can have all the information in front of you on a computer, do you need the actual city?” Just as the ultimate competition for Coca-Cola is drinking water, the city as a vital space of social life, like the Athenian agora, is the final enemy of cyberspace. Information wants to be free, as Stallman says, but information is a signal seeking a receiver, or receptor, or a latah, until every surface glows with data, and every flickered iris is recorded.
China’s early lockdown on information out of Wuhan, starting with the neutralizations of the earliest whistleblowers, and the smokescreen which it pumped out through the WHO, did not stop the memetic transmission of the virus, just as it did not arrest the movement of the microbe, but only made it visible to a specific group of people: the online anon right, the wet market of cyberspace, with their antennae for catastrophe, and their intellectual antagonism to the media consensus narrative. It was their infection, led by Curtis Yarvin, patient zero, and super-spreader Nick Land, which primed the pump for exponential panic in the West, and at the same time demonstrated something else: the secret affinity between the NRx heretics and the neoliberal mainstream.
From New Zealand to Malibu Beach, revealed preferences speak for themselves, but structural assumptions remain silent: every liberal is NRx about what they know best, and even as it understandably resents the presence of a progressive ideological police force permanently pointed at traditionalist targets, NRx does not contest the liberal premises of secular modernity which makes the contract possible. “Tell me, Strangers, is a God or some man supposed to be the author of your laws?” inquires the Athenian stranger, cardinally, at the beginning of The Laws, and Curtis Yarvin blinks.
Behind the camouflage of social justice, nobody in power anywhere has any doubts about IQ or HBD, or any number whatsoever: nobody who condemned Andrew Sabisky really has a different point of view, if they even have a point of view. Whether advertised explicitly, in silence, or unconsciously, the doctrine is as follows: man is an empirical animal, metaphysics is meaningless, and death, like happiness, is a scientific problem to be solved, rather than the door to eternity, and the mirror of life.
Fixated on misogyny, to sublimate their homosexuality, or racism, because transgressive, to the point of imbecility, while dreaming intermittently of techgnosis or collapse, what the post-Landians are disinclined to grasp is that the true taboo is deeper: that race is human quality, with the emphasis on quality, and sex is a cosmic principle, with the emphasis on principle, as opposed to the Undifferentiated Human Matter of what Renaud Camus calls replacism and the artificial privilege of desexed, post-race PoC.
Liberalism, unable to think beyond the category of the individual, terminates in being unable to grasp the individual itself, yourself, as project, character, and destiny. As Pessoa pointed out: the problem isn’t that we’re individualists. The problem is our individualism is static, rather than dynamic. Hence the fast regime adoption of the apocalyptic NRx account in March, flipping almost overnight from blank dismissal to hysterical exaggeration was simultaneously the end of NRx as a credible intellectual project, to become a simulacrum of thinking, like others, for a bodiless American Mind. Like Cassandra, suddenly reduced to silence, as the chorus started to repeat her lines, having never understood the enemy as spiritual, but only as political, if not emotional, forced to show its hand, NRx revealed it had no cards, as the Cathedral bet on fear of death and pestilence as panic raged around the world.
OFFICIAL NUMEROLOGY
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In the eye of the cytokine storm of the media as it reports daily deaths, stripped of all explanatory context, as if the normal rate was zero, against the backdrop of apocalyptic models, already proven wrong, by Imperial College academic Neil Ferguson, a credentialed numerologist wrong on every single claim that he has ever made, the global power elite now saw an opportunity to break the back of atavist resistance to the technocratic modern project.
As David Cole points out, whenever science is unsettled, the State will always favor the account that enables it to display dominance, and impose repression: the true meaning of the figure of the expert as instrument and alibi for will to power.
How many times over the past four months have the public heard the repetition of authoritative claims from “experts” which have later been proved wildly exaggerated, if not completely false? In January the World Health Organization was insisting there will be no pandemic, that face masks are unnecessary, and that “stigma” was the real threat, today it stutters catatonically, and yet the organization and its ludicrous Director-General is still advertised as credible.
The issue is not just a contingently low quality of expert (“We need better experts!”) but the category itself. Because the function of the expert within the paradigm of what Thomas Kuhn calls normal science is to reiterate the institutional consensus, like the function of a liberal politician is to affirm the climate of opinion, the real surprise is to encounter expert competence and wisdom, as in Sweden, as opposed to the arrogant, incompetent, passive aggressive norm. James Watson, who discovered DNA, lost any claim to expertise when he transgressed the party line on race, but Neil Ferguson, discoverer of nothing, the kind of figure who appears at the sunset of great nations, with the ear of a weak king, retains it through his readiness to tell politicians what, secretly, they want to hear.
SPANISH TRAGEDY
Perhaps nowhere does the rhetoric of expert science ring more hollow than in Spain, where another weak-man, ugly-girl team of the narcissistic Pedro Sanchez, and the sociopathic Pablo Iglesias have aligned their own political survival with the devastation of their country. As Francisco Rosell remarked in El Mundo, with a line that could be generally applied, to characterize the scale of the government’s mismanagement one could reverse Churchill’s famous praise for the pilots of the Battle of Britain: never have so many suffered so much destruction in so short a time at the hands of so few.
The stage was already set six months earlier when the Socialist Sanchez launched his election campaign in October with the reckless decision to exhume Franco’s body from the Valley of the Fallen in Madrid. “He who moves the dead winds up paying for it with the curse of Tutankhamun,” Vox leader Santiago Abascal warned ominously at the time. Failing to win a clear majority, and entering a coalition with Iglesias, a repulsive, rat-like figure, ideologically-determined hubris continued into March, with the government promoting a national Woman’s Day March on March 8, attended by 120,000 people where demonstrators waved banners insisting that machismo is more lethal than the virus.
Six days later, the horse now far away and running free, Sanchez spasmed into panic mode, and slammed close the stable door, with the imposition of the most arbitrary and senseless lockdown in the world, banning all outdoor movement, except trips to pharamacies or supermarket, one at a time, and all Spanish children from leaving their homes. The measures produced no clear effect on halting the spread of the virus, indeed, given that it seems to spread more effectively indoors, may have encouraged it. What they did was create the groundwork for a Communist police state.
Since March 14, the Spanish police has handed out around 650,000 fines ranging from 600 to 10,000 euros, and the head of the Guarda Civil has informed the country that his duties include “minimizing the climate of opposition to the government’s management of the crisis.” Meanwhile, the government has threatened to impose five years in jail for anyone found spreading “hoaxes” and “misinformation.” As in the UK, where places of worship are closed, and the British find themselves instead compelled to participate in the new ritual of applauding the NHS medical death cult (as Solzhenitsyn pointed out: never be the first to stop clapping) every evening, the Spaniards, confined to their homes, are compelled to applaud a parade of the emergency services, like prisoners applauding their jailers. But discontent is mounting. Each night hashtags calling for Sanchez and Iglesias to resign, if not stand trial, circulate on Twitter. But hashtags are hashtags, and so long as the Spanish Left controls the state, and Franco’s ghost remains abroad, Spain remains in the role which it played in the thirties as herald and sigil of the future to come.
PLAGUE COMMUNISM
If traditionally, the appearance of the plague marked a sign that a regime had lost legitimacy, and heralded a fall from power, when a regime is already an anarcho-tyranny, corruption and incompetence augments it. Make no mistake: the lockdown does not end the power of the global Left, but marks its triumph — the apotheosis of the safe space and the cancellation of the world.
In the shadow of the virus, the regime’s repressive apparatus upgrades from policing the supernatural contagion of symbolic heresy to the biopolitical emergency of a planetary pandemic licensing even more senseless and sadistic measures: hence arrests for surfing on an empty ocean or walking in a park are accompanied by releasing murderers from jails.
Meanwhile Facebook and Amazon expand as small businesses stay closed: the idea, not exactly plan, but systematic tendency, is that they all close. At the end of a long century of relentless Party-State expansion, plague communism completes the triumph of post-liberal power and the FAANGs with the greatest destruction of liberty since the great transformation of Karl Polyani: a great confinement, following the seventeenth and eighteenth century acts of enclosure which threw the peasants off their land to turn them into proletarianized raw material for the industrial revolution. Not for nothing was psychoneurotic Sophie Lewis pushing family abolition in the Ford Foundation funded Open Democracy one of the first post-Lockdown pieces to appear: this is what the police state wants. As Adorno once observed, what disintegrates, along with the family “is not just the most effective agency of the bourgeoisie, but also the resistance which indeed oppressed the individual, but also strengthened the latter, if not indeed producing such.”
In the world they want the individual is a string of random coded letters, LGBTQ-138, embedded in a UBI cash-matrix connecting digital serfs and OnlyFans virtual prostitutes, in which every statement is recorded, and any opposition is deleted in advance. YouTube’s Susan Woznicki has already clarified that her remit for censorship includes the removal of anything contrary to the advice of the World Health Organization, the institution whose failures played a key role in allowing the virus to spread; among the first casualties were the two Bakersfield doctors whose skeptical video presenting their own clinical test data racked up five million views before being removed from the platform; meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg (reminder: the son of Dracula) is deleting from Facebook initiatives to coordinate protests under the Soviet category of harmful misinformation.
And soon enough, this account will also disappear…
