The Daily Sceptic is dedicated to expressing scepticism about three contemporary cults: the cult of Covid-19, the cult of Climate Crisis and the cult of Wokery. I have written a few essays trying to offer suggestions about how to think of these cults and perhaps to sketch a grand unified theory of scepticism about them. I have described them as aspects of ‘nice totalitarianism’. I have suggested that they derive from a belief system which could be called ‘narcissistic gnosticism’. But let me try again, perhaps in blunter and simpler manner.
We are, I think, in a world of TOXIC MONOPOLIES.
I hope the irony in using ‘toxic’ is evident. We often hear much about ‘toxic masculinity’: but, as I hope to show, ‘toxic masculinity’ is one of the old (and not actually very toxic) monopolies; whereas the specifically toxic monopolies I want to talk about here are new.
Let me begin by telling a story about the recent history of the world. This history comes, as all good histories do, in three stages.
Stage 1 is the era of the existence of the old monopolies. This is the ancien régime, the world which runs from, say, Coriolanus to Oliver Cromwell, the world of military rulers, the world in which the only way to achieve political stability was to engage in successful wars, and the only way to achieve economic growth was to make successful conquests. At least in England, and in the centuries closer to Cromwell, the significant monopolies were three: the monopoly of the aristocracy, the monopoly of the church, and the monopoly of males, all three monopolies, happily, crowned by the king – or occasionally by a queen.
Stage 2 is the era of the abolition of these monopolies. In 1870 J.R. Seeley, in what is still an astonishing essay, suggested that the best way to understand the revolution of his time was to explain it in term of the abolition of monopolies. And he specified the monopolies which had been abolished, or were in the course of being abolished, of which the three most significant were the monopolies of aristocracy, church and men. He asked what had brought about such a result and his answer was the vague and potent one, ‘public opinion’. The abolition of each monopoly established a condition of the future order. Aristocracy had fallen, so the modern order would be democratic. The church had fallen, so the modern order would be secular. The men had fallen – or, what was the same thing, the women had been emancipated – and so the future order would be egalitarian.
This order is the one we tend to take for granted. We call it ‘liberal’: and what we mean is that we are free, and that out freedom is constrained by the rule of law, for the particular purpose of enabling everyone to be free while only minimally interfering with the freedom of others. But the order we take for granted has two sides. It is not only ‘liberal’ or ‘liberalised’. That was the particular nineteenth century contribution to modernity. It is also ‘socialised’: the particular twentieth century contribution to modernity. By ‘socialised’ I do not mean ‘socialist’: what I mean is that the order is constrained not only for the sake of freedom, as it is on the liberal side, but for the sake of security. The word ‘security’ covers many of the features we associate with the modern state: social insurance, unemployment benefit, welfare provision, state education, the national health service.
For a century or more, our political order has been dominated by the divide which was first seen clearly in politics in the 1880s when a debate arose about the respective merits of ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’. This divide was muddied somewhat as long as politics was dominated by Conservatives and Liberals, but once it was dominated by Conservatives and Labour, it became the most obvious point of difference – and it still is around, if we are to judge by the most recent budget of Truss’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng. This explains something which is sometimes not seen clearly, which is that conservatism, though originally inclined to traditional order and some measure of ‘collectivism’, naturally turned on its axis when it was opposed by a Labour party espousing a much more theorised and articulated form of ‘collectivism’. This explains why modern conservatism has often been not much more than liberalism in tweeds. The fact that the major obvious political difference is still ‘individualism’ versus ‘collectivism’ may be seen also in the reaction of the Guardian to Kwarteng’s budget. However, something else happened.
Stage 3 is the era of the emergence of new monopolies. Rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the ancien régime, this is the era which has been rising for 30 or so years, if not 60 – if we date everything from Larkin’s 1963 – but which has come into cold clarity in our own time, especially in the strange double revolutionary years of 2016 and 2020. The first of these years, 2016, was the year of ‘Brexit and Trump’: which suggested that politics was possibly turning on its axis, away from ‘individualism’ versus ‘collectivism’ to something like ‘nowheres’ versus ‘somewheres’, ‘uppers’ versus ‘downers’, ‘globalists’ versus ‘populists’. ‘Brexit and Trump’ was above all, a negative result for the dominant ruling class, and for the court culture of the higher-educated. The second of these years, 2020, was the year of ‘COVID-19’, and was a positive result for the same dominant ruling class.
At this point in the argument I have to bring in Adam Smith. A recent book by Paul Sagar, Adam Smith Reconsidered, has brought to our attention an astonishing insight Smith made in the pages of The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Smith famously commented that people who engage in the same trade “seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick”. Sagar has polished up this insight and called it “the conspiracy of the merchants”. The idea is that Adam Smith approved of markets; however he did not approve of merchants. Merchants were necessary for the working of markets. They were the ingenious men who worked out that political stability did not require war and economic growth did not require conquest. But merchants not only knew how to manage markets: they knew how to influence markets in their own interest. Their knowledge and their wealth meant that they could, in combination or separately, influence politicians in such a way that, after a few centuries, the entire political-economic-social system would eventually be completely distorted in their favour. In a word, Adam Smith anticipated that the merchants would destroy the pure working of the markets by creating and maintaining monopolies: and that this had consequences – seen even more clearly by Edmund Burke a bit later on – which would run right down to the foundations of church and state. It was one element in the abolition of the old monopolies, though not one Seeley recognised.
Smith’s insight explains much that happened since the middle of the nineteenth century: the rise of the great combinations, companies and corporations, from those of Rockefeller, Edison, Hearst and Ford right through to those of Gates, Jobs, Bezos, Musk, Dorsey and Zuckerberg. It also explains something which, again, might not have been so obvious to the more innocent among us – and I include myself – until 2020, when it was made as clear as it has ever been made clear in the history of the world that state, media, universities, corporations, professions were, seemingly, more or less united in perpetuating a vastly distorted sense of reality.
The distorted sense of reality can be demonstrated very simply in relation to COVID-19. I saw a piece in the Spectator a few days ago which had the title ‘Vaccines disguised the errors of our lockdown policy’. But there is no reason why the title could not have been reversed: ‘Lockdown disguised the errors of our vaccine policy’. Both are true. Something came, a virus, a, and our response to it was so deranged and distorted and monotonous and managed that this response of lockdown, B, appeared to confirm the possibility that what had happened was in fact as calamitous as the most extreme analysts had suggested, hence a was in fact A, and, in this situation, B could only be considered a interim measure, the desperation and destructiveness of which could only be justified if we found a miracle cure, C, called a ‘vaccine’. For those who believed in this circular nonsense, it was as simple as ABC.
But what is significant about this is that it was undeniably accompanied by toxic monopoly. This toxic monopoly is so pervasive that even now, after two and a half years, academic papers are being retracted, responsible commentators are suffering exile, calumny or demonetisation, and governments and corporations and media are still maintaining that A was as bad as originally thought, that B was justified, and that C has succeeded. The costs of B and certainly C are still taboo subjects, especially the second. No one, except in the marginal online press, questions the vaccines – even while there is every evidence that something extremely bad has happened.
As the Daily Sceptic continually implies, the COVID-19 policy forms a strange triad with Climate ideology and the political correctness of the Woke movements. They are all elements of the toxic monopoly of our time. By this I mean that they make claims to truth, or even ‘fact’, which seem to justify extreme forms of censorship and cancellation. The COVID-19 monopolists are very quick to blame their critics for ‘spreading misinformation and disinformation’ when they themselves have been caught very obviously doing exactly this at almost every point during the course of the pandemic. But this is also true of the Climate Crisis monopolists: since criticism of our current climate politics appears to be an extremely marginal phenomenon, carried out by a persistent fringe set of scientists and speculators. Wokery is different because, unlike the Covid and Climate ideologies, it is not about ‘facts’ – and cannot depend on an appeal to science – and this is in large part why it is hard to explain why exactly these three movements have come together.
But here is the explanation. Not only are they ideologically perfect examples of toxic monopoly: by which I mean that they offer new ways of establishing monopolies of opinion against a background of liberal and socialised assumptions. But they also share the strange property of being approved of by the state-media-corporate-university monopolistic culture itself. This is the oddity. Corporations have embraced the COVID, CLIMATE and WOKE doctrines: even though, on the face of it, this seems counter-intuitive. It would be counter-intuitive if markets worked the way ‘neo-liberals’ or the Chicago School economists think they do. But they do not. Markets work the way Adam Smith thought they did: they are bent out of shape by merchants – that is, by monopolists. And what we now have is a late system in which the mercantile influence has penetrated so far through the universities, the professions and the political system that the entire higher culture now forms the officer class of a vast post-liberal monopoly. And its ideology is built into out post-liberal monopolistic positions which constitute not only a continuation of the process by which the ancien régime monopolies are abolished – there is no love of church, aristocracy or men in this modern culture (and, in this, it runs parallel with the liberalism of the second stage) – but also an established of new monopolies (and in this it runs against the liberalism of the second stage).
In sum, at first the conspiracy of the merchants contributed to the abolition of the old monopolies, but, after a hiatus, it is now contributing to the establishment of new, toxic, monopolies. They are monopolies because they are meant to be beyond argument. They are also monopolies because they are being wielded by a newly technologised mass state-corporate elite against us. These are toxic because they are partial and involve a distorting of reality. I would go so far as to say that they all involve a fundamental belief that ‘nature is not nature’. On the one hand, ‘science’ can be twisted by the toxic monopolists to achieve the correct political effect. And now, on the other, ‘morals’ are also being twisted in the same way, since our moral nature is found to be as artificial and as malleable as nature itself.
Taking the knee is a triumph of toxic monopoly. So is extinction rebelliousness. So is victimhood. So is positive discrimination. So is trans ideology. So is hunting for institutional bias or unconscious racism. So is cancellation. So is wearing a mask. So is zero liability for manufacturers of vaccines. So is mandating of the same vaccines. So is any politics which concerns itself with ‘zero’ anything. So is suppression of the truth about all of this. Finally, so is censorship of anyone attempting to uncover the truth.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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Bill Gates the man who went to lolita island just for the parties. I wonder how much Melinda managed to fleece out of the utter creep over his trips there during their divorce. Any normal person doing what he’d done would choose to keep a low profile, but not him.
I think this document makes some useful points about how this clown world has developed against all reason and evidence.
Ditto!
Interest in and action against private monopolies has declined as lobbying has increased and politicians and retired civil servants have been paid large sums for seemingly negligible services. Private monopolies and market distortion ought to have been given much more attention, especially as technology, distribution methods and markets have changed over the past 30 years.
Meanwhile, the politicians have been creating artificial monopolies so they can either charge fees that are not justified or sell off the monopoly for cash which they spend without accountability required for tax rises.
This is similatr tyo the structures King Charles I tried and other monarchs before Parliament came into its own. Now we have MPs allowing the political class to do it again.
This is good, but I think, though it involves monopolies, it goes beyond them and is more profound and nebulous than the term “monopoly” captures.
Something bigger is at play. I think a more appropriate term is “mono-culture” because there is a tendency to one unified acceptable view or narrative. But even this doesn’t capture the extent of what is happening.
I could write a whole book about how this monoculture displays some of the characteristics of a mind. It is easy to overplay this comparison, but nevertheless, in some limited embryonic form I think there is truth to analysing it along these lines. It is almost as though, through the Internet, humans have become neurones, wifi and network cabling, the neuronal links and together, a hive-mind is emerging like a blind disembodied brain in a vat. Unlike an actual mind it is slow and disorganised, but nevertheless in common actual minds, it is seeking to establish and cleave to basic (but very simplified) principles where contradiction of those principles is seen as weakness and is to be eschewed.
If you ever meet someone who says one thing and then, moments later does another, you immediately think of them as unserious. A bit of a joke. Humans have great built in appreciation of the fact that to contradict ones own principles is in some sense to contradict one’s very essence. We understand it is to be avoided at all costs. So powerful is the shame associated with being seen to directly contradict our principles, the Chinese, during the Korean War, were able to use this to leverage American POWs away from their compatriots and turn them. I won’t go into the precise mechanism because there is too little room, but I raise this to note how fundamental and overpowering this aspect of the mind is.
If the Internet has brought an organisation and form of slow neuronal processing that exhibits in some low level sense characteristics of a hive mind, then dissent from the mono-narrative is a bad thing and is to be punished. Neurones failing to conform will be treated like infected cells and ejected (shunned).
Anyway I realise there is a lot to be justified here and I am talking very loosely and yes it is easily overplayed. But I do think there is something in this way of looking at our current society. I believe at some very basic level the hive mind is a little more than just a metaphor. Since the Internet and the evolution of social media, there is a deep rooted drive towards a mono-narrative. Yes it is, across it’s length and breadth self contradictory (it is not very sophisticated remember) and so might seem to break the “no contradiction” rule. But I would argue the point is to the unsophisticated embryonic hive-mind, the important thing is that adjacent memes remain congruent. Differences over a larger distance are not a problem or a threat. And so we find this reflected in the blanket of woke values. At once uniform, yet, from edge to edge, so often highly contradictory.
A global human “entity” or “superorganism”; absolutely, I think so too, one which attained a kind of life when humans covered the surface of the earth with radio, and even more so since the Internet. So much so that I have been comparing the recent developments, especially lockdowns, but also the upcoming “freeze” ( of fuel and food shortages/inflation etc ) as a sort of pupation, the period between the insect larval stage and the flying reproducing adult stage, in which after having consumed voraciously everything within its reach it experiences/perceives signs of imminent shortage/depleted resources ( which it seems is what triggers the shut down in the insect ), and construction of the chrysalis , during which it dissolves/reduces the majority of its larval cells and organs into a sort of soup, and then, under the guidance/direction of nodes/buds called “Imaginal Discs”, which were hitherto almost invisible and/or relatively inactive, begins to “build back better” into the very different form of the adult insect.
Powerful metaphor. And we shall all be a beautiful rainbow scale on this creature’s wings, carried effortlessly from flower to beautiful flower. Sign me up and send my body to the recycler.
Unfortunately for civilisation, people’s revealed preferences are that this vision is quite appealing.
That’s a nice idea. But while the larva may have lived for some years, the insect (a dragonfly, presumably) is really just a special purpose device existing for a very limited period of time: It enables male and female larvas to meet each other so that eggs can get fertilized and new larvas will come into being from these. Afterwards, the now useless adult insects die. Hence, this is really a form of self-sacrifice of mature larvas which enables the larva race to live on, ie, the larva is the purpose and what you call adult insect is the means to achieve it.
I was specifically thinking of dragonflies as their nymphs match the description of eating everything in sight. Dragonfly nymphs can live for some years while dragonflies themselves won’t survie the year they emerged in.
There’s a particularly ugly variant common in Reading around the watercourses in spring which suddenly appears in huge numbers. For a few weeks, they’re everywhere up in the air and then die very quickly. After mating and laying off eggs has been accomplished, they land on some vertical surface (literally any kind, eg, T-shirts someone is wearing) and die of exhaustion while sticking to it (corpses remain sticking to the location the insects died in).
This piece is also quite illuminating in that regard.
“The Changing State
The technocratic focus on outside justifications and the individual can be understood in the context of long-term trends in the British state. In particular, this is often understood as a neo-liberal shift, a retreat of the state ceding all to the market. However, this is to misunderstand the historical shift from the post-war consensus state to the neo-liberal or regulatory state (it has been described in many ways). In this shift, the state neither disappears nor shrinks, but its role and relationship with citizens change. Primarily, this is a political project that has at its heart the removal of the demos from policy making.”
httpss://brownstone.org/articles/the-new-parasitic-leviathan/
It’s a nice essay that trends in the right direction, but I think it wholly misunderstands the nature of the modern economy and where the real monopolies are.
The modern economy contains a financial economy and a real economy. The financial economy dwarfs the real economy, to the extent that we might say that financial firms and their interests have a monopoly over the economy.
Within the financial economy we have a network of private banks that operate in national and international cartels with their national central banks and the international monetary agencies respectively. These organisations have a monopoly on the creation of money.
Every publicly listed firm, whether it trades in the financial or the real economy, is dominated by institutional capital (basically comprising life insurance and pensions which is managed on the beneficiaries behalf, but they have no control over). Institutional capital in turn is dominated by BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street and a small number of others. The entirety of the stock market is owned by a small oligopoly of firms that issue guidance in the form of ESG requirements that increasingly controls how the global economy operates.
Finally, in terms of international trade, this is monopolised by international trade bodies such as the WTO and the UN that conspire to make the West less competitive at the expense of the East, so everything can be made in one hemisphere and consumed in the other, thus making each utterly dependent on the other and the monopolists very wealthy and powerful.
The goal of these firms up to now has been to increase productivity of the firms they invest in. But now they have decided to massively increase the debt by printing money, using it to buy up assets and then colluding with governments to inflate their debt away. All the little people and the firms in the real economy get wiped out and we wake up in a few years and they own everything. Also, China their client state will be well positioned to take the rest of what we have by force.
Compared to these monopolies, the tech companies are trivial. The only reason we care about the tech companies’ influence so much is because they are the firms we most often interact with.
It’s the monopolies that tell you “you’ll own nothing and be happy” you have to worry about. Tech firms and other firms that operate in the real economy don’t have the power to do that. Banks and governments do.
I would agree that the power of tech monopolies tends to be overstated because of their novelty and the amount we interact with them.
However, I think the main point of the article is good and still stands.
What the author is calling a monopoly is really a collusion of powerful interests with several echelons of people, but all of a similar type: “educated”, progressive mindset, enthusiastic about technological progress, beholden to material success and very disdainful of people that don’t think and act like them.
What I wonder is whether freedom emerged in his stage 2 when the world became bigger from the discoveries of new lands and from the advance of travel technology and has only lasted until enough power and wealth could be reconcentrated in the hands of a few mega oligarchs, the kings and emperors of our time, allowing them to wrap their arms around the whole world once again.
Great point. And you could then say that the financial reality/organ or monopoly is like a brain, interacting with, feeding off, the physical reality of the “body”, in the same way as the huge human brain uses ( I think ) something like 90% of the body’s oxygen and energy/blood sugar, a disproportionate amount. The body still has a substantial say in things, ( what it eats affecting mental processes for instance ), but the brain is, most of the time, in charge of complex behaviours, ( including what it orders the body to eat ), deciding as it does to engage in many activities which are harmful or neglectful, abusive in fact, towards the body, like smoking, or sitting for hours, or eating sugar, ( which acts like taking out a loan, providing an instant boost of energy but requiring painful/slow high interest repayments afterwards ), etc. We ordinary/”little” people are cells in the body providing for the brain/financial sector.
…. Makes me wonder whether cancer is a kind of rebellion/attempt at revolution, a return to a time of individual/independent single celled organisms, not subject to the demands of a “brain”/CNS.
Your argument can also be seen in the corruption of the 4 estates:
1. The aristocracy, the ruling class, succumbing to anti-democratic forces.
2. The commons, who appear to have list their critical faculties & seek safety over freedom.
3. The Church, which, I would argue, now includes Green & woke agendas.
4. The Press, who, like the commons have abandoned their role of enquiry.
But surely the Fifth Estate has been spared.
PCR agrees with the ‘creation of monopolies by the elites against the interest of the people’ thesis.
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/09/23/we-might-be-spared-nuclear-war-for-now-but-the-threat-of-home-grown-tyranny-remains/
“Wokery is different because, unlike the Covid and Climate ideologies, it is not about ‘facts’ – and cannot depend on an appeal to science – and this is in large part why it is hard to explain why exactly these three movements have come together.”
Indeed, for wokery, facts are literally irrelevant, as they prioritize feeeeeelings, nothing more than feeeeeelings….trying to forget……
Woke attacks language the same way the manmade-climate-change narrative attacks fuel and food supplies and the covid narrative ( lockdowns, masks, vaxs etc ) attacks our health/bodily autonomy. Woke destroys the meanings of words, disrupts communication. It dissolves/reduces the cells and organs of human language/communication to a soup.
An interesting essay but I incline to the view that intellectualising what is happening in the world is unfortunately masking the profound evil that has taken hold of our world.
The evil confronting humanity has depths of depravity we have probably only envisioned via the likes of for example George Orwell’s 1984 and even Animal Farm.
We must always remember that a satanic violence has been unleashed and will undoubtedly get worse.
Over-thinking our situation can easily mean we ignore the lesser aspects of our misfortune.
It was a point that struck me in the recent pod cast that each of the unholy trinity references the word ‘zero’. BTW its fascinating how quickly “being more tolerant’ has morphed into ‘zero tolerance’, we can only assume of intolerance. My thought was that any philosophy that embraces ‘zero’ anything is surely by definition totalitarian! Only total ‘zero’ will do, not even 0.1 is acceptable. The ends justify the means. Etc. To illustrate this, if they had used this language 80 years ago, would the Holocaust be have been termed ‘Net Zero Judaism’, rather than ‘final solution’?