It was possible to bill last week’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference as a kind of anti-woke Davos, and many did. The sheer weight of personages and, apparently, money, put the event in a similar stratum. Representatives from venture capital and private equity had paid £1,500 each to be there. There were long, languid breaks between panels for ‘Networking’. There were branded notebooks and pens, as many as you could carry. Jimmy Carr circulated the hall with a knot of retainers.
But what ARC reminded me of more than anything else was another alpine conference: the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15, in which the shaken remnants of Europe’s old order gathered to plan for the future after Napoleon’s defeat. For one, the whole thing had a decidedly central and eastern European tinge. Something like a plurality of the guests seemed to be from Poland, Germany or the Danubian basin – huge moustachioed men, each walking with the upright carriage of a hereditary officer. Clericalists abounded, of all shapes and sizes; cassocks, burning incense, long and pointed fur hats. The event was guarded, ushered, and superintended by a corps of what seemed to be Cossacks or Hungarian hussars, each smartly fitted out in a sort of Byronic poet’s shirt.
Present, too, was the same feeling of Metternichian despair, of the ultimate futility of their efforts. An impressive galère committed to some kind of political change in the Western world had assembled here, with considerable resources at their collective disposal. But no one seemed to take much heart from this. Even Jimmy Carr looked glum, and didn’t tell any jokes. There was a bit of a collective pall, and the closest thing I found to a salon wit or social lion there was Curtis Yarvin, otherwise known as Mencius Moldbug, the blogger and tech entrepreneur. Taking no active part in the conference, he instead wandered amiably around the hall, dispensing bits of social and historical apercus.
And this general gloom was borne out in the talks themselves. The unspoken assumption behind most of the headline speeches seemed to be that some kind of flight to the hills would eventually be necessary, and that these people were simply here to set out their stall for posterity.
This manifested itself in a few different ways. You could see it in the retreat to the realm of pure ideas – itself a form of quietism. Jordan Peterson opened the first panel with: “What is the difference between a Story and a Theory?” You could see it in the way that even the possibility of victory was never entertained; the schools, the universities, the bureaucracy, the corporate boards – all were in enemy hands, but this is something that was, time and again, described as a kind of meteorological event, like the rain, not something that had been accomplished by human wiles, and could be undone by the very same. Trump and Brexit, the two attempts to put some of these ARC ideas into practice, were hardly mentioned at all.
You could see it in the panel chaired by Niall Ferguson (whose usual bonhomie was gone), which, bizarrely, focused on foreign policy. This seemed like another wilful distraction. If the stakes are really this high for the Western world, then surely we can put the fate of the Taiwan Strait and the menace of TikTok on ice for now?
You could see it, worst of all, in how the proposed solutions were all personal, not political. Everything always seemed to boil down to some kind of Tolstoyan appeal. Again and again, it was suggested that the attendees should cultivate individual virtues; far less often was it suggested how the assembled might organise themselves for the capture and exercise of power. Day two of the conference began with an extended reflection on Christian forgiveness, which was followed by a musical number from Hamilton on the same idea. Peterson asked the audience to “meditate on what each of us can do” in their personal lives – a fine phrase, but somehow less compelling than Dominic Cummings’ or Trump ’25’s plans to simply fire all the bureaucrats. The best laid proposals were for ‘parallelism’ – that is to say, the founding and nurturing of parallel cultural institutions. But even this spoke to a certain narrowness of vision. What the clamour for new colleges and Sunday schools suggests, ultimately, is that the speakers at ARC hoped only to act as a frustrated appendage to woke society, like the English Dissenters.
For their part, the British delegation did not really rise to the level of events. In this hall the fate of the human race seemed to be at hand, but most of the British speakers kept translating everything back into the local vernacular of the Westminster Lobby. It was myopic and annoying. “Leveling Up”, “SW1”, “Whitehall”, “London-centric”, and – most wincingly – “Blue Labour”. These were all blandly dumped onto the stage with little explanation or introduction. How this audience of long-dispossessed Polish szlachta, Uniate clerics, and ‘Great Hungary’ revisionists were supposed to know what these terms meant was anyone’s guess. Michael Gove began his speech with a giggle about Cummings’ testimony to the Covid Inquiry (few sitting around me seemed to know who or what that was), before reading out a fairly standard Daily Telegraph leading article about the glories of the English constitution after 1689, and how these “Robust Institutions” could explain our present prosperity. He was followed by the patriarch of Duck Dynasty, the American reality show, who gave his predecessor a bemused glance as he quit the stage.
What also disheartened me slightly while listening to these speeches is how backwards the diagnosis tended to be. According to ARC, what has gone wrong with the Western world is a lack of moral purpose – absent strong “Judeo-Christian” values, nihilism, hedonism and, as milord Glasman put it, “atomisation”, beckons.
This simply won’t do. What is woke? It’s a series of unfalsifiable egalitarian moral ideas that you are not permitted to disagree with, and which are now encoded in national and international law. There is nothing languid or directionless to any of this at all; these ideas are enforced in deadly earnest, and the West’s governing classes are less relaxed about heterodoxy than at any time since the 17th century. Insofar as Western nations experience ‘anarchy’, then it is official anarchy – groups like Extinction Rebellion are protected by the courts and the police, whose emergent political function is to protect these provincial Ultras from the wider citizenry. Meanwhile, all Western nations are now signed up to a Net Zero political economy of degrowth and ruralisation. This isn’t hedonism at work here, but the twee asceticism of heat pumps and Solar Punk.
Jordan Peterson’s favourite novel is The Devils. In the book, the spur to narrative action is provided by a group of local nihilists, who mock the reigning social order and intrigue for its overthrow. For Peterson, this is the primordial battle, one that is now being waged on a global scale. This is certainly the case, but ARC’s position in this battle, properly understood, is that of the nihilists. The attendees at ARC are not the defenders of a moral consensus, but the enemies of an existing one. The house slogan of ARC was ‘The Better Story’ – well and good, but the “Better Story” requires first and foremost the destruction of the old one. This is something that demands a certain kind of nihilism, a willingness to declare that all reigning values are stupid, deadening and false. Hope for the future, sure, but never forgetting the value of pure, gleeful negation – which the present order of things can never assimilate.
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Fortunately, at least where I live, the ARC conference barely registered with sceptics on the ground. We retain our sense of purpose and support each other in maintaining this. The other factor that Jennifer Marohasy reported was the virtual absence of any recognition of the importance of the scientific endeavour and its achievements (contrasted with the deathly scientism of recent times).
We are still being far too reasonable when the opposite side are happy to kill ppl with their experimental jabs and want us to freeze to death. I sometimes think if Toby was around in the 1930s he’d have tried to appeal to Hitler/Stalin’s better angels. Love Tobes but feel like he’s still living under the old paradigm.
Yeah, would have loved to have listened to a pre-war Weekly Sceptic podcast:
Nick: “Hitler seems to have plans for world domination. An evil bast*rd. What do you think?”
Toby: “Well, he could just be saying these things to be part of a group. And it’s not what he really thinks privately.”
Followed by a post-war one:
Nick: “Well that didn’t end well. And the slaughter of the Jews? Clearly his plans were more malevolent than we could have imagined. I don’t know, what do you think?”
Toby: “Cock up!!”
In the excellent video ‘Are all wars Bankers wars’….WW2 was really about the hyper inflation and Germany being independent of central banks. Some of Churchill’s quotes allude to that but could be open to interpretation.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/what-price-british-values-now/
Role Norfolk at TCW with a robust look at where we true Brits are now in the battle for survival.
“Civilised restraint in Britain is breaking down. When the free exchange of ideas is persecuted even in universities, diversity turns from a claimed strength to a clear challenge, particularly when some ideologues – from world-savers to soul-savers – are absolutist and believe they have a higher authority than the secular State to sanction property destruction and violence against persons. So much for ‘respect and tolerance’.”
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/double-standards-and-the-thin-blue-line/
An excellent examination of the virtual collapse of our police forces.
“As we remember the fallen during this sombre weekend, it will be worth reflecting on what the country they gave their lives for has become.”
Good read. Thanks for the link.
Comment on the text: I’m meanwhile convinced that the FPTP voting system is pretty much the only one which makes any sense. Each MP was directly elected by his constituents which means all of them have a democratic mandate. It’s not the parties which got elected but each individual member of parliament.
Alternate systems usually like to call them themselves proportional representation to suggest a somehow higher democratic legitimacy but the question is proportional representation of what? Certainly not of the opinions of the voters themselves, as these never get to express them in public.
With PR, party leaders decide on policiy proposoals which sometimes get voted on by party members. Party leaders also decide on lists of candidate MPs and all voters are usually allowed to do is to select one of the canned candidate lists based on one of the canned policy proposals.
This gets worse once actual government have to be formed: These will almost always need to be coalition governments. Hence, no party will ever be able to actually implement the policies it had proposed, only the subset of that which is not fundamentally incompatible with the proposals of some coaltion partner. The outcome is usually muddle on just like before, possibly with a few faces changed. And that’s probably exactly the intended outcome: Parties can do whatever they’re most comfortable with, usually Do nothing and get paid princely for that. Voters who are not happy with this are to be dealt with by the security forces because they’re all far right extremists, anyway.
IMHO, parliamentarism has a host of problems as system of government, but I’ll ignore that here as this text is more than long enough already.
I highly doubt the counter revolution to the collectivist tyranny we are being subjected to will come from a conference of high minded people, however well intentioned. Less still one with Michael Gove in it.
Yes Gove is an utter creep, bereft of intelligence or moral character, the commander in chief of lock down. He showed us there not only is he a huge fool, but a very evil one also. Note he also jumps on the eco loon band wagon whilst fully aware it’s a scam. Hell is too good for such ppl.
And Jimmy Car made a bit of a jibe against us refuseniks. I get the dark humour and free speech, nobody has darker humour than me, but there is plenty to take the piss out of from the other collectivist side. Remember Family Guy bigging up the mRNA, they need to do another sketch of sports stars collapsing!
Sounds underwhelming! Peter Hitchens may have energised it somewhat. Better yet, a dose of the late Christopher via AI of course.
A point he kept driving home in 2020 was….If you give the state too much power, you rarely get it back without a fight.
Good article.
Woke is Maoism –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6rk1mYiOAw
The central issue is here and it’s to do with the money creation process –
https://archive.is/9MQg6
Quote
Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Editor, FT
I watched all the speeches and panel events and I thought they were all pretty good and not, on the whole, downbeat. Yes there was a tedious suggestion repeated over and over that, as J Sorel puts it above: “attendees should cultivate individual virtues” – the sort of wooly rubbish I can’t be doing with, but it was a good start in trying to get some intellectual underpinning for the anti-woke fight-back.
It remains though absolutely true that political activity on the ground is very spasmodic and I have tried and failed to get things going locally on a few occasions. My conclusion is that our side is too old and we will unfortunately have to wait for a younger generation to take up the fight. Sadly, we all know that by then it will be too late to save old England, but perhaps something even better will emerge.
I’m afraid that we will have to await the figure who will save us. Maybe Trump with Veraswammy will inject the juice into the battle in the US, but so much damage has been done to Europe, and continues to be done to Europe we need someone of the stature of a Martin Luther, to face this lot down and begin the reformation. I can’t see it in the next generation, but maybe the one after..? My time will be gone. I just pray it doesn’t wreck my childrens lives in the meantime.
Nobody will come to save us, we each have to take responsibility for ourselves & our families. Our actions may on their own be tiny & seemingly insignificant, but the more of us who make those small acts of resistance adds up to a significant number. They know that, they know that there are more of us than them, why the heck do they keep the population terrorised, fearful & cowed? It’s all about suppressing resistance & maintaining control.
You cannot control the actions of others, but you can control how you act.
Peaceful civil disobedience is our way through this war, which many of us will not live to see the end of. It could be years, decades away but if we each don’t resist, who will?
I have my doubts that the best way to counter the pernicious creep of WEF and globalists of all sorts is with a globalist movement of our own.
There are lots of local groups around the globe building local structures parallel to the national ones. We cannot change the current structures from within as they’re too corrupted. Alternative structures which benefit locals will gain support slowly but the corrupted structures will wither over time.
Nothing is going to happen overnight & if we try to play them at their own game, on their playing field, we’ll lose.
So instead of wasting energies fighting, channel those energies into building.
I don’t think we can survive along side of these control freaks, they will eventually come for us. We need more radical action that is beyond writing to the corrupt MP.
Building parallel structures has absolutely nothing to do with writing to your MP. Look out for your local community assembly. Join it. Contribute. Do what you are able.
The only person who is going to come to your rescue is you.
The People’s Health Alliance, The People’s Food & Farming Alliance, World Council for Health are just 3 parallel structures which have been developed from the ground up as alternatives to corrupt systems.
If you want to fight back against woke globalism, then inviting Gove to speak is the equivalent of ushering in the horse at Troy.
“we can put the fate of the Taiwan Strait and the menace of TikTok on ice for now”
If Taiwan goes the western world will face a major setback from which it might not recover in time to defend itself when the state – on -state offensive begins, and not even when terrorists get organised. The proportion of high grade chips produced in Taiwant is critical to the west.
As to Tic Toc, its dismissal by the author s he sort of answer Tory monisters have given, along the lines of “oh, its only foam or fluff and of no consequence”. They say it about BLM and Wokeism. Some of them still say it about Islam and demonstrations in the streets.
They are wrong and so is the author ofn dismissing such issues. Social media and demonstrations are the building blocls of undermining confidence in the west among its citizens.
The fact Gove was there shows it was far too oriented to the political class or elite. Where was Farage. As to comedians, where was Dominic Frisby.
Don’t be fooled. Farage is the other side of the fake binary. The antithesis to their thesis. He’s there to channel and assuage articulate, conservative-leaning dissent.
I think the problem western civilisation is facing is the problem with left brain/right brain ‘thinking’. Dr Ian McGilchrist has some insight into this dichotomy which I am only just beginning to appreciate. Our problems started 3 or 4 centuries ago with the rise of science and the rational, materialistic, mechanistic view of nature and the universe. We are all cogs in a machine that can be dissected and re-engineered to achieve perfection (left brain). But consciousness, soul and God, anything subjective and unquantifiable (right brain thinking), was ignored and forgotten because there are no equations or formula that can adequately explain these ethereal phenomena. The pursuit of scientific dominance of nature and humanity is our undoing. We need a little bit more self-reflection and awareness of transcendental values in life to balance the scientific, materialistic achievements that science has obviously brought us. No one wants to revert to the stone age, apart from Greta.
Glad to see this mentioned. McGilchrist’s steer is that we ought to be guided by spiritual ideation. He is right on, and has clearly influenced Peterson.
Here he talks with Peterson –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcthCcEHmAc
“The attendees at ARC are not the defenders of a moral consensus, but the enemies of an existing one”…..So what was the jab pushing, fake Brexiteer ‘Gove’ doing there!
I’ve heard tell that JP is merely controlled opposition and the fact that this conference was more of a damp squib than the spark of the fight-back seems to support that view. Peterson is a perfectly capable orator so why waste this chance to ignite and inspire? And the inclusion of Michael Gove? WTF? He’s part of the problem surely, hanging around on the periphery of government with his over-moist lips, waiting for the next train crash. What a pity.
Having Michael Gove speaking at this conference voids any credibility that it might have had as a vector of positive change or effective opposition to the spreading evil of world governance. He already sold his soul to the devil
First the end destination must be defined.
Where are they going?
What will society look like if they get what they want?
Only when they know their end goal will they know in what direction to go and begin to plan how to get there.