Mandating confusion and eroding clarity

The biggest tonic is that we may have hit bottom and survived – barely – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara

Finally, on 18 May, commenting on Title 42, US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch spoke out against “lockdowns” and “mandates” navigating the political murkiness of the Court’s composition.

He spoke with uncompromising clarity while other agencies still continue to flounder, flailing in outright denial still. He clearly took us to task for the “greatest intrusion on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” 

Executive officials had issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders shut people in their homes and imposed “lockdowns” galore. Chillingly similar to the playbook adopted elsewhere, including here in Sri Lanka.

When the incompetence of the ruling class is exposed (when reality dutifully ignores their prognostications), they must construct ever more elaborate and extremist stories to retain and project power. And these seemingly exponential “crisis” threads seem to mandate ever more comprehensive, top-down solutions

In too many States in the United States, on went the shutters on businesses and public and private schools. Churches were prohibited from worship while casinos and other “favoured businesses” swaggered on. Criminal sanctions loomed into view as well as civil penalties for “transgressors.”

But the party was just getting going: surveilling Church parking lots, tracking license plates, and threatening even attendance at outdoor services. Not satisfying social distancing strictures and “hygiene” requirements actually led to having your behaviour classified as “criminal conduct.” 

Cities and neighbourhoods got “colour coded” and individuals fought for the right to express their liberties on emergency timetables. And then these authorities changed the “colour coding,” when defeat in court seemed imminent, to heighten unpredictability.

And then they further upped the ante! Federal law officials entered “the circus” too. Out came “emergency immigration” decrees, landlord-tenant relations nationwide came gushing out from “public health” HQ. A workplace-safety agency issued a “vaccination” mandate for most working Americans. 

Any employees refusing to comply were threatened with severance, and those in the armed services were also threatened, with dishonourable discharge and confinement no less! Social media companies, it seems, were also pressured to suppress information about any contrarian pandemic thinking or policies they disagreed with. 

Emergency decrees came fast and furious. State legislatures, who normally adopt laws, became hushed if not outright mute. Only a few intrusions into real liberties were actually challenged.

Courts were, in fact, leveraged to perpetuate emergency health decrees for collateral “benefits” – a form of “lawmaking by litigation.” 

In a nutshell we found many despicable “lessons.” Fear and safety collude, stoking a desire, indeed a “clamour” for action, even intemperate action, as long as that reflexive action comes forth to allegedly quell a threat. 

Certainly, in Sri Lanka, mass shutdowns to “save the nation” were greeted with cheer, and all the hoopla of state action was mobilised accordingly. No country has a monopoly on these smokescreens. It’s a dead giveaway when you encounter a leader or an ‘expert’ who claims they can fix everything as long as we do exactly what they say! Bayonets are not needed; a mere nudge will do to allow us to ignore the ‘formality’ of requiring fresh laws to be passed or existing ones to be followed, when en masse decrees and panic mongering can substitute for them. 

How many civil liberties did we cede this way from not being able or allowed, in country after country, to debate cost benefits, to worship freely, to consort with friends and family or simply to head off on a journey that beguiles us?

The ancients warned us, after all, that so called democracies lurch readily towards autocracy in the face of fear. However, we needn’t have consulted the classics. If we had been studying the outcome of recent folly, the type of power that is ‘popular’ and concentrated in the hands of the few, does not tend toward sound government. Truly none of us is as smart as all of us. 

In fact, decisions taken that are not subject to any real criticism are, in fact, not decisions after all. 

Those damned decrees 

Congress studied emergency decrees in the United States in the 1970’s and how they became a conduit for enmeshing proclamations that long outlived the crises that originally gave rise to them. 

The argument often was that quick unilateral executive action is at times necessary and required by that type of constitutional framework, and so the National Emergencies Act came into being. Ironically the number of ‘emergencies’ has only continued to proliferate. 

The judiciary might now finally be pausing to assess how ill-advised it is to permit litigants to perpetuate a decree designed for one emergency to address a completely separate one. Such indefinite “emergency” edicts give us just a veneer of democracy and a hollow shell in place of thriving, robust civil liberties. 

And so, the problem for the zealots with Justice Ginsburg passing away in September 2020 and Justice Barrett joining the Court is that the Court’s stance on religious freedom in the COVID era was split and “pro COVID” was no longer the default setting. 

Justice Gorsuch wrote a separate opinion critiquing the authoritarian and irrational deprivations of America’s second COVID year, “Government actors have been moving the goal posts on pandemic related sacrifices for months, adopting new benchmarks which always seem to put restoration of liberty just around the corner.” 

Gorsuch’s recent review of the devastating loss of liberty suffered over the 1,000 plus days it took to ‘flatten’ the curve hinged in part on how Hollywood could host a studio audience or film a singing competition with nary a protest, while not a single soul was able to enter California’s churches, synagogues or mosques. Who knew that public health could be so secular, mainstream and faddish? 

Profligacy

For 20 years the United States rampaged across the Middle East for increasingly dubious ends. Does anyone sanely believe that $ 8 trillion was justified to kill Osama Bin Laden, the once ally of the western powers? 

And along with that money came two decades worth of lost lives, lost limbs, national fixation and widespread national disgrace. From different ethical and geopolitical camps both presidents Obama and Trump took stands against these seemingly perpetual wars, but the permanent Pentagon policy panjandrums from which these flowed, seemed irreversible. 

The trillion or so spent on TARP and the financial sector bailouts of ‘08 and ‘09 gave rise to Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party Movement. How quaint they seem today as we have cavorted in the decade following, to another $ 10 trillion bolstered by the Fed’s zero-interest quantitative easing.

Then came the COVID Mad Hatter’s Party. The ‘experts’ virtually shut down the economy and all our social life replacing productive human activity with yet another whopping $ 6 trillion in debt. 

We got nothing for this debt-fuelled spending orgy. Lockdowns were demonstrably futile relative to the spread, everyone got COVID regardless with no shocking mortality outcomes, health worsened overall, and we have the biggest inflationary burst in 40 years. Developing countries like Sri Lanka got these same woes, but exponentially! 

So total Federal US debt mushroomed from around $ 6 trillion in 2003 to more than $ 32 trillion today! Having seduced voters with entitlements it is now virtually impossible to pry them loose from them. 

The largest sector of the unsustainable, entitlement riddled economy is health care, awash in infuriating deadweight and dysfunction. However, how do you explain the extra $ 20 trillion added by Washington politicians via non entitlement policy choices virtually all of which failed in their aims? And this sad two decade run also represents the most sluggish economic growth outside the Great Depression. 

Panicked by crisis

Wars on ‘terror,’ bank meltdowns, Russia collusion, COVID mania, disinformation galore, China games—experts hype and leverage such threats in order to proffer extended, all out, campaigns of panic and profligacy. 

The greatest celebratory panic picnic of all? Catastrophic climate change! For over 30 years the climate industrial complex has spent hundreds of billions shaping the true ‘weather narrative.’ This delirium now dominates the energy and financial sectors and terrorises the global psyche. 

Environmental Social and Governance investing or ESG has overtaken the financial world, the logic of democratic capital markets being replaced by ideological fever. This, to date, other than proliferating yet another “consulting” cottage industry, seems to have had an inverse impact on growth or enterprise.

Tim Buckley, the CEO of the leading asset fund manager (the world’s largest or second largest depending on how you calculate), Vanguard, had a public “Copernican” moment akin to the Renaissance polymath who challenged paradigmatic orthodoxy about celestial movement. Buckley challenged the asset-management industry’s environmental, social and governance orthodoxy, saying in essence, “Our research indicates that ESG investing does not have any advantage over broad-based investing.”

We have to agitate for them to replace the pseudocrats and earnestly recommit to basic global ideals of excellence, honesty, pluralism, and growth. They will need to launch multiple peaceful, creative, genuinely entrepreneurial revolutions in culture, economics, media, business, science, technology, and foreign policy. If so, the concept of human progress, a brew of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, now in a more multi-polar world, might yet recover and thrive.

Just remember we can only overthrow tyranny through our character and collaboration, and by making them unelectable and incoherent

Countries like Sri Lanka, beware! We cannot build “recovery” on phantoms. And it isn’t just talk. He withdrew his firm from the $ 59 trillion Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, part of the UN affiliated Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. 

He says clearly that the financial world, hoodwinked by climate change fervour, can’t make such commitments without abandoning its primary fiduciary responsibilities or claiming clairvoyance as to where world events may lead opportunities to come forth or which investments will track progress as per how the real economy operates. 

Back to the ancients! Hubris to nemesis to genuine crisis.

And so, the internet enforces narrative control from legacy know nothings to etch messages on millions of lazy brains. Herds of online trolls stand ready to defame anyone who dares to stray from the plot. 

In opposition, alternative channels with truly expert content, evading gate keepers on thousands of decentralised channels, seek to enlighten billions of savvy “info-sumers” who seek to parse and argue and think critically for themselves. 

And so, policy by panic grows both more difficult and yet more necessary. When the incompetence of the ruling class is exposed (when reality dutifully ignores their prognostications), they must construct ever more elaborate and extremist stories to retain and project power. And these seemingly exponential “crisis” threads seem to mandate ever more comprehensive, top-down solutions.

The chasm between reality and narrative grows wider. Each side considers the other batty and deranged and certainly each side produces loons a plenty. But only one of the sides relishes open discussion and more data. The other thinks open information is a threat and demands we ‘lockdown’ those who speak openly. And so what this has spawned in turn is “the censorship industrial complex.” And we have propaganda at the fore, rather than journalism.

Dire expertise

The class of experts in and out of government who go to war, cook up viruses, lock down, bail out, censor, and spend money without our consent or even knowledge bears little resemblance to “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” in Abraham Lincoln’s phrase. 

There’s a legitimate debate over relative portions of popular rule and technocracy. The Founders of the American Republic and legions of freedom fighters since, knew too much democracy was dangerous, so they bequeathed a republic, with multiple interconnected webs of adversarial checks and balances – three branches, states, due process, and popular votes leavened by Constitutional rights, such as free speech. We have similar “shells” elsewhere, even if they flicker less convincingly. Pure populism is of course destructive. And braying “experts” holding forth on the national best interest serve primarily to confound us. True experts are needed to manage the nation’s finances, to adjudicate its courts, to oversee laboratories, much less to monitor the intelligence apparatus or a nuclear arsenal. But all these crucial functions occur with guardrails provided in statute, Constitution, and norms of civil society, and they require social contracts and legal and economic processes and “habits of the heart.”

Our new form of government undermines all these important and nuanced gradations. Most of the adversarial mechanisms, where iron sharpens iron and criticism promotes truth, are gone. Big Media, Big Government, and Big Business merge into a cooperative juggernaut, unrestrained by one another. Everything seems to be for sale and the Internet is the only faltering counter to this crisis of accountability.

Meanwhile, as elites appropriate ever more power, their quality declines – catastrophically so.

Far too many of our elites are not in fact elite. Neither in expertise nor in character. Our technocrats are not technically competent. Or at least, they pretend not to be. And far too many cannot coherently communicate or empathically understand.

Among dozens of recurring medical bungles during COVID, for example, the nation’s top medical experts denied that recovered immunity from infection was a real phenomenon. As Martin Kulldorff of Harvard reminded us, we’ve known about “natural immunity” since at least the Athenian Plague of 430 BC. Of course, infection provides protection against future disease. This high school biology is the very basis of vaccines research, which seek to mimic natural immunity. By far, the most addled people in this regard seemed to reside in DC and London and Brussels and Singapore, and the most corruptible in virtually every capital besides.

Akin to that, the very same group of foreign policy “experts” who delivered the $8-trillion Mideast Adventure, meanwhile, want to spend another trillion or two in Ukraine, driving Russia and China together, and are charting, instead of strategically avoiding, a China clash. 

With the erasure of the southern US border, some 6.5 million migrants have entered that country illegally in just the last 28 months. Deadly fentanyl flows in corresponding volumes, vaulting many cartel jefes into the multi-billionaire ranks. Even those longtime advocates of robust legal immigration are left dumbfounded by this abdication of the most basic government responsibility. But it’s worse still. Politicians then beef up E-Verify, which deputises (and makes liable) American business owners to enforce the immigration labour laws on which the public officials reneged.

In an astonishing development, we just learned that 51 intelligence officials, including five former CIA directors, who lied about one candidate’s corruption on election-eve 2020, received official kudos from the CIA itself. They claimed they were protecting “our democracy.” 

We cannot, however, let our civic and business leaders off the hook. When the debauchery of COVID, censorship, and the other counterproductive policies were taking place, instead of pushing back and fighting for their countries, most CEOs, university presidents, and scientists applauded, going mulishly along. Financial posturers, similarly, acquiesced to the ESG “Revolution” in their own industry, until just recently, as explained above, Vanguard CEO Tim Buckley courageously ”broke with the crowd” and brought the inanity and insanity to light. 

Politicians in both parties now “suddenly” unite against China and TikTok, lamenting that foreign propaganda is capsizing US patriotism. The bipartisan TikTok freak-out, however, is a mass deflection by our own ruling class from its own grave sins.

No one has propagandised our young people more – via legacy media, social media, and our own schools and institutions – than Americans in leadership positions. Or Europeans, or Asians, or whoever held the levers of influence, in those respective societies. 

Beyond pseudocracy

Unfortunately, we are governed by pseudo-elites and “pseudocrats,” both in government and outside of it, both in substance and lack of character. Let’s face it; we live in a Pseudocracy as it is now increasingly called. 

And yet, there is hope. 

The biggest tonic is that we may have hit bottom and survived – barely. When the computer freezes, you reboot. The growing realisation of comprehensive pseudo-elite bankruptcy needs to spur new generations of leaders in and out of government. 

We have to agitate for them to replace the pseudocrats and earnestly recommit to basic global ideals of excellence, honesty, pluralism, and growth. They will need to launch multiple peaceful, creative, genuinely entrepreneurial revolutions in culture, economics, media, business, science, technology, and foreign policy. If so, the concept of human progress, a brew of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, now in a more multi-polar world, might yet recover and thrive.

Just remember we can only overthrow tyranny through our character and collaboration, and by making them unelectable and incoherent.

Thomas Jefferson reminded us that democracy cannot survive without an educated electorate. And, needless to say, we cannot look to those in power to provide us the education by which to overthrow them. 

We need take a stand for governing truths we first get engaged in defining: pragmatic, innovative, transformative. And for those and by those, will we be defined, tested, renewed and redeemed.

(The writer is the founder and CEO of EPL Global and founder of Sensei Lanka, a global consultant with over 30 years strategic leadership experience and now, since March 2020, a globally recognised COVID researcher and commentator.)