The Great Rehash, Part Three: Unsafe and Ineffective
The Great Rehash, Part Three: Unsafe and Ineffective
In the first two parts of this sequence of posts (1, 2), I’ve outlined the background of the Great Reset, Klaus Schwab’s dreary rehash of the last half century or so of fix-the-world schemes, and used the creation and destruction of the Georgia Guidestones as a lens through which to see how those schemes have so reliably run face first into the brick wall of reality. In this third part of the sequence I want to put those phenomena in a broader context.
My regular readers will not be surprised to hear that there are historical parallels for the situation we’re in, in which a complex society is managed by a caste of privileged intellectuals convinced that their mastery of abstract notions makes them uniquely qualified to run the world. That’s a common state of affairs at a certain point in the history of civilizations. My regular readers won’t be surprised, either, to learn that quite often the point in question is roughly where the first half of the time-honored phrase “decline and fall” gives way to the second half.
Something of the sort happens tolerably often when a clerisy ends up in control of a society. A clerisy? Why, yes. For those of my readers who aren’t familiar with the further shores of English vocabulary, a clerisy is a group of people whose claim to privilege is that they’re better educated and therefore, at least in theory, smarter than the rest of us.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was a better poet than philosopher and a better philosopher than political theorist, coined the word in 1818. He believed that in order to flourish, humanity needed the guidance of a secular organization of well-educated people to tell the rabble what to think. Being the Germanophile Romantic that he was, Coleridge borrowed the German world klerisei, a term for “clergy,” and Englished it. He was ahead of his time; more than a century passed before a fossil-fueled technological boom and the metastatic expansion of the university system after the Second World War created the clerisy he wanted and put the reins of power temporarily in its hands. Fortunately for Coleridge’s peace of mind, he didn’t live to see the complete botch they made of things.
Now admittedly our modern clerisy has two strikes against it that most of the clerisies of past civilizations haven’t had. To begin with, most clerisies in history have been religious in nature, not secular, and devoted much of their time and effort to pleasing the gods and achieving salvation rather than micromanaging political and economic affairs. I have no reason to think that religious clerisies are any less clueless than their secular counterparts, but their activities are less subject to empirical disproof. Barring the invention of a soteriometer to measure the relative salvation potential in different dogmas, a great deal of empty handwaving will always be able to slide by in theological circles. Our clerisy isn’t so fortunate; it claims to be able to manage things down here on the material plane, where the results of its policies can be all too readily observed.
The second strike is a little subtler. Most of the secular clerisies of the past have had a pervasive conservative bias. The standard example is the Chinese mandarinate, which managed the affairs of the Chinese empire for more than two thousand years with tolerable success. They did it by clinging with monomaniacal intensity to the teachings of Confucius, who wrote concerning history and public affairs in archaic China many centuries before the mandarinate was born. This rigid fixation on the outworn past, as it turned out, gave the mandarins a significant advantage in managing public affairs that our modern clerisy doesn’t have.
Human beings are not as creative as they like to think. In particular, they like to make the same mistakes over and over again. The more innovative they think they’re being, the more certain you can be that they’re rehashing a mistake that was already gray with the dust of centuries when Confucius was a little boy perched on his mother’s knees. Thus a student of the Confucian classics enters public service with a good general notion of what didn’t work in the past, and if you know that, you’ve got a very good idea of what won’t work in the future, either. This allows you to avoid a surprisingly large number of obvious but frequently repeated mistakes.
Our modern clerisy lacks that source of strength. Raised to believe that the world is progressing and that the past therefore has nothing to teach them, they inevitably fall into one overfamiliar mistake after another because they think they’re too wise to bother learning the obvious lessons of history. The result has been one abject failure after another. Think back over the last three quarters of a century—the period, roughly, that our clerisy has been churning out the policies that politicians enact and the rest of us have to cope with. How many of the grand promises of that period actually panned out, as compare to those that tripped and landed flat on their noses? How many of the horrible apocalyptic dooms the mouthpieces of the clerisy so luridly predicted have turned out to be wholly imaginary?
One of the lessons of history, in turn, is that a clerisy that fails too reliably loses its grasp on the reins of power. In the days of the Chinese mandarinate, a clique of government officials that got too fixated on pursuing failed policies was normally removed from power by the good practical expedient of beheading: either the emperor got tired of repeated failures and had his headsman take care of the matter, or the emperor lost the throne and the soldiers of the incoming dynasty handled the same job in their own ebullient way. Plenty of clerisies have ended the same way, with or without the elaborate formalities of execution in an imperial court; others have been removed from power in less sanguinary ways—but removed they have been.
…and this is one reason why it worked. Not that I’m recommending this, you understand.
I’ve come to believe that we may be fairly close to the point at which the current managerial clerisy in the Western industrial world will fall from power. The fall of a clerisy, like that of any other self-selecting and self-promoting institution, usually follows on some pratfall sufficiently disastrous, preventable, and obviously self-inflicted that afterwards, no one can seriously believe in the pretensions of the people who claim to know it all. We’ve had quite a number of such pratfalls recently—how many recent official policies can you think of offhand that have actually achieved the goals their promoters claimed they would achieve?—but the great-great-grandmother of them all is unfolding right in front of us at present.
Yes, I’m talking about the Covid vaccines.
When yet another novel coronavirus came out of China early in 2020, the political establisment and the corporate media all over the Western industrial world insisted with a single voice that it was a dire threat that would surely kill us all unless the wonders of modern medicine stopped it. When the pharmaceutical industry obligingly came out with a series of vaccines—well, actually they were experimental genetic therapies unrelated to classic vaccines, but we’ll let that pass—the political establishment and the corporate media all over the Western world insisted with a single voice that the vaccines were safe and effective.
As it turned out, Covid-19 wasn’t a serious threat to most people. It has a 99.6% survival rate, around that of an average bad flu, and nearly everyone who died of it was either very old or immunosuppressed—the classes of people who are usually most at risk from a novel respiratory virus. If you’re younger than 60 and in reasonably good health, in other words, your chances of dying of Covid were not much worse than your chances of being struck by lightning. Most people know that now. My own experience was fairly typical; I caught Covid in April of 2020 and got over it promptly with rest, hydration, and alternative health care. I’ve had colds that were worse. Yes, there were some people who had a much more difficult time of it—that happens now and then when a new respiratory virus comes through, you know. For the vast majority of people who got it, however, it was an ordinary illness.
Then there are those three awkward words “safe and effective.” The Covid vaccines were neither. Let’s start with “safe.” Here’s a convenient chart of the number of vaccine-caused deaths reported to the official US government program that tracks vaccine side effects. Notice the way the death rate exploded upwards in 2021, when the Covid vaccines hit the market and government and media alike were demanding, and in some cases mandating, that everyone get vaccinated. No other vaccine in history has driven anything like so large of a spike in deaths.
If you’d like to do a deeper dive into the data, this page links to more than 1250 peer reviewed studies in scientific journals documenting harmful or fatal side effects from the coronavirus vaccines. (If you want to follow the science, that’s one way to start.) No, they’re not all rare—here’s a recent study that found heart damage in nearly a third of patients injected with Covid vaccine. You can find heartbreaking stories of people who’ve been crippled by Covid vaccine side effects here, among many other places; one thing that nearly all the accounts include is that the victims faced systematic gaslighting from a medical industry that, as usual these days, puts its profits and its reputation ahead of the health and safety of mere patients.
So much for “safe.” The “effective” side of the slogan hasn’t aged any better. Most people have noticed by now that it’s the people who took the vaccines, not the people who refused it, who are getting Covid over and over again. Another curious detail—you can look this up yourself on the internet if you like—is that right now, all the countries in the world that are being hit hard by Covid are countries that had very high vaccination rates. Countries where the vaccine found few takers, by contrast, have next to no cases today. New Zealand, for example, has one of the highest Covid vaccination rates in the world; Haiti has one of the lowest. Care to guess which of them has a serious Covid outbreak raging as I write this? Hint: it’s not Haiti.
Nobody knows for sure why it is that people injected with the experimental genetic therapies marketed as “Covid vaccines” end up more vulnerable to Covid than the unvaccinated. The reason nobody knows is that the necessary testing wasn’t done. There have been other vaccines against coronaviruses developed in recent decades; none of them got through long term trials because the side effects were so bad. There have been other mRNA products developed, too; none of them got through long term trials either, for the same reason. Pfizer, Moderna, et al. evaded that problem with the Covid vaccines by simply not doing long-term testing at all—the Pfizer vaccine, for example, got all of eight weeks of testing before it started being dumped into human bodies. All those claims that the Covid vaccines got tested as stringently as any drug on the market? If liars actually did have their pants catch fire, the corporate shills who spread those claims would have been reduced to charred stumps from the waist down.
Now of course it’s only fair to say that this kind of blatant dishonesty and depraved indifference to human life is par for the course in corporate circles these days, especially but not only in the pharmaceutical industry. The difference this time seems to be roughly that between the last but one and the last straw piled on the back of the proverbial camel. You can only gaslight people for so long, it turns out, before they start paying attention, talking to one another, and comparing notes. Once that happens, if your misbehavior hurts enough people, you may end up in much more trouble than you expect.
One of the indications that this is happening around us right now is the increasingly frantic outbursts emanating from from the medical and pharmaceutical industries these days. The quest to find some reason other than vaccines why young vaccinated people are dropping dead of heart attacks in unprecedented numbers has spawned so many dubious media articles it’s practically an industry of its own. Meanwhile The New York Times, the voice of privilege in this country for well over a century now, features plaintive articles talking about how parents are refusing to vaccinate their children, and what can we do about it? Pfizer has added to the conversation, in a certain sense, with a series of endearingly inept memes. One shows a milk carton with the words “trust in science” in place of the usual missing-children photo.
Um, I hate to break it to you, Pfizer, but that horse left the barn so long ago it’s filling out change of address forms in another state. If you want people to trust science, it would be helpful if the people who claim to speak for science didn’t tell so many lies. If you’d like to follow the science, here’s an article from the British Medical Journal—one of the world’s most reputable medical periodicals—talking in brutal detail about the way that “evidence-based medicine” has become a front for corporate profiteering, institutional corruption, and wholly avoidable injury and death. None of this is news for the millions of people who have been harmed by medical malpractice, drug side effects, nosocomial infections, et al.—but here again, it’s being discussed openly.
The question is what happens next.
The predicament faced by the clerisy of the modern industrial world is that its members staked nearly all that was left of their tattered reputations on that “safe and effective” label. From Joe Biden on down, governments, scientists, and the media insisted that the vaccines would keep people from catching or transmitting Covid-19. Yes, they were wrong, but that’s not the crucial point. The crucial point is that they made that false claim in absolute terms, vilified and censored anybody who disagreed with them, tried to push the vaccines on everyone via dubiously legal mandates, and are still doing their level best to suppress information that shows that they were wrong.
Imagine, by contrast, an alternative timeline in which governments, scientists, and the media responded to the emergence of Covid-19 in a less dictatorial and more honest manner. Imagine Joe Biden et al. saying, “As far as we know, these vaccines are the best option we’ve got, but we’re going to monitor cases closely to make sure they don’t have nasty side effects.” Imagine the media and the medical community encouraging the free sharing of data about alternative treatments and potential problems. Imagine the clerisy of the industrial world treating the rest of the population as adults whose rights and concerns deserved to be taken seriously. Had that happened, no matter what twists and turns history brought, the medical and pharmaceutical industries and the established order of industrial society would have come through the crisis with the renewed respect and support of the populace.
But of course that’s not what happened. There are plenty of reasons why Joe Biden’s approval ratings are so abysmal right now. Equally, there are plenty of reasons why trust in the corporate mass media and the other official institutions of American public life is chalking up one record low after another. Those institutions, and of course Biden himself, have labored long and hard to shred the fabric of mutual trust and respect that’s essential to the functioning of any society. As the proverb points out, if you lie to people often enough, sooner or later they’ll stop believing a word you say—and that old saw still has very sharp teeth.
One of the things that interests me about the way this is playing out is that it has a very precise echo in American history. Two centuries ago, state and federal governments that were explicitly set up to preserve the privileges of the well-to-do against everyone else were shaken right down to their foundations by Jacksonian populism. Laws restricting the vote to people who owned a certain value of property were overturned in state after state, and so were other bastions of privilege. One of these, and indeed one of the most hated of these, was the legal structure that kept medical practice in the hands of a wealthy and educated minority.
The reason that this was among the most hated bastions of privilege in those days is that the medical care that resulted was so bad. Scientific medicine at that time, backed up by all the most respected authorities of the day, focused with monomaniacal intensity on bleeding and purging, which by and large killed more people than they saved. Physicians also charged sky-high prices for these officially approved but ineffective treatments. Plenty of less harmful, less expensive, and more effective therapies existed, but people who tried to practice them faced the same sort of legal penalties you get for practicing medicine without a license today.
Enter the Jacksonian era. Faced with the prospect of social revolution, elite classes across the new republic realized that they would have to buy off the rebels by giving them some of what they wanted. Throwing the medical industry of the time under the bus was an easy way to do that. Most state governments accordingly either lowered the requirements for a medical license to a nominal fee, or abolished medical licensing altogether. The result was a broad improvement in the quality of medical care, and a quick death for the bleed-and-purge school of health care. Once the formerly licensed doctors were forced to compete on a level playing field against healers using other modalities, it became clear very quickly who the quacks were.
We could very easily see similar scenes repeating themselves in the years ahead. Far too many people no longer trust anything that comes out of the mouths of medical and pharmaceutical industry spokesflacks. What’s more, a vast number of those people have very good reasons for that mistrust. As populist opposition to our current dysfunctional clerisy builds, one easy way for elites to win a breathing space for their own malfeasance would be to throw the populists some red meat to chew on. I’m pretty sure America’s public schools, which are even more dysfunctional these days than our medical system, will be among the tidbits thus tossed, but the legal privileges that keep the medical industry from facing the wholesome discipline of the market would make a very satisfying chew toy as well. So, of course, would the careers of those politicians and bureaucrats who so enthusiastically pushed Big Pharma’s agenda on the rest of us.
The question is what happens after that. In the final installment of this sequence, I’ll sketch out the possibilities as I see them.
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