The Economy of Permanent Emergency, Part II

The continuation of Professor Fabio Vighi's account of the context of the Covid plandemic, focussing on the reasons why totalitarianism was ‘necessary’ and why the left abandoned its traditional base.

The moment we’re arrived at now — the AI moment — has been signalled for, more or less, a century, so we’ve had plenty of time to get our ideas straight. Yet, aside from a brief explosion of discussion back in the 1980s about ‘the future of work’, we seem to have assumed it would look after itself. Yet, the questions it raises are surely the core of Marxian concern: the ownership of the means of production, a matter concerning which leftists generally seem to have fallen silent.  It has seemed to me that, regardless of ideology, democratic communities ought to have long been examining this question from all angles, with a view to formulating a new kind of society in which the ‘human quotient’ might find a new way of existing in the absence, generally speaking, of paid work.

It may well be that such a society is impossible, but we surely had a responsibility to try, if not for our own sake, then for the sake of those to whom we might bequeath the world on departing it. Yet, from the 1990s onwards — under the influence of low interest rates and consequent manufactured prosperity — this discussion has been more or less abandoned outside of academia, where it was pursued in largely a token manner. It might well be observed that, in principle, democratic societies — even if Marx had never existed — ought to be talking about how to redistribute the dividend of the AI moment to their ‘shareholders’, which is to say their citizens. It might be postulated, for example, that the chief concern would be along the lines of contriving something like a ‘redistribution of dignity’ (and probably other elements, like creativity, nurturing, meaning etc.) with a view to an initial framing of the necessary discussion. But nothing of the kind has occurred — leaving behind what one might well conclude is a deliberately cultivated lacuna. 

Now we’re being driven into the terminus and not a thought in any head. The result is that the human population faces a Hobson’s choice: totalitarianism or chaos. By the rule of might-is-right, we may end up with the former, albeit incorporating an ironic mix of capitalist, neo-feudalist and communist elements. This situation is largely a failure of the democratic/political system to insist upon the appropriate issues being tabled and thrashed out. Now, it may be too late.

The idea that the development of technology should be privately owned appears to be anathema — unthinkable — in our culture. To suggest that it ought to be owned by the people causes an involuntary shudder to pass through the (cultivated) ‘liberal’ physique. Yet, most ‘liberals’ are cool as ice with something far, far worse.

JW: ‘Don’t we need to find ways of reclaiming our economic systems and give their fruits back to the people as a whole, notwithstanding that we might no longer be contributing our labour?’

FV: ‘I agree with you. In that sense it would make sense to have ownership of the means of production — if we can go back to the real economy, the distribution of real goods. But in that case we need to step out of the capitalist mentality, and also deflate completely the financial system. We need to eliminate the financial speculations, because they wouldn’t work in this context — in a context where there are people who collectively own the means of production, and agree on a certain redistribution — not based on work any longer. The problem with socialism was that it was a narrative based on work. So to me, socialism was state capitalism, almost — very similar in many ways. But now we are out of that narrative, we know that work can be done by machines mostly, we need to find a way to justify people’s existence outside work. So, you mentioned dignity . . . There’s other type of work that people can do: helping other people, what we call voluntary work, mentoring the young, creative work, intellectual work. Why not base the society on that kind of work rather than on work that is done for profits, which is not working any longer? I mean, that’s the problem. It’s not like there are revolutionary armies outside trying to destroy the system. No, the system is imploding, the system is shrinking.  People need to realise that this work society is imploding. I think we are in denial at the moment, and maybe the financialisation of the economy is the worse part of denial in that respect.’

JW: ‘Universal Basic Income, set apart from the social credit tyranny, might have had some merits — freeing people up to do more creative and inventive things with their lives. But here, combined with surveillance and social credit regimes, it will become an instrument of tyranny.’

FV: ‘If you take it out of the context, yes, it has merit, because it helps people to survive and it gives people also an option to think about the world, you know? Because potentially you’ve got time to organise, you’ve got time to do other things. And that in itself is a positive thing, absolutely. But it still is a symptom, I think, of this shrinking economy that we’re talking about — the real economy. So I think in the long term, when most people will be on UBI, or whatever, it will need to be administered with very sophisticated technology, and by authoritarian means. There’s no other way. This is the direction the whole thing is moving in.’

JW: ‘Given the logic at play — the fragility of the system, the fact that the system is controlled by its own mega beneficiaries, the relative ignorance of most people about the workings of monetary and economic systems, the bought-off state of modern media — the most ‘plausible’ ‘solution’ became what in another light might have been the most unthinkable. It’s bizarre.’

FV: ‘People are always telling me, “But c’mon, it’s not in capitalism’s interest to lock down society.” People haven’t realised that capitalism is not consumerism any longer. It’s not about work and consumption. It’s more and more about finance. It’s an ultra-financialised capitalism that we’re talking about. The disparity between the value produced in the financial sector with regard to the real economy, or the retail economy, is already huge. And I think we come to a point where, let’s say, the economy cannot manage itself with its own tools. It needs some kind of extra tool, like global emergencies, or, you know, this sort of authoritarian turn, which is likely to become totalitarian, even though it might still call itself democracy, you know, with some thinly-disguised definition, but in truth it’s obviously totalitarian.’

Is he suggesting that ‘emergencies’ could become an enduring tool of economic policy, that the totalitarianism that has visited Western societies over the past two years is not merely a temporary device to manage a lockdown but a permanent state of existence? He is. If we wish our societies to continue as conventional capitalist economies, the only way of doing this, within the present system, is to accompany the maintenance of a constant state of emergency with forms of social control that prevent the populace from rattling too much the chains that are necessary to making this kind of system work. For certain, the foundations of a long-form totalitarianism, together with elements of a biosecurity state — including our acquiescence in it — have been established. Much of the donkey-work has been done: the blueprint, infrastructure, paraphernalia, habits, are in place to be activated at any time in response to a similar or different ‘emergency’. We, the people, are primed, programmed and ready to be herded and driven once again.

FV: ‘There’s no way that we can go back to a different kind of capitalism. For me this is inertia, almost. It’s a kind of evolutionary trajectory within capitalism that is slowly killing the system because the system is shrinking in terms of its capacity to produce real value for the people. But it can try to survive by kicking the can down the road for a bit longer. But it needs this sort of totalitarian means.’

JW:  ‘How do the “emergency” and “totalitarian” elements combine? Does this “new model of economy” need both elements in unison?’

FV: ‘I think the emergency brings in totalitarianism. It legitimises the totalitarian measures. We can see that now — how it changes people’s mindframes straightaway. People are going, “Oh yeah, but they’re right: if it save lives . . . we need to go with the totalitarianism.” People are saying it in the streets already!’

A handful of years back, when we were still free to travel, my wife and I were at Dublin Airport one morning to catch a flight to the United States. New machines had been in place for some time, to ‘assist’ passengers in checking themselves in, but now there were machines to check in your baggage as well. At some of these machines, there were people in airline uniforms helping passsengers to negotiate the new system. With their help, you could carry out the full process yourself and then deposit your tagged bags at a desk in a corner of the check-in lounge. There were still people behind the check-in counters, for those who were unable to figure out the machines, and also for those whose bags had failed the weight test or some such. It struck me that we were moving closer to a moment when there would be nobody behind any of the counters, just people milling around in front carrying out the airline’s work for it (while still paying the market price of an air ticket). My first thought was, “Progress!” or some such. My second thought was that there was a problem here, not at first sight for the airline, but for the society, which went something like this: Since the people inside the counter would also become, at other moments, the people standing outside other counters, the net outcome was not a saving of costs but a shrivelling of total economic activity. To put it another way: If you eliminate the people behind the counters, you eliminate also the counters, which is tantamount to eliminating the economies they cumulatively comprise. This, I think, is close to illustrating Fabio Vighi’s concept of the ‘structural problem’. It is also essentially what I was writing about 30 years ago, though I did not put it so succinctly.

FV: ‘That’s why they want to give people some money. People will want to consume a little, anyway. The only solution is that they throw some money at us — this UBI thing, which will become truly universal, I think, especially with digital currencies, and will allow them to control this money that they give to people to consume a little, and that will in a sense keep the system going for a bit longer, allowing people to have some money, even if they don’t work any longer. I think they have to be very artful to synchronise this because if they impoverish people too quickly, people will react violently. You can see that from history. It’s inevitable. When they have nothing to eat, they will start riots and revolutions. So they’d want to avoid that, of course. So that’s why the UBI thing can help them to at least give people the illusion that they’re free, somehow, when they’re not, any longer. You know, when they have something to eat et cetera. And also they said it themselves: You’ll have nothing but you’ll be happy.’

Within the logic of the system, and the interests and scruples of its — in effect — proprietors, there was ‘no alternative.’ Outside of that logic, the alternative was a radical one: tell the people what the problem was, set in place a plan to replace the system at a chosen moment, in accordance with democratic principles, acknowledging that human beings have jointly-held interests and equities in the economic and monetary systems that grew out of the totality of human endeavour and ingenuity through time, and commence a democratic discussion as to how this might be managed to create a genuinely new kind of world — in particular, though not exclusively, tackling the vexed question of how to bequeath to the people their just entitlement of a ‘dividend’ from the final onset of the AI economy, which would in effect put the entire species into a largely involuntary retirement. This would have posed many taxing problems, not all of them economic. There would be, for example, the problem of how to ‘reinvent’ human cultures and societies for an age in which the meaning and dignity of human existence was no longer bound up with paid work. This might have involved something along the lines of what I have called a ‘redistribution of dignity,’ so as to valourise activities of the human that are currently deemed to be ‘social,’ ‘voluntary,’ or ‘recreational.’ Professor Vighi agrees with this analysis but, I suspect, thinks it impractical and naïve to imagine that the ‘proprietors’ of the system as presently constituted, were ever going to hand it over to the people out of the goodness of their hearts.

FV: ‘I read what you said about the redistribution of (dignity). Well, first of all capitalism was never really about redistribution. It was for a bit, under social democratic conditions, but it was only thirty years, more or less. The whole history was never really about (that). It was about greed and making money, and profiting.’

What is happening, then — definitively — has nothing to do with your health. It has to do with what you may have thought of as your wealth. It is, in effect, an attempted plundering of the world’s financial resources with a view to commandeering the hard assets later, for a song — in effect, retaining most or all of the real value of the world’s economies but transferring them from the billions of the world’s working populations to the comparatively miniscule cadre of self-appointed ‘owners and controllers’ of a system that, although having osmotically deviated from democratic principles and understandings, is still — in principle, morality, truth and correctness — the property of the human race as a whole, for to say otherwise would be to say that democracy is and has always been a sham. The implications are staggering, ominous and unparalleled by anything in human history before.

We seem to be moving towards a kind of serviced slavery. But how long can that last — the ‘serviced’ element, I mean? Things change. For the initial period, yes, as the new oligarchs sneakily rub their hands in glee at the idea of getting away with it, the people may find themselves indulged, and the atmosphere may be, for a time, more Huxlean that Orwellian. But then, ever so slowly, the temperature may change. The oligarchs, controlling pubic opinion as much as everything else, may be able to impose on the public mind, and in the minds of its constituent members, a sense of individual uselessness, then of superfluousness, then of pointlessness. Gradually we may move towards a kind of constructive culture of self-liquidation. In five years, ten years, the oligarchs may ask: Why are we paying these people to just sit around guzzling beer and stuffing their faces with pizza?

But this will perhaps be matched on the other side of the line by a belated awakening to the trick that has been pulled.

FV: ‘I’m sure there will be revolutions, changes. I’m sure people will become aware. And also because we have the technological means now to live at higher standards. So people will start asking questions: Why are we under this control society? Where they control everything we spend? Or they control everything?

‘If you throw into the mix the climate change thing, the control society becomes pretty obvious, the carbon footprint and all the rest of it. It’s going to be easy. I think the climate narrative is an even better one than this one to control people, because it’s really something that hits people in the heart: “We are destroying the planet!” So people sacrifice, you see, willingly almost. So they have a few weapons at their disposal. The pandemic is an obvious one, but the climate change one is better in the long run. Or a mixture of the two, some kind of deadly overlap of virus and climate that will keep people quiet and scared. But it’s all done, I think, to keep this system in place for a bit longer, for as much longer as they can.’

JW: ‘How do you see the role of the political classes in all this?’

FV: ‘I think the people who are in power, they know that they have to do it. I think they really were given orders by . . . I think we underestimate how hierarchical the system is, and how politics is totally overwhelmed, totally in the hands of the financial people. So they either say yes or they’re out. You know, it’s as simple as that, and then it’s a matter of their careers, their lives, their money and everything else. So they end up saying yes. The moment you stand in the way, you’re out. They destroy you, one way or another —politically, of course, but maybe also personally. I don’t really have much faith in politics as it is now. Whether it’s left or right, to be honest, doesn’t make a difference, But I have to say that the right — unfortunately from my point of view — at least they’ve been a bit more vocal about these issues, And maybe religion has a place here — I don’t know. But then you think about the Catholic Church, you think about the pope — right?’

JW: ‘Yes. Religion or spirituality are languages of that dimension of the human being and the human community concerning its deeper dimension, and there is no other language for this, really, that is effective. It is very problematic when you have the pope and all these guys coming out on the wrong side of history.’

FV: ‘That’s the worst kind of thing that can happen to any kind of of spirituality — like at the moment, with the Pope in with them. But that doesn’t matter as spirituality can develop in different ways outside of the official channels and so on, and it can connect with even more material things like growing one’s own vegetables, developing some kind of parallel economy, parallel society.’

In all of this, the left has gone AWOL, abandoning its core base (and all questions pertaining to the welfare thereof) in favour of a new client-set under the rubric of ‘cultural Marxism’ (an unhelpful moniker, generally speaking). This desertion has seemed to culminate in the Time of Covid, with left-liberals (the Woke and SJW elements in particular, though not exclusively) essentially rowing in with ‘The Man’ — that legendary figure of hippie lore who sought to control and own everyone. One result of all this is that the blue-collar worker of myth has had to go shopping for advocacy of his interests, and has ended up on the far side of the traditional ideological divide. Even more bizarrely, in some leftist quarters there is this daft idea that they should support the Covid tyranny on the basis of the alleged racing certainty that it will bring down the capitalist system.

FV: ‘It’s madness. I can’t explain it. Well, I can, in many ways. There’s the liberal left and . . . what can you say? I’ve given up on them a long time ago. They are totally part of power, so what can you do with them? Nothing. The more radical left I’m disappointed by, to an extent, because they should see through this: that it serves a quite different purpose than pandemic, et cetera. But for some reason, because of this narrative of solidarity the system has abused, they’re falling for it. They think that the system is doing something good in terms of solidarity! With the vaccines, et cetera. I think that’s how they were co-opted. And I think the system knows that it needs the left [in order] to do all this. It needs that kind of leftist mindset of solidarity, collectiveness, collectivity, et cetera. And it very cleverly co-opted the left into it. Because it wouldn’t have worked, I think, unless these notions of solidarity were part of the game. That’s why we get all these philanthropists around. And people love the philanthropists  — they do good for everybody else!! (Laughs).’

JW: ‘Is it fear-based?’

FV: ‘I don’t think it’s fear-based, I think it’s ideological, I know some radical leftists really believe that this will be the end of capitalism and the beginning of some kind of communism. I don’t know what kind of communism they have in mind. But they kind of think, secretly at least, “Well this will break capitalism finally,” which is so naïve, because capitalism is actually so resourced . . . I think capitalism has organised this precisely to avoid implosion, so it can carry on, maybe another ten years, maybe 50 years, maybe even a century, by different means. It’s not the end of capitalism. Some of them — I think a minority — thought like that, and the others — most of them were in the system, the liberals. And the others like (Slavoj) Žižek and so on . . . I think, naïvete — this naïve sense of solidarity. I don’t know how they can put together the system and solidarity! I just don’t know how!’

JW: ‘A couple of decades back, the left appeared to locate a new client base, the so-called minorities who have the protection of what is called cultural Marxism. Almost immediately, their old base — the working class — was stigmatised as white and reactionary. Suddenly the blue-collar base of the old left was the enemy. Amazing how these forces converged to make this happen just prior to this moment.’

FV: ‘Yes. And identity politics is a wonderful instrument of distraction. That’s what I’ve always thought about it. You talk about it and it becomes the main purpose of any kind of struggle, and you forget that there are causes that are much deeper and much more important for . . . everybody, in fact, for the collective. And those are totally removed from any discussion. The left has given up on questioning these things that we are questioning here, for a long time: like the purpose of work, like the means of production — things like that are totally out. They’ve been out for a while, unfortunately. And I think it’s been quite easy to co-opt the left, through promoting this cultural or identity type of Marxism, Woke stuff. This works perfectly for the system.’

JW:  ‘And then there was the astonishing phenomenon whereby Covid seemed to manifest almost from the beginning in full ideological raiment, designed to repel some and, perhaps as a consequence of this reaction, draw others to its side. The first respiratory virus in history to break populations down between left and right . . .’

FV: ‘Absolutely. In America it was particularly like that, with the Trump thing. I was writing a book for an American publisher in 2020, already under contract et cetera, and I used some of my stuff on Covid in the book. I have a chapter on it. And, all of a sudden . . .  censorship! I couldn’t do that because it was politically insensitive! Because, in America, if you say something like this then you’re with Trump. And the liberal press let that happen. So it totally polarised in political terms, But, again, this is part of the ideology we’re talking about, because people don’t see the real issue. They think it’s some bad guys versus some good guys.’

JW: ‘It seems to be set up so that people who opposed the narrative would come across as “right wing” or “far right”, and this caused a ricochet by which people on the left decided that, if that was the case, they would support the narrative. We were all totally played.’

FV: ‘I think initially it had a lot to do with that. Because it came down to the idea that wearing the mask was the right thing to do for the left and the wrong thing for the right. Same with vaccines. Everything became polarised in political terms.’

JW:  ‘And now people have become quite crazed: left-liberals calling for vax mandates, soft-pedalling on mandatory medical experiments, eugenics, et cetera.’

FV: ‘My God! This is what really pisses me off more than anything: that these guys are ready to protest on behalf of bears in the Arctic — about anything really — but they turn around and, when it comes to these kinds of discrimination we’re seeing today, they pretend they’re not there. Or they are in favour of them!’

JW: ‘Or drag out their boxes of semantic rationalisations. Like apartheid suddenly means something other than discriminatory treatment — skin colour is not comparable to vaccination status, because you “choose” to be unvaxed!’

FV: ‘It’s incredible. In Italy it’s so bad at the moment. I was there a few weeks ago and it really is incredible, and it’s getting worse and worse: You cannot have a coffee standing up without your vaccination card. It’s properly authoritarian. It’s dystopian, and yet people are going with it, and they’re turning against each other, fighting this horizontal war against each other.’

JW: ‘Have you been surprised by the responses of the public to this?’

FV: ‘It is, psychologically speaking, a form of hypnosis — mass hypnosis. And what do you do? You create little networks. I’ve been in touch with loads of people from everywhere. We talk about this and that. You create something that maybe is the basis for something to come, and then you write something because you feel like that’s the only weapon you’ve got. What else can you do?’

JW: ‘Maybe a lot of people are more scared that you’re going to be right than that you’re going to be wrong . . . ‘

FV: ‘Absolutely. They’re scared of their own thinking! They’re scared of their own understanding of the situation. I think they’ve repressed a kind of knowledge that they know is there, but they don’t want to have to face it, because they don’t have a Plan B. They don’t have anything else apart from their belief in this system, and if this system falls apart, then they’re completely lost. So I think it comes from a deep sense of anxiety, which causes a refusal to think.’

JW: ‘What, if anything, might trigger a change?’

FV:  ‘Who knows? But I’m always thinking that maybe some piece of news . . . Sometimes it takes very little to turn people against such things. Something that comes out of the system, because the system is not perfect — we know that. They make mistakes all the time as well. They try not to, but . . . So maybe capitalising on some kind of mistake that they would make. My effort now is to try to be as clear as possible in what I say, because I want people to get the causal connections — the connections from an imploding society to the pandemic simulation, and all the rest. But I agree with you that people will struggle to admit it to themselves that this is real, even if they understand it logically. Even if you give them the figures, even if you give them the evidence.’

JW: ‘The media, of course, is completely corrupt . . .’

FV: ‘I have had a little bit of faith that there could be a kind of journalistic . . . somewhere . . . but now that’s being destroyed completely. When I see mainstream media, it’s just . . . they’ve just sold themselves totally.’

JW: ‘Despite knowing what I know, I sometimes find it hard to believe this is happening. Nothing in my life up to 2020 had prepared me for what I’ve witnessed.’

FV: ‘Yes, It’s been a shock also for me. Those who are pulling the strings . . . you know that notion of “the banality of evil”? I think it’s very much like that. They’re doing their jobs. They don’t really question it too much. And what they care about is that the system can continue, that it can reproduce itself. Then they go home to their families and they’re nice people et cetera. But in the meantime they’re destroying everything.

‘I don’t think they have full control over it, because things can happen. But to me they are moving in that direction quite quickly now. And things can happen quite quickly in history — now, in the next ten years. What’s scary for me is that this is still heresy for most people. This is madness for most people, because people still believe that we live in a certain type of economy, they believe in institutions, they think that institutions are free, they believe that the media are free and pluralistic. They don’t realise that the economic power, the financial power, has taken control of everything. Whatever we can think of, it’s controlled by them. So I think the first step is to make people aware, more and more, that these things are happening, and to think counter-intuitively, because you need to think now in these counter-intuitive terms to understand what is going on.‘

JW: ‘I think the idea that this whole scam has been so cunning has given people the idea that they are dealing with supernatural levels ointelligence. Yet, there’s no denying that there is an enormous ingenuity about the whole thing, at a dark level, which has scared people into thinking that these people are omnipotent.  I’m interested that you say they are not as smart as people think they are.’

FV: ‘No. I don’t think they are. Because we began to think of them as some kind of spectre, like in some James Bond movie, but they’re not. I think we need to think in systemic terms: It’s the system that is attempting to introduce its own conditions but through different means. And these guys are enabling it. These guys are functionaries, they’re bureaucrats of capitalism, of the system. And they will find ways to make it work, regardless of the consequences. So, to me, what really matters for them is that the system continues. And they will try to manage the consequences. They will try and do what they can. But then again you can’t really predict, because first of all they are not that intelligent, they don’t have a a super intelligence that we don’t have! And, also, it’s just a few of them, and more and more of the majority of the people will be in these difficult conditions and they will need to stick together.’

JW: ‘In a sense — not a moral sense, but within the logic of the system as it was functioning and the options they saw as viable — they didn’t have any choices?’

FV: ‘In a sense, yes. Because the other choice would be to be prepared to move out of this system and create a new one. But I don’t think that was ever for them a possibility. If you look at their faces, they are quite desperate, themselves. They don’t have a Plan B. I think they know that the main plan is going to be painful for most people. They’re trying to manage it somehow. But it’s not going to work, and at some level they must know.’

JW: ‘It’s also possible they have no idea what’s going to happen?’

FV: ‘No. They don’t. They can’t really control the effects that this will have on people. They’re trying to do that [to control things]. They’re lying all the time, through ideology and all the rest of it.  But you can’t . . . I don’t think you can totalise the system completely. It doesn’t work, because there’s always something that you can’t control in people. In psychoanalysis, which is where I come from in a sense, it’s the unconscious. The unconscious cannot be brought under control. There’s something within each of us that is totally uncontrollable — even for us, even for our own consciousness. We don’t know what it is, but we cannot control it. And that, I think, is also true socially. And that’s where our freedom, you know . . .  this hope for freedom . . . comes from, because there’s something that they cannot control. So in a sense I’m optimistic, but there has to be come kind of critique, some collective awareness of what’s going on — this needs to grow.’

JW: ‘In one of your essays you make a chilling observation: “No crime against humanity can be ruled out when systematic implosion is so stubbornly denied.”’ 

FV: ‘I tell you, Why not? I mean, these guys do not . . . Eugenics? Malthusian narratives? They’ve been in there for a long time! They’d be very happy if the world population was reduced, because they know we’re going towards a world where less and less people are needed to produce wealth, and more and more people would need to be given the money to consume, if they are alive. So I really believe that. Why not? We’ve seen it in history before. So why are people surprised? Do they think that those guys care? Really?’

JW: ‘It’s interesting that you’ve been the one to push this analysis, not being an economist per se. Economists in general have been silent about or complicit with Covid. But nor have they spoken about the “shrinkage” problem.’

FV: ‘Economists only think about the surface. I studied economy for a little bit and then I got so fed up because all I was taught was through this logic of supply and demand, et cetera — the very surface of economy, not about how value is produced: the big questions that you ask as a child even, Why can’t they just print money and give it to us, Daddy? And when I asked that question to my father, he didn’t really know how to answer it. He mentioned something about inflation, but I didn’t quite get it. These things are not studied. They don’t really teach you this stuff. So economists end up being very technical, but miss the big picture. So you need somebody like a philosopher, somebody that can zoom out and look at the whole thing.’

JW: ‘Do you think these people can be brought down without permanently destroying the fabric of civilisation?’

FV: ‘Wow That’s a big question! I’d love to see that at some point, but I don’t think that maybe, in my lifetime, I will see it!  But I’d like to see a radical change in the way things are. It’s the sheer imbalance in wealth that determines control and power, and the power structures and so on. So it would need to be brought down at some point. But it’s difficult to see that. I mean, it’s difficult to see any kind of revolutionary movement, or . . . I think that the only way for something to happen is if people develop some kind of parallel way of living together, parallel societies or . . . even if it’s only small communities to start with. Something can grow from there.’

We know not how this is going to land. The immediate future may be in some kind of parallel economy, supporting a parallel society: people going back to basics to provide their own needs, independently of government, banks, monetary systems or conventional supply chains. As with the airport analogy, we need to understand that by maximising profitability the financial conspirators attack the very root of their own fabulous wealth. In this moment — this moment alone — they have the optimal situation: All the money in the world, and the world as it more or less was until the day before yesterday. But, if they ‘succeed’ in the present endeavour, by the day after tomorrow this will have started to change, and the world will have begun to shrivel, and they and their money within it. It is possible that they are even more stupid than the most optimistic have allowed themselves to believe: that they have not paused to imagine what a world without people, without life, might be like. What would money be for? Could they eat it? They not merely saw furiously at the branch they are sitting on, but have forgotten that, when they are finished, there will be nobody to keep even the saw sharp for them to continue their hobby of sawing off their own supports.

JW: ‘It is the system that has failed, not humans, not their work. Human work can still create the value that humans need to survive. So, if our heads are not kicked in by the Gestapo, we might contrive our societies again from the ground up, based on our own needs, and leave “their” system to wither on the vine.’

FV: ‘Exactly that. Because it would lose . . . They can have all the financial power they want, but they need the people as well. They need the people to work for them, to buy their stuff. If people refuse to do that, because they’re doing something else — they’re producing their own goods for their own use, without all the waste and the excess — then they [the conspirators'] would be lost, absolutely! And I think that that’s maybe the most realistic way that some kind of opposition to this system can grow, because I can see it already developing quite quickly through networks. You can do it socially in different parts of the world when small communities can get together, through technology, and develop similar strategies.’

JW: ‘Its already happening. I have been going to meetings all around the country with 50 or so people in the room talking about growing vegetables and getting clean water et cetera.’

FV: ‘So the mindset is already there to do it. If the people are prepared to do it, I think there is some hope there. It comes from that sense of humanity, and that spirit, and people need to rediscover some kind of spirit, some kind of spiritual togetherness and sense of community. That’s why I have always been sympathetic towards religions, because they have that inner strength that brings people together. And that’s what is needed, because these guys are psychopaths. They are on their own — they don’t care about this because they are self-sufficient.’

If Fabio Vighi is correct — and there are vast swathes of evidence to indicate that he is — what we face here is, without doubt, the greatest, most amoral crime in all history. For it would mean not only that the people have been deceived to an end that bears no semblance of benefit or profit to the common good of humanity, but that the deception — enduring over two horrendous years — has been perpetrated to dispossess the human race in virtually its entirety under the subterfuge of protecting its well-being. Even more devastating is the realisation that, if this is what has occurred, it has been — and continues to be — effected with the cooperation and connivance of the ‘people’s representatives’ — the political classes, those elected by the people to protect their welfare and defend them from harm, as well as the supposedly democratic media who claimed the role of watchdogs over the people’s interests and well-being, the police forces and judiciaries paid for from the public purse, and with the collusion also of most of those who had purported to be the advocates and defenders of an ethical economics since Adam was a boy.

How many of the human actors implicated in this immense and lengthy deception might or could have known what they were doing is a matter, for the moment, of conjecture. It is hard to accept that, even if many of them did not realise at the beginning — being bamboozled like the public in general by the misdirecting story of pandemic — they did not, at some point along the way, begin to realise that something dark and nefarious was afoot. All of them, however, whether knowingly or not, must now come to terms with the fact that they have been engaged for two years with the criminal usurpation of the world at the expense of its billions of inhabitants to the benefit of a tiny cadre of evil and remorseless robber barons.

This has been a long article and yet we have not gone into many details that relate to its content and resonate within it in relation to what has been happening since the spring of 2020. Much of Professor Vighi’s primary analysis resonates with what we know of the misuse of the PCR text to generates Covid ‘cases’; with the clearly calculated and industialised falsification of mortality; with the frenetic urgency and malevolence that attended the purveying of alleged ‘vaccination’ long after herd immunity had been achieved; with the principles of groupthink defined by Irving Janis and of mass formation by Gustave Le Bon; with the global use of behavioural psychology to impose mass formation/hypnosis as an aid to social indoctrination and control; with the witness of hundreds of doctors, scientists and, occasionally, economic commentators (such as the German writer Ernst Wolff). Above all, Professor Vighi’s analysis renders crystal-clear the context and reasons for ‘measures’ that made no other sense: face masks, social distancing, the censoring of dissident voices — and dovetails with much, if not all, of the analysis of commentators who have placed these recent events in a broader historical frame. It is the most complete and manifestly irrefutable account of the ‘pandemic’ I have encountered to date.

You can read Fabio Vighi’s brilliant essays via this link to the Philosophical Salon:

https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/author/fabiovighi/

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