The 'Victory' of Bondage

The Time of Covid has revealed to us something we would not have believed about our fellow human beings: that many of them are happier in slavery than in freedom.

Since virtually everyone’s favourite ‘conspiracy theory’ is now turning out to be no more nor less than ‘The News’ — actually, The News that ‘journalism’ appears to exist to hide from you — I thought I’d float one of my own. It is that all those TV shows called Big Brother, Celebrity Big Brother, Does Big Brother Get Off With Big Sister? and I’m a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here (spoiler alert: one of these titles is made up) were by way of preparing the masses for the Time of Covid.

Think now. Remember the vacant stares that came across the faces of your loved ones as the Hour of the House grew near and you were still on the beach — did it not anticipate by two decades the panic-stricken eyes peering up over the face masks of the zombies patrolling our streets these days for no better purpose than to find someone not wearing a face mask and give them a hard time?  Think of the refusal of Big Bro fans to enter into any form of humour concerning their addiction/affliction; of the imperviousness to sarcasm, akin to profound deadness, they affected whenever anyone tried to suggest that there were more important things in life than watching people act out their incest fantasies on live TV. 

It is strange, in retrospect, that they called it ‘reality televison’. Essentially a game show, the first Big Brother series on this side of the pond arrived on Channel 4 in 2000. It minutely followed the progress of eleven contestants, known as housemates, isolated for the duration from the outside world in a custom built House. Each week, one or several of the housemates were evicted by a public vote. The last surviving housemate won a monetary prize. The show was predicated on nurturing in its audience anti-qualities like voyeurism, envy, schadenfreude, vindictiveness and lynch-love. 

Those of us who gleaned our knowledge of this phenomenon from glancing down (appropriately!) at the tabloid headlines as we passed on our way to procure the latest Popular Mechanics or Spectator (Call me a snob, but realise this: our snobbery is now the only thing that stands between us and barbarism) are now in a position to understand the meaning and timing of the Big Brother thing. It was, in the modern sense, educational, which is to say that its purpose was to explode, as though with a neutron bomb, every incipient thought in every adjacent mind, and render its subject amenable to entrancement on the basis of a deep, unacknowledgeable craving to be locked up in their own Houses, lectured to and abused by distant figures of authority; treated like wayward children, punished and, occasionally, rewarded; to be made feel like nothing, to lose both responsibility and rights in a dizzying obliteration of identity; to be enslaved and to love the enslaver. 

This is where we are, really. Let those of us who have been conscious for some time of something badly wrong herewith agree that we shall no longer drive ourselves crazy trying to explain the flaws with PCR testing or point out the absurdity of insisting on face coverings in order to ‘save lives’ and then dumping them on the footpath for every dog and devil to come along, lick and circulate. Let us look each other in the eye and realise that we have entered a new and very different world — a world, you might say, changed utterly, a world of terrible ugliness and stupidity and, yes, manifest evil. Let us begin to focus finally on the hidden psychic meanings of all this, the archetypes being exercised, the unsaid, unsayable aspects of what has been thrust upon us. 

All civilisations tend to take their own mythologies literally, and these beliefs, usually transmitted by religion, have been the very buttresses of multiple civilisations, supporting their moral orders, cohesion, vitality and imaginations. There is here a paradox: the more a society moves towards rationalism, the more it risks disequilibrium and entropy by virtue of no longer holding fast to its founding and sustaining mythologies. Human life, as Nietzsche told us, depends for its propulsion on illusions. The loss of literal understandings of the founding myths leads to uncertainty and the collapse of values and moral order, to decay and degeneracy and, finally, to civilisational collapse. This, essentially, is the background to what we must belatedly realise has been the inevitable arrival of the Time of Covid. 

It has been remarked many times already that there is a quasi-religious aspect to the Covid thing: the rituals, prohibitions, superstitions, sins and penitential rites. This is not accidental, an odd quirk of cultural harmonics. Because we have become so accustomed to seeing ourselves as an advanced technological people, this hypothesis seems implausible, but this is part of the genius of Covid: it renders sinful the human condition as previously the darker elements of Christianity used to do. To be human, prone to sickness, liable to become infectious, these are the newly-declared Mortal Sins of the Time of Covid. 

The sin of contagiousness casts us into Hell, but Hell on Earth: Covid, thereby, has been the mechanism by which we have descended into the Underworld to encounter our own shadows. It is the last-ditch attempt of an atheistic age to meet in itself the innate human craving for a myth-based existence, the prior model having been scorned in the sloughing off of religion. It is as if even the most obtuse of the neo-atheistic leaders have come to realise that human beings do not function for long without two fundamental things: a capacity to find communal meaning to enable a living together with others in society, and a hope of overcoming mortality and transcending this life.  

Covid makes all this available, albeit at the cost of everything we might not long ago have thought of as essential, and most crucially freedom. The core superstition of the Time of Covid is that through collective effort we can overcome death — by ‘saving lives’, each other’s lives, if only symbolically, or even theoretically, as an act of defiance against Nature and a spit in the face of the dead God. But this comes at the price of renewed fear at the level of fire and brimstone to the power of 10,000. 

If we scan back through our rudimentary ‘memories’ of history, it may dawn upon us that we had been living through a short period of normalised fearlessness, a time that seemed naturalistic and unexceptionable but which was really an aberration: the period between the end of the Cold War and, say, Saint Patrick’s Day 2020.  Through history, the presence in culture of intense fear — of both life and the afterlife — has been the norm, and that is what our genetic make-up is best adapted to. Covid takes us back to the beginning. 

The medical, scientific, political, economic and conspiratorial aspects to do with the Whys and Wherefores of Covid are important, interesting and often disturbing, but they are secondary to this point about what we might call the undertows of the Time of Covid. I believe in the Great Reset, the New World Order, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the coming of Klaus Schwab and what he will soon be calling his Fourth Reich, but I insist that this is just the garden furniture. The ‘garden’ is the Garden of Eden, the locus of the founding myth of our civilisation, the mythical mysterious origin of our mortality and the partitioning of our hearts into Good and Evil. Unbeknownst to ourselves, this ‘memory’ of the Fall haunts us, and causes us to roll it around in our subconscious minds as though the details of an avoidable traffic accident we had lived through ourselves. Because our understanding of mythology is so limited and so literal, and because our culture no longer reminds us of such elemental circumstances, we think our myths as dispensable as yesterday’s newspaper. 

By intent of forces unknown, or otherwise, Covid reconnects us with all this neglected and forgotten elemental interior weather.

As Joseph Campbell taught us, what happened in the Garden of Eden was that man, under the attrition of propaganda, impetuously chose the fruit that he believed would allow him to distinguish between Good and Evil over the more desirable fruit of eternal life. This, we are told, was the Original Sin of our species, and until now this sin has not been matched for horrific or scarifying characteristics. In truth, it was much more than a sin: It was a loss so incalculable as to obsess the human race for all of its subsequent journey. (By the way, if anyone thinks that these forces can be avoided by the smirking assertion that the story of Eden is ‘made up’ let me just urge you to seek out Joseph Campbell and read him carefully: He is not saying what you want him to be saying.) 

But then comes Covid, which turns into a sin or quasi-crime the very nature of the human being: the way he is built by God or evolution or God’s evolutionary process, his paradoxical capacity to protect himself from sickness by becoming sick and spreading it around, his inbuilt capacity to strengthen himself and his neighbours by dint of temporary weakness, just as tiring and painful labour makes his body strong.  

Those who have dreamed up Covid know this well: That the line dividing good and evil runs, as Solzhenitsyn told us, through every human heart, and that the struggle within him of these two forces defines every human being, whether he knows it or not. And the dominant note of this struggle is fear, largely fear of the unknown, of the unpredictable, of responsibility, consequences, risk, all followed by unbridled terror of the certainty that is death, all the worse because it is denied. This fear demands to be made my master or my conquest.

Nothing brings out the badness in the human heart like those two elemental forces: fear of life and fear of death. These fears drive men to surrender not merely their own lives but also the lives of their fellows — to defend freedom or to give it away. Something we are being reminded of in the Time of Covid is that these two inclinations refer to two utterly different kinds of men. For one, it is axiomatic that life without freedom is not worth living; for the other it is clear that risk of death is worse than any other prospect. 

These latter are our true prospective gaolers, for there is not enough of any elite, illuminati, Bilderbergers, or Davosians to achieve this on their own. And mark this: Such men exist; they are among us now, and they would sooner be slaves living lives of predictable misery than face the fear of the unknown or the risk of calling out their own fears. They would trade their rights and other freedoms for the freedom from responsibility, even responsibilities for their own lives. They would trade their children’s lives for an hour’s relief from the terror of living or the contemplation of death. What do they care for your freedoms? 

It seems also that, somehow or another, human beings will always try to find ways of re-enslaving themselves, no matter how many times they have broken free in the past. It is as though not freedom but something like its opposite is the natural disposition of the average human being in society. The desire to be imprisoned, debased, humiliated, ridiculed, tortured psychologically and even physically by one’s fellows, appears to be a driving desire of a significant majority of humans, at least in the sense that they are not prepared to risk paying any price to avoid it. They are content enough to be free but, stumbling or nudged into the antithesis, they take to it like rats to a sewer. 

‘It is incredible,’ wrote Etienne de la Boétie, almost half a millennium ago, ‘how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.’ So observed la Boétie in 1549, in The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. Yes: 471 years ago. (https://www.mises.ch/library/Boetie_Politics_of_Obedience.pdf)

La Boétie said that it is not as simple as deciding that people obey just out of fear. Rather, he proposed, they obey out of habit, short‐sighted self‐interest, greed, and love of privilege, or under the influence of state trickery, such as propaganda, and symbolism — a near-perfect synopsis of the Time of Covid.

But the greatest of these forces today, I would say, is fear, and fear is at the root of them all, the fear of facing life in its deepest recesses. 

La Boétie’s thesis is that the state, which is to say a tiny minority of the population, will always try to dominate the majority, and is always in danger of being permitted to do so because most among the majority will refuse to exercise their power to overthrow such a tyranny. The paradox that he seeks to illuminate is that the tyrant has solely the power given to him by those he oppresses: ‘Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you?’ 

Take a look at the police rampaging through the streets of London last weekend, arresting old men with placards and women in disability scooters, and read those lines aloud to yourself as you do so. 

And how about this for an ominous prognosis:

‘Men will grow accustomed to the idea that they have always been in subjection,’ he wrote, ‘that their fathers lived in the same way; they will think they are obliged to suffer this evil, and will persuade themselves by example and imitation of others, finally investing those who order them around with proprietary rights, based on the idea that it has always been that way.’ 

By the way, have you bought in yet those cardboard plates the Man from NPHET says to get for your Christmas dinner? 

The former judge of the UK Supreme Court, the wondrous Lord Jonathan Sumption, who has been resisting the lockdown across the water from its beginning last spring, said similar things just six months ago in a BBC interview: 

‘The real problem is that when human societies lose their freedom, it's not usually because tyrants have taken it away. It's usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection against some external threat. And the threat is usually a real threat but usually exaggerated. That's what I fear we are seeing now. The pressure on politicians has come from the public. They want action. They don't pause to ask whether the action will work. They don't ask themselves whether the cost will be worth paying. They want action anyway. And anyone who has studied history will recognise here the classic symptoms of collective hysteria. Hysteria is infectious. We are working ourselves up into a lather in which we exaggerate the threat and stop asking ourselves whether the cure may be worse than the disease.’

What would we give to have in our midst but one figure of such stature but even half the gumption of Lord Sumption at this hour!

What we surely realise from all this is that the impulse to tyranny, inbuilt into the modern bureaucratic state, is matched by the desire to be subjugated apparently hard-wired into a majority of human beings. These moments of the Time of Covid were therefore inevitable, and those of us who have lived a long time in these accidentally free societies — free because no one was really paying attention, like free parking in Dublin in the glorious, long-gone Time of the Lockhards (ask your father!) — were actually on borrowed time.

Let us, then, we who have reached a great age in relative freedom by the standards of any age, resolve to do two things: Give thanks for our deliverance even for a part of our lives from the cravenness of our fellow man, and at the same time determine to spend what time is left to us to fight so that those coming after us who might be inclined to desire freedom rather than slavery might have a chance of knowing it. To this end, we must determine to ignore and bypass the lassitude and will-to-collaboration of our neighbours, those tragic meat robots who are so lethally content in their servitude as to look on us already as their infectious enemies, as they bang their pots and sing in their chains like the sea. 

Though the average man may not be relied upon to fight for even his own freedom, La Boétie believed that, in times of great danger, it would always fall to a few clear thinking individuals to save the rest: ‘Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it. For them slavery has no satisfactions, no matter how well disguised.’ 

The implication is clear: There is no cavalry but us.