Special/Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I’m so old, I remember when the Soviet Union fell. I also remember what happened afterwards.

I suppose it makes sense for me to be beset with this sense of deja vu right now, because we live in a truly bizarre time. I honestly feel like we’re watching someone trying to build the USSR after the Berlin wall has crumbled and as everyone is escaping in every possible direction, and some imaginary, in cars that were more or less made of cardboard and spit, and which they drove until they couldn’t drive anymore, which is why Portugal was littered with Trabants.

I know why I’m having that sense of double vision. I keep running into people who talk about our current Junta as though it were an empire for the ages.

Which it would be, if you didn’t take in account a) the quality of the people who have staged and are running this travesty of a farce of a comedy or a f*ckup. b) their knowledge of how society works. Or, you know, in what general direction reality might lie, up to and including where their food comes from, what humans CAN survive on, what it takes to run a technological civilization, etc. ad nauseum. With bells on. They know none of it, and don’t even know what they don’t know. And if you tell them, they’ll tell you it’s an aggression of some sort. c) that the regime they’re trying to install is not one that can survive anyway, not in a nation that is the economic engine of the world. d) that in their crazed efforts to install it they have in fact castrated or perhaps put a stake through the heart of those fields they control, including but not limited to education, Hollywood, the performing arts in general, traditional publishing…. pretty much, yeah, everything they control. some of these fields were already dying, and some would die anyway, but they accelerated that demise.

Put it another way, the system they are trying to erect—not the utopia, yeah, I know that never worked—the total surveillance/controlled information/collectivist/everyone in cities/everyone living or dying at the say of the government never worked very well. In exceptional circumstances and after a major trauma, like say WWI (there is no substantial difference between this partnership of would-be oligarchs and industrialists and that of Germany, except for national versus international. BTW, the international version is insanity of people who never even talked to foreigners outside a university and who don’t realize how little power they actually have.) And yeah, I don’t need you all to tell me that Hitler also had, at best, marginal contact with reality and resembled these twits to an almost frightening degree, from vegetarianism, to paganism, to bizarre hollow-Earth theories. And yeah, that lasted 12 years, but only because it first consumed the majority of its own wealth, and then the wealth of conquered nations. These ass clowns couldn’t conquer Mexico if they tried. Hell, they couldn’t conquer Canada. It’s highly doubtful they could conquer Tim Hortons, even if it’s owned by an American company. Even if they managed to get our troops to go to war and invade our nearest neighbors, they’d become moored down in fairness and hearts and minds, and who knows what else. Between all the time they’d have to spend making sure that our soldiers weren’t mean to left-handed Canadians of fluid gender, and trying to decide under what flag our troops would march, invading our nearest neighbors isn’t a thing. But if it were, what would these countries give us, that would keep the country going for any amount of time? Yeah, pretty much nothing. In fact they would take more from us than we’d get from them.

There simply isn’t enough wealth in the world to keep the giant going, once it collapses. So no, they’re not building the kingdom of a thousand years.

Now mind you, if they hadn’t had to employ the crazy measures they did all through 2020 to break us enough to pull their massive scam, this probably would have lasted ten or fifteen years, by which time we’d have been seriously broken and broke, and rebuilding the republic would be probably impossible. We’d probably have ended up as many separate countries, and maybe closer to Mexico than Canada in lifestyle, productivity and general creativity and stability. (Not that Canada will be much better than Mexico if it doesn’t have the giant to help support its deficiencies.)

But they had to try for something extreme. They had in fact to shut the world down to attempt to bring us to heel. That they had to do that tells you the level to which they had already lost.

It doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous. As I’ve pointed out before, there is nothing quite so dangerous as a wounded and dying wild boar. And these would-be oligarchs are closer to that than to any group of humans.

In fact the problem is they’re creating a lot of destruction, and the destruction will bring them down.

Again, I said this before, and I’ll stick by it, there’s an implosion coming somewhere between six months from now and two years from now.

No, I don’t think we can avoid violence. I don’t know if their fall will actually be sped by violence, but I suspect so, because they can’t leave well enough alone. They can’t be like other kleptocrats, fill their pockets and let us do what we can. No, they want to destroy us. Partly because they’re terrified of us. I’ve got absolutely no clue how bad the information is they’re trying to keep quiet, but it must be a heck of a doozie, because they’re convinced if we figure out what they’ve been up to these….what? 10? 20? 30? 50? years, we’re going to come for them.

They’re not precisely wrong, I bet you. I bet you, too, that the information will come out, and it will come in circumstances where they’ve done enough damage to the rule of law that instead of orderly trials, which might give them a chance to escape and live off the fat of the land in some third world republic, it’s going to get ugly.

How ugly? I don’t know. Look, until about a month ago I couldn’t “sense” anything ahead except a big break. And if you’re going to complain about that verb, no I don’t think I’m some kind of prophet, except I’ve read a lot, I’ve thought a lot, and I know—more or less—the shape if not the size of the corruption and scams these people have been running. All of which depended on a captive and UNIFIED culture, where all the information was fed from the top and where all the dissidents thought they were alone.

That’s broken, and the repeated unforced errors—of saying the quiet part aloud—these idiots indulge in is a sign of how terrified they are. They keep telling us we need “truth commissions” or truth and reconciliation commissions, and informing us that we all need to believe their dictated truth.

But there is a terrible quality to genii. Once we found out we weren’t alone, once we found out that after their massive “get orangemanbad” campaign orange man bad still beat them so handily they had to fraud obscenely, in plain view and in the light of day, none of us is going to believe we’re alone again.

I’ve said before, they can’t win.

The crash is coming. six months to two years, and I doubt we go to two years, though I think it’s going to start with isolated and spaced out incidents. “First slowly, then very fast.”

And they won’t win. In fact, they’re tarnishing their brand to the extent that “leftist” or “marxist” will be terms of opprobrium within this decade. The mush heads and loud mouths will turn on a dime. I’ve seen it before.

The problem, and what you guys might not even be seeing, is that every industry, every profession, every … routine of life has been infested by these people. Lefty insanity is a positional signal that the “upper classes” use to distinguish themselves from the peasants.

Yes, to a great extent this means they’ve made vast portions of our professional hierarchies and our industries and our fields of knowledge non-functional.

On the other hand, there is a hierarchy and humans live by hierarchies. And when those collapse….

It won’t be the first time. It won’t be the last.

But it will leave a vacuum of power. And more importantly, it will leave a vacuum of trust. And a vacuum of information.

Our likelihood of coming out of this a constitutional republic is still high. Why? Well, because societies under stress become more themselves.

I remember when the USSR fell. And out of the ashes Tzar Putin emerged, who is despicable, but not particularly out of keeping with Russian monarchy.

So, yeah, the pull of our culture will be towards the reestablishment of who and what we are and were: a constitutional republic.

But on the way…

Look, I remember when the USSR fell.

The people in the USSR knew they were being treated like mushrooms: kept in the dark and fed on crap. They knew there was truth in Pravda. But they were used to having certain information, and interpreting it.

And there is something worse than reading the news in totalitarianism. You can get used to interpreting the news, and knowing the shape of the hole of what they’re not reporting.

But once you realize it’s all nonsense, once the coherence of the news breaks—and it’s doing so now, earlier than I expected, with the Times article, with the New York Times admitting the protesters at the capitol didn’t kill the police officer—once there are holes, but they’re not consistent, or they’re consistent, but then contradicted; once the narrative changes almost by the week, to the point it can’t be ignored, that’s the dangerous period.

I know I joke that by the end of this year I’ll have to apologize to the lizard-people conspiracy theorists. But the problem is that the lizard people conspiracy theorists can acquire respectability and a strange new respect. Or something even crazier. Heck, a lot of crazier things.

To an extent the 9/11 troofer conspiracies, which yes, are crazy and also anti-scientific were our warning shot. That they flourished and that to this day a lot of people believe them means that there was already a sense that the news made no sense, that there were other things going on behind the scenes that we weren’t aware of.

It’s going to get far, far worse than that, as the actual elites, the top of various fields fall like struck trees in a thunder storm. There is a good chance that authorities you rely on for your profession, or just for your knowledge have been compromised. A lot of our research is tainted by china paying to get the results it wants, for instance. And there’s probably worse. You already know most research can’t be reproduced, and that’s not even recent.

As all this stuff comes out, the problem is that people won’t stop believing. Instead they’ll believe in all and everything.

I don’t know how much was reported here, as the USSR collapsed. but I remember what I read in European magazines and journals. All of a sudden it was all new age mysticism and spoon bending and only the good Lord knew what else.

And that’s what we’re going to head into. So, when you find yourself in the middle of an elaborate explanation that someone constructed, well…

First find the facts. Pace Heinlein: Again, and again what are the facts. Never mind if your ideology demands they be something else. Establish the facts to the extent you can. Facts and math don’t lie. (Statistics do. So be aware you can lie with them. And any metrics that involve intangibles, like intelligence or performance much less sociability or micro anything? forget about it.)

From the facts, deploy Occam’s razor. What is the simplest explanation?

Then remember that humans run at the mouth, and the more humans in the conspiracy, the more facts are likely to leak out somewhere.

And while we’ve seen a lot of Omerta among leftists, note that they’re all afflicted by evil villain syndrome. Sooner or later, they brag about how clever they were in deceiving us. So, if your conspiracy theory requires perfect silence forever, it’s probably not true.

Above all and more importantly, remember there are no simple explanations. Yes, we got here through Marxism, but to get where we are took almost a century of small steps with a lot of crucial slips and stupidity. (Like the elites buying into just-so stories that make them feel superior.) It also took the crushingly fast technological development of the 20th century, which both drove the growth of Marxist dominance and, ultimately undermined it.

And whatever happens remember physics don’t change. Not for me, not for you, not for anyone else. So, yes, jet fuel does in fact cause steel to bend if the heat is concentrated enough. And spoons don’t get bent by your mind, no matter how much you wish them to. We don’t advise using jet fuel to bend them either, mind. If you really want to bend a spoon, we recommend using pliers. But mostly we recommend you leave spoons alone.

It’s going to get very scary. And what will make it scarier is the fact that the barrage of false information from the top that we were subjected to all through 2020 is going to be joined by streams of information from every side, much of it incomplete, corrupt or outright crazy.

Take a deep breath. There are—probably—no lizards among us. (Yes, I know, that’s what a lizard would say.) I do realize the evil incompetence we’re subject to can make you suspect that there must be aliens bent on our destruction.

Well, maybe there are. But what would be different if there were? or if all we see were merely the incompetent malice of humans trying to be good social apes while the fabric of life twists and racks under them?

So, deep breath. Try to get the facts. Don’t rush to join any new and shiny theories.

Keep your head on a swivel.

And keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

 

Reprinted from https://accordingtohoyt.com/ for February 16, 2021