One of my very old friends sent me this interview of Matthew B Crawford whom I was not familiar with. The discussion was about the various aspects and causes for our current imprisonment by a managerial state that uses endless states of emergency to control us.
When the interviewer Freddie Sayers concluded the discussion by asking whether individual people should seize more control over their own lives, Crawford replied, “I do think it’s one by one from the bottom up, is how social change happens. But also, it is political, because I mean you don’t have the option of disengaging from this stuff. You’ve got an HR department at your work or your kid’s in school that again, have this sort of militancy to them. So, I think the response, by way of defending the space of normal human activity, normal human life and ownership over the things that are most meaningful to us. There has to be I think, some actual political power exercised in reining in these sort of Messianic transformative social engineering initiatives.”
And that sounds right. Individually we can try to resist, get on with our own lives and try to move in our own direction. But the forces of coercion that are arrayed against us are more than daunting. They’re implacable. So, unless a power center immune to this coercion creates an oasis of freedom in the current desert then it doesn’t seem possible for us to live normal lives.
So that seems to be what era we now live in. We’re like the Jews of the 1st century AD waiting for the Messiah. Will it be Trump, DeSantis, Gaetz or no one? Will it be a president or a governor or something completely unexpected? Maybe it’ll be a holy man who begins a religious revival. Or maybe it’ll be a labor leader who declares a general strike and shuts the country down.
It’s like the flame of freedom is being snuffed out across the country and someone has to build a shielded fireplace to protect it and allow it to warm the inhabitants. Then it can be a template for the next neighbor to copy. I like to think that Ron DeSantis might be that champion down in Florida. Maybe he’ll strengthen his state to the point that the feds finally give up trying to ruin it. That would take a remarkable effort to face them down. Because we know that the Justice Department would come after him hammer and tongs. I wouldn’t doubt that they’d come after him personally with trumped up criminal charges and try to imprison him. But if he won, that might be a breaking point.
But whoever steps forward, this is probably our last chance for at least a generation. The Millennials and the Zoomers are pretty much locked down by the safety culture. The Boomers are too old and Gen X is getting up there too. If it doesn’t happen soon, we’ll have that Great Reset that Dementia Joe spouts on about. We’ll have electric cars without electricity. Homes without heat. Cricket tacos for dinner and jobs at Uber and Amazon. And childless forty-year-old girl bosses cohabiting with their cats and goldfish while their male counterparts are playing video games and waiting for euthanasia.
“There has to be I think, some actual political power exercised in reining in these sort of Messianic transformative social engineering initiatives.” Very true Mr. Crawford. But who?
