Eugenics And Other Evils

I’ve never made any secret about my antipathy for Libertarianism. In my view, Libertarians complain about the abuses of a system that they themselves enable. I’ve also warned that—with the Covid Regime—we find ourselves in the hands of the Eugenicists. I hope, here, to ties these ideas together.

Yesterday I came across an article at American Greatness that I found interesting because of some matters that were raised almost in passing:

Woke Capital Won’t Save the Planet—But It Will Crash the Economy

High inflation and squeezed living standards make it a safe bet that come this time next year, woke capital will be running even faster in the opposite direction.

Of course the idea that Woke Capitalism—or, as it’s more often referred to, Stakeholder Capitalism—is being set back on its heels is a development to be welcomed by we the subjects. If

The days of woke CEOs criticizing democratically elected politicians for, say, not mandating unisex bathrooms, also seem to be drawing to a close.

we should be glad for the respite. But it’s only a temporary respite.

The reality is that Stakeholder or Woke Capitalism is really a means to an end. As such, it’s not going away because of a temporary setback—especially since it has proven so devastatingly effective in crushing normal human nature beneath the heel of transhumanism. This Stakeholder Capitalism is, I would argue, enabled by Libertarian concepts of the liberty of the individual—ironically, perhaps, given that Stakeholder Capitalism is a key tool of the modern Progressive movement to abolish individual liberty. Something like Libertarians selling Stakeholder Capitalists the rope with which to hang us.

An extended passage in the article illustrates the way in which the Globalist oligarchy uses Stakeholder Capitalism to crush freedom and impose their vision of a transhuman future:

[Larry Fink] requires all companies BlackRock invests in to set short-, medium-, and long-term targets for greenhouse gas reductions—as if BlackRock is an enforcement arm of government and net zero is a done deal. “Incumbents need to be clear about their pathway [to] succeeding in a net zero economy,” he writes.

Actually, the reverse is closer to the real concept that animates the WEF’s idea of a Great Reset. Rather than aspiring to make the big corporations the enforcement arm of government, the WEF’s Great Reset downgrade government to being the enforcement arm of Global Woke or Stakeholder Capitalism. Big corporations would be giving government its marching orders—to mandate all sorts of woke projects, of which compulsory unigender johns is just the start.

... Forcing companies to conform to a scenario that has virtually no chance of materializing destroys more than shareholder value: it makes all stakeholders worse off. In this respect, ESG investing is antisocial because it is detrimental to society.

Yet when was the last time you heard a libertarian attacking current corporation law, that makes the shareholders gods?

ESG (environment, social, governance) investing won’t help the environment, either. Cutting off capital to publicly traded oil and gas companies will not reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. Fink knows this. “Any plan that focuses solely on limiting supply and fails to address demand for hydrocarbons will drive up energy prices,” he admits. Congress has not passed legislation to cap demand and is extremely unlikely to do so—a reality he is unwilling to accept.

But this is where the Globalist vision of Woke Corporations driving governance comes in.

BlackRock’s embrace of woke investing puts it in an awkward and untenable position, as Fink’s partial retreat demonstrates. In November, Riley Moore, the state treasurer of West Virginia, and 15 other state treasurers wrote an open letter threatening collective action against financial institutions that boycott traditional energy industries in their states. Last week, Moore announced that West Virginia would not use BlackRock as part of its banking operations.

BlackRock is also feeling the heat in Texas. On January 3 of this year (though it misdated the letter 2021), BlackRock wrote to Texas state legislators to say that it supports hydrocarbon producers because of their crucial role in supporting a successful energy transition—one that would put those companies out of business.

The letter did not explain BlackRock’s vote to put anti-hydrocarbon directors proposed by Engine No. 1—a tiny activist fund claiming to use ESG to drive economic value—on the board of Texas-based Exxon Mobil. Commenting on Exxon Mobil’s recent emissions pledges, Charlie Penner, who led the Engine No. 1 campaign, remarked that the company should not pursue projects that “only make economic sense if the world fails to meet its climate targets.” The world is on track to miss these targets by a country mile. Engine’s activism is not about investing; it is politics by other means.

Precisely. The Globalist movement is using the structures of capitalism—Stakeholder Capitalism—for distinctly anti-democratic ends. The super wealthy globalist oligarchy uses its leverage as shareholders to install radical activist directors and officers over the heads of the majority of shareholders. This is their model for all of their activism, including through “philanthropies” and NGOs. You don’t need to be majority owners or donors to call the shots. And once you get the necessary leverage you can start ousting any dissenters. And the same goes in the political realm. “Politics by other means.”

OK. So the title of this post is actually the title of a book by G. K. Chesterton. I was reminded of it this morning by a two part substack Douglas Farrow that cites GKC’s book:

Anarchy from Above

Part I: Crushing Democracy

Anarchy from Above, Part II

Constructing the Health Tyranny

Chesterton’s prescient book was written in 1922, but it contained themes that he returned to throughout the remainder of his writing career (he died in 1936). One of those themes was that the forces animating the Eugenics movement of his time—other euphemisms are used currently—were distinctly anti-democratic. I offer below an extended excerpt from Part I, which may appeal to readers who sense that America’s experiment in “government of the people, by the people, for the people” is distinctly endangered—if it didn’t expire some time ago.

It continues to amaze me how few people understand what is actually going on. ... Overt bullying fails to disgust us, or to move us to action. We digest government hate propaganda, teach it to our children, and parrot it to pollsters. We are as out of touch with the actual facts, in matters of which we nonetheless speak confidently, as we possibly could be. And we have no idea who our real friends are, or our real enemies. We have no idea who is leading us or where we are being taken.

…

One hundred years ago, G. K. Chesterton warned us of this. In 1922 he published one of the most prescient books ever written, Eugenics and Other Evils, which explains how what was already happening then would develop into what is happening today. Ten years later, in a column entitled "On Industrialism" (The Illustrated London News, 16 July 1932), he insisted that it was growing plainer every day "that those of us who cling to crumbling creeds and dogmas, and defend the dying traditions of the Dark Ages, will soon be left alone defending the most obviously decaying of all those ancient dogmas: the idea called Democracy." And he knew whom these benighted believers would be defending it against:  those who for public consumption now style themselves "inclusive capitalists" or "stakeholder capitalists;" viz., the Davos men, the men and women of the Great Reset.

Chesterton was content simply to call them industrialists or capitalists or monopolists or even plutocrats. He didn't know what labels they would later use for themselves, but he described them and us (we fools for "progress") with uncanny accuracy.

…

The organization of society by the industrialists, and our acceptance of it in the name of progress, could not but lead right through democracy and out the other side, as Tocqueville had also feared.  Modern man thinks himself very clever, very advanced, but what is being advanced to him at the moment is that he must leave democracy behind. "Modernity," said Chesterton, "is not democracy; machinery is not democracy; the surrender of everything to trade and commerce is not democracy. Capitalism is not democracy; and is admittedly, by trend and savour, rather against democracy."

Chesterton's alternative to this surrender was known as distributism, which (like Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum) sought a third way that was neither communism nor unfettered capitalism. The former concentrated property and power in the hands of the state, the latter in the hands of the industrialists. Distributists worked on the principle of subsidiarity, advocating for legal and economic structures that protected private property and local enterprise while preventing the formation of manipulative, controlling cartels, whether public or private.  

In other words, it was the very opposite of what is being aimed at today under cover of "covid containment" policies: the destruction of small businesses, the demolition of the middle class, the end of democracy and of autonomous nation-states, the triumph of the machine; ultimately, the computerized control of all economic, social, and political life, even indeed of religious life, on a centralized global basis. And what is being aimed at today has been aimed at, at least inchoately, for more than a century. It already lay exposed to Chesterton's penetrating eye. Situated between the World Wars, he described what he was seeing as follows:

Capitalism is breaking up; and in one sense we do not pretend to be sorry it is breaking up. Indeed, we might put our own point pretty correctly by saying that we would help it to break up; but we do not want it merely to break down. But the first fact to realize is precisely that; that it is a choice between its breaking up and its breaking down. It is a choice between its being voluntarily resolved into its real component parts, each taking back its own, and its merely collapsing on our heads in a crash or confusion of all its component parts, which some call communism and some call chaos. The former is the one thing all sensible people should try to procure. The latter is the one thing that all sensible people should try to prevent.

By the end of the twentieth century, it seemed to many that the latter had indeed been prevented. Communism had been defeated in the West and capitalism had not, or not openly, resumed its attempt to throttle its remaining competitor, the ordinary man and the free people to which he belonged. In the East, to be sure, the Chinese were taking up capitalist means without abandoning communist ways. The new means made possible fresh triumphs for the old ways. The surveillance society and a smothering social-credit system were born, or reborn, with almost unlimited reach and a withering efficiency. Capitalists began flocking together with communists in the confusing migratory gyrations of the jet set; beneath which, unobserved in the bowels of level-four laboratories, preparations for war against free peoples were again being made.

Preparations were being made also in the cities of the West and in their universities, which both capitalists and communists were busy seeding with their own people and ideas. Businesses everywhere were being bought out, and in the countryside farmland was (and is) being bought up. The media, where tares of tyranny could be sown surreptitiously and the wheat of freedom rooted out through censorship, was no exception. Operation Lockstep was being readied, as was the program for international health passports.

In 2020, as the covid darkness descended, a Trojan horse was prepared for delivery. Before long, its doors were flung wide to release the PPP warriors secreted within it. First, the world was thrown into chaos by anarchy from above—by deliberate pursuit of policies designed, not to end, but rather to perpetuate "pandemic" fears to the point of mass hysteria and psychosis. Next, the "vaccines" were rolled out as a universal remedy; and with the vaccines, in support of the remedy which has proven no remedy at all, the vaccine passports and other weapons of surveillance and control, the introduction of which was the whole point of the exercise.    

Of course this is the obvious reason that key governments are so strenuously resisting an end to the Covid Regime—in the face of real science.

PPP stands for public-private partnership, something the generals of the Fourth Industrial Revolution love to promote as an antidote to populism. But what is a PPP, really, if not a pact between the statists and the industrialists against the middle class and its naÏve democratic ideals?  What is it, if not the two enemies identified by Leo ganging up, like Stalin and Hitler, on the free world, the world in which populist, localist, and distributist notions, however muddled or impure, stand some sort of chance?

When democracy is all but dead, and it is very nearly dead now, the climate change agenda of the jet-setters (whose vapour trails attest to their insincerity) will complete the task of smothering the people's ambitions, not only to own their own homes and goods but to pursue their own livelihoods and run their own communities. "You will own nothing and you will be happy—because if you are not happy to own nothing we will punish you still more severely."

Now, Chesterton wrote his book in the context of controversies over proposed Eugenics laws in England designed to deal with “idiots and epileptics, and with imbecile, feeble-minded, or defective persons not certified under the Lunacy Laws." As Farrow explains in Part II, the eugenic principle that Chesterton reacted so strongly against is the idea that the State should be in charge of improving the humans under its tutelage. Thus Farrow writes:

The explanation comes down to this: There is no logical stopping point for reforms that operate on the eugenic principle. There is no one who might not find himself among those requiring "improvement" or needing to be controlled, even in the matters most dear to him. ...

The principle of eugenics, in other words, is the principle by which some men can seize control over the affairs of other men, even their most intimate affairs of love, marriage, sex, and child-rearing, simply by extending the categories of the incompetent or the perverse in such a way as to embrace them. On the principle of eugenics can be built the scaffolding to which Nietzsche referred when he said that society must not be allowed to exist for its own sake, but only for the sake of aristocrats and Übermenschen.

Chesterton, though he mentions Nietzsche but once, saw this scaffolding already going up. Without a clear definition of what it means to be human, or to be a human of sound mind, nothing prevents any aspect of life from falling prey to lunacy laws. Eugenists wish to improve something they cannot or will not specify, which means that there is no limit to what they may choose to regard as an improvement or as being in need of improvement.

Which of us cannot see the direct progression from these “progressive” ideas of a century ago to the Woke Progressivism of today—leading us to tutelage under the system of Stakeholder Capitalism, with government as the enforcement agent for the Globalist elite? Who cannot see in all this the transhumanist ideal:

The very idea of human nature is anathema to them. A man is something to be invented, not something to be respected. These days, one doesn't even use the word "man" to refer to man, just as one doesn't refer to God as the maker of man in his own image. One invents one's own nature. The imago dei has become the imago mei.

Now, if one belongs to the ruling class, one also invents a nature for the other; that is, for the lower classes. Their unwanted characteristics—believing in God, for example, or in the natural family unit—must be trained out of them. Freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom to arrange themselves as and where they will, must be taken from them. Even faith in natural immunity must be pared away, for it is an obvious form of allegiance to nature and the goods of nature. It gets in the way of what Jacques Attali has called the commodification of man and the industrialization of health. People who cling to such old-fashioned ideas are said to be a threat to society. They must be penalized, perhaps even institutionalized. The scaffolding of society requires that they be redesigned for their own good, …

A threat to society. Or, don’t we—I mean, the FBI—now call such non-conformists Domestic Terrorists?

The function of eugenics, [GKC] argued, was chiefly to serve the industrialists and their well-heeled friends. Eugenics was a means of trimming the lower classes to an optimum number, and tailoring them to an optimum form, for the nurture of capital; that is, for the advancement of the rich. Public hygiene would serve nicely as the justification for doing so.

That is what today's capitalists, the socialist-capitalists of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, have grasped. That is what they have set out to achieve, with remarkable success.

Does this remind you of Bill Gates and friends?

Is there hope? There’s always hope:

In Canada this seemingly irresistible force has met an immovable object, or so we may hope. The Freedom Convoy that all across the country passed under bridges lined in sub-zero temperatures with cheering supporters has parked itself on Parliament Hill, to the dismay of the prime minister, who ran away and hid before poking his head above the parapet to hurl insults. It is his anarchic government that has no brakes, not the truckers with their banners reading "Enough is Enough!"