There’s a scene in the movie The Big Short where the guys who were betting against the banks suddenly understand that it’s not a fair game. The key line is the following which you can also find in the attached clip.
“I guess you don’t realise how clueless the system really is. Yes, there’s some shady shit going down but trust me, it’s fueled by stupidity. Look at yourselves. You know, you pass yourselves off as cynical people but you still have some faith in the system, don’t you.”
A few days ago I wrote an article where I criticized libertarians and people on the Right for losing their minds at government reactions to the current pandemic crisis. Economist Steve Kates penned a write-up in reply and he wasn’t too happy with my take on things.
“I would like to discuss a previous thread by one of our anonymous posters who wrote “about the only thing of note that I haven’t mentioned is the hysterical meltdown of those on the libertarian side of things to just about any government reaction to the current crisis” and I stress the word “any”. Peter Hitchens is apparently “one of the very worst offenders”, someone whom I have quoted a couple of times, “an hysterical female-like counterpoint to his deceased brother”. He is apparently “dancing around with his hands in the air in mortal abject terror of any government imposed change to his daily routine whatsoever” (my bolding).”
Well, my name was on the piece and it linked to this blog, so I must say that I’m a little hurt that Steve has forgotten all about me. We once shared a very enjoyable lunch in Melbourne with our respective wives, at the time. He is getting on a bit though, so maybe it’s just an oversight in these excitable times because Steve sure is excited.
“Speaking for myself, I feel in many ways I am already living in a police state. Very benign for the moment, but they are only just starting to get used to the idea of using the police to take away our historic rights. What has amazed me more than anything in this latest episode is how few people actually seem aware of how much is at stake. There are a handful of deaths from the coronavirus but we are not in the middle of the Black Death. What we may well be in the middle of is the death of our personal freedoms. There are plenty around who would like to take them from us already and who they are ought to be visible to us all since they never stop threatening us for going out to take a walk in the park. Once you are used to that, who knows what will come next?“
Rights? We don’t have rights. We are rats in a cage, in bondage unto death to a system that openly hates and persecutes us. Steve Kates is a straight white Christian male who is openly conservative. He is the enemy of the system incarnate. Why on earth does he think that such a system has any of his interests at heart? His and our only hope is that the system goes down in a pile of flaming wreckage and that from the misery some of us are in a position to be able to build up a society based on truth, something that has not been seen for a very long time.
I feel that my last two posts have been building up to this one. It is not business as usual not because of our current circumstances. This bug is simply the catalyst that has exposed the rotten heart of our supposedly free and stable democracies, the shining political entities which we have been led to believe for so long are just about the very best thing ever.
I can’t begin to count the number of times on this side of the political divide that I have read a comment along the lines of, “we ain’t gonna vote ourselves out of this mess,” in reference to the awful state of our democracies. How many articles have we all seen bemoaning the infestation of our institutions by cultural-Marxist nutcases? No matter what right wing party wins an election in a Western country the outcome is always the same; we simply get a lite version of leftism. The Right never seek to move the needle back against the tide of the Left. Instead they simply shrug and accept the new moral reality. Gay marriage, anyone?
We all know that the system is broken, but you never really believed it. “You passed yourselves off as cynical people but you still have some faith in the system, don’t you.” So when this crisis hit you expected a system which you professed to know was broken to suddenly start working properly, and in a global pandemic of proportions not seen since 1918 but with global trade and travel thrown in for good measure.
How much is at stake right now? I’ll tell you how much is at stake – if you believed that the only way out of this mess was to shoot our way out then you were wrong. The big bug has shown that there is another way. The vast majority of people who are running the show are indeed quite stupid in many different aspects. And the entire system is a diseased and rotten structure built on global financial fraud on behalf of banks and government that is just waiting to collapse in a pile of fetid waste.
So what do you really want? Do you want a new start from the awful wreckage of before or do you want to stay cocooned in the warm embrace of soft-left governments as you feel free to mouth off about all those darkies that are cluttering up your suburban streets? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Originally published at Pushing Rubber Downhill. You can purchase Adam’s books here.