Some of you are not yet clearpilled
"Never apply power. Only build power."
I always get a lot of flak when I covidpost. This time is no exception.
In general, your attitude toward this covid shitshow predicts a certain kind of political sophistication and detachment, which you can call whatever you like. If you have it, you are going to make it. If not—well, it is my job, isn’t it? To help you try to make it?
Some smart readers ask: sure, in the abstract, a sovereign regime has the abstract sovereign right to emergency biopower, up to and including welding its subjects in their condos to cope with some kind of airborne smallpox-leprosy. But… this regime, these measures, and this virus?
The answer is that right is always abstract. Sovereignty’s rights are always unlimited. This by no means makes all its uses of power right and proper. Especially in the case of our own dear regime—which is really a beaut.
When power is doing the wrong thing
We cannot say the regime is acting rightfully, because rightful emergency measures require a genuine emergency; and the measures must be genuinely effective. There is not a clear case for the efficacy of Western nonpharmaceutical interventions; and those currently driving them seem curiously uninterested in basic measures, such as better masks and more, cheaper rapid tests, that would make them work much better—but do not invoke the tense, avenging joy of collective coercion. And while covid is sort of an emergency, an emergency is an emergency if handling it as an emergency works much better than business as usual—which isn’t completely clear here, either.
So? That’s okay. Honestly, it’s not a great regime. It does weird stuff for weird reasons. Right? But we knew that, didn’t we?
When power is doing the wrong thing for some dumb reason, I hope it’s not too hokey to quote Bruce Lee: “be water.” The wrongfulness of power’s thing makes it rightful to resist. But: is it prudent to resist? Is it necessary to resist? Almost always no.
Your action must not be reactive. Water does not push back. Water lets the enemy expend energy, expending no energy against him. Water does not forget that the enemy is an enemy—nor ever lose sight of its lovely dream of filling his throat.
When you are not following Bruce Lee’s wisdom, you always think you are fighting back. Usually, what you are doing is participating—giving your energy to the enemy.
Power in opposition
The only practical reasons to study political science are to study (a) how to apply power against the current regime, (b) how the next regime should apply its power.
The answer to (a) is very simple. Never apply power. Only build power. In the end, it is quite likely that you will not even need to fight—you will win almost automatically. And once you have enough power to fight, you’ll definitely know it.
This is not an absolute rule. There are no absolute rules in the art of war, which like it or not includes the art of politics. It is not impossible for collective action from a dissident position to be effective.
But any collective action is a military action and must be judged on a military basis. The standards for the prudence of a military action have never changed: a prudent action must be expected to increase your strength relative to the enemy’s strength. The war is won when the enemy has no strength—no power to resist.
We can imagine collective action aimed at a goal, offensive or defensive, that meets this very high standard. Suppose the goal is stopping a new regime measure that will open the borders and give ruling-party memberships and voting rights to everyone who comes in, thus stuffing the ballot box with human beings. The defensive power value of this goal is very high, since failing to achieve it will politically disempower the native population for all time eternal.
Most actions are not like this. If the goal of the defensive action is preventing some abuse of power. assuming there is actually a collective action against this abuse that would be effective, we still need to ask whether the abuse of power is making the regime more powerful.
If not, by opposing the abuse, we are only dissipating our power. Using energy against power, even successfully, does not create more energy. It just uses up energy. The main effect of Brexit was to dissipate the political energy that created Brexit. No power was created either by the symbolic victory or the tangible results.
The worst kind of goals to use power on is entirely symbolic goals. Then, victory is nothing but dissipation—the emptiness of a masturbatory orgasm. When the goal is substantive and good, better—but this does not validate the goal as a target. Only if the goal can be plausibly achieved, and if achieving it improves the balance of power, do we have a prudent political target.
Most abuses of power make bad targets, for the simple reason that most abuses of power tend to discredit the regime. Therefore, ending them—even if it can be done—is actually naive and un-Machiavellian, a luxury no rebel can afford. As Napoleon said: never interrupt the enemy when he’s in the process of destroying himself.
The proper message to the people on how to handle an abuse of power is as follows: this abuse of power is characteristic of this regime, which will never change. If you don’t like this kind of abuse, you need to figure out how to help change the regime. Which will not happen soon in any case—so do figure out how to endure the abuse.
Moreover, these kinds of goals are terribly distracting when we are sitting back in our armchairs and solving problem (b)—what the ideal regime of the future should do about a problem like covid?
You might not think solving this problem would help get us to the ideal regime of the future—but you would be wrong about that, too. Nothing can happen until it becomes plausible; and making it plausible is the job of the intellectual. Plus, it sucks to be in power and have no plan to use it—history has seen more of this than one might think.
It is safest to assume that when you are out of power, your goal is to build power, not use power. True—there are real opportunities for dissident collective action. But your monkey mind wants to see these opportunities so badly that not a hundredth of them are real—as judged by basic, inescapable military logic.
In LA? There’s an informal meetup in Plummer Park, Sunday December 12, 12 noon. Be there or be square. Also, here is some off-blog content—an interview, with a mysterious British professor, about my old guru Thomas Carlyle.
No, no, no.
The problem with your article was not that we are not enlightened enough to understand it, it is that you said (among similar statements) the following:
"In the West, where power depends on either managing or following public opinion, the idea of actual governance is almost unfamiliar. The wise experts who manage the public mind have one school of governance theater; the cynical sycophants who milk the populist mob have another."
The choice for a lot us is: does your business go bankrupt or not, do you lose you job or not, can you leave the house or not, can you go to the pub or not, do you have a social life or not, is your child subjected to elaborate ritualised abuse at school or not, do you have to take some shitty vaccine that you don't need and doesn't really work or not, is your doctor legally prevented from prescribing you possibly effective palliative medicine or not. What bad thing have these 'cynical sycophants' done to us that justifies you both-sidings it, other than your refusal to admit that you let your hypochondria get the better of you?
So, yeah, actually a lot of the original article was completely correct, but you couldn't resist rubbing our noses in your disease paranoia and limitless faith in big pharma, and, apparently, most of us really aren't in the mood for it anymore.
Also, P.S., your war analogy is retarded. War's aren't fought to save lives. Almost invariably the easiest way to save lives is just to surrender. War is when you sacrifice people's lives to achieve some sort of desired national goal, often national independence or the maintenance of your way of life. The logic of the war analogy is that the old and ill people who are risk of dying of Covid-19 should willingly lay down their lives to maintain a standard of living that we think tolerable for ourselves and our children.
Why are you saying this to us, Curtis? Are we really the ones who are not "clearpilled"? It strikes me that insofar Covid-19 is concerned, you are the one whos is not sufficiently clearpilled. And in a deeper sense than you yourself use that word.
You were the one to advocate very concrete political measures in response to the virus from the start. You are the one who continues to advocate such measures despite your own mantra that "power does what power wills and our opinion is irrelevant, so we should stop trying to have one". Then you chastise us for having an opinion, just like you do.
Your opinion is not any less reactive than ours. It is just as reactive, only in the opposite direction - "actually they should have cracked down on us EVEN HARDER". Then you LARP about being "clearpilled", quote Bruce Lee how we should "be like water" and tell us that we are cringe. I am fine with being called cringe (if we are honest I think that is clearly part of the reason why we are all paying for your content), but please try to be consistent.
Speaking of being like water, that is what the reaction of all governments should have been from the start of the pandemic. Some forces of nature humans still cannot stop or even control (in fact as you yourself pointed out earlier this year, this whole debacle was started by humans trying to do exactly that). So just let it go and get to natural immunity. Isn't that the "clearpilled" solution? Or are we really going to have to indulge your laughable example of China, as if we have any reason to believe any piece of statistical data coming from that country? And your data on Singapore is the exact opposite of reality.
Look, it's fine to be wrong. I actually agreed with you in spring 2020. I thought lockdowns were the way to go. I thought they were even too relaxed at first. I thought going full prison-planet China-style lockdowns is the way to go. I used examples like Singapore and South Korea for how efficient tracking and targeted but very strict lockdowns can work. Well where are those countries now? You can google the data yourself. China's numbers are obviously cooked.
And don't get me started on the vaccines. There are so many red flags that the whole vaccination process from the earliest clinical trials to now looks like the red army marching through Eastern Europe in 1944. I am not even suggesting malicious intent as others do, only rampant incompetence and corruption among our public institutions. The signs of which I have learned to identify very quickly in big part thanks to reading your texts over the past 9 years.
So can you please drop this ridiculousness? The Covid-19 pandemic is a gigantic tragedy. A tragedy of our incredibly corrupt public science establishment, as correctly identified by you. But sometimes a tragedy is so immense that it is well outside the scope of human power to control. As others pointed out in the comments under your previous post - this should be a lesson for the "Nihilist prince" that sometimes when shit hits the fan there is actually nothing which can be done to improve the situation. But plenty can be done to make it worse and in more ways than you can imagine a priori.
Put simply, you are overrating the power of power. Your sci-fi fictions of a multipolar decentralized global order being maintained by a benevolent solar-system level dictatorship already suggested that sometimes you tend to overlook the limits and realities of human power. This here is another such example.