The well-to-do managerial classes suffer from an extreme form of cognitive dissonance. In public, they love to express their sympathy with the plight of the underclasses, especially those who belong to perceived victim groups. In private, they dream of a society where everyone shares their narrow worldview and the uncooperative great unwashed masses have either embraced new more malleable childlike identities or have disappeared into oblivion. They can only tolerate the underclasses if they know their place and do not question official experts. In a new virtual reality, the guardians of truth may hide unspeakable crimes against humanity while treating whistle-blowers and dissidents as terrorists or psychiatric patients. If you think this sounds far-fetched, just consider the plight of former school chaplain, Dr Bernard Randall, who was reported to the UK’s counter-terrorism body, Prevent, for delivering a sermon on respectful free speech. It is now clear our technocratic masters want to ensure the next generation is unaware of alternative perspectives. They can only trust the upper echelons of the managerial classes to resolve controversies. Everyone else should internalise and recycle the authorised scientific consensus, even if it conflicts with our first-hand experience, common sense intuition and earlier scientific orthodoxies.
We could see the warning signs of our current drift towards progressive totalitarianism long before the covid scare. While politicians posing on the liberal left may be well-intentioned, their advisors have consistently promoted policies that disempower the working classes. Comprehensive education in large high schools stifles excellence and creativity. Teachers spend more time on dealing with inevitable conflicts in oversized classes than imparting a passion for learning. Such an approach rewards conformity and penalises critical thinking. Schools no longer teach children how to think but rather what to think. The same well-paid consultants support welfare incentives for smaller and more malleable non-traditional family units, while also favouring the influx of new communities with a stronger work ethic. Ironically new immigrant communities often prefer traditional families and retain more socially conservative attitudes. As a result, millions of working-class youngsters have been deprived of meaningful job opportunities. First they had to endure dumbed-down schooling that failed to inspire them, then they encountered intense competition at the lower end of the labour market unable to compete with better disciplined newcomers and finally, they succumbed to the allure of welfare dependence and became the clients of mental health outreach workers.
For much of the 20th century the upwardly mobile middle classes continued to grow, while the numbers of traditional blue-collar workers gradually shrank. Big business first outsourced and then automated manufacturing. By the turn of the millennium, the burgeoning service sector employed the lowest paid workers such as temporary burger flippers, toilet cleaners or fast-food delivery drivers, with gruelling farm labour and food processing assigned mainly to transient migrant labourers. A dwindling minority of the working people now make essential goods or provide mission-critical services. Since the advent of medical martial law in early 2020, we’ve learned to call such people key workers. Policymakers now consider everyone else expendable or in modern parlance non-essential. Seriously, our authorities seem more concerned about covid compliance and vaccine acceptance than helping young people gain fruitful employment and start natural families. In the UK a nominally Conservative government has overseen the largest expansion of welfare dependence ever and the decimation of independent small businesses. The other main parties all support the rapid transition to a new economy that will exclude most adults of working age from any meaningful participation, except as cheerleaders, rule enforcers and carers. Via the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Huawei, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, the global high-tech industrial complex has swept aside the old debates over public ownership, EU membership and Scottish independence. The National Health Service has now effectively become a subsidiary of big pharma with central government merely dishing out digital cash underwritten by banking cartels.
The Equality Myth
In classic NewSpeak we are “the same but different”. Learning disability charities love the slogan and shamelessly recycle it for very different categories of people with additional support needs. Expressions such as differently-abled may make us feel good about our assigned disability but really mean that some people are more equal than others, i.e. not equal at all. Since the early 2000s I’ve chronicled a growing trend to broaden the definition of learning disabilities to cover anyone who has challenges in any intellectually demanding task. Dyslexia is both hard to define and may affect as many as 10% of the population. A much larger percentage could be mathematically challenged and the vast majority of mobile phone users would struggle with rudimentary programming concepts. Eventually, learning disabilities may apply to anyone below the top 10% of the IQ range (approximately 120+). As smart automation gathers pace, more and more workers within the medium intelligence range (80 to 120) will lose their jobs to AI. With moves afoot to roll out universal basic income, people will soon be rewarded not for their labour but for their compliance and good behaviour with social credits. Many may earn a little extra as part-time as carers, customer relations managers or narrative enforcers. However, these roles are non-essential and serve only to manage the moods and behaviour of other members of the underclasses. We can see that now with store staff employed not to serve customers - something machines can easily do these days - but to ensure visitors comply with new covid measures. It should come as little surprise that over the last 15 months governments around the globe have targeted independent small businesses that are not subservient to larger corporations. This follows in the wake of a three-decade-long worldwide onslaught against small-scale farmers. It hardly comes as a surprise that Neil Ferguson’s wild projections of mass death also served to bankrupt family-run livestock families in the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, leading to the incineration of over 6 million animals.
Traditional skillsets, of the kind farmers and craftsmen once had in abundance, rely on multiple facets of intelligence, experience and conscientiousness. Devoted generalists could succeed in life with a can-do attitude. This is no longer the case. A broad range of mediocre skills no longer suffice for anything but personal care and hobbies in a world where big business with its vast economies of scale and smart automation can undercut any talented artisan. There remain niche markets for millionaires prepared to spend £13,000 on a handcrafted record player, but the rest of us may enjoy superior sound from a digital download at a fraction of the cost. Craftspeople work today more as artists who sell their creative spirit more than their actual products. An overpriced custom turntable is a work of art whose market value depends on its uniqueness and authentic embodiment of a bygone technological era. However, only a tiny minority of the millions of skilled workers who once formed the bedrock of modern industrial societies will transition to new roles as celebrity artisans. Alas most young adults have chosen to pursue tertiary-sector professions that are neither mission-critical nor immune from smart automation. We live in a world with more recruiters than engineers and more social workers than fishermen.
The once culturally homogenous working classes have now morphed into a motley collection of atomised individuals that social scientists may categorise by employability and mental health. A new social structure is rapidly emerging:
- Non-academic people, i.e. within the low to medium intelligence range:
- The caring classes: Well-socialised and compliant members may earn extra within the social care and awareness-raising sector. Their jobs may be non-essential but serve to give people a sense of purpose and participation.
- The idle classes: Well-socialised but lethargic members may rely on UBI (universal basic income), but occasionally earn social credits for compliant behaviour. In practice, most people will flow between these groups at different stage in their lives.
- The victim classes: This growing subsection of emotionally unstable and often uncooperative individuals, prone to drug abuse and risky behaviours, will be subject to intensive surveillance and act as guinea pigs in social and medical experiments. As long as their noncompliance is expressed through recreational drugs, junk culture and sports, social workers can prevent the brighter elements within this subgroup from succumbing to the lures of personal independence and associating with subversive intellectuals.
- Academically gifted, i.e. within the upper 10 to 20% of the intelligence range.
- The Managerial classes comprise the better-socialised and more cooperative among the new upper classes, they will vary from low-ranking social engineers to high-status policy analysts but will rely increasingly on artificial intelligence.
- The Engineering classes: This more creative but cliquey group will be rewarded for their technical expertise and afforded greater personal freedoms within their exclusive clubs.
- The critically thinking classes will form a subversive subset of the first two subgroups. They may be tolerated to a limited extent to allow some innovation but must be carefully monitored at all times. When dissident academics overstep the mark, they will be treated as psychiatric patients but kept well away from other potential troublemakers.
I have just outlined a likely outcome of the Great Reset within the next 10 to 20 years, assuming it all goes to plan, which I hope it will not. The policy planners at the World Economic Forum seek to phase out the middle and skilled working classes as they roll out UBI and social credits while restricting private ownership of real estate and motor vehicles. Our challenge is to build an alternative and avert this drift towards a Huxleyan dystopia. Meanwhile, the progressive chattering classes, from media pundits and leftwing politicians to trade union leaders, have betrayed us by denying us any meaningful bargaining power. Among the biggest cheerleaders for the so-called zero-covid strategy favoured by many progressive think tanks such as the misnamed Independent SAGE in the UK, are the trade unions. They perpetuate the founding myths of the corona scam, through their dogmatic embracement of face masks in workplaces and schools and their abject failure to oppose experimental gene therapy injections in school children, despite ample scientific evidence of their potential for long-term neurological adverse effects. Many wishful thinking lower-ranking middle managers may mean well, but they serve the interests of their technocratic masters.
It beggars belief how anyone with half a brain could let an obsession with infection rates destroy the freedom of future generations.