State of the State
Many people are concerned, and rightly so, about creeping authoritarianism in our world. In the last two decades, we have seen failed state after failed state succumb to despotism and totalitarian rule. We have seen the supposed bastions of freedom of progressive values in the West increasingly adopt draconian measures of surveillance and control both abroad and at home, on their own citizens. And we have seen an increasing tolerance for these abuses of power among the general population.
All this has come at a time when we have seen the greatest vertical redistribution of wealth in centuries, at a time when the wages of workers have stagnated for decades while corporate profits and MP’s salaries have skyrocketed. Vast sums of public money have been handed over to private enterprises in the name of “stabilizing” economies. Workers no longer have what little security we fought for through the union movements, with the norm now being short term, casualized contracts, stripped of protections and benefits. Against this backdrop of precarious work and flatlining wage growth, the price of living has risen steadily alongside the price of housing, so much so that many people are now priced out of the market and are unlikely to be able to afford a home of their own. Public services have been defunded and pared back to the bare essentials, or sold off into private ownership to be run as businesses. Funding to aged care services, to domestic violence support, to hospitals and schools, community programs, the arts, to mental health services, has stalled, decreased or been cut altogether. We are increasingly policed and surveilled, and for the most part our role in making the decisions that shape our communities has been reduced to passive commentary and the occasional symbolic protest.
In many ways, authoritarianism and its everyday realities are not a storm brewing on the horizon, something still distant and yet-to-come; but already upon us and defining the character of our everyday lives.
It was onto this powder-keg of forces that COVID’s match fell in late 2019. Our “democratic” states, reduced bit-by-bit over the last five decades to barely functional shells of their former selves, rushed to respond (or, in many cases, to avoid a response), and largely failed to institute equitable and proportionate policy measures. Financial assistance was, in most cases, non-existent despite the closure of businesses and the economic downturn. No significant mental health support was organized for individuals. The medical community, including frontline workers such as nurses, were left under-resourced and under-protected. A half century of neoliberal doctrine, aimed at reducing the role of the public and our democratic institutions, and growing the power and reach of the private sector, left us ill-prepared and unable to forge a coherent national or state-level response to the virus.
Nearly two years on, we find ourselves more-or-less in the same position we were then: a state both unwilling and incapable of addressing the situation, and a public divided and looking for quick solutions and ways to make sense of the chaos.
In late 2019 and early 2020, the scientific community mobilized quickly to analyze the virus and develop evidence-based guidelines for states and communities to follow. States were slow in their uptake, or, as in the cases of India, Brazil, and the United States, refused the advice of medical experts, preferring to weaponize doubt about the measures being proposed in an attempt to shore up their political viability. A wave of conspiratorial rhetoric emerged calling into question the legitimacy of organizations like the WHO, and individuals like Anthony Fauci, while simultaneously raising the profile of individual doctors and personalities pushing conspiracy theories about the virus, its severity, its origins, and how to treat it. The commentary was picked up and amplified by right-wing media and politicians, and flowed through unexpected channels into the wellness and self-help spaces; thanks in no small part to the presence of divisive individuals trafficking in “alternative facts” and weaponizing doubt for their own social, political and economic gain.
The mainstream media raced to frame the situation primarily in terms of economics, with many pundits calling for states and individuals to continue business and life as usual, allowing the elderly and sick to be sacrificed for the greater good of all. They portrayed the medical and scientific community as divided and out of touch, and politicians who followed their advice as “dictators.” Lockdowns were subject to intense, 24 hour criticism from the commentariat, with every detail scrutinized down to the molecular level; a far cry from the almost non-existent media coverage of authoritarian data-retention policies, surveillance measures, militarization of police or the mass deregulation of the private sector. On social media, opinion, personal politics, self-directed research, popular influencers, and conspiracy theory all intermingled to split our common sense-making into highly polarized camps, each reacting to the others in increasingly insular ways.
The communication between us fractured along lines which had been chiselled into the ground of our common ideas about who we are, what we’re working towards, and what’s real and important in our world. Divisions manufactured in a slow-boil by conservative media and right-wing political actors, such as Sky News, Fox, the Trump administration, and the National party began to dominate public discourse at an unprecedented rate. Individuals like Craig Kelly, Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones and Peta Credlin, to name a few, re-stoked the fires of the “culture wars”, associating the medical and scientific community with a “radical Left” and insisting that measures such as lockdowns and mask-wearing were an unforgivable intrusion into our basic civil rights. Political and media personalities with decades-long careers touting the benefits of authoritarian policies, of stripping women’s reproductive rights, denying LGBTQI+ people recognition under the law, of racialized policing; suddenly rushed to position themselves as anti-authoritarian defenders of the common man.
And when a striking example of authoritarian policy was enacted by the state, in the lockdown of nine public housing towers in Melbourne, many of those who had been most vocal about the government response to the pandemic fell silent, or supported the measure. Hundreds of police arrived unannounced and placed the towers into immediate lockdown. Residents discovered they were not allowed to leave their flats , whether to shop, or to collect children who were on play dates with friends, and there were visitors to the towers who were not allowed to go home. The subsequent administration left residents without food, medicine or support, and has left many permanently traumatized. This played out in stark contrast to the claims of Orwellian measures being enacted against the majority, but seemingly did little to temper or inform our attitudes to what we considered to be an authoritarian response to the pandemic.
Elsewhere, members of the community who were left by our hollowed-out states to fend for themselves financially and otherwise began to look for answers and support, and found a dubious form of it in the aforementioned shock-jocks in conservative media and politics; but also in each other. In the social media sphere, people connected around a frustration with poor communication from the state regarding the lockdowns and health advice such as mask-wearing and social distancing, and the lack of any genuine support for struggling people. They found common ground in their rightful anger with a state that refused to support them financially, while mandating they stay at home and not work. And those who already existed on the margins had easy answers as to why all this was happening, and were eager to share them with those who hadn’t heard: Qanon and its ideological tributaries enjoyed a striking resurgence in popularity, alongside right-wing and libertarian movements; culminating in multiple protests against the lockdowns and assertions that the Victorian premier had orchestrated the lockdown on behalf of a global shadow government in order to smuggle child slaves in tunnels under Melbourne’s CBD. At the rear of these movements were the usual motley crew of white nationalists, ecofascists, racists and violent extremists, apparently always ready to use a crisis to find a foothold among the general population and to insert their ideas in veiled forms into public discourse.
The fear of authoritarianism and state power was, and is still, front and center in the public mind. However, for the majority of white Australians, our interactions with the state have been limited to occasionally filling out a few forms, applying for a social security payment, registering a vehicle or paying a fine. We interface with the machinery of discipline and control infrequently, and for the most part we are spectators to it, or unaware participants in its functioning. We are not typically bothered by the police unless we are engaged in a highly visible criminal activity, nor do we find ourselves entangled in Kafka-esque bureaucratic systems (unless of course we have the ill-luck to be living in poverty, in which case we are subjected to all manner of bizarre tests and requirements to claim a payment significantly below a living wage). In stark contrast to the racialized authoritarian lockdowns of the towers in North Melbourne, or the current authoritarian police response to the COVID outbreaks in Western Sydney, white Australia was largely given a free pass from authorities to bend and even break restrictions, with the rates of enforcement among the wealthy even lower still.
Is it any wonder, then, when the average white, middle class Australian enjoys such a degree of unimpeded and invisible freedom of movement, of speech, and of action; that the introduction of lockdowns and restrictive health measures was seen as something on the level of Stalinism, or that it was compared with Orwell’s 1984? We as a population are so used to moving through our lives unaware of the existence of the state or the systems of control which shape our lives, that any change in this scheme of things is almost guaranteed to produce such a reaction.
And all the more so, when the reasons behind the intrusion of the state into our private lives were communicated so poorly, and when the measures introduced are in many ways completely counter to our common sense; and in some ways, out of step with the science. This is not to absolve individuals of their responsibilities to inform themselves: we all owe it to one another to take what time we have to learn a little about how to best care for each other, and all the more so in times of peril. It is rather to note that official communications around COVID safety and restrictions have been patchy at best, often ignoring non-English speakers, and largely failing to give concise explanations of the science, where it is available, behind the measures being put into place.
I have spoken with close friends about their distrust of these measures, and they have said frankly that had the communication been clearer, more thorough about the science and the medical evidence for the measures, they would have responded differently and likely held different views to the ones they currently do. I would add to this the fairly obvious thought that, had they been well supported financially, they may not have felt at odds with the measures being put into place, and would most certainly have felt a degree more trust and support for those introducing them. Had our official channels not left a vacuum of information into which the far-right, conspiracy theorists, QAnon-ers and their adjacents, and health-conscious followers of alternative medical frameworks could place their beliefs unchecked and unexamined; perhaps we would have seen a more united community ethic and a more universal understanding of how best to keep each other safe and well.
This combination of our own unfamiliarity with brutal authoritarianism, poor communication from relevant authorities, the response of the media, and our increasing informational and ideological fragmentation, has created something of a perfect storm leading us to where we are now: a public that has lost confidence not only in the last vestiges of our democratic infrastructure, but which is also increasingly distrustful of itself. The divisions in our worldviews and our beliefs about this situation are in many ways only widening, though encouraging steps are being made towards communication and the building of consensus. But there is a question worth asking here: from where did the storm come?
Perhaps the best thing we can do now for each other is to begin the difficult process of listening to one another again, and of offering our most thoroughly grounded assessments of the world we now find ourselves in. To that end, I want to attempt to answer that question on the origins of the storm, to offer my thoughts on what I believe to be most concerning about the current ideological climate surrounding COVID, and how this relates to the perceived and actual authoritarianism which has so gripped the public imaginary.
Power, Visible and Invisible
I briefly mentioned above the role that neoliberal capitalism has played in bringing us to our present dysfunction. I also touched upon the role that “alternative facts” and influencers have played in damaging our ability to reach public consensus, and how this has led to our division into increasingly isolated camps of ideology. What I want to demonstrate is not simply that neoliberal capitalism has eroded the state and our democratic infrastructure to the point of it being largely incapable of a coherent or proportionate response to a crisis such as the pandemic, or any other natural disaster for that matter, a fact which is obvious to anyone who has lived through the last few decades; but that it presents a more insidious, less visible, and more total form of authoritarian control than the state ever has, or could.
And alongside this, I want to show that the alternative facts and systems of thought we see on an increasingly common basis are in no small part a result of the way in which this authoritarian neoliberal capitalism builds and conditions subjectivity, of the capitalistic social media ecosystems we inhabit, and of individuals and communities attempting to make sense of the increasingly complex and occult world that this system produces all around us. At the very least, I wish to point out that these worldviews are insufficiently critical of authoritarianism as it exists in our world today, and that they reproduce much of its foundational logic.
First, we should examine briefly what the main differences are between the old form of power, housed in the state, and the new form of power which is distributed through and in global capital. But before we do, it is worth mentioning that the state and capital are not separate and antithetical forces, existing in opposition; but rather exist in a state of mutual relationship, with aspects of each reinforcing, shaping and developing the other. Capitalism as we know it today could not have arisen without the armed force of the state to allow it access to new territories and resources, without the coercion of state police, judiciaries and legislators to compel the people into becoming participants in the system; without slave labour, displacement of indigenous peoples, war and conquest and the resulting opportunities for profit. And likewise, capitalism would not exist today without the re-appropriation of wealth made possible through the state, in the form of bailouts for corporations using tax money collected from everyday people like us.
The state has always been a highly visible form of disciplinary power. It functions and achieves its aims through the mass conditioning of bodies and behaviour, a process which takes place in the institutions of the school, the prison, the hospital, the psychiatrist’s office, the military, the judiciary and so on. The state reserves the final right to use force to compel a citizen to behave in the manner which the state decides is appropriate.
When we think of authoritarianism, we almost reflexively associate it with these forms of power: with uniformed fascists, with the party-apparatuses of state-communism, with the police and the judge, the headmaster and the psychoanalyst, the doctor or the scientist in a white coat. We expect it to arrive in these recognizable forms, with an emblem and an army and a mandate; to shout us into submission from a pulpit. And this is, to an extent, the case, broadly speaking. The state still plays a major role in public and private life, and regulates the flow of our bodies and our energies into the various institutions, the molds, it has prepared for us; all the more so if we are poor, indigenous, a person of colour, LGBTQI+, an immigrant to the country, if we are neurodivergent, if we belong to a religious minority; in short, if we do not fit the majority norm proscribed by the state. If we deviate from the norms, we are disciplined.
The definition of authoritarianism, “favouring or enforcing strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom”, could therefore in principle be applied to any and all states as a general rule. We ought not to be surprised when a fundamentally authoritarian institution behaves in accordance with its own logic: if a state behaves in an authoritarian way, it is because states are in their constitution and by design, basically authoritarian.
The new power we see in our world, however, does not proceed by this visible and recognizable route. It is a power of camouflage and subtlety. It blends into our surroundings so perfectly that we barely notice it is there. It entices us, rather than disciplines us, and it never broadcasts its method; so that we come to invite our chains, to beg for our cages, all the while believing fervently that this was our own original desire and that we wanted it all along.
This kind of power, which we can call a control system or control society, operates by creating conditions that determine our behaviour in advance. A good example is a highway: if you build it, people will drive on it. You don’t need to set laws to compel anyone to use the road, you don’t need an authority figure to force people to drive on it: they will choose to use it because it is there, because it provides a clear pathway from one state of being, one location, to another. It provides a convenience. It “works for us”, and so we see it as a positive, and adapt ourselves to it, while leaving behind or forgetting that we used to wander freely through the forest that used to grow where the highway now lies.
We can see this in the way that we have, as a culture, adopted new technologies and media platforms, freely volunteering thousands upon thousands of points of identifying data which are then used to predict and manipulate our social and economic actions. We can also see it in the way that privately owned media limits the scope of respectable discourse to only those topics which can be discussed without requiring a broader critique of the control system itself; of capitalism or nationalism, normative concepts of identity, race, gender, sexuality and so on. It exists in the transport systems we use, in the layout and design of shopping centres, in the algorithms that curate our social media feeds; never disciplining us or outright ordering us, but always luring us and tempting us into actions which we come to believe are our own.
It is by this method of carrot instead of stick, of exhaustively designing the built environment and the world of information in which we move each day, that neoliberal capitalism has come to supersede the state as the primary mechanism of control in our world today.
What is concerning about this new power is that it is largely invisible to us, and as such, resistance to it is more difficult to organize. Under the old mode of power, we were able to organize against a central figure, a representative of that system of power, and so could more easily work as a collective to improve the material conditions of our lives. The boss at the factory, the minister in government, these were highly visible organs of the system of state power and old capitalism that we could unite against, as workers, as unions, or as citizens, and bargain or fight for better lives. Under this new mode of power, no-one is truly responsible for anything. The CEO is only acting boss, and his existence is superfluous to the continuation of the company. There is nowhere that we can “find capitalism” or pin down the “control society” in concrete terms: by its very nature it is diffuse, spread out, non-localized, and blends into the background.
Being unable to find the source of our oppression in the world around us or in a recognizable figure, we have instead internalized the dynamics of power: no longer do we feel pushed by our boss to upskill, rather, we feel inwardly compelled to optimize ourselves for the market, to always be growing and improving as an individual, to be flexible enough to fit an ever shifting pattern of success, of employability, of social standing. For the majority of us as white, relatively well off Australians, the policeman and the boss no longer stands over us. Instead he lives inside our own heads: we have become both master and slave in one, and we schizophrenically oscillate between the two. This is psychopolitics: the modulation our very minds, our identities, what we think and feel and how and why, by the system of control that is neoliberal capitalism, and the disciplinary state which it has captured and now uses as a tool to further its control.
Alongside this internalization of the power dynamics of the control society; there has been a simultaneous erosion in the external world of all the ways in which we have traditionally organized as a collective. As I mentioned earlier, the program of neoliberal capitalism is to hollow out states, to erode democratic infrastructure and to convert this into private power. The century long assault on our unions, on any political project that dared challenge the unquestioned supremacy of the wealthy man and his property, on our public broadcasters and newspapers, has resulted in a public sphere and a democracy which now largely exists as an idea; and a hotly contested one at that. We no longer really believe that anything different is possible. We seem to have lost faith in our ability to come together and shape the world as a people, as neighbors and as communities, as fellow beings. And on some level, many of us no longer even desire another world: the anaesthetic of constant information and entertainment is enough to keep us comfortable while the world falls apart, and we forget that there was ever anything outside of our little bubbles. This sense of futility, of the impossibility and unimaginability of a different system, a better way of relating to one another and the planet, and its replacement with a comforting and stimulating virtual world into which we can escape from the real is part and parcel of the control society neoliberal capitalism produces and maintains.
(Un)Wellness and Liberation
It is into this crisis of the imagination and of our collective capacities that a flood of alternative worldviews and facts has rushed. We are desperately seeking some system of ideas, some narrative to make sense of a world that by all means makes very little sense. After all, who can see that we face a sixth mass extinction while our governments continue to spend our taxes on fuelling the very system that is causing it without feeling that something doesn’t add up, that we aren’t being told the full truth; without wanting some kind of an answer? Who can face the meaninglessness of our bullshit jobs, the threat of global pandemics and natural disasters, and the increasing corporatization of the state without feeling that there must be something profoundly wrong somewhere, some cause that we can point to, and some course of action we as individuals can take to make it all better?
This search for meaning in an increasingly chaotic world has led many to turn for guidance to the “so-called” wellness industry. Comprised largely of social media influencers, western Yoga teachers, proponents of healthy diets and lifestyles, “flow” coaches and self-help gurus; the wellness industry has grown out of the countercultural movements of the 1960s into a global, multi-billion dollar a year enterprise. If there is a problem that exists under the sun, there is likely a proposed solution to it somewhere in the wellness space. In the time of COVID, so-called alternative treatments for the virus, along with conspiracy theories about its origins and connections to global systems of government have become exceedingly popular, leading to many progressive adherents of wellness practices being drawn increasingly into reactionary and extremist ideological positions.
Alongside the potential health risks the rejection of proven medical advice can present, there are more subtle risks posed by the implicit ethical and political ideology which informs the wellness industry; an ideology which is for the most part conspicuously free of systemic critique or any cogent analysis of the systems of power that exist in our world today.
As I mentioned before, control societies rely on camouflage and imperceptibility to function. As the most visible forms of power and oppression have receded into the backgrounds of our lives, and as the control society has become the dominant force shaping our daily experience, we have lost much of our ability to clearly identify the material causes of our struggles. We have instead come to locate the primary causes of our tragedies and our sufferings in our own personal, individual failings. We believe that if we do not lead the kind of pristine life we see modelled for us by various social media gurus or proponents of “alternative” lifestyles, it must be because we ourselves are basically insufficient. We aren’t trying hard enough, we aren’t smart enough or spiritually pure enough. Or, perhaps we think that all we need to do is to “work on ourselves” and then this charmed life will manifest itself into our laps.
Instead of a robust critique of the systems of power which operate on us daily, and in which we conduct our work, feed our families, raise our children and care for our elders; the wellness industry, like neoliberal capitalism, presents to us a version of reality stripped of class, of any power other than our own “personal” power, a world where the only “real” obstacle to our self-actualization is our own willingness to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Presenting themselves as alternatives to the medical models of mental health and to capitalist modes of living, they have ironically reproduced the same wholly individualistic theoretical frameworks, and in doing so tacitly adopted the maxim of British conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher: “There is no such thing as a society, there are only individuals and families.”
This industry, which presents itself as a form of liberation, as a force for lifting people up and helping people become their authentic selves, has based itself foundationally in a notion of original sin: we are never good enough in the eyes of God (or the market), and there is always room to improve. If we suffer, it is because of our sins; and the blame rests solely with us. It is the same infinite guilt, placed as a burden upon the individual soul, that informed the development of the systems of thought that undergird and make possible the kind of rapacious extractive capitalism that has led us headlong into a fifth mass extinction.
The kind of “oneness” that much of the wellness industry proposes is one stripped of difference, of material conditions, of the historical context in which people live and thrive, or struggle and die. It is reductionist, preferring vague general statements about the validity or intent of ideas to rigorous examinations of their coherence and the evidence available to support them. It is isolating, often inviting believers to abandon collective sense-making and the feedback of friends and loved ones in favour of a notion of complete self-trust and intuitive knowing which can only amplify our innate confirmation biases. And it is atomizing in that it presents us with an individualized worldview, removed from collective action, which tends to characterize political and social activism as un-enlightened, partisan, and non-spiritual.
In this isolating, atomizing and indivualistic worldview, acknowledging our material conditions as a source and determining factor in our lived experience and the conditions and hardships we face has become a taboo. And in creating this taboo, in bidding us not to see the very real problems each of us face, the wellness industry has cut off any real potential for our liberation as people; because, simply put, our liberation is personal. It is collective.
If the spiritual traditions of the world which the wellness industry mines for content, like Rio Tinto mines for coal, have anything in common; it is this. That we exist in relationship, that we are fundamentally interconnected with one another. A beautiful expression of this can be found in Buddhism, in the notion of “dependent origination”, or as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, “interbeing.” None of us exists in isolation, and all of our fates are bound up together. None of us can be truly free until we are all free.
This, to me, is not simply a theoretical or rhetorical concern: it is a statement about the fundamental nature of reality. And to my mind, no way of thinking or acting that fails to see the deep interconnectedness between us as unique people, between us and the social worlds we inhabit and move through, or between us and the various systems we interact with throughout the course of our lives, can truly liberate us. It can only further bind us to delusion, and to the path of suffering and death.
These concerns are why I identified alternative worldviews and facts as some of the greatest dangers that we face. There is a real need and demand for answers and for ways of life, among the chaos of our time. And there are countless people and countless ideas that claim to provide them. I believe that we can find better ideas, and better ways, than those offered to us through the wellness industry, and through the various conspiratorial worldviews that have come to attach themselves, profitably, to it.
What Did We Forget?
We should be looking for answers, and asking questions. And we should be doing this together, collaborating to make sense of our world, fostering a healthy distrust for official narratives, for experts and their positions in our society. We should question authority, ruthlessly and without holding anything back, and demand that all power justifies its existence and its right to power; but without first understanding the systems of power we face, the weaponization of doubt and misinformation, indeed, the system of thought and ideology that undergirds neoliberal capitalism and all its virulent tendrils, our efforts will be in vain.
If we are stuck in old ways of conceptualizing what power is and how it looks and behaves, it will simply bypass our efforts to resist it, and as it has increasingly been doing in recent years, commodify our resistance and sell it back to us. If we are still labouring under the image of authoritarianism captured in Orwell, if we believe that the system of control and power in the modern day will announce itself in the clothes we expect it to wear, then we will have little chance of seeing it clearly or challenging it.
We have seen this writ large in the ways in which the rightful public distrust of the state and its use of power in the response to COVID has been weaponized by violent extremists, in the rise and rise of Qanon and how quickly it spread, like a virus, through our communities, turning brother against sister and parents against children, and culminating in an attempted coup of the United States government by an armed mob. We have seen it play out in the fracturing of our communities, as each of us attempts in a vacuum to make sense of the world and arrives at increasingly idiosyncratic and insular results, guided all the while by the algorithms, all watched over by machines of loving grace. We have seen it in the way the public has conflated the health profession with a totalitarian regime, in the ways we have begun to think in absolutes, lumping all scientists under one banner, doubting on principle instead of on a case by case basis, and generalizing our approaches to complex problems like the wearing of masks, vaccination, surveillance, technology, spirituality, education, political parties, even down to how we choose what we purchase and why.
When we attempt to make sense of a world that is actively engaged in psychopolitics, in confusing our ability to make sense of the world, and when we do this unaware of this process or how to resist it; we are doomed to arrive at the kinds of beliefs, ideologies and strategies which the control society has already selected in advance. We will arrive at kind of conclusions and beliefs that emerge naturally out of the logic of this system, which reinforce it and ensure its continued dominance. And all the while we will do this believing that we have broken the net, that we have seen through the veil of illusion and discovered the truth behind it.
This is what is concerning to me about much of the current ideological climate surrounding COVID and how it relates to the perceived and actual authoritarianism that exists in our society: it is profoundly disconnected from the actually existing systems of control and conditioning which shape our world today, which are behind and in our jobs, our entertainment, in the products we consume and the services we use, and which use us. The focus on the state as the primary engine of domination and the source of authoritarian control not only misses the mark, it actively helps the system of neoliberal capitalism gain power and fade even further into the background of our awareness. The concern around authoritarian control, while legitimate, is misplaced in what it identifies as authoritarian, and in that misplacement it is ironically giving life and power to an even more insidious and more difficult to challenge system of control. The rise of alternative worldviews and facts has in many ways scrambled our ability to make coherent sense of information, and to evaluate and assess the merits of claims based on the evidence available to support them.
And because we have not diagnosed the source of our problems correctly, because we have attempted to make sense of the situation using the tools that built the masters house; our solutions are becoming increasingly authoritarian themselves. We seem to have forgotten to consider, in the context of our thinking about this problem in terms of liberty and freedom, that these are products of community and co-operation, of compassion. We hear now that people are hesitant to get vaccinated because they feel that it is simply a matter of their own bodily autonomy, a personal choice, seeming to forget that viruses are communicable: that when we get sick we spread it to others, and that we have a duty to look after one another as well as ourselves, that every free society looks after its most vulnerable people. It is not uncommon now for people to suggest that we allow our fellow human beings to perish for the greater good. Good people, who would radically oppose any attempt at eugenics or population control imposed by a state, are now coming to suggest or, at the very least, not to push back against the idea that we should sacrifice the vulnerable to ensure the liberty of the strong.
And it seems that we have forgotten that those chords were played not long ago, those particular phrases were spoken to mass rallies at Nuremberg and in Italy under Mussolini’s rule; that those were the same sentiments used to justify the slaughter of indigenous people and the theft of their lands here in Australia. It seems we have forgotten that these ideas, that the weak should die off or their rights be ignored in favor of the will of the strong, were at the heart of attempts to strip us of our rights, to oppose social security and welfare, to oppose public health and superannuation, our rights at work, indeed our very freedom itself. That these ideas do not work in favor of our bodily autonomy or our freedoms as individuals, families and communities, but rather strip the very basis of those rights and freedoms away in favor of a brutal and violently competitive society. These were the ideas with which the practitioners of slavery defended their plantations and their right, as strong men, to rule over the weak.
Moreover, it seems we have forgotten, or perhaps simply not noticed, that the strongest supporters of these ideas in our time have been the rich and the already-strong; that they have been those who are already benefiting from the massive inequality wrought by neoliberal capitalism. As I mentioned earlier, the most vocal opponents of the health measures and lockdowns were the conservative media and extreme right-wing politicians, people who have spent their entire lives working to erode our rights, to pit us against one another, and to support governments who put forward authoritarian policies. They wrote articles suggesting that we let COVID burn through the aged care system in order that companies like Harvey Norman and Myer could remain open and trading, and they wrote in defense of the CEOs and bosses who took the limited financial support offered to workers by the government and kept it for themselves. Those who suggested we ignore the health advice under the guise of freedom and liberty already had more freedom and liberty than most of us ever will; they had more to gain and less to lose than any of us.
Alongside them are multi-level marketers, experienced grifters with a litany of unpaid debts, failed businesses and burned bridges, who have seen and taken an opportunity to capitalize on the anxiety, fear and anger members of our communities are feeling. They offer no coherent political program, no material demands for better conditions, and no solidarity with existing struggles for liberation, and on multiple occasions the figureheads inciting the public to rally against lockdowns have been seen abandoning the very people they claim to represent when they need it most, or actively leading them into police custody. What they offer instead are expensive supplements and lifestyles, claims that their products can prevent or cure COVID-19, and they have aimed these sales pitches primarily at vulnerable people who are struggling to stay afloat both financially and psychologically during the pandemic. They have cynically enriched themselves while the people they claim to advocate for and represent still struggle to have their most basic material needs met.
These people have weaponized our rightful doubts, have taken our legitimate confusion, frustration, our search for meaning and used it to divide us and to trick us into fighting on the side of the very system that oppresses us. That’s how this new system of power, of authoritarian control works, and the fact that we do not clearly see it and so cannot meaningfully fight it concerns me greatly.
And Where to From Here?
So, then, if this is the case, what can we do?
As I mentioned before, perhaps the most important step is to begin once again to open up to each other, and to listen. To hear the concerns of our friends and family, and to take them on board without personal judgment. We need to re-establish the lines of communication which have been intentionally fractured by bad faith actors looking to profit and gain from our losses, to re-claim our sense of trust and faith in one another through a rejection of this manufactured doubt and division. We are all trying to make sense of the same world, the same situations, from very different standpoints. And when we are honest with one another about where we are coming from and why, and take the time to listen and to reflect on what we are communicating, at least some of the tension between us might evaporate, and we may find in its place a stronger sense of community and collectivity than we have felt in some time.
If we can reach out to each other and listen non-judgmentally and with compassion to concerns about the danger of vaccines, the rates of injury apparently arising from medical practices, about the effects lockdowns have on mental health, about the measures around COVID leading to further restriction of our freedoms in the future; and then offer our honest thoughts and feelings, our best understandings of the situation, then we all stand to gain immeasurably from this kind of candour. We are truly stronger together, and we can make more sense of the chaos together. We shouldn’t shy away from these difficult conversations, from challenging each other’s ideas with kindness and perhaps a little humour; because this is how we learn and grow together, and how we might build the kind of world we truly want to live in.
Secondly, we can start to more radically assert our opposition to this system of control and all of its tools and tendrils: to identify that at the root of our present ills lies the system of thought underlying neoliberal capitalism, and to resist and reject its assumptions about value, worth, who we are, what the world is, and how we must treat it and one another. To do this, we’re going to need to work together to clearly identify the logic of this system, and how it plays out in the world of our daily lives; and then find new ways to challenge it, new weapons capable of dismantling the unjust mechanisms of control and domination we find, new ways of working together collectively. We’ll need to challenge our perceptions of what an individual is, what “society” is, and whether or not and how we think collective action is possible.
Here, we can join with the spiritual among us and assert that this world, these people, this life, is sacred; that it is valuable well and beyond its use value, or its value of exchange in a market system. That we as human beings participate in the divine, that we are not born into original sin but instead that we are friends of the gods, that we are co-creating this reality with innumerable other beings from plants to animals, to fungi, viruses, bacterium; all the way up to the great cosmic beings of planets, stars, nebulae, galaxies. That what we think of as “matter”, dead and dumb, is in fact burgeoning with life and intelligence, that there is becoming and experience at every level from the greatest to the smallest, and that all this is sacred and should be related to with the utmost kindness, care, respect and, yes, even a sense of worship.
We can and should learn from Indigenous peoples about what it might be to live in reciprocity with this world, to respect the ancestors, to care for country; and begin to start the process of healing the wounds of the past, and ending the violence and oppression that continues to this day.
And to make sure we’re not being gaslit into yet other forms of authoritarianism and exploitation, we’re going to have to learn to clearly differentiate between shit and shinola, to tell fact from fiction. One of the ways in which this system keeps us at each others throats is to imply that there is no such thing as truth or objectivity, and that even if there is, no-one knows how to tell the difference. This kind of relativism gives power to those who seek to spread misinformation in order to benefit themselves, it clouds our vision and makes it more difficult for us to see clearly what is and isn’t real. But we know from our own experience in life that we are able to make sense of this world, to get in tune with life and each other, and to make good choices based on the best evidence we have available. And that we are all the more capable of this when we work together and hold ourselves and each other to a high standard of evidence, of being able to show and demonstrate what we are claiming is the truth. This is crucial to us moving out from under the shadow of weaponized doubt and mistrust, and coming to base our worldviews and our actions on what we can clearly show to be true, or at least, true enough. It is not to argue for a strict empiricism based on Enlightenment ideas of reason and logic, to imply that only mainstream or Western ways of making sense of the world are valid; but rather to acknowledge that all cultures have robust and coherent forms of sense-making, and that the best of these approach the study of reality and the search for truth with rigour, are critical of all claims, and are based in what is demonstrable through experience and experiment.
And alongside our efforts at collective sense-making and systems change, we’re going to need to look inwardly and begin the difficult but incredibly rewarding process of decoupling ourselves from the logic and the practice of this system: of becoming post-capitalist people, cultivating post-capitalist desires, wanting what the market cannot offer us and becoming someone the system cannot predict or account for. We can begin to investigate what it might be to become imperceptible to the algorithms, and to the state, to become invisible to capitalism and all its legions of marketers and ad-men; to refuse its products and its services. And to help us in our efforts to build our worldviews on solid ground, we can begin to experiment with clearing up our awareness, with techniques of meditation and concentration. We can begin to reclaim our spirituality and our wellness from the corruption of the capitalist worldview, to find out what it is when we free it from the individualism and commercialism it has become synonymous with. And we can further our efforts too with critical study where we are able to fit it into our busy lives, so that we can more clearly recognize what our biases and our items of faith are, and be honest with ourselves and others about whether or not we have good reason to continue to hold on to them.
And what gives me hope, among my concern in this time, is that I see so many of us already engaged with this process of decolonizing our minds and our bodies, of becoming ungovernable and accountable not to the control society, but to each other. So many of us are recognizing that we are in this together, not in the sense used by billionaires, but that we are adrift in the same turbulent seas on which they sail their superyachts, all clinging to bits of debris. Our best hope of survival now as it seems to me is to swim together carefully, to put our pieces together into some solid ground, and to help lift one another up onto that firmament so we might calm the raging storm around us and see the sun part the clouds once more. What will get us through these uncertain and disturbing times is compassion, honesty, co-operation, intellectual rigour, and imagination, and despite the forces set against us, I believe we are beginning to recognize this in a way we that perhaps we never have.