Today I got a call from my good friend Tom, who is a CEO with access to other high-ranking CEOs. It’s funny to hear how investment bankers express their concerns about the growing unrest in the Western world. This growing unease is tied to phenomena such as the housing crisis, mass immigration, the collapse of the middle class, growing resentment towards politicians and even complete distrust in the political system. Of course, the recent murders of Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska have done nothing but add fuel to this fire.
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Intro: The Hive Mind
So now we get to the questions of conscience: is this going to change anything, and if so, will there be any positive consequences? Or will everything only get worse? Apparently, the investment bankers and top-rank CEOs are now facing the same concerns, as the already widespread societal unease is starting to breach their bubble. Paradoxically enough, Luigi Mangione’s murder of a healthcare CEO was apparently without consequences within those circles. But now that the masses are taking to the streets, carrying flags, things are about to take a real turn.
Tom said: “The hive mind is fickle. These people – even CEOs at the head of multinationals – are following a herd mindset and do not truly think for themselves. As soon as a new set of ideas comes into prominence, they quickly bend over and adapt. Their minds are essentially vacuous, waiting to be filled by something that comes from outside. All of it is based on fickle emotions and half-baked ideas. The entire status quo can embrace a different set of values from one moment to another. The only thing that is required for that, is a change in momentum.”
Hearing this statement from Tom immediately opened a crossroads within my mind with four different branches. I unpacked these four intuitions one by one.
Intuition One: Dating and Consensus
The first one reminded me of the dating market. Without going into a lot of background research regarding hypergamy and shifting role patterns, what it – in this context – really boils down to is: “How controversial is the potential mate?” If you have a cushy government job, you might come across as a ‘boring’ guy. You will offer financial stability, however, which triggers the provider vibe. If there are too many polarizing reactions to you, your chances of actually making the date happen will suffer severely.
This has to do with judging things through a consensus mindset. “How do I feel about this person” is often less important than: “how does the group feel about this person, and will the social environment be okay with me dating this person?” This is exactly what Tom described: there is no real intellectual substance behind the dominant social structure. It is approximations of social responses to social impressions.
For this reason, my more serious relationships were usually with women with small social circles. Because even if the woman herself is politically neutral, or even supportive of your ideas, there is usually at least one family member or friend around who will object to your ‘controversial’ status. This aversion is almost always not based on things that you stated yourself, but on things that your enemies construed you to have said. Those misrepresentations are then spread globally using the left-wing dominance of search engines and social media.
Essentially, this is how Charlie Kirk got killed. Not because he was a ‘fascist’ or a ‘racist’. But because trolly 10 second long clips funneled the impression that he somehow was.
Individuals can never overcome such entrenched systems. They will just – as Elon Musk recently stated – be isolated, defeated and destroyed. For this reason, the left-wing tribalisation must be answered with a right-wing tribalisation counter structure.
Intuition Two: Overcoming the Entrenched Structures
Tom’s analysis – of a fickle mental constitution of the established order and how easily they would fold if a new set of values gains momentum – runs against everything that I endured throughout my career. Let’s start with Climate Gate, which came to light in 2009. In correspondence leaked from the University of East Anglia, it was revealed that scientists who express skepticism about man-made influences upon the climate, were actively fired, actively pushed out of the academic system. Everything was put into motion to prevent them from publishing in academically accredited magazines.
Climate Gate showed that the so-called ‘scientific consensus’ around climate, was actually the product of political power. Fed by the need for a discourse that would guarantee continuous funds and political traction. It shows how a deeply entrenched network is created which involves jobs, career perspectives, the inflow of subsidies, political activism and specific ideological positions. This is basically what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci laid out in his Quaderni del carcere. A fortified network of inner ramparts that are impossible to breach from the outside. Today, in layman’s terms, we call this the ‘Long March Through the Institutions’.
So, from that intuition, I was tempted to think that Tom’s view is very naïve (but I will get back to that in my next intuition). My friend Wim owns a chemical company and moved his assets to Switzerland to avoid most of the EU-bureaucracy. More than a year ago he said that, in order to do business globally, he needs ‘accreditations’ and ‘certificates’ which comes down to instructions in woke-ideology and company policies that comply with woke-ideology.
Then there’s the example of the Arnhem local government – and I know this for a fact because I was part of the city council’s gathering where this was discussed last Wednesday. The local government has a set of buying policies where they want to express certain values and that decides whom they do business with. In the most extreme example, one alderman explained, a bakery who wants to do business with the local government would have to prove that the ovens they use are not made using child labor. Other topics include human rights, animal friendliness, and so on.
The political party D66 – a Dutch equivalent of the US Democrats – even wants to expand this policy to be a combination of different local municipality governments banding together. So, if these kinds of structures exist that mix ideological convictions with how someone earns their living and which directly influence their career outlooks; good luck uprooting such entrenched structures just because the fleeting public sympathy is now briefly on the side of right-wingers because one popular conservative got killed.
The problem – and a big contribution to the inevitable Fall of the West that I cover in my new book – is that these kinds of analysis run too deep for politicians to understand. Most of them are basically just grifters. Let alone that the average citizen would do anything with them. Their political understanding of the world oftentimes does not extend beyond a single peak of outrage – in this case the brutal murders of Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk.
Intuition Three: the Fountainhead
With ‘The Fountainhead’ I refer to the original source of ideas. All ideas – whether left- or right-wing, whether progressive or conservative, must – in the end – come from a source. And here we get back to what Tom stated, that the existing institutions basically absorb and copy opinions. They espouse echoes of echoes and copies of copies. Engaging with ‘public opinion’ is like being in a mirror maze where each wall only reflects reflections. Originality must be somewhere, and come from some individual artist or philosopher. But it is certainly not found at the top of most established institutions. Yet those institutions are the ones who decide what we get to see, and even what to feel.
So yes, Tom does have a point. This is in essence a war over myths. I refer to ‘myth’ as it was understood by the French philosopher Georges Sorel. Some powerful arrangement of symbols that allow us to interpret the world, make sense of it, and find our place within it. In the example of the Cold War: the capitalist myth of the ‘self-made man’ and the ‘American dream’ proved stronger, providing more motivational force than the Communist myth of a ‘proletarian revolution’ and a ‘classless society’.
Of course, both were largely fictional, but that is not the point. The point is: which fiction is stronger, more appealing, has more life force. At some point, people start reproducing the fiction in their actions: this is how ideas conquer the world. But it all goes back the brilliant mind of one individual who steps outside of the herd and who initiates something – some unique pattern of thought – that eventually penetrates the vacuous minds of the masses and the institutions, replacing the existing content there.
Yet this war over myths, indirectly proves the point of Marxism: who is the owner of the means of production? Because if you control the media capital, if you get to program the algorithms, then you get to control what sort of myths can gain ‘flying power’, momentum, to begin with.
Intuition Four: The Inevitable Clash
Because this article is already running longer than I intended it to be, I will just quote a message I received from my friend Stephan. When Tom said what he had to say on a change in the dominant discourse being on the horizon, I had to think very strongly of what Stephan said.
He moved abroad, lives somewhere in Asia with a Chinese girlfriend who doesn’t care about the woke-discourse in Europe. He is not afraid to be arrested and prosecuted, like opinionated people in the Netherlands and Belgium are. Such as Raisa Blommestijn, Dries van Langenhove, Jeff Hoeyberghs and Jan Roos, to name only four. I will just let Stephan’s message speak for itself and translate it with a machine translator.
NPO means ‘Dutch public broadcasting’. The point is: if they know that people watch the videos by Charlie Kirk, and they will realize that he is not a ‘racist’ or a ‘fascist’, but someone who sought to engage in argument and dialogue, using the power of words… But these news agencies do not care about this and just continue to manipulate short clips to ‘prove’ that Kirk was bad… Then the institutions have already concluded that the people they antagonize are without any political pull, without any institutional traction. These folks can basically be ignored without repercussion, exactly like hillbillies in ‘flyover country’ can be ignored by East Coast elites and exactly like Hillary Clinton referred to Trump voters as a ‘basket of deplorables’.
So, to finalize, please think as deeply as you can about my four intuitions, and draw your own conclusions. I would love to read them! Until next time – stay safe and take care.
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