I think these “ hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats” are officious petty tyrants, mid-level tools who relish in whatever level of control or power they can get their hands on. I have see them in corporations, condominium co-ops, and food co-ops. Middle management is a useless (at best) class of society; they create nothing, take much, and have all the power. I lost my job recently not because of company policy on masking, but because of the lone HR toad who pressed to have it enforced (while they completely ignore the smoking ban!).
And the ones that aren't tyrants are often idiotic cowards, imposing the dumbest rules imaginable in response to pressure. Boss/constituents are clamoring for Something To Be Done about a perceived problem? Quick, this stupid plan is Something, so we need to do it!
In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
We've really gotten to see exactly who is who, that's for sure. Ironic that we have masking mandates just when the metaphorical masks have been removed to reveal just who has been behind them all of this time.
I agree. It seems unstoppable. But relentless defiance and noncompliance, that is a start. One on one, open discussions with other people, that is another step. I have had two such discussions in the last two days. It doesn't take much, simply to seed the idea of "why am I doing this?"
History is littered with the corpses of supposedly unstoppable forces.
The collapse is long overdue, likely delayed by the complete control over media/tech/gov - info. I have a neighbor who still thinks that the pandemic will only end when everyone is vaccinated. I explained to him that countries with near 100% vaccination have seen the opposite effect in exploding case numbers. He just replied "yeah, there was always going to be resistance to the vaccine mandates", as if resistance to vaccination is the obstacle. It's almost like he's sublet his brain aka zombie. Maybe the zombies will have to booster themselves into oblivion before we can return to normalcy.
This is most definitely your finest post yet. Hugely inspiring and so on point. I do wonder if the elite will destroy themselves, after all they are where they are because of their egos, they will fight amongst each other. So when you say “nobody knows how to stop it”, maybe we just need to sit back and watch them stop it for us.
Due to the Eugy-aforementioned priming by elites and the overwhelming complexity of the system as a whole: I expect some elites may eat themselves within the currently unfolding debacle, but many more will capitalize on their demise. Or rather, one group of elites will succumb to their self-made machinations while another will rise explicitly because of it, going forward in this way in perpetuity.
Meanwhile, we the plebs/proletariat, will be only as able to stop/change it in the future as we are now. We need better tools and (actual) representative democracies to have a chance at preventing further nonsense or ending the current abomination.
At the start of this debacle I was angry, but found that only led to despair. Now I have to be hopeful, because as Sridhar Popovic (https://canvasopedia.org/) says, “anger without hope is a destructive force”. But yes this will not be an easy journey, I wish less people would comply, it is that more than anything that has shocked and disappointed me. Nick, you have a very valid point that some of the self appointed elite will attempt to capitalise on any demise of one of their cohort. I just can’t help thinking that this time the overreach is so extreme it will collapse under its own weight. Then from that we need exactly what you state in your last paragraph, better tools and better representation, not least to stop this type of takeover ever happening again.
"We now have a class of globalising, extra-national super-elites, who identify primarily with each other, and who have lost contact with their native populations."
There's a theory that because of the wavelength principle (and I'm sure I'll get this wrong), a particle can spontaneously pop into existence. Usually the laws of physics in that place make it unviable and it pops straight back out of existence. Occasionally everything is right, there's a big bang and a new universe is formed.
Maybe that's how it is with conspiracies. Sometimes several agendas coincide to get them moving as though coordinated, when they are not heavily coordinated.
In the case of Covid, CCP desire to save face by spreading its crazy policies ran into the global media's passion for a beat up, US elite desire to get rid of Trump by destroying the economy, and WEF/bureaucratic goals of seizing power to perfect the world. Plus all the low-level Karens who love this stuff and make it happen right down to the level of 7-11s and suburban parks.
A good way to frame it in our minds is to recall that this is not the first time interests have aligned like this. WWI was another example, although that one involved our old aristocratic elites.
It so damaged their reputation that it did them in.
On thing I would add on "public private partnerships".. The reason the philanthropists love these so much is that for relatively small dollars, they can influence and guide enormous expenditures from the public purse.. much of which, surprise surprise.. finds its way back into their pockets (ahem - Gates' fortuitous investment in BioNTech is just one example). Gates' new testing company investments?
Absolutely key point. To take it even further ... How did these companies get so much power so fast? The US used to have monopoly laws that seemed to be enforced by the government. Bell was broken up, IBM , and Microsoft. All for much less of a power monopoly than the current Tech Oligarchy has now!?
... and they all parade around under the guise of a "Foundation". Badly needed regulation here , but the establishment never takes this cause up because they are on the payroll as well.
The foundations are non profits and charitable blah blah.
Nonetheless they exercise enormous power. I would rather tax all organizations equally and have lower overall taxes, because trying to legislate what "charity" means is a losing battle and these things have been used as multigenerational tax dodges forever.
As for anti-trust, that has never really worked well in practice. The typical rule is things get broken up after it's too late, because it's nearly impossible to apply anti-trust to organizations with massive political power - e.g. a monopolistic organization at its height. Even then it's not likely to succeed. Microsoft - what was the outcome there? The ability to delete Internet explorer from your computer.. after years of litigation.
As for Facebook Google Twitter Microsoft Apple etc... the bureaucracy ("deep state") seems to prefer to leave them intact so they can be used as an authoritarian tool. Why would you break up google when they will happily let you snoop into anyone's gmail account, help you out with back doors, censor people you find inconvenient, and support every government diktat with the full power of Internet hegemony?
A fascist system is in the business of authorizing and supporting monopolies, not breaking them up.. so we will not see FAANGs or MSM broken up until things really change. I'm hoping to just replace them all with grass roots "new tech" - odysee, bitchute, substack, gab, .win, etc.
However much libertarians and anarchists wish for small government, regulation of markets is a necessary centralised function. Clear rules and strict enforcement is necessary but we have neither, plus revolving doors and conflicts of interest within.
So many branches of bureaucracy rotten to the core. Oh to tear it all down and rebuild from scratch...
Let us all go back into the yard and grow some vegetables. First we will have something else to concentrate on. We will be outside and get some vitamine D. We will not be on a grass mower with dirty diesel fumes. If things go well we will have some fresh food on the table. And we will forget the conspiracy theories. I was starting to believe it too, but thanks to your articles from the last days, it just looks like a train rolling off a hill without brakes. It will eventually crash in the valley.
This is great advice for us bystanders - just live your life and hope the world returns to sanity. But the problem is not only the bureaucracy Eugyppius described, it's also the large numbers of other people who seem to have just accepted the "new normal" because they've been convinced that this is somehow unprecedented and intractable. You know.. "because science".
There's a huge population of adjacent people who buy into the idea that we are forever in this "new normal", and are looking to have everyone accept that and solve "problems" in that context.. people who write apps for vaccine passports; people who design technological solutions to contact tracing; people who design new kinds of face mask or restaurant table pods with special ventilators; etc.
I'm hoping this is only my view because I live in a place with a particularly high density of idiots.
I'm also hoping they come to their senses eventually, although the fact that mass vaccination may have effectively created the problem they feared... is a problem.
Yes the cheery compliance and disaproving rolling of eyes at us "conspiracy theorists" in the face of voluminous batshit crazy, nonsensical Kafkaesque diktats is one of the scariest aspects of this whole thing.
Just like the good old times... Jews in WW2. Only now can we realize what it is to be in a suppressed minority. For me the only difference is the people I talk to. Some are just beyond reach.
I work non clinically in the NHS and seriously, you have to go through so many hoops to get anything done it sometimes feels like the bureaucracy was actually designed to stop you making any progress. I have more knowledge and experience of the work I’m in than most of the people higher up the chain than me but its hard to get past the ‘we’ve always done it this way’ mantra. The machine feeds itself is a phrase I often use
That is why as a former European, I stumble over so many unexpected tape here. A doctor nor a vet is used to questions asked, or having meds refused, or treatments questioned. My luck I found both a doctor and a vet who understand.
Your experience would appear to contradict the feasibility of the author's thesis. None of the conspirations would come to fruition in such a constipated institution. Surely dictat is the only way to implement change in the NHS for example.
Anecdote: My niece was a nurse in autumn 2020 before her maternity leave, One of her colleagues had a patient she was sure had 'flu. They apparently can and did test for flu' every year for thousands of patients. Her superiors denied the test (it seems the decision was from a very senior level). Only covid mattered. That is no accident.
My view is only possible in places like the one where I live, in very rural places. In cities, I don't think it is possible. I am also retired, which solves another problem. Unfortunately we can not buy bottled common sense. If so we could spread it and the problem would be solved. In the meanwhile I wish you luck !
People in cities are too divorced from the underlying reality of their lives. I think that is why rural populations tend to have more common sense, being closer to where the rubber meets the road. But even that is not universally true. I would like to retire to the country, and it is fiscally attainable, but I have not yet gotten buy-in from the family.
Also accountability and the other community members. Los Angeles is so insane because 90% of the population is transplanted from elsewhere and there is zero sense of community where everyone is a stranger.
Yes, community doesn't scale well to large, multicultural cities. People are too anonymous and don't build trust with their neighbors well. Plus in LA people rarely leave their cars - locality is irrelevant.
Indeed ! We see it coming though, and hopefully no one pushes us under it. There is a risk of dying when you are alive. That risk is there for all, although most people never think about it!
This piece is the best explanation of bureaucratic madness I have yet seen. Keep at it, keep thinking, keep refining. Perhaps you are on to something important. The solution must start with understanding the problem.
Excellent piece. The nameless faceless functionaries implementing the various plans are like the triangles, squares and circles in the squid game. We are the players, herded from game to game by the elites in power.
Hugely insightful piece — I loved reading it!! Hmm... wondering why you picked the name “Eugyppius” —Is that the same as “Eugippius,” who lived circa 500 AD? I was only dismayed by your last sentence: it’s too defeatist for my tastes. One thing we need to do is to stop funding these bureaucracies. We need to vastly shrink the size and scope of the federal government, for one. Pull out of these global institutions. Another point is the petty tyranny being wielded: once people like that get power, they are reluctant to give it up (I’ve seen this phenomenon in family relationships, as well). I am now more freedom-loving than I ever was before. Many of us are getting back to basics, so my optimistic nature compels me to look at this vast overreach as a giant wake-up call. As I tell my small Rumble audience (channel name: DeborahRCastleman), we are in a war — and in the midst of a war, no one knows how it will all end, but we have to fight nonetheless.
I think a piece about how to talk to people in the age of insanity would be incredible. People entered into this mass hysteria at the same time and are sobering up one by one, we all just need tips on how to speed the healing of the people around us.
I use the Socratic method. I don't preach and tell people they're idiots for not knowing what the MSM won't tell them. When politics come up, I ask questions, a al, "Sounds good. How will we pay for that?" or "Is it really free, or is the cost being shifted to people like us?" "Are electric cars really clean energy? Doesn't most of our electricity come from burning fossil fuels?" Etc.
I had a productive exchange with a young lady who was dismayed that the COVID eviction moratorium was expiring. How unfair that evil landlords could now evict people who haven' paid rent in a year! It was completely outside her frame of reference that a lot of landlords were the mom and pop variety, who had mortgages they had to pay whether or not their tenants were up to date. It took about 15 minutes of Q and A to get the light bulb to go on in her head, but it was very satisfying when it did.
My God. As I read this, my brain resonates with the words in this essay completely. You have nailed it. I have to read it again. On a normal day, these type of theories seep into my head and I wonder - am I crazy? or is this happening? As a US Computer Scientist and an avid sci fi reader, I recognize daily snippets of what was once our "future" theorized societies ie. 1984 (DAILY), Anthem, Atlas Shrugged, Foundation, The Time Machine, Hunger Games ... . We definitely seem to be moving out of the "all men are created equal" phase towards some Oligarchy/globalized classed society that we have no idea what is really happening. We're not in sci fi land anymore and the Constitution doesn't cover all of this. Most people I know feel this way. As an American, it's both terrifying and sad to see our freedom and way of life shredded and being taken over like a soft coup that many are not realizing. We've got alot of Eloi here.
There's nothing soft about this coup.... The pile of bodies this will create will dwarf all prior wars. And the hypnotized stupid Eloi will gladly die and sacrifice their children to the nameless evil. They will also come for us.
Seems like these minor conspirations develop out of the bureaucratic urge to "improve" things by changing them. Even at lower levels, bureaucrats are constantly trying to come up with a reason to change something (usually justified entirely by a priori reasoning) ostensibly to improve it in some way. So long as it sounds good to someone higher up, its a win regardless of whether it actually does anything at all.
I can imagine higher level "improvers" gather groupies in their organizations who benefit professionally by being zealous defenders of the team, whether they understand the problem or the proposed solution at all.
For an example just look at pretty much the entire field of education research. Most studies are garbage and non-replicable, but things like mandatory learning objectives on syllabi are vigorously enforced despite there being exactly zero evidence students benefit from, or even read, them in practice.
So maybe what conspiracy theorists see as grand plans are just scaled-up bureaucratic retardation.
The stupid bullshit that's come out of the American education system is a useful counterexample for anyone who thinks that anything as far reaching and awful must have masterminds behind it pulling the strings.
Look at whole language: it became the dominant method of teaching reading in the US, and stayed that way for years, despite its obvious silliness. When I was a child, the overwhelming majority of schools in my area not only used whole language, they taught children to read and write using cursive. Print script was only introduced years later to those students. Why? Well, the theory sounded good to some school admin, and everyone else went along with it.
Or consider zero tolerance policies, which automatically suspended or expelled any student caught with drugs (even OTC ones) or weapons (even toys), or caught fighting (even if they were purely defending themselves). Despite being obviously unjust and stupid, even on a cursory reading, these policies were adopted all across the country. No conspiracy, just a bunch of administrators copying each other in an effort to Do Something.
“ Despite being obviously unjust and stupid, even on a cursory reading, these policies were adopted all across the country. No conspiracy, just a bunch of administrators copying each other in an effort to Do Something.”
Or to avoid having to do something. It’s a lot easier to blanketly enforce a policy than to deal with each situation individually. You don’t have to think.
We don't know how tobstopnit -- nefarious conspiracies are fundamental to human nature -- but we know how to control it. The best solution is to reduce the influence, and the budgets, of the elites. Small governments with well defined scope don't engage in such shenanigans because they're more transparent and understandable. It's only when bureaucracies overwhelm the public's capacity to understand them that the nefarious conspiracies, and the inevitable theories about them, arise. The true counterweight to bureaucracies that become too big to manage is the proliferation of information that makes conspiracies increasingly difficult to hide. But even that fails when the public becomes too dumb or dependent to react to revelations of misbehavior. A major indication of the social pathology of ignorant populations was the whistle-blowers about US intelligence operations violating American and international law which produced no demands to get them under control. Now the clear fraud of the medical industry has terrified parents clamoring to vaccinate their infants. We are our own tyrants. Global Stockholm syndrome.
We used to make things. Now we make believe. And we can't tell the difference.
Things like the pandemic response are the reason aliens lock their spaceship doors when they pass by earth
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Hahaha again 🤣
I think these “ hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats” are officious petty tyrants, mid-level tools who relish in whatever level of control or power they can get their hands on. I have see them in corporations, condominium co-ops, and food co-ops. Middle management is a useless (at best) class of society; they create nothing, take much, and have all the power. I lost my job recently not because of company policy on masking, but because of the lone HR toad who pressed to have it enforced (while they completely ignore the smoking ban!).
And the ones that aren't tyrants are often idiotic cowards, imposing the dumbest rules imaginable in response to pressure. Boss/constituents are clamoring for Something To Be Done about a perceived problem? Quick, this stupid plan is Something, so we need to do it!
Remember Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
I hadn’t heard of Pournelle, but that’s pretty spot-on. Thanks Eric!
We've really gotten to see exactly who is who, that's for sure. Ironic that we have masking mandates just when the metaphorical masks have been removed to reveal just who has been behind them all of this time.
Love this. Thank you!
"We don't need no vaccination. We don't need no thought control." In on auto-replay in my head!
"Fauci - leave those kids alone!"
Nobody knows how to stop it
I agree. It seems unstoppable. But relentless defiance and noncompliance, that is a start. One on one, open discussions with other people, that is another step. I have had two such discussions in the last two days. It doesn't take much, simply to seed the idea of "why am I doing this?"
History is littered with the corpses of supposedly unstoppable forces.
Noone can stop it.
It will collapse. As it always has and will.
The problem for us is time.
The collapse is long overdue, likely delayed by the complete control over media/tech/gov - info. I have a neighbor who still thinks that the pandemic will only end when everyone is vaccinated. I explained to him that countries with near 100% vaccination have seen the opposite effect in exploding case numbers. He just replied "yeah, there was always going to be resistance to the vaccine mandates", as if resistance to vaccination is the obstacle. It's almost like he's sublet his brain aka zombie. Maybe the zombies will have to booster themselves into oblivion before we can return to normalcy.
This is so true. The problem is time, and more inportantly the damage done in the meantime, before it stops.
Conspiracies always demand corpses. Only question is how many.
They sold Covid to us as the Black Death. The only thing they didn't have was the mountains of corpses.
But they soon will.
So does Utopia
Been really enjoying reading these articles recently. Very informative and I very much like the style of writing. I'm very grateful. Thank You
This is most definitely your finest post yet. Hugely inspiring and so on point. I do wonder if the elite will destroy themselves, after all they are where they are because of their egos, they will fight amongst each other. So when you say “nobody knows how to stop it”, maybe we just need to sit back and watch them stop it for us.
While I hope this is true, I'm not optimistic.
Due to the Eugy-aforementioned priming by elites and the overwhelming complexity of the system as a whole: I expect some elites may eat themselves within the currently unfolding debacle, but many more will capitalize on their demise. Or rather, one group of elites will succumb to their self-made machinations while another will rise explicitly because of it, going forward in this way in perpetuity.
Meanwhile, we the plebs/proletariat, will be only as able to stop/change it in the future as we are now. We need better tools and (actual) representative democracies to have a chance at preventing further nonsense or ending the current abomination.
At the start of this debacle I was angry, but found that only led to despair. Now I have to be hopeful, because as Sridhar Popovic (https://canvasopedia.org/) says, “anger without hope is a destructive force”. But yes this will not be an easy journey, I wish less people would comply, it is that more than anything that has shocked and disappointed me. Nick, you have a very valid point that some of the self appointed elite will attempt to capitalise on any demise of one of their cohort. I just can’t help thinking that this time the overreach is so extreme it will collapse under its own weight. Then from that we need exactly what you state in your last paragraph, better tools and better representation, not least to stop this type of takeover ever happening again.
I do very much hope you're right and I appreciate your well thought out response. All the best.
Autocorrect is a pain, it is Srdja Popovic.
"We now have a class of globalising, extra-national super-elites, who identify primarily with each other, and who have lost contact with their native populations."
Worth the entire article for this sentence alone.
There's a theory that because of the wavelength principle (and I'm sure I'll get this wrong), a particle can spontaneously pop into existence. Usually the laws of physics in that place make it unviable and it pops straight back out of existence. Occasionally everything is right, there's a big bang and a new universe is formed.
Maybe that's how it is with conspiracies. Sometimes several agendas coincide to get them moving as though coordinated, when they are not heavily coordinated.
In the case of Covid, CCP desire to save face by spreading its crazy policies ran into the global media's passion for a beat up, US elite desire to get rid of Trump by destroying the economy, and WEF/bureaucratic goals of seizing power to perfect the world. Plus all the low-level Karens who love this stuff and make it happen right down to the level of 7-11s and suburban parks.
A good way to frame it in our minds is to recall that this is not the first time interests have aligned like this. WWI was another example, although that one involved our old aristocratic elites.
It so damaged their reputation that it did them in.
As Rahm Emmanuel said - “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. It’s definitely a play in the book.
On thing I would add on "public private partnerships".. The reason the philanthropists love these so much is that for relatively small dollars, they can influence and guide enormous expenditures from the public purse.. much of which, surprise surprise.. finds its way back into their pockets (ahem - Gates' fortuitous investment in BioNTech is just one example). Gates' new testing company investments?
Absolutely key point. To take it even further ... How did these companies get so much power so fast? The US used to have monopoly laws that seemed to be enforced by the government. Bell was broken up, IBM , and Microsoft. All for much less of a power monopoly than the current Tech Oligarchy has now!?
... and they all parade around under the guise of a "Foundation". Badly needed regulation here , but the establishment never takes this cause up because they are on the payroll as well.
The foundations are non profits and charitable blah blah.
Nonetheless they exercise enormous power. I would rather tax all organizations equally and have lower overall taxes, because trying to legislate what "charity" means is a losing battle and these things have been used as multigenerational tax dodges forever.
As for anti-trust, that has never really worked well in practice. The typical rule is things get broken up after it's too late, because it's nearly impossible to apply anti-trust to organizations with massive political power - e.g. a monopolistic organization at its height. Even then it's not likely to succeed. Microsoft - what was the outcome there? The ability to delete Internet explorer from your computer.. after years of litigation.
As for Facebook Google Twitter Microsoft Apple etc... the bureaucracy ("deep state") seems to prefer to leave them intact so they can be used as an authoritarian tool. Why would you break up google when they will happily let you snoop into anyone's gmail account, help you out with back doors, censor people you find inconvenient, and support every government diktat with the full power of Internet hegemony?
A fascist system is in the business of authorizing and supporting monopolies, not breaking them up.. so we will not see FAANGs or MSM broken up until things really change. I'm hoping to just replace them all with grass roots "new tech" - odysee, bitchute, substack, gab, .win, etc.
Make them all irrelevant!
However much libertarians and anarchists wish for small government, regulation of markets is a necessary centralised function. Clear rules and strict enforcement is necessary but we have neither, plus revolving doors and conflicts of interest within.
So many branches of bureaucracy rotten to the core. Oh to tear it all down and rebuild from scratch...
Let us all go back into the yard and grow some vegetables. First we will have something else to concentrate on. We will be outside and get some vitamine D. We will not be on a grass mower with dirty diesel fumes. If things go well we will have some fresh food on the table. And we will forget the conspiracy theories. I was starting to believe it too, but thanks to your articles from the last days, it just looks like a train rolling off a hill without brakes. It will eventually crash in the valley.
This is great advice for us bystanders - just live your life and hope the world returns to sanity. But the problem is not only the bureaucracy Eugyppius described, it's also the large numbers of other people who seem to have just accepted the "new normal" because they've been convinced that this is somehow unprecedented and intractable. You know.. "because science".
There's a huge population of adjacent people who buy into the idea that we are forever in this "new normal", and are looking to have everyone accept that and solve "problems" in that context.. people who write apps for vaccine passports; people who design technological solutions to contact tracing; people who design new kinds of face mask or restaurant table pods with special ventilators; etc.
I'm hoping this is only my view because I live in a place with a particularly high density of idiots.
I'm also hoping they come to their senses eventually, although the fact that mass vaccination may have effectively created the problem they feared... is a problem.
Yes the cheery compliance and disaproving rolling of eyes at us "conspiracy theorists" in the face of voluminous batshit crazy, nonsensical Kafkaesque diktats is one of the scariest aspects of this whole thing.
We loooove to just to our part! (Pssst.. you'll find the anti-vaxers hiding up in the attic!)
Just like the good old times... Jews in WW2. Only now can we realize what it is to be in a suppressed minority. For me the only difference is the people I talk to. Some are just beyond reach.
Yeah, it is quite a crash course in oppression, fascism, and demoralization. But the free donuts are great!
I work non clinically in the NHS and seriously, you have to go through so many hoops to get anything done it sometimes feels like the bureaucracy was actually designed to stop you making any progress. I have more knowledge and experience of the work I’m in than most of the people higher up the chain than me but its hard to get past the ‘we’ve always done it this way’ mantra. The machine feeds itself is a phrase I often use
That is why as a former European, I stumble over so many unexpected tape here. A doctor nor a vet is used to questions asked, or having meds refused, or treatments questioned. My luck I found both a doctor and a vet who understand.
Your experience would appear to contradict the feasibility of the author's thesis. None of the conspirations would come to fruition in such a constipated institution. Surely dictat is the only way to implement change in the NHS for example.
Anecdote: My niece was a nurse in autumn 2020 before her maternity leave, One of her colleagues had a patient she was sure had 'flu. They apparently can and did test for flu' every year for thousands of patients. Her superiors denied the test (it seems the decision was from a very senior level). Only covid mattered. That is no accident.
My view is only possible in places like the one where I live, in very rural places. In cities, I don't think it is possible. I am also retired, which solves another problem. Unfortunately we can not buy bottled common sense. If so we could spread it and the problem would be solved. In the meanwhile I wish you luck !
People in cities are too divorced from the underlying reality of their lives. I think that is why rural populations tend to have more common sense, being closer to where the rubber meets the road. But even that is not universally true. I would like to retire to the country, and it is fiscally attainable, but I have not yet gotten buy-in from the family.
Also accountability and the other community members. Los Angeles is so insane because 90% of the population is transplanted from elsewhere and there is zero sense of community where everyone is a stranger.
Yes, community doesn't scale well to large, multicultural cities. People are too anonymous and don't build trust with their neighbors well. Plus in LA people rarely leave their cars - locality is irrelevant.
Amen. I think it's not only people that just "buy in" though. I think people are fearful of getting canceled and just keep quiet.
"I live in a place with a particularly high density of idiots."
Loved that : it's very hard these days to find places that aren't!
We just don’t want it to crash on us!
Indeed ! We see it coming though, and hopefully no one pushes us under it. There is a risk of dying when you are alive. That risk is there for all, although most people never think about it!
Unfortunately, the valley is populated by the human race, and the train is pulling tanker cars full of flammable liquids and a variety of poisons.
This piece is the best explanation of bureaucratic madness I have yet seen. Keep at it, keep thinking, keep refining. Perhaps you are on to something important. The solution must start with understanding the problem.
Excellent piece. The nameless faceless functionaries implementing the various plans are like the triangles, squares and circles in the squid game. We are the players, herded from game to game by the elites in power.
Hugely insightful piece — I loved reading it!! Hmm... wondering why you picked the name “Eugyppius” —Is that the same as “Eugippius,” who lived circa 500 AD? I was only dismayed by your last sentence: it’s too defeatist for my tastes. One thing we need to do is to stop funding these bureaucracies. We need to vastly shrink the size and scope of the federal government, for one. Pull out of these global institutions. Another point is the petty tyranny being wielded: once people like that get power, they are reluctant to give it up (I’ve seen this phenomenon in family relationships, as well). I am now more freedom-loving than I ever was before. Many of us are getting back to basics, so my optimistic nature compels me to look at this vast overreach as a giant wake-up call. As I tell my small Rumble audience (channel name: DeborahRCastleman), we are in a war — and in the midst of a war, no one knows how it will all end, but we have to fight nonetheless.
don’t mean to be defeatist - i simply think nobody knows. but maybe i’ll write about what kind of things i think might stop or reverse this
I think a piece about how to talk to people in the age of insanity would be incredible. People entered into this mass hysteria at the same time and are sobering up one by one, we all just need tips on how to speed the healing of the people around us.
thanks, I have even thought about a piece like this - I am now encouraged to actually write it.
I use the Socratic method. I don't preach and tell people they're idiots for not knowing what the MSM won't tell them. When politics come up, I ask questions, a al, "Sounds good. How will we pay for that?" or "Is it really free, or is the cost being shifted to people like us?" "Are electric cars really clean energy? Doesn't most of our electricity come from burning fossil fuels?" Etc.
As a teaching method NOTHING beats asking the right questions! 😉
I had a productive exchange with a young lady who was dismayed that the COVID eviction moratorium was expiring. How unfair that evil landlords could now evict people who haven' paid rent in a year! It was completely outside her frame of reference that a lot of landlords were the mom and pop variety, who had mortgages they had to pay whether or not their tenants were up to date. It took about 15 minutes of Q and A to get the light bulb to go on in her head, but it was very satisfying when it did.
My God. As I read this, my brain resonates with the words in this essay completely. You have nailed it. I have to read it again. On a normal day, these type of theories seep into my head and I wonder - am I crazy? or is this happening? As a US Computer Scientist and an avid sci fi reader, I recognize daily snippets of what was once our "future" theorized societies ie. 1984 (DAILY), Anthem, Atlas Shrugged, Foundation, The Time Machine, Hunger Games ... . We definitely seem to be moving out of the "all men are created equal" phase towards some Oligarchy/globalized classed society that we have no idea what is really happening. We're not in sci fi land anymore and the Constitution doesn't cover all of this. Most people I know feel this way. As an American, it's both terrifying and sad to see our freedom and way of life shredded and being taken over like a soft coup that many are not realizing. We've got alot of Eloi here.
There's nothing soft about this coup.... The pile of bodies this will create will dwarf all prior wars. And the hypnotized stupid Eloi will gladly die and sacrifice their children to the nameless evil. They will also come for us.
Seems like these minor conspirations develop out of the bureaucratic urge to "improve" things by changing them. Even at lower levels, bureaucrats are constantly trying to come up with a reason to change something (usually justified entirely by a priori reasoning) ostensibly to improve it in some way. So long as it sounds good to someone higher up, its a win regardless of whether it actually does anything at all.
I can imagine higher level "improvers" gather groupies in their organizations who benefit professionally by being zealous defenders of the team, whether they understand the problem or the proposed solution at all.
For an example just look at pretty much the entire field of education research. Most studies are garbage and non-replicable, but things like mandatory learning objectives on syllabi are vigorously enforced despite there being exactly zero evidence students benefit from, or even read, them in practice.
So maybe what conspiracy theorists see as grand plans are just scaled-up bureaucratic retardation.
The stupid bullshit that's come out of the American education system is a useful counterexample for anyone who thinks that anything as far reaching and awful must have masterminds behind it pulling the strings.
Look at whole language: it became the dominant method of teaching reading in the US, and stayed that way for years, despite its obvious silliness. When I was a child, the overwhelming majority of schools in my area not only used whole language, they taught children to read and write using cursive. Print script was only introduced years later to those students. Why? Well, the theory sounded good to some school admin, and everyone else went along with it.
Or consider zero tolerance policies, which automatically suspended or expelled any student caught with drugs (even OTC ones) or weapons (even toys), or caught fighting (even if they were purely defending themselves). Despite being obviously unjust and stupid, even on a cursory reading, these policies were adopted all across the country. No conspiracy, just a bunch of administrators copying each other in an effort to Do Something.
“ Despite being obviously unjust and stupid, even on a cursory reading, these policies were adopted all across the country. No conspiracy, just a bunch of administrators copying each other in an effort to Do Something.”
Or to avoid having to do something. It’s a lot easier to blanketly enforce a policy than to deal with each situation individually. You don’t have to think.
We don't know how tobstopnit -- nefarious conspiracies are fundamental to human nature -- but we know how to control it. The best solution is to reduce the influence, and the budgets, of the elites. Small governments with well defined scope don't engage in such shenanigans because they're more transparent and understandable. It's only when bureaucracies overwhelm the public's capacity to understand them that the nefarious conspiracies, and the inevitable theories about them, arise. The true counterweight to bureaucracies that become too big to manage is the proliferation of information that makes conspiracies increasingly difficult to hide. But even that fails when the public becomes too dumb or dependent to react to revelations of misbehavior. A major indication of the social pathology of ignorant populations was the whistle-blowers about US intelligence operations violating American and international law which produced no demands to get them under control. Now the clear fraud of the medical industry has terrified parents clamoring to vaccinate their infants. We are our own tyrants. Global Stockholm syndrome.
"to stop it" not tobstopnit. Virtual keyboarditis.
"Never let a good [virus] go to waste." -- Rahm Emanuel
"Convergent opportunism." -- Michael Yeadon
"The illegal we do it immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer." -- Henry Kissinger