Welcome to the New World Disorder. It is a great joy to see the managed decline of democracy being interrupted. The new administration in the USA doesn’t do sanctimonious bullshit. I remember at a press conference in his first term, Donald Trump was asked whether a certain group of people might be offended by the policy he was enacting. Trump replied, “I don’t care about offending people.” Beat. “I thought you knew that by now.”
We certainly do today.
The huge number of people who loathe Trump oppose everything he does, so they find themselves supporting ‘democracy’, liberty, the military industrial complex and slaughter and corruption in Ukraine. The idiocy of this position is evidence of the hypnotic phenomena I discuss elsewhere. People in trance are capable of holding two logically contradictory positions at once.
A similar trance is commonplace in the UK. As the country has suffered from enthusiastically destructive policies from Tony Blair (or, some might say, Tony Crosland) onwards, many people imagine that somehow or other Britain will muddle through. Maybe that’s what the Aztecs thought when the Spanish arrived.
The UK’s social, public health and economic problems are persistent: unemployment, obesity, depression, SSRI consumption, petty crime, violent crime, transgenderism, social division, Islamic terrorism and “unexplained” excess deaths.
Everything run by the UK Government is at best a mess, at worst a catastrophe. It’s not (yet) as dramatic as the White House Fight Club, but it is a lot more dangerous, at least for British people. Defence, education, housing, health, fiscal policy, immigration, policing, legal aid, censorship, business regulation, prisons, town planning, local government and public sector productivity are all disaster zones. The private sector working population of the UK is overtaxed and the rest – the civil servants ‘working’ from home, the NHS bureaucrats, the university administrators, the DEI blob and the millions upon millions of benefits claimants – are overpaid. Still spreading like mRNA-assisted turbo-cancer throughout the land is the unscientific, unattainable absurdity of Net Zero.
Some issues appear to be heading in the right direction. A certain scepticism of medical authorities is increasing in the light of continuing excess cancers, heart conditions and deaths. It is good news that more people are beginning to pay attention to the data about vaccination, but that won’t cure those already disabled, injured or deceased. Similarly, there is growing resistance to trans-insanity, but it is too late to undo the damage done by years of hormones and barbaric surgery. How can a mother ever face the truth if she actively encouraged the mutilation of her child? How can we help people stuck in post-operative no-mans-land with their natal sex organs butchered and their fantasy gender as unattainable as ever?
Social disaffection is rampant, but the schisms are just getting started. Perhaps the key cohort of the coming catastrophe are the mainstream teenagers and 20-something-year-olds who are being urged on to the orthodox path to success, and yet have been completely betrayed. They are facing a lifetime of wage slavery with no reward. They have almost no chance to buy a house. Student debt is a profound disincentive to building any career short of the stupendously lucrative. Having children is horrendously expensive.
The rational action for these young people is to emigrate or simply refuse to work. Stop working, stop paying tax, stop paying for a pointless university education, and start claiming free money. And that is what they are doing. They have already started. People who do still work and prefer to be their own boss are managing their work and income carefully – it is not worth earning over 100k unless you earn very, very much more than 100k.
Excessive bureaucracy and unfunded public sector pensions are grotesquely costly and will become unaffordable. Eventually even those younger generations who do want to work will quite rightly refuse to pay for the comfortable retirement of the leeches whose greed and luxury beliefs have so devastated their country. But how, exactly will that refusal manifest? Can we look forward to re-education camps, and a cultural revolution? Or perhaps when they come to power they will just insist that all recipients of public sector pensions must be up to date with their Covid-19 vaccinations …?
In the UK there are far too many disastrous policies to mention, let alone discuss. However beneath all this madness lies a profound misunderstanding of reality. The majority of the ‘educated’ population are ideologically indoctrinated – or to put it another way, they are entranced by abstractions. They believe in chimera such as absolute human rights and anthropogenic global warming. They imagine that abstract analysis delivers a better understanding of reality than immediate perception, personal experience and thoughtful, informed discourse. They assume that the benefits of centralisation normally outweigh its costs. They believe that abstract, idealistic goals such as diversity, equity and inclusion are not only desirable but achievable.
None of the above is new news, but we rarely try to face it all at once. It is more comfortable to imagine that somehow everything will be alright. Sadly, for too many it will not. It is not sustainable, which highlights one of the many ironies of modernity. When a word becomes a buzzword, the more it is used, the more its opposite is true. Sustainability is unsustainable, equity leads to inequality, anti-racism begets racism, the more talk there is of leadership, the more appalling our leaders are and so on and on.
The content of these problems is new, and yet the pattern is ancient. In his Republic, Plato pointed out that the penalty for failing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. That comment, and reality today, stand as a rebuke to all of us. Democracy gets its mandate and its meaning from the aggregation of the will of many individuals. It is our differences, our independence of thought and action, which gave rise to democracy and which ultimately it protects.
We can’t all stand for Parliament, but we can help each other to be more engaged in thoughtful discussion. Ironically in this era of infinite data and global connection thoughtfulness is most unpopular. We live in a blizzard of messaging yet almost all of it falls into simplistically opposed categories: Go MAGA or Orange Man Bad, Global Boiling or Total Scam, Welcome everyone or Throw them all out. These opinions are simplistic, pre-fabricated ideas which we can take on board only if we are cut off from the complex, subtle, changeability of real life. Not one of us has the answer for us all, and mostly we need to understand better what we already know.
Our challenge today is to wake up ourselves and our hypnotised peers. That is often a very slow process. In personal conversations I ask myself, ‘what is the smallest genuine questioning I can induce?’ For those I have not met yet, my recent book, is amongst other things, a gentle possibility of awakening.
It is a very, very long way from the safety of orthodox opinion to the self-reliance of speaking honestly, acting courageously and remaining open to being corrected. Yet since the Covid debacle many brave people have made that journey and since 2020 the Free Speech Union has been protecting those whose statements differ legitimately from officially approved opinions.
There is trouble, destruction and violence ahead. Let us wake up as many people as we can so that some of us come out safely on the other side.
Hugh Willbourn is the author of “The Bug in our Thinking and the way to fix it”.
According to a recent review, “Willbourn’s book is exceptionally accessibly and clearly written—a marvel of non-professional-academic, or real, philosophy.” It is available by clicking here, and internationally as a paperback, ebook and audiobook at Amazon.
If you enjoy The New Conservative and would like to support our work, please consider buying us a coffee or sharing this piece with your friends – it would really help to keep us going. Thank you!
Very good. His book must be worth reading (even buying!).
‘Sustainability’ has been given the glossiest treatment to gull the people’s unquestioning adherence to everything wrapped up in the promoted UN2030 Sustainable Goals agenda. Of course, there is unrelenting propaganda to ensure the ‘gloss’ doesn’t wear off. However, perhaps the ‘gloss’ has been tarnished by the excess of the glossy treatment and propaganda. That in itself is unsustainable…..falling on deafer ears, and
a more cynical citizenry. The ‘covid pandemic’ and ‘the climate emergency’ unsustainable doctrines.
There are those (on here and in other places) who saw through Covid, vaxxes, net zero, fear of ‘carbon’, trans, LibLabConGreen, Islam, illegal immigration, Ukraine, Gaza etc. yet still showed their innate propensity to be conned by ‘last chance saloon, white man’s hope, new kid on the block’ thinking about Reform ignoring inconvenient facts about its inner ruling circle. Some may have finally learned, some may still cling to the wreckage, but too many are already investing their hopes in another ‘saviour’ who may say the right things and be thoroughly decent (frankly I don’t know, I’m open to enlightenment) but still is, and always will be, about as British as Sunak and Badenoch. When will we ever learn?