Essays in Idleness

In the future, unless you are a member of the ruling class, you will surrender your home and move into an apartment; you will give up your car and take buses and trains; you will stop eating meat and begin eating insects (and highly-processed vegetable matter for a treat). You will submit to rationing for water and energy. And you will be happy.

For only if you can present yourself as delighted with the imposition of green fascism, will your bank account not be cancelled, and all the government’s “gifts” taken back. As in the heroic age of communism, you will have only one human right. That is the right to be annihilated when you step out of line.

Of course, you might instead be a member of the “progressive element,” in the ruling party, in which case you laugh at all these restrictions, and mock the people whose survival depends on abject obedience.

This is the future, for which progressives everywhere are striving, unknowingly, but also, knowingly. The prospective arrangement has enjoyed a “great leap forward” during the Batflu lockdowns, and is hyper-accelerated by inflation.

In the United States, the federal government has passed (under the current administration) three-point-eight trillion dollars of climate and woke subsidies, towards achieving this end. This is justified by an envelope of lies, pretending that the purpose of the spending is to “fight inflation,” when it is caused by the very same reckless expenditure. The American media support this effort with their own torrent of fiendish (and farcical) fabrications; in Canada, the media situation is worse.

In both countries, and throughout the world, governments and large corporations are simply “following the science.” This is their guiding satanic untruth.

Not George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, gives the best account of how we descend into Hell by this method; and the latter also, how we rise out, through an effort that is not our own. As Orwell complained, Lewis’s scientifictional story allowed supernatural agency, in defiance of readers’ bourgeois sensibilities. We might call it an attack on science. By contrast, Orwell provided a counsel of despair.