Happy Serfdom

Have you ever had one of those periods where thoughts you thought were immobile began to shift?  Two recent info sources have done this for me - David Wengrow's (unfortunately titled) The Dawn of Everything and Jordan Peterson's climate change interviews with some of the top fluid (climate) physicists Koonin and Lindzen.

Wengrow's insight is that "tribal" societies, or at least those which aren't classically Western or axial age changers, have very complicated structures which minimize the reach of structural authoritarianism.  This is especially true with respect to political structures and their tension to foundational societal morals.  From this tensions moral meta-narratives emerge, presumably, out of biological tendencies for inter-group differentiation.  "We are the people who don't keep slaves,"  "we are the people that potlach", etc.

Peterson has taken on climate hysteria, seeing it technically as a type of death cult religion which is energized by toxic caring ideas to "help out", and social justice needs to "make a difference", suppress 1% richness (at least of non social allies), and create socialist equity.  I've long considered voices that minimize human caused climate change as rather fringe and conspiratorial.  I figured the political choices and implications of tackling human climate change were where the real questions lay.  But now that WEF climate change lock-in's have become fully manifest following Covid lockdown norm-breaking, I'm having second thoughts...

What seems to be happening is that leaders' tendency for power enhancement as manifest by kingdom expansion has combined with the emergence of a new religion whose scale is at the magnitude of the axial age transition.  Societies haven't yet figured out how to stabilize "toxic caring" and so the energy created by growing income inequality has stumbled into mass hysteria solutions.  I mean, just look how irrational Orange Man Bad thinking is...  That intelligent people actually believe populist democracy has to be curtailed to protect democracy itself is lunacy.  What's happened is that meta-narratives about things like Orange Man, climate change, social justice, have polarized.  We're seeing major destabilization in the hitherto dynamic tension between individual freedom and state power.  That's where Wengrow's book comes in.  Peterson's points enable us to see authoritarian collectivism as the breaking of old social contracts through cult like reasoning.  No nuance or counter facts are allowed.  Hysteria is required "for the greater good".

It's all classic societal splitting.  The magnitude of things is at least as big as the Protestant Catholic split during the 1600's and the emergence of printing as a way of gelling new magnitudes of people to common ends.

HAPPY SERFDOM

In this dynamic, political leaders have stumbled into "happy serf" solutions.  This seems like a conspiracy theory, and the reasoning most people use to get there definitely fits that mold. But I suspect the technocrats who've gotten together for years to address climate change have figured out that a simple carbon trading scheme enables a perfect storm of change.

• Total carbon levels drop
• The 1st world gives up progress rates and riches by transferring 20th century styled energy-based wealth creation to the 3rd and 2nd world.  World social equity is furthered.
• The rich in the 1st world get fabulously wealthy as they are solely positioned to leverage financial gain in this change (see Sundance from TheConservativeTreeHouse for insight)
• World leaders get to feel like they're doing good, and get to manifest their biological desires for kingdom expansion (bring in the immigrants, and "expand Canadian values to everyone"
• Leaders get to better manage their populations for "sustainable growth" and "right- values".  This is done ini the name of climate salvation, world peace, and social/woke progress.

The meta-ethos is that only a managed population enables sustainability.

The reactionary ethos is that freedom enables novel solutions which then transcend current realities.

No wonder climate change has become the de facto religious issue at the global level. One side says it is real, but insignificant compared to larger trends and issues (like billions of starved poor, future tech change, etc.).  The other side sees commitment to it as a clearly factual test to common pool problems.

CONCLUSION

In this space, technocrats have had to endogenize (incorporate) revolution into change dynamics.  That's why there's so much resonance around "happy serfdom". It's the only solution.  This is what Wengrow describes in relation to traditional societies. Some level of slavery or mass control is inevitable in societies.  How overt this is is largely random.  I suspect how far it goes just depends upon how quickly and successful competing "freedom" narratives and moral solutions solidify.

It's an arms race.  Right now, the freedom movement isn't looking like it's up to par with new global organizations, mass media monocultural controls, and the new woke religious movement.  Serfdom seems inevitable.  Will happy serfdom devolve into 1984's end model (which is fabulously sustainable in theory)? I suspect it will take a few generations for counter movements to get enough traction to overthrow the new authoritarianism.  It was a good 200 years from the 1600's War of Religions until the Democratic revolutions of the 1800's.