Tea at Trianon: The Rise of the Biosecurity Complex

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, March 4, 2023

The Rise of the Biosecurity Complex

From Compact:

In his 2022 book, States of Emergency, the Dutch political scientist Kees van der Pijl traces the roots of this crisis-led, fear-based regime to the end of the Cold War. The disappearance of the Soviet bloc and communism—the adversary that had given unity and purpose to the West for more than 30 years—exposed a moral and ideological void that threw the Atlantic ruling class into an existential crisis, despite the triumphant proclamation of the end of history. Having abandoned the rational class compromise of the postwar “Keynesian” era in favor of an aggressive class war from above, and having no legitimating symbolic reservoir, or “secular theology,” to draw from beyond nihilistic consumerism and individualism, the question for Western elites arose as to how to get the majority to accept being ruled by an increasingly small minority.
The answer they came up with was fear. As the threat of a conventional or nuclear war between superpowers subsided—since now there was only one superpower left—Western strategists increasingly began to turn their attention to other, less conventional threats, ranging from terrorism to large-scale natural disasters. A new paradigm emerged, what we may call “full-spectrum preparedness,” which involved preparing for all sorts of high-impact, low-probability worst-case scenarios. As the French health historian Patrick Zylberman noted in his 2013 book, Tempêtes microbiennes (Microbial Storms), many of these scenarios brought the logic to such an extreme that they effectively went beyond the measurement of probability, veering off into the realm of fiction. What Zylberman calls a “world market of fantasy” was created, also thanks to the emergence, in the same period, of 24-hour news channels and the internet as unlimited information hubs.
While there were certainly various factors driving this trend, such as the expanding power of computing and the growing importance of mathematical modeling, in hindsight there is little doubt that in the eyes of Western planners the point of such worst-case scenarios wasn’t so much to prepare against a threat as to raise the specter of a threat—to create a situation in which citizens, gripped by fear, would submit to in the belief that there is no way of escaping the looming disaster it is told hangs over their head other than by obeying government instructions.
As Adam Curtis put it in his 2004 documentary, The Power of Nightmare: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promised to protect us from (often fictional) nightmares. Worse even, to the extent that worst-case scenarios increasingly came to be seen as plausible reasons for making people give up their freedoms, they created perverse incentives for elites to transform such fantasies—or nightmares—into reality. If the future could be imagined, why couldn’t it be scripted? (Read more.)