The whole world seems to be at a standstill, awaiting a coronavirus vaccine. Only when a vaccine is available, we are told, can we risk opening up the borders again and resuming normal life. But there are many good reasons to be skeptical about the impeding coronavirus vaccines. I won’t be taking one – and in this essay I explain why not.
The mainstream media has presented a misleading picture of how easy it is to produce a coronavirus vaccine. The story we’ve been sold is that we just have to wait a few months longer, then it will be ready and all will be good. Apparently, “COVID-19 vaccine development has been expedited via unprecedented collaboration in the multinational pharmaceutical industry and between governments.”
By September last year, a variety of different potential vaccines were supposedly in advanced stages of development. At some point – soon – doctors everywhere will be telling people that they have an effective and safe coronavirus vaccine, and they’ll be expecting people to believe them, as they expect people to believe everything else they say.
And I won’t be believing them and I won’t be taking a coronavirus vaccine.
Why?
Because they still don’t know that cannabis is medicinal. If they still don’t know that cannabis is medicinal, where there is mountains of evidence suggesting this, and has been for decades, then how can I trust them to inform me accurately about a coronavirus vaccine?
In 1996, doctors in California, being aware already then that cannabis was medicinal, organised to have it made legal. They arranged to have a referendum on the subject and made sure that the voters were correctly educated. Since then, recognising the science, 16 countries and 39 other American jurisdictions have legalised medicinal cannabis.
Despite these advances, doctors here in New Zealand have resolutely stayed ignorant. They know nothing about medicinal cannabis, not even the difference between CBD and THC. All cannabis use causes mental illness, they bleat, as if it were still 1970. The most recent quarter-century of scientific advancement can just fuck off.
So when doctors start telling me about a coronavirus vaccine, and how they’re sure it’s safe and effective, I’m just going to laugh. Their approach to medicinal cannabis has shown me that they’re more interested in political realities than scientific ones. Twelve years of asking New Zealand doctors about medicinal cannabis has been utterly fruitless.
If doctors want people to trust them about a vaccine that has been known for a few months, they have to start telling the truth about a medicine that has been known about for thousands of years. If they’re not capable of doing that, I’m going to stay well away from any vaccines they might offer me.
That Clown World is at the point where democracy tips over into tyranny is evident from the state of elections today. If there’s anything in today’s world that could be compared to a grotesque circus, it’s our general elections. The political world has always been like a circus, but in Clown World the circus is 24/7.
Problems with starting a democracy in places like Africa, it is said, don’t generally arise during the first election. It’s in one of the subsequent elections, when the winner of the initial election loses, that the problems start happening. It’s all well and good for one party to assume control after winning the first democratic election. What matters more, though, is what happens when they lose control and are asked to hand over power.
Characteristic of democratic elections in African scumholes is that they are contested. Almost inevitably, the loser accuses the winner of cheating, either by stuffing ballot boxes or by intimidating opposition voters into staying home. This is especially likely to be true if the loser won the previous election. It’s common for these disputes to end up in massacres or even civil wars.
Characteristic of democratic elections in the West is that the loser accepts the result. This is why it was so shocking for the 2000 American Presidential Election to drag on for as long as it did. But in Clown World, elections in the West have started to go down the African route.
The first real sign of it was the Russian interference conspiracy theory that was pushed by Democrat Party operatives in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. This conspiracy theory suggested that the election result might not have been legitimate because it was influenced by the actions of the Russian Government, who supposedly purchased enough FaceBook ads to switch the result from Clinton to Donald Trump.
At time of writing this chapter, the result of the 2020 American Presidential Election still isn’t clear. Seven weeks after the election, neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump has conceded (although the mainstream media has anointed Biden the winner). Trump has mounted a number of legal challenges relating to the vote, and rumours persist that he might try to enlist the military in a coup.
The tendency of Clown World politicians to dispute election results is made worse by the fact that the elections themselves have become detached from reality. The election process presents an image of a politician that 99.9% of voters will never meet. So it’s almost impossible to know if the results of a general election reflect the will of the country. This makes disputes much more plausible.
In Clown World, elections come down to a battle between competing narratives. Whichever narrative can assert itself the strongest wins, regardless of what any vote tally might say. Elections aren’t so much won as consent for one side’s victory is manufactured. This has made elections into permanent public relations exercises more than temporary leadership contests.
Buying media space is how positive public relations are maintained, and thereby how most elections are won. 90% of the time, the better-resourced candidate wins. This is because most voters in a democracy simply vote for the candidate with the most name recognition. If they saw Candidate A on the television and not Candidate B, that must mean that Candidate A is superior.
It’s even possible to calculate how much money you need to buy enough positive attention to win. A seat in the United States House of Representatives, for example, will cost around $1.6 million. However, it’s not always as simple as money – Michael Bloomberg spent $500 million to win the Democratic nomination for the 2020 Presidential election, and failed. Generally speaking, the lower the office the easier it can be bought.
No matter how hard it is to buy an office, though, people will always try. Because of all the mainstream media propaganda and disinformation this leads to, we still don’t know who has won the 2020 Presidential election. Faith in institutions is so low that there’s no-one we trust to tell us the definitive truth about who the President will be. FaceBook will censor anyone questioning Biden’s supposed victory, but as of right now it’s not clear that Trump intends to concede.
The great risk when elections become disputed is that it can lead to tyranny. The logic is that if the other side isn’t going to play fair, then why should we? Mistrust can escalate to the point where both sides reason that they had better get their retaliation in first. At that point, the country is essentially in a state of civil war.
Unfortunately, if the last two decades of American presidential elections are anything to go by, civil war is almost inevitable. It seems like the election results are becoming more and more heavily disputed by the loser. Trump is digging in his heels right now, and ill will is so widespread that if he called for a million Republican supporters to hit the streets with firearms he might get it.
For democratic elections to work, there has to be widespread confidence that the electoral process is legitimate. This means widespread confidence that there is no voter suppression, no foreign interference, no collusion with outside third parties and no influential disinformation campaigns. If one or more of these factors are present, the results are liable to get disputed.
It might well be that democratic elections themselves are inherently signs of Clown World. But the decay doesn’t stop at democratic elections. The predictable future is increased Weimarisation, up to the point where the system collapses or is overthrown. One possible pre-emptive solution is withdrawing the franchise from certain anti-social groups.
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This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in January 2021.
The West is proud of its egalitarian heritage. We derive a sense of moral superiority from being a culture in which even the lowest classes can, through hard work, determination and applied will, reach the highest positions. The example of Abraham Lincoln, born into poverty in a frontier log cabin, is archetypal. But class relations in Clown World are very different to those in the 19th century.
In Clown World, we’ve effectively gone back to feudal times.
It’s so hard to buy a house today that, if you aren’t born into money, you will need to be in the top segment of income earners to do it. In both America and Britain, the house price to income ratio is at highs not seen since the aftermath of World War II. In the case of Britain, things are so extreme that you’d have to go back to the Victorian Era to find a time when it was harder for the average person to own their home.
This has led to large proportions of entire generations becoming resigned to paying rent in perpetuity. Some have even labelled the lower classes Generation Rent. Class relations in Clown World are marked by the great distance between the landowning class and the renting class. Many landowners in Clown World make more profit from capital gains on property than they could working for a wage.
This state of class separation is maintained by a concerted effort on the part of the Establishment to destroy class consciousness, the only thing that could really threaten it. The mainstream media pushes any and all alternatives to class consciousness: race consciousness, gender consciousness, age cohort consciousness, any possible corporate brand consciousness. Anything but class consciousness.
These efforts keep class relations much less antagonistic than would otherwise be the case. There are no workers’ marches in Clown World, because the working class is divided along multiple lines of fracture. These lines of fracture prevent the solidarity that would be necessary for collective action.
These divisions are maintained by the control that the ruling class has over the apparatus of propaganda. This control allows them to set the agenda in every Western country, and this agenda is inevitably fighting racism, fighting sexism, fighting ageism – and never fighting classism.
Class relations in Clown World, then, are characterised by the relentless efforts of the ruling class to keep the lower classes divided and conquered. The masses are bedazzled by the 24/7 circus of flickering images coming through the television. They are demoralised by the relentless bombardment of bigotry accusations. They are disorientated by the contradictions coming from the government.
The net result of these efforts to keep poor people down is greater inequality, and less social mobility, than ever.
Inequality is now at historic levels. The American Gini Index sits at 41.4, meaning that America is even less equal than kleptocracies like Haiti, Iran and Turkmenistan. Even China and Russia – bywords in some circles for autocratic shitholes – have lower Gini Indexes than America.
It’s similar with homeownership. The homeownership rates in supposed poverty-stricken dumps like India and Mexico is higher than in supposed lands of opportunity like America, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Yet the Western mainstream media bleats incessantly about how wonderful everything is and how we’ve never had it so good.
In Clown World, wealth equals the ability to suck productivity out of other people by controlling their labour. The commodification of some people means fat profits for others. The poorer a population is, the more readily they can be extorted out of rents. The class system in Clown World, then, is much like a food chain: energy is passed upwards.
Inequality has reached such levels that a person can be significantly wealthier than average and still be a long way from the upper economic strata. The result of this is a widespread absence of sympathy for those in the lower strata. They are so far below that they might as well be animals. In Clown World, your opinion only matters if you’re wealthy enough to buy media time.
The 2020 American Presidential Election was fought between the billionaire Donald Trump and Joe Biden, a man who had already spent 47 years in the upper levels of American governance. The previous election was fought between Trump and Hillary Clinton, who had also spent decades in the upper levels of American governance. The one before that involved Mitt Romney, whose net worth was $250 million, and Barack Obama, the descendant of slave owners.
An Abraham Lincoln is unthinkable today. Someone born into poverty in today’s America is born so far behind that even becoming a homeowner would be a herculean effort. That they might become President is just laughable. Today, the ownership class has a complete lock on positions of power.
Naturally, a situation like this is ripe for revolution.
Democracy is about the easy satisfaction of desires. When those desires can no longer easily be satisfied, dissatisfaction quickly turns into a will to cause chaos. The widespread rioting of 2020 is a foretaste of the inevitable suffering of the next decade. As it becomes harder and harder to meet desires for decent housing and decent pay, people’s willingness to riot will increase.
The real risk of Clown World is that class relations become so bad that a majority of people want to overthrow the system. That could lead to them putting all their energies in behind a tyrannical demagogue. A leader who promised to get revenge on those hoarding property could summon a hurricane of rage behind them.
For class relations to improve, the masses have to have hope again. This doesn’t mean hope of becoming multibillionaires, just hope of meaningfully improving the station into which they were born. It means that they suffer less drudgery and poverty as they get older, and not more. If economic forces or policies push the masses away from hope, they push them into the clutches of fear and hate.
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This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in January 2021.
All kinds of relations are bad in Clown World, but generational relations are at their lowest point ever. Instead of the difficulty that marked generational relations in the past, today there is hate. This hate is based on the fact that one generation in particular – the Baby Boomers – are chiefly responsible for Clown World and for its perpetuation.
The social contract, ever since the start of human civilisation, was that each generation prizes and nurtures its young so that, when those young are adults, they can take care of the elderly. This contract worked successfully for hundreds of generations. Each cohort of elderly people, upon observing their children, could take pride at the quality of life they left for those following.
The Boomers were the first generation to break this contract. Thanks to their unprecedented levels of godlessness, the Boomers decided that they had to indulge every possible desire during this life. And so they spent up large, whether by cash or on credit. Even their descendants’ credit was spent.
Instead of acting to preserve the wealth they inherited, so that their offspring could enjoy it, the Boomers squandered it on material possessions and crude pleasures. They became the first generation in history to leave less wealth to their descendants than they inherited from their predecessors. This is the main reason why generational relations are so bad in Clown World today.
In Normal World, elderly people put aside wealth they don’t need so that their children and grandchildren can escape poverty. In Clown World, Boomers vote themselves luxurious pensions that their children and grandchildren have to labour to pay for. Generational relations in Clown World are analogous to a war that the Boomers won 20 years ago. Since then, they have been enforcing their terms.
Boomers are happy to cut funding to any sector of society if it means more for them. Young people who, because of growing up in Clown World, have developed a mental illness that prevents them from working, are given less to live off than Boomers who already own their own homes. Other young people, struggling to start families, are given less assistance than Boomers give to refugees.
The result: in Clown World, generational relations are marked by hate and accusations of neglect and ingratitude.
The archetypal Boomer invention is the reverse mortgage. Thanks to the invention of this financial device, the descendants of many Boomers will inherit next to nothing. The bank gets the property, and the Boomers spend the rest. Like the grandmother in Dostoevsky’s Gambler, they just piss the money up the wall and let their kids go begging.
Nowhere is this more obvious than with national debts. The Boomers started getting their fingers on the national pursestrings around the turn of the century. At this time, the American national debt was less than $6 trillion. After two decades of Boomer stewardship, the American national debt is now over $26 trillion. The Boomers just ticked up luxury on the national credit card and left it for the younger generations to pay off.
Boomer mismanagement of the economy has led to Millennials having much less wealth than the generations before them. The average Boomer in 1989 had four times as much wealth as people of the same age today. By 2020, most of them have inherited from their WWII-era parents and are living it large. They don’t care if any of this largesse is left for the coming generations.
This has led to the Boomers becoming known as the Parasite Generation. They have purposefully set out to take as much from the following generations as they possibly could, and to give back as little as they possibly could.
The younger generations resent this immensely, but are so far too timid to do anything about it. Few speak of revolution, at least not seriously. The plan seems to be to wait 20-25 years for the Boomers to die off en masse. By then, hopefully, normal relations will restore themselves between Generation X, the Millennials and following generations.
The Boomers seem to have become as selfish as they are for two major reasons.
The first reason is because they, themselves, are heavily damaged. The Boomers were the first generation whose parents and grandparents were both World War veterans. This means that they were the first to be raised entirely by severely traumatised people who, quite naturally on account of the suffering they endured, put themselves first.
The prewar generations were too busy dealing with the psychological damage caused by the World Wars to raise the Boomers properly. The Boomers were, consequently, emotionally neglected. Most of them internalised this example and decided it was natural. So they neglected their own children in turn.
The second reason is spiritual. The Baby Boomers are a cohort of spiritually undeveloped beings. Very few believe in God; very few care about the possibility of incarnating in a place of torment after the death of one’s body in this world. The vast majority of them believe this world is all there is, so gimme gimme gimme now now now.
This widespread spiritual ignorance has convinced the Boomer that there is no punishment for misdeeds in this life. The Earth is a free-for-all, where one is permitted to indulge any desire one wishes at anyone else’s expense, and when the physical body dies the moral ledger is wiped clean. So selling the future of the younger generations, for the sake of comfort now, is not morally unconscionable for those born before 1964.
That generational relations are terrible can, given all this, be predicted.
When the Boomers start dying off, it will be a great relief to the younger generations. Quality relations between young and old will return when Clown World ends, and this is extremely unlikely while the Boomers still call the shots. Barring sudden support for a Day of the Pillow-style move, it’s probably at least 20-25 years away.
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This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in January 2021.
