Resisting the Psychocrats

Resisting Psychocrats

I’m still on The Green Party’s mailing list, despite letting my membership lapse some time in 2018 or 2019. I left The Green Party for a number of reasons. I didn’t make a huge ‘God that failed’ statement, which always strikes me as incredibly self-important. People join political parties thinking it will change the world for the better in some way, and then find all about inflated expectations and misplaced hopes and loyalties. I don’t think The Green Party is up to much at all and has zero understanding of the material relations and class dynamics at the heart of the crisis in the climate system. More than that, I think The Greens – and environmentalists generally – cultivate a climate of fear, alarm, panic, and catastrophe as a deliberate strategy. Presented at the level of practical reason, Green demands for the transformation of social and economic life are not merely unpersuasive but hugely unpopular. And they know it. How could they not know it, given the number of times it has been rejected at the ballot box? We are becoming used to the climate rebels and resisters complaint that ‘we tried democracy and it failed’ in response to the question as to why they don’t put their views before the public at election time. What the complainants fail to realise here is that that is not a failure of politics and democracy, but politics and democracy in action. Some you win, some you lose, depending on the efficacy of one’s modes of communication and persuasion. Hectoring lectures stating climate truths and demanding obeisance and compliance in face of a range of expensive, austerian environmental measures is not persuasive. As hard as that is to explain to monomaniacal fanatics and fantasists, that’s a simple enough truth that is easy enough to understand. And let’s be honest, Greens and environmentalists know it to be true; their awareness of telling unpalatable truths is written all over their politics, framed as a ‘beyond politics’ that is a ‘non-politics.’ That framing is an attempt to avoid having to take one’s chances within a competitive democratic forum, knowing that the chances are that one will fail. My point is that it is not merely the message that is unpersuasive here, but most of all the messenger and the modes of action, communication, and persuasion employed. The claim that ‘we have tried politics and democracy and they have failed’ can be more accurately rephrased – Greens and environmentalists have done politics very badly and been rejected by the citizens of the great public for quite predictable reasons. The failure to do politics properly shouldn’t be so surprising. Environmentalism in the practical field is a rather debilitating mix of scientism, naturalism, and moralism. It makes constant reference to ‘Nature’ and ‘necessity’ and insists on couching its claims in ‘The Science,’ a science which it weaponizes and wields as unimpeachable, unquestionable, unanswerable authority in ‘debate.’ There is, as its leaders persist in saying, ‘no debate’; ‘there is no argument,’ ‘there is no debate.’ We hear this repeatedly in the wave of environmental protests. The criticism that such protests are counter-productive in alienating people has, finally, filtered through to the protesters – who style themselves as resisters – and their response has been to state openly that these actions are not about persuading people and winning support. There, in a nutshell, is an expression of the democratic deficit I have been pointing out to lie at the heart of environmentalism as ‘non-politics’ for more years than I care to remember. There is the source of the political failure of environmentalism as a practical movement of change, in the scientistic denigration of politics and ethics as the fields of practical reason, the belief that moral and political positions can be simply read-off from ‘the truth’ as revealed by ‘The Science,’ which turns out to be no more than ‘Nature’ as an empty signifier reified by the selective and selected voices of certain scientists. There is also the misanthropic and Darwinian potential that has continued to stalk ecology, which has always been apparent in the obsession over population and which has never quite gone away. That misanthropy tends not to be too explicitly stated these days, but instead is an undercurrent that comes to be expressed in myriad other forms. There is a pessimistic temper to a lot of Green positions, appearing most often in the repeated view that human beings are ‘stupid and selfish,’ and ‘don’t know’ about climate change and ‘don’t care.’ Hence the constant campaign to wake people up. It’s been going on for so long now that we need some peace and rest. I have spent years trying to get environmentalists to understand that this is not where the problem lies. If you consistently demand ‘action’ without at the same time furnishing the means and mechanisms of action, then nothing will change. The denunciations of people as being stupid and selfish follow that failure, and ignore that the source of failure lies in the cack-handed politics of an environmentalism hooked on simplistic models of truth telling, lacking any practical purchase on social realities and having zero connection with people. Always on the outside and always in educative mode, environmentalists have seen change in the crudest of terms – sounding the alarm, waking people up, a knowledge elite informing empty heads in a passive process. Of course it fails. Environmentalist politics hasn’t been up to the tasks it sets itself from the start. And now we see the reversion to the overt elitist and authoritarianism of the ecology movement in the 1970s. There is are reasons why that movement failed in that decade and they have naught to do with the quality or otherwise of its predications (the usual doom and gloom whose motivational force is subject to rapidly diminishing returns). The problem is the failure to take politics seriously, something which entails a respect for the agency of the individuals composing the demos, debate and dialogue and the negotiation of consent on the part of citizens, recognition that governments are responsible for a whole range of issues, not just the one, and that that responsibility comes with a degree of responsiveness to the governed.

And so on. I could go on, but won’t, for the very reason I have wasted so much of my time – my life – trying to develop a properly political and ethical dimension within environmentalism. I’m afraid to say that I have wasted my time and would encourage all those who possess a genuine concern with socialisation and democratisation to reclaim the environment – social, moral, and cultural as well as natural – from environmentalists – and reject the reductive models of environmentalism that are now the dominant forms. They are an authoritarian dead-end utterly inimical to liberty, autonomy, and democracy. They are inimical, too, to genuine authority.

To return to this email from The Green Party, I was struck by its heading “Greens do what the government won’t.”

That’s a bold claim, and a cheap one. In my years in academia, researching in the field of politics, I learned many valuable lessons. One of which was how easy it was to be idealist the more remote a politics is from power, popularity, and responsibility. Writing on the history of socialism it was easy to extol the virtues of Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci and, my favourites, the Council Communists like Pannekoek and Gorter. It was easy to denigrate the likes of Karl Kautsky, ‘the Pope of Marxism,’ as a renegade, a bureaucrat, a sellout. A remoteness from the practicalities, necessary compromises, and responsibilities of politics encourages an idealism at the level of principle, a privilege that those charged with making actual decisions whilst being responsible to a range of diverse agents with competing and often contradictory interests lack.

In abstraction from the realities of power and its responsibilities, Greens can promise to do a whole range of things that governments simply can’t. The problem with this claim from The Green Party is not that it is radical but that it isn’t radical enough – it is merely a pious ideal that is lacking in the means and mechanisms of its realisation. Any fool can draw up a wish list and demand implementation on the outside. The hard part is having the institutional, political, and motivational capacity to facilitate implementation on the inside. It is easy enough to make large claims on paper – living up to them and living by them in practice is the hard part. And it is the hard part that concerns me most. For years I have written on the gap between theoretical reason and practical reason that lies at the heart of the failures of environmentalism as politics. Scientific knowledge and technological know-how give us the ability to act, but they do not make us want to act: they therefore lack the proper qualities of the virtues. That, put simply, is the point I have been trying to establish for a quarter of a century. It has been so frustrating to see environmentalists sound the climate alarm and demand ‘action,’ without realizing that they were doing nothing to facilitate the springs of action. These springs refer to the inner motives as well as material interests; they refer, too, to the collective media enabling discrete individuals to engage in practical transformative action. Individuals are located within socially structured patterns of behaviour and to demand action here requires a critical, practical purchase on social relations. Environmentalism has been deficient in all these areas, modelling its ‘non-politics’ on a scientistic naturalism. And it is in that that the old misanthropy can be detected, emerging most clearly in the democratic pessimism which notions of human beings being ‘stupid’ and ‘selfish’ express. The result is that instead of a genuine motivational economy, environmentalists have recourse to the elitist-authoritarian short-cuts of the environmental vanguard – the environmental philosopher-king I have sought most of all to avoid. This is to succumb to the age-old temptation and escape of would-be universal reformers of all stripes. It is a dead-end. One certain way of determining whether that radicals and reformers are on the right or wrong lies in judging the extent to which they revert to the figure of the Lawgiver. It is here that the scientism of environmentalism is debilitating, unable to escape the paradox of emancipation – if people are the product of circumstances and if circumstances are so corrupt as to require their transformation, then people will be so corrupted by those circumstances as to be incapable of initiating the required changed. Time and again, the response to that paradox is the intervention of an educational elite or vanguard which, somehow, has escaped the environmentalist premise. It is an attempt at a short-cut that short-circuits the transformatory process and turns ideals into their opposites in practice.

I dashed off a quick response to The Green Party, as I have done several times in response to the many question-begging emails they send me:

Governments are elected by and responsible to the governed, a situation that that The Green Party doesn't need to trouble itself with. The more remote you are from power and responsibility, the easier it is to sound radical. And competent. There are far too many autocrats in our midst and too few democrats. And God preserve us from "Green experts." Experts by way of what? Not politics, that's for sure, hence the repeated failure to win support at the ballot box and inspire actions. Experts in a selective approach to "The Science" maybe. But not in politics.

That response took me a minute. I left it there, in full knowledge that such words fall on deaf ears in politics. I offered much more detailed observations when I was a member of The Green Party. I can remember wasting one Christmas writing up my observations at length as part of some consultation or other. I was asked, as a ‘valued member’ of the party, for my views on certain aspects of Green Party policy and politics, and so I responded. That work had a great impact – the party went off entirely in another direction, and I went away. I warned the leader of my local party back in 2014 that The Green Party was in danger of becoming a twenty first century update of the nineteenth century hygiene movement, employing clean, green technology in the hands of the corporations within ambitious and expensive government programmes rather than actually transforming social relations and economic systems. It would be the same system – and same exploitative relations – powered by a different energy mix. I was ignored. Just as the ‘messages’ I now send get ignored. Of course. Because these messages from The Green Party are automated, and are concerned with rallying support around an agenda.

I don’t actually disagree with that agenda, stated in broad terms. If there is £27billion to invest, I’d prefer to see it invested in ‘the green economy’ rather than road building. I just need more details on what is entailed by that ‘green economy’ – and its energy infrastructure, and the sources of its resources and technologies. I also agree that ‘without comprehensive political action,’ green pledges ‘won't address the core of the issue. Without legislation and real action, pledges fall short and we fail to move away from an economy that puts profit before people.’

That’s quite a claim. To reverse that situation and put ‘people before profit’ requires precisely what socialism spent a century and more trying to achieve and failing. It is that transition away from the capitalist economy that catches my eye, because I don’t think that Greens and environmentalists have the first idea as to what is entailed by such a system change.

I’ll not write more on this, because I want to keep this brief and centred on another issue. I shall instead refer people to my work on Marx and on Istvan Meszaros, which deals with issues of systemic transformation and mediation in detail. My critical ire comes in response to the way that environmentalists are tending to employ the language of system change as a political slogan designed radicalize and rally mass support for government-led programmes that involve anything but system change. Again, my criticism is not that such claims are radical but that they are not radical enough or even at all.

Take the final passage of the message from The Green Party:

‘Greens know that our economy needs a reboot. Our systems must change to preserve fundamental ecological conditions for future generations. Imagine what a climate conference like COP26 would look like with more Green experts in the room. Will you support us today so that we can campaign to get more Greens elected to parliament?’

That view is politically and sociologically illiterate, and dangerously so. I’m all in favour of an economy that works within planetary boundaries rather than violates them. In my work I have sought to show how the capital economy is based on a systemic detachment from and hence deafness to the realm of use value (both social as well as natural). Importantly, I also show how the state – the government which environmentalists level their ambitions demands upon – serves as capital’s command centre, ensuring unity in a fundamentally anarchic system of production, a second order mediation which is integral to the process of accumulation. The idea that we will transition from an economy organized around the pursuit of exchange value to one that serves use value via government – and via the election of Greens to government – is fanciful. I would say laughable were the consequences not so serious. We are just emerging from the failures of a century of parliamentary socialism and ought to have learned the hard way of the impossibilities of skinning the tiger claw by claw. It is hard to credit the naivety of those who espouse the parliamentary road to the ecological society. That road can only be taken with prospects of success when it is buttressed by a substantive social transformation, and that thing simply has to have agency at its core – social transformation has also to be a self-transformation or it will be no transformation at all. What we have here in this government-centred approach to transformation is the old parliamentary reformism on steroids – a deformation that cannot but issue in authoritarian form. There is no social and democratic agency at its heart. Where is the agency with the structural and organisational capacity to act? And, most of all, the will and motive force to want to act? These are the key points for me. Beyond the diagnosis of the problem (which is also deficient in environmentalism), there is a need to make agency the central part of the solution. Instead, the whole area is scotomized, opening up a democratic vacuum that can only be filled by those most loathsome of creatures, the bureaucrats of knowledge and power. These bureaucrats, of course, will make the claim to be independent and neutral, ordering the world and the people in it from some Empyrean Heaven removed from society. But this is merely managerial ideology at its purest. In reality, they will be rooted in the material interests of the prevailing society, reproducing its asymmetries in power and resources.

Environmentalists (as represented by the dominant voice) haven't got the first idea about what is required by system change and social transformation, for the reason that you have zero understanding of agency - and zero connection with the individuals composing the demos. The elitism and authoritarianism is explicit and fits the 'clean, green' corporate form perfectly.

I have referred to the social and political deficiency of environmentalism above. I write on this at length in my posts on Being and Place as well as in my theoretical work. I encourage you to explore the list on the Posts page.

I want to write more on the failures with respect to morals, motivations, and metaphysics here. My first degree is in history. I am a historian by training. By this, I refer to something more than accessing, respecting, and evaluating fact, but in exercising judgement when it comes to change and continuity in history. Environmentalism is as deficient in history as it is in politics. History is reality, a genuine lived experience that is rooted in interrelation, subjective and objective factors in their interplay. I can date my parting of the waves with environmentalists to 2016, when it became apparent to me that the whole area is mired in a wretched combination of scientism, naturalism, and moralism, a contradictory motley of planetary managers, planetary engineers, and planetary fetishizers. I noted the barely concealed relish that some took in the daily doom of planetary disaster – snide comments on the Thomas fire in California were the final straw. On another occasion I offered my advice, as a historian, on the nature of change and the factors that need to work in tandem in transformation. I was barely out of hospital after suffering a near fatal heart attack – and people I was engaging with knew this – and was met with a combination of abuse and dismissal. ‘People are dying now!’ one screamed, ‘what is your strategy?’ he demanded. This is a character usually found extolling the virtues of indigenous people and damning western civilisation as a fall from innocence. Hopeless. I saw the same cluelessness in other, more sophisticated, places – the same search for clever strategies in the absence of inner motive force. This environmentalism has no structure and no agency, no springs for the action it demands. All change in history is a synergistic combination of material interests, moral motives, and metaphysical ideals. That general statement packs a wealth of meaning, and I have spent a lifetime trying to unpack its terms. Anyone who think that that reduces to a strategy is clueless. The environment is far too important to be left to the environmentalists.

I need to wrap this up by writing something on the environmental technocrats and psychocrats in our midst now. The moral, motivational, and democratic deficiency I have constantly pointed to in environmentalism, causing unresponsiveness when it comes to calls for action, has, at long last, been noted. Unfortunately, the gaps I have been concerned to emphasise between theoretical reason and practical reason are not being closed. Instead of a genuinely moral and motivational approach to change as an inner transformation, both personal and societal, there is the scientistic approach of behaviourism. Instead of a democratic approach to change as something that involves the agency, will, and consciousness of human beings as change-makers, there is the cynically manipulative and managerial approach that reduces human beings to the status of passive objects of an externally engineered change.

This is galling. If I could, I would like to have the last quarter of a century of my life back, time I would now choose to use more productively in terms of personal enjoyment. But, to go once more into the breach, I’ll make the necessary distinctions. Theoretical reason pertains to the realm of fact, our knowledge of the external world, and has technological know-how as its spin-off; practical reason is the realm of value and involves the fields of politics and ethics, where we decide how to act in light of knowledge and, through know-how, implement those judgements. It involves will and consciousness and has economics as a branch. Environmentalism has emphasised the former whilst being deficient in the latter. The sad fact is that the ratcheting up of psychological pressure on the public to change their behaviour indicates the extent to which the dominant scientism still prevails at the expense of ethics and politics. It will cost you liberty and democracy. At its heart is an anthropological pessimism, the idea that human beings are merely survival machines, balls of meat responding to external stimuli, entirely lacking in inner meaning and motive. It’s the materialism of the Enlightenment – itself deriving from Hobbes – and it leads inexorably to inhumanism.

I need to comment these nudge units which are employed by government and which are also involved in promoting certain messages throughout media and culture. The gap between theoretical reason and practical reason I written at length on over the years has finally been identified. Unfortunately, it is being filled by manipulation and managerialism rather than by the virtues, values, and will I was most concerned to emphasise. In other words, the gap isn’t been closed at all; instead, we have the extension and entrenchment of scientism in the form of behaviourism. This was, of course, always likely to be the approach in an age inclined to take the latest fashion in physics and the latest piece of neuro-nonsense as forming the content of its metaphysics, morals, and politics. This isn’t something new, of course. In a broad sense, governmental education has always involved what could be called ‘indoctrination’ by which I mean socialisation according to dominant norms, values, and belief systems. That in itself is hardly a controversial point – I would expect governments to act in such a way to reproduce culture and society. But there is now a qualitative difference in this indoctrination – we have a covert manipulation replacing education and socialisation. The problem is that, in the absence of an authoritative and overarching ethical framework (and the concomitant virtues that practice its values), the problem which Nietzsche characterised as the ‘death of God,’ people will approve and even demand the growth of powerful government when they think it will force their values on their recalcitrant non-believing neighbours, but will squeal like stuck pigs when that same power is used to force their neighbours’ values on them. And that’s the problem – in the absence of that authoritative ethical standard, all that there can be is existential choice, with each person choosing the good as he or she sees fit. Such existentialism strips society of its moral capacity, with the freedom of each person with respect to choosing the good generating a collective unfreedom by way of mutual self-cancellation. The debilitating practical effects of such existentialism become apparent when society is confronted by problems demanding collective endeavour and action. The problem is that environmentalism in its dominant contemporary form is failing to address the issue at its roots but instead seeking substitutes and surrogates. Instead of constituting a genuine commonality and public, we are confronted with a mob of squealing collectivists demanding ‘action’ and levelling huge and expensive claims upon the great abstraction that is ‘government.’

And with that, the radical moment for societal transformation is not merely lost, it is diverted and perverted to become the very opposite of that which idealists intend – we get a system preservation under the protection of authoritarian form instead of system transformation – we enter a new era of unelected global totalitarianism. Scotomize the hard questions of power, privilege, and asymmetries in resources, and how these are embedded in material relations, and you will regret it.

‘We now stand at a unique point in our planet’s history, one where we must all share responsibility both for our present wellbeing and for the future of life.’ Spare me. Attenborough has also described all of us people as a ‘plague on the surface of the planet.’ It is little wonder that there is a democratic deficiency at the heart of environmentalism. I well remember being at the dinner table with environmentalists, experts in some technology or another, who offered the view ‘it is time to cull the herd.’ Is that the kind of power you want to cede to government, I asked. Who gets to decide who lives and who dies? At least there was an honesty to this inhumanism. Most noticeable in current campaigns is the covert nature of the inhumanism, and its iniquitous character. With the raising of environmental costs, the poor are to be rationed and regulated, priced out of the good things in life. Going Green means ‘ordinary’ folk ‘going without’ in this respect. And society is being subject to a process of education/indoctrination in order to normalize this iniquity, or at least demoralize people to such an extent that they accept it as inevitable. TINA, the Goddess of elites, is back with a vengeance. The facts of climate ‘necessity’ are repeated daily and the old doctrine of ‘there is no alternative’ reinstated. And if ‘ordinary’ people – thankfully – remain sceptical, there are far too many autocrats and precious few democrats among the activists. In time, the permanent wave of protest engulfing society may sap the energies of the common folk, who just give up in search of peace. That will be a fatal mistake – there is no peace along these iniquitous and repressive lines. There will be a libertarian and populist backlash, as there was against the democratically deficient EU. I am neither a libertarian nor a populist in these terms but have sought to establish autonomy and authority in such a way as to avoid the constant swinging between libertarianism and authoritarianism at ever greater extremes. There is a need for a rational restraint, but this has to be grounded in will and consent, in proximal relations and small-scale practical reasoning. That’s my consistent view. It’s the tougher solution, one that goes deeper and takes longer to achieve. But that is precisely why it is a solution and not a substitute and a surrogate. I have over the years argued for creating and cultivating the means and mechanisms practice, persuasion, motivation and participation in order to close the gap between theoretical and practical reason. Knowledge and know-how lack the qualities of true virtue in that they give human beings the ability to act but do not in themselves make humans want to act. That gap is debilitating. At long last we have gone beyond lamentation at the persistent failure at the level of action and started to relate the question at the level of motivational economy. Unfortunately, instead of the cultivation of the virtues, the education of desire, and character construction in tandem with social reconstruction, there is the engineering of the will by scientistic means – behaviourism instead of ethics. At times, even I despair. What stops me short of despair is that I am not in the least bit surprised. But it is still discouraging to see how many autocrats there are in our midst, and how few democrats. To those who persist in saying the ‘truth trumps all things,’ I say that the temper of politics is judicious – and truth is a far more complicated thing than they know. We can have no more truth than the nature of a thing allows, and the more certainty we have of one thing than another does not necessarily indicate a greater truth, merely that some things are more simple than others. Whence comes the proverb, "The most beautiful girl in the world can only give what she has."

It is telling that with the collapse of a God-centred ethics, it has been found well-nigh impossible to motivate individuals intrinsically in face of collective purposes and the common good, only manipulate them externally by scientistic means. ‘Utilitarianism is what you get when STEM people try to do humanities things.’ (Aristotelian meme).

The climate hysteria framed in terms of ‘necessity’ is an attack on democracy. ‘I don’t think ordinary people should be flying,’ I heard one environmentalist activist (elderly, retired, upper middle class) say in an interview (it’s on You Tube somewhere, but many say the same thing). How utterly wretched! Comfortably off people telling the less comfortably off that they will have to do without the good things in life that the comfortably off have been enjoying since ever! How are ‘ordinary’ people able to have a say on whether they should be banned from flying, banned from eating meat, banned from having central heating, banned from owning a car, banned from procreating? Yes, eugenics, remember that? The scientistic high bourgeois loved that, too. Backed by science, of course, it was morally repugnant.

If that is what environmentalism reduces to, then not only do I not support it, I oppose it vehemently and would seek to join with others in rejecting it in no uncertain terms.

I’ll finish with a comment on Christmas, which is pertinent to the above attempts to engineer the thoughts, actions, and behaviour of people. Tocqueville wrote of the ‘revolution of rising expectations.’ We seem to be in the presence of the very opposite here, a deliberate attempt to get people to lower their expectations, supplanting their hopes with fears. It is a process of demoralisation designed to suck the life and soul out of everything and everyone, keep people constantly aggravated and annoyed, fostering the sense of that things are bad and can only get worse. I have no idea if Christmas is about to be cancelled or not. This may be yet another scare story designed to make us angry. I don’t care either way, because Christmas is Christmas and is not something that takes place – or not – at the say-so of the authorities. I think the issue seems to be one of crowds, even crowds outdoors as well as indoors. No Christmas lights are going on because of the need to stop people gathering together in crowds. I attended the turning on of the Christmas lights late November 2019 in my home town of St Helens, but that was the last Christmas celebrations before Covid. There was nothing last year, but I had a nice Christmas indoors, just me and some very warm memories. I probably overdid it a little bit. A lot, to be honest. But it was the last Christmas at the old family home before moving, so I made it a good one. And that gives you some idea of how to fight back against this constant war against enjoyment, this systematic assertion of atomisation over against association. You win by taking note of advice and instructions, but ignoring petty edicts by those drunk with power. You win by staring them down, and continuing to laugh, by living and by having the time of your life, putting up as many trees as you have (I have three), so that all the little children of the world can get a little relief from the constant diet of fear by seeing what Christmases used to be like when we ourselves were little and didn’t need to seek permission to have fun. I love Christmas. Christmas is my line in the sand moment. I can do without most things. But whenever Christmas is threatened I will fight back and say to the cancellers that you won’t get away with it, we won’t let this happen. Presuming that Christmas is indeed being cancelled, that is. I remember the threat last year and have no idea what happened. I celebrated Christmas in the normal way. The only difference is that I didn’t go to midnight mass, for the first time in years. I love midnight mass, one of the highlights of every Christmas. But the prospect of seeing midnight mass in a scanty congregation full of masked people, all under instruction, with no singing of carols, saddened me. I didn’t want the last midnight mass in my own home town to be such a memory, so I didn’t go. I don’t like to live this way. This is no way to live. And I don’t think we should let people constantly laying the law down on social activities to ruin everything they touch. We will do our own community life, bring people back together, drink sherry and sing ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas.’ We need to celebrate, and not let the neurotics win. We need to scrutinize all these claims, which are propagandizing our mentalities, making us feel guilty in merely seeking fun, let alone in having fun. This is all about control, conditioning us, reprogramming us as if we were machines, changing our habits, behaviours, and lifestyles. And it softens people up by demoralising them, splitting them up from one another, rendering them passive and powerless in front of extraneous demands and imperatives. Human beings are social beings. Being human is about sharing in the collective spirit, about being a part of a community with others, taking part in communal gatherings, and these are the very things that are being cancelled. We need to resist this, and hold on to who we are. We need to get back to communion, and re-affirm the communion of each and all in our daily practice. Enjoy yourself. That’ll drive the neurotics in their crisis-ridden, fear-driven world mad. It is about learning to think for yourself and act for yourself when being ‘nudged’ from all directions, remembering always to think about and act for others, as members of the one community. It means affirming association as against atomisation. It means resisting the psychocrats, the people who combine the bureaucratisation of the world with the psychology of behavioural change.