The social credit system is coming in.
By various means.
Another acronym that people had better start deciphering – ESG.
Environmental and Social Governance, which means putting social life into a straightjacket.
It extends the most inorganic and unecological forms over the whole of society and does so in the name of environmental health.
Western governments are ditching democracy in favour of the Chinese model.
Beware the use of measurements in politics, such as carbon footprint.
People will be made to account for their existence, with records kept of their every action and transaction.
If people don't cut their carbon emissions they will lose social credit.
Those deemed good will be able to access money and resources, those deemed back will be penalised and cut adrift.
It is no surprise that the corporations are adhering to ESG, since it entails a regulation of the world which protects and advances the corporate form, free from both democracy and from the market. Environmentalists are also keen on the regulatory approach, having zero faith in democracy and zero competence for democratic politics. They presume that the environmental ends they espouse can be best served by the bureaucratic imposition of rules and regulations. This reveals a technocratic mindset rather than an ecological one. ESG involves the idea that it is more important for business to exhibit their 'green' and 'social' (cultural) credentials than to serve the customers. Customers are actually being lectured to by corporations and banks. Then there is the acronym gang, a de facto governing authority that operates outside of the democratic political sphere. The result is that the major decisions in the lives of the governed are not made by elected governments but by unelected officials working hand-in-glove with the transnational corporations.
Be wary of all those who lavish praise on the way China handled Covid – such people are hankering after extending the Covid Lockdown regime into a Climate Lockdown Regime – and since, as we are told daily, the climate crisis is going to be with us for a long time to come, this Climate Regime will entail a permanent lockdown. Weber's 'iron cage' is about to become a digital cage, characterised by digital ID, total surveillance, the governed being made accountable to unrepresentative government, digital currency and 'green' (central) banking. These people are positively salivating at the prospect of locking people down and in, making people justify their very existence. They never did like people much, which goes some way towards explaining their political ineptitude. Mainstream politicians are in on it. Real politicians have been weeded out, the ones who remain are only where they are because they are part of the system, appealing to the banks and finance, the markets, the dominant institutions, media and culture. They have been selling the sovereign people out one slice at a time with each and every passing election, every one of which has been an exercise in diminishing hope and expectation with respect to democratic possibility.
The social credit system means that an unelected and unrepresentative class of people working to extend and entrench the corporate form will get to monitor and review your every action and transaction, make you account for the views you express, your activities on social media, the people and causes you support. These people are in a position to exert pressure and force to induce you to change your behaviour, on pain of exclusion and excommunication.
The social credit system imposes the new moral code, it is the new virtue ethics, the new authoritative standard. All the things I have argued for, and which liberals and libertarians have resisted as inherently repressive of their precious liberty, 'otherness,' and 'difference,' will be instituted from above and administered bureaucratically without consent. You are about to be judged as to whether you are a good or bad person, but not in accordance with genuine moral standards, but in accordance with the standards set by the corporations. You will learn to be 'good.' You will cowed into being 'good.'
The strangulation of society by way of rules and regulations is all about compliance and control instituting undemocratic governance.
Keep the population in fear and render then compliant – have people make themselves cowed and compliant. That's the policy.
The social credit system is enforced social compliance.
One final point – where are all the rebellious, libertarian, and transgressive Foucaultians who have wreaked such havoc on the poltiics of public purpose and common good? Nowhere, that's where. After having spent their lives railing against an authoritarianism they tended to see everywhere, they are nowhere to be found when the Panopticon Society they have built lucrative careers warning of comes into view. But I never was fooled into believing they were the transgressive rebels they always posed as being – libertarians taking an easy ride on the back of the system they pretend to reject, they are always the first to cave in.
Nobody has been asked if they want any of this, any of the things which are currently dragging society down and tearing it apart, because they people behind it know fine well that nobody wants any of it. They are deliberately cultivating a sense of inevitability and hopelessness.
As for the banks, we should remember the time we the great public bailed them out – they wouldn't be here but for us. And the same goes for all the other would-be universal controllers. Rather than keep bailing these forces and institutions out we should be reclaiming their power as our social power, restituting resources to the body politics and make the commitment to create and sustain the self-governing democratic social order. Does anybody remember socialism?