What is going on?   Or more succinctly, wtf?!?   We are surrounded by insanity.  The Western world is riddled with irrational beliefs, absurd policies, dysfunctional organisations and fanatical advocates of monomanias in medicine, climatology,  education and sexual politics.  Amid this lunacy single-minded corporations are making outrageous profits regardless of the collateral damages of their actions.

The mad, like the poor, are always with us.  Is there more madness today?   Or it is simply more visible?  Maybe we have, as I suggested earlier, run out of sufficient sane people?   Whether this an increase in insanity or a redistribution matters not.  What does matter is that it is a real, present affliction in everyday life.  

THE DEEP CAUSE

Why is this folly almost everywhere?  There are of course many, many causes but I propose that beneath many of them lies one factor:

The default prioritisation of abstract ideas in lieu of context-based solutions.

More specifically it is the promotion of ideologies, policies, reductionist measurements and narrow, overarching targets regardless of circumstances.  This prioritisation is very rarely a decision, rather it is built in to the thinking of many modern people. 

Understanding a situation in terms of abstractions leads to the idea that the best response to a problem is a policy: a new law, a protocol, standards, measurements, oversight and compliance. This is not only untrue, but it leads to an accumulation of policies which has become a massive waste of time and money.

Below are a few real examples from hundreds of thousands of possibilities, of the inappropriate use of abstractions. Click the links for the full details.

GENDER

Whereas genitalia are visible and chromosomes are identifiable physical realities ‘gender’ is an abstraction.  It is not observable.  You can’t put it in a wheelbarrow.  It is an abstract construct, famously the plaything of a delinquent philosopher, and latterly a springboard for trendy, dubious ‘science’.  In the real world the policy of eager affirmation of an adolescent’s fantasy of this abstract notion and unwillingness to explore the trauma that may have promoted it have dire consequences. 

CLIMATE

Destructive on an international scale is the myopic, staggeringly expensive obsession with controlling  CO2.  Here the abstractions are model-based, inaccurate predictions.  They fail to engage the real world context which offers the far cheaper, far easier possibility of adaption to temperature change. Net Zero policies are not compared with the real, immediate benefits of health and wealth that could be achieved for the same expenditure.  Further, the externalities, that is to say the full cost and physical limitations of Net Zero, are simply ignored.

COVID

In COVID times lockdowns were justified by a concatenation of ludicrously narrow, unreliable abstract models and measurements.  They were continued even in the face of clear evidence of their inefficacy and dangers.

VACCINES

Similarly the advocates of vaccines pursued their abstract targets even in the face of clear evidence of inefficacy.  They refused to consider personal variables such as religious concerns and immunity arising from previous infection.   Further harms of that programme continue to manifest every day  and the dangers persist.

HEALTH

The Midwestern Doctor comments "Corporatized medicine has inflicted upon the doctor-patient relationship  [a loss of connection which]   has led to doctors abandoning their traditional way of practicing medicine (a detailed physical exam and history which allows each patient to teach the doctor) and instead replacing it with a rapid standardized protocol which can fit into a 15 minute office visit.”

EMPLOYMENT

In employment the attempt to enforce “equity” and stamp out “racial discrimination”  - both abstractions - leads to inequitable discrimination.

MEDIA

In media the idolisation of the twin abstractions of safety and misinformation threatens the possibility of any UK citizen speaking truth to power.

GOVERNMENT

Abstraction is the language of officialdom.  It permits clever theorising but limits understanding of concrete reality.  The reliance on abstract analysis provides the justification for a ridiculous number of costly, obstructionist and dysfunctional  quangos in situations better served by direct, positive solutions.  When I contracted to the UK Government we would frequently report to civil servants and ministers who were unwilling or unable to take on board the findings from the research they themselves had commissioned.  More than ten years ago, when presented with unequivocal evidence of universal hostility to a project to house asylum seekers in rural areas, a civil servant told us,  “Ministers have decided to take a lead on this issue.”   One year and fourteen million pounds later the project was abandoned.

There are thousands upon thousands of such stories of malign consequences arising from valuing abstract analysis above practical solutions.  Abstractions are inherently unlimited. They make it easy to assume large scale benefits will outweigh individual disbenefits.  When disbenefits are diverse and dispersed (as in the case of Covid vaccinations) they are easily ignored because they are not measurable on the narrow criteria of the initial project.  

I have written elsewhere about the  origins of this default to abstract thinking, and also how abstractions have such a fierce grip over the minds of otherwise sane people.  Briefly it is a long-term consequence of changes brought about by the earliest technology, literacy.  Initially these changes delivered enormous social and technological advantages.  Now, after more than three centuries of progress, diminishing returns have set in.   

 Ideologies, quintessentially abstract, were first conceived at the end of the eighteenth century when literacy began to spread rapidly.  Marxism, with first mover advantage, become the first ideology to have a worldwide impact.    Gradually the inappropriate  dominance of abstract thinking leads to ideology trumping reality, policy replacing principles and  protocols replacing personal relationship.    

Abstract thinking has brought us countless benefits.  It is the basis of modern science and hence the ground of the magnificent technological progress of the last four hundred years.   Abstract thinking is in itself neither good nor bad.   The critical issue is how we use it.

We win when we use abstractions as tools. 

We lose when we use abstractions as rules.

THE EVAPORATION OF AUTHORITY

This unorthodox proposal about language and thinking has far more corollaries and consequences than I can touch on in this essay.   Here I want to draw attention to one peculiar consequence: the gradual evaporation of authority.

Authority is in essence a relationship between one person and one or more others.   The fons et origo of authority is the author – the person.  By extension we can exert authority over dogs and other animals, because we understand them to be conscious, however when we say a person has authority over an area of land we don’t mean that person commands the soil, the trees and the animals but that person has authority over the action of humans within that area.  The primary meaning of authority is a human relationship.

Authority is not necessarily authoritarian.  It can be organisational, educational, defensive, ludic,  social, spiritual and so on.  But we do not talk of an engine having the authority to move a car.   It has merely power. When I lift my coffee cup to my lips I do not exert authority over the cup.  I merely apply mechanical energy. 

This observation is etymological and phenomenological.  It is not a proof.  Each of us must notice for ourselves.   What do you mean when you use the word ‘authority’?  For you, is there a difference between ‘exercising authority’ and  ‘controlling something or someone’?

With the rise of abstraction and its offspring, objectivity, authority tended to move away from the word of a man or woman to objective facts, impartial rules and institutions.  If we collude with this movement we give away our own authority and it accrues to the institutions to which we defer.  If we do not take charge of our own savings for retirement, pension funds take control of them.  If we do not care for our own health, the medical establishment tells us what to do.  If we do not educate our children, the state will do so, and so on. As we hand over our responsibilities to institutions and policies we disempower ourselves.

The tendency to think with abstractions  is like a force built in to our language that draws us away from personal authority and self-reliance and towards universal, structured solutions. The much mocked ‘prepper’ movement in the USA is a reaction against this force.

The apotheosis of abstract thinking in social organisation is Kant’s categorical imperative  which urges us explicitly from the particular to the general:  

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

Indeed it claims that the generalised abstraction has a higher moral authority than the particular. This is the moral justification for the transfer of authority from the individual to the institution.  During the Enlightenment impersonal institutions governed by rules and protocols began to proliferate and exert more and more influence on society. Many  of  these institutions were most excellent,  from  friendly societies  to the Royal Society.  The latter was a locus of prodigious invention and discovery.  Only latterly has it sadly  traduced its origins.

Nevertheless in spite of this historical transfer, authority remains essentially individual.  Authority is meaningful only insofar as it is a personal relationship.  If it lacks the personal component, that which persists is mere power or control. It follows that  institutions are authoritative only to the  extent that the people who run them have authority, that is they have mastered themselves sufficiently to manifest authority, e.g. an authoritative judge, headmaster or referee. When the person who wields institutional authority has no personal authority something is lost, as recently exemplified by the fatuous pronouncements of Justin Welby and the petty behaviour of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner.

When institutions – misleadingly called “authorities” –  become just systems which control people  we can say, if we speak precisely, that they no longer exercise authority.   And when eventually we notice that our institutions lack authority but seek to control us we arrive in 2024.  The distortions consequent on this loss become grotesquely manifest when a  54 year old woman carer is jailed for posting on facebook  and a career criminal who physically endangered people  is not.  

Thus have our institutions fallen.  Whatever the overt political structure, when a Government has power but no authority it moves towards dictatorship. 

THE RESILIENCE 

As authority evaporates from our institutions we can ask, “Is it condensing elsewhere?” Where, now, if anywhere, can we find authority?  Who are the new nobility and what are they doing?

Some of them are the independent thinkers and honest scientists who publish on independent media such as The Daily Sceptic, Rumble and Substack.  

Early on in the Covid debacle authoritative voices such as John Ioannidis, John Lee, Mike Yeadon, Sunetra Gupta, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff spoke up.   Practitioners like Peter McCullough, Paul Marik,  Pierre Kory,  Meryl Nass and Tess Lawrie honestly reported their own experience.  They refused to comply with the institutions  within which they found themselves at the beginning of 2020.   Many have been ejected from those institutions precisely because they have the integrity to assert their authority.

Media figures such as Toby Young, Mark Steyn, Neil Oliver, Del Bigtree and JP Sears advocated honesty when the mainstream media became propagandists.

Researchers, clinicians and statisticians like Carl Heneghan & Tom Jefferson, Jessica Rose,  Joel Smalley, Clare Craig, Robert Malone and Steve Kirsch relentlessly publish real data that contradicts the coercive mendacity of the poodle press.

Independent minded academics like Sinead  Murphy, David McGrogan  and James Alexander think and publish outside the tortuously slow academic press.

Many other writers and countless independent bloggers are fighting the tsunami of psychosis.  I am delighted that there are far more such people than I can list, and far more than I know of.   Beyond those who are publishing are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people doughtily remaining honest in the face of institutional chicanery and corporate malice.

These people have been labelled “The Resistance.”   That makes sense.  However I offer another name as well,  “The Resilience”, because I do not care to be identified by what I reject but rather by what I embrace, and that is resilient, responsible authority.

All these people have authority.  It is founded in their personal experience, their own values  and their courage.  They strive to tell the truth as they see it and are open to correction.   They are not grandiose.  They do not seek to seize control but rather to reduce the control that others exert.

MY CONTRIBUTION

My small part in this is threefold.

Firstly and above all I do my best to be polite and truthful, which at times means being sceptical.

Secondly I write blogs such as this.

Thirdly I have written a strange book, The Bug in our Thinking and the way to fix it.  It is not expository – it is not about.  It is not instructional – it is not advice.   It is a story – which perhaps may affect.  It is a story of many stories and like all good stories it cannot be reduced to facts, or a moral or guidance.  I do not seek to make others think as I do, but rather to offer indirectly means of deepening or clarifying our thinking.   I commend it to you and all your friends, relations, colleagues and adversaries.

This blog, like all writing, will become more and more easily misunderstood as it falls away into the past.  However each of us, if we are willing to perceive the sometimes very painful present, can strive  to see clearly, to speak truthfully and to fuel our resilience. Eventually some of us will have to restore authority to the institutions that have betrayed us.

Hugh Willbourn is the author of "The Bug in our Thinking and the way to fix it". 

According to a recent review, "Willbourn’s book is exceptionally accessibly and clearly written—a marvel of non-professional-academic, or real, philosophy."

It is available by clicking here, and internationally as a paperback, ebook and audiobook at Amazon.