China’s path for the West
The most important factor enabling the gradual implementation of Chinese social gains on Western soil is not all sorts of utopians, dreamers or lackeys, but our key psychological conditioning, namely the need for a subjective sense of security
Wojciech Golonka
Crises are the perfect opportunity – we know this from the mouths of the globalists themselves, who often emphasize this fact – to introduce reforms and laws that nations would not otherwise have the desire for. In their optics as globalists, visionaries as they consider themselves to be, these are changes necessary to save humanity, the planet, its resources, progress, etc., with their philanthropic activities not necessarily lacking financial profitability, on the contrary – it is not uncommon for their profits to be skyrocketing. Medicine, on the other hand, is usually bitter in taste – explains the people subjected to reforms at the moment – and unpleasant to swallow – getting used to the new state of affairs quite quickly, which, however, continues to mutate.
For there has been no shortage of crises in recent years – we have even gone, I think, full of circle of permanent crisis, if not economic, then sanitary, if not sanitary, then military, energy, nutrition, etc., which are intertwined with each other and mutually condition each other – so there is no shortage of such coveted opportunities for this after all bitter in taste, though sweet in gain, ordering the world. And while both the end of the crises and the reconstruction of our civilization itself are not yet in sight, the already emerging clear outlines of a “brave new world” fill us with trepidation, though not enough felt by the masses to stop these processes at this stage.
WELCOME TO 1984
Yes, we have entered an era when conspiracy theories, and sometimes the most unreal ones, after a while begin to become facts. “Deluded” interpretations that aroused healthy skepticism if only because they radically deviate from our Western perception of man (stemming from both Christianity and the Enlightenment, with its individual autonomy and rights), and thus rightly seemed more or less implausible – these even “deluded” interpretations are beginning to come true, sometimes even at a dizzying pace, at least at the level of the declarations of the reformers themselves, and already partly at the level of facts – accomplished facts.
It is true that the changes taking place are not uniform everywhere, and do not occur with the same speed and breadth, which causes a certain sense of surrealism: what still seems unthinkable in our country is happening before our eyes, albeit elsewhere (which does not mean that it is not also happening here, only at a slower pace and intensity). For habituation to our model of values, however subconscious or unconscious, is so strong that it is indeed difficult to consider as real the attempts to remodel the world so thoroughly, and probably this lack of apparent rationality condemned these theories to the name of “conspiracy” in our eyes. Meanwhile, the implementation of the otherwise familiar dystopias is going ahead, the ground for them having apparently been sufficiently prepared, so that even at the level of the self-proclaimed reformers’ declarations themselves, the dystopian goals are made clear enough, although, it is to be understood, their dystopia is presented as a necessary stage of progress.
In the end, it is by no means a matter of triviality, some carbon footprint or plant meat: it is important to recall that an essential element of the two greatest literary dystopias of the 20th century was ubiquitous and total control of both the individual and the masses. The lockdown era, which imprisoned us indoors in anticipation of the then heralded “new normalcy,” which was not to be the same as the “old normalcy,” prompted me to refresh myself with Huxley’s “Brave New World” and Orwell’s “1984.” Reading these books one after the other in quick succession, one can’t help but be amazed to what extent, in this day and age, the related visions of these two authors – dystopias that not too long ago horrified readers, are coming to life, at least in terms of the goals set to be fulfilled and the attempts undertaken to fulfill them.
However, there is one thing that Huxley and Orwell did not foresee, although the latter clearly sensed such a possibility when he described the tool of control in every home in the form of a screen allowing a party to track even the most private aspects of a citizen’s life, namely the development of digital technologies enabling the collection of data about everyone and everything on a scale hitherto unthinkable, and making it possible, through powerful artificial intelligence algorithms, to manage the human masses, their behavior, etc., in real time.
TOTAL CONTROL
The People’s Republic of China, with its peculiarities of a communist-capitalist power, is a perfect example. In China, as is well known, everything is under control, for better or worse: the citizens, their beliefs, culture, the press and media, health and education, the Internet, and, above all, the daily lives of citizens (at home… and also abroad, as came to light recently in connection with the foreign operation of unofficial outposts of Chinese police supervising their own citizens).
It is true that China has its own proper historical peculiarity in its approach to man – it was a powerful civilization in the past, but not Christianized, and it was Christianity that emphatically legally empowered every person coming into this world, marked in addition by a certain isolationism, of which even the Great Wall of China was to be a symbol, although it was built over the centuries for purely defensive reasons against invasions by peoples from the northern steppes. Moreover, modern China traces its lineage back to the Communists’ victory in the Civil War of 1949, and this beginning marked nothing less than one of the bloodiest totalitarianisms of all time, in an intensity perhaps unknown even to the Bolsheviks themselves: historians estimate the death toll of Mao’s regime to be at least in the tens of millions.
It is on this specific double ground that today’s party-all-powerful state was born, with its permanent surveillance with millions of cameras in public spaces, perfect algorithms that recognize faces, cars and Big Brother in the form of the Social Credit System. Yes, in China, citizens and companies are assigned a given number of points at the start, which they can lose or gain depending on their correct or faulty behavior. Some assumptions seem innocuous and even desirable: you don’t pay your bills, you disturb your neighbors on the block, you have to suffer the consequences. This is true, but the consequences of losing points are already controversial, such as the inability to buy a fast train or plane ticket, i.e. exclusion from certain areas of social life – without a court ruling.
Above all, this system requires total control of the population to be functional – we are talking about more than 20 million CCTV cameras installed in China and Big Brother algorithms that recognize everything from cars to human faces. And unfortunately – the tools of these social punishments, along with the entire surveillance apparatus, can be turned against people on much more serious levels than going through a red light, just think of the many Christians who, in China, officially professing atheism, have, to put it mildly, a strong uphill battle.
In addition, the system will develop in a distinctly socialist direction: China has launched a digital yuan (e-CNY), which is to have an expiration date by design. In other words: money, available only in digital form, will “expire” after a certain period of time if not spent. In addition to the easy-to-imagine surprises, such as blocking of digital money due to loss of public trust, this system will also prevent people from saving money. Importantly, as long as these types of projects are not officially implemented, only tested in a trial phase, affect only a certain region, a percentage of the population, they do not attract much attention and thus do not raise objections; once they are widely implemented, it is already too late.
THE WEST WANTS TO COPY CHINA
One could respond that this is just a cultural peculiarity of China, and even there people can revolt, as in the case of protests against sanitation policies – but this is not a solid argument. As for the protests, it is difficult to judge the situation in a country that is an ace at both filtering information and creating a message as to which recordings reflect authentic public sentiment and which are allowed as part of some information propaganda. What’s more, China is treated by global elites as a model to follow – this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos was inaugurated by President Xi Jinping, pointing out the social cohesion of Chinese communism, which was then just celebrating its 100th birthday (to China’s great credit, however, it should be cited that it is not in the habit of meddling in the internal affairs of foreign countries, caring above all for correct trade relations).
One could also refer to ever more glaring examples of Western imitations of the Chinese model of governance. Canada, once synonymous with freedom and prosperity, which even so eagerly supported recent protests in China over sanitation policies, in the name of national security simply cut off access to the bank accounts of peaceful critics occupying downtown Ottawa who were opposing Canadian sanitation policies. Closer to home, in November this year, the well-known French news television station BFM TV aired a video titled “2050: Let’s open our eyes,” which considered how to achieve zero-carbon emissions. The solution proposed is simple: by introducing cards, but more modern ones – payment cards integrated with an algorithm that calculates what our share of emissions is, of course blocking purchases of given things if we have exhausted the limit in a particular segment. The goal? To reduce the current annual average emissions of nine tons of CO₂ per person to two tons. Admittedly, BFM TV highlighted that it was “docufiction” and not a documentary, but the most accurate reflection on such ideas are Bill Gates’ words about the need to give up meat (and Prof. Filipik’s echoing of Gates in our country about Poles “gobbling up” too much meat), and above all, the European Union’s agenda and plans for a green transformation, by taxing and banning…and tracking our consumption. No, there is no personal carbon credit system in Europe yet, but, as the BFM TV video points out, it would be an ideal tool to achieve the indicated goals.
TIMES OF NEW SLAVERY
However, the biggest factor enabling the gradual implementation of Chinese social gains on Western soil is not all kinds of utopians, dreamers, or lackeys who will make money from brokering any deal, or celebrities ready to support the biggest aberrations of the moment as long as they are applauded by the media. These are not irrelevant factors, of course, they are important and fundamental, but the key in all this is our psychological conditioning, namely the need for a subjective sense of security.
First, the fear of death. The most far-reaching government intrusions into civil liberties in the West during the COVID era, often overturned later by the courts, including in Poland, gained much public approval precisely because of fear (anything but a respirator and a coffin). In the Union, we barely avoided to make green certificates permanent, which, without a solid medical basis, were supposed to remove lepers from many segments of public life; and despite protests (let’s mention the mass demonstrations in France every Saturday), this policy had wide social acceptance. To reiterate, as the engineers of social progress themselves make no secret of it: crisis, fear-inducing as it is, is the best opportunity for unpopular reforms.
Second, and this is also related to fear, the naive, but like a very firmly rooted desire for a perfectly safe world where nothing threatens us, where we always know how best to act because we are guided by the directives of wiser technocrats, where there is no need for real responsibility, since the only responsibility is to follow all sorts of guidelines and ever-emerging ordinances, even if they are not supported by reason or meta politics as determined by human nature and traditional norms of social life.
Finally, and this is perhaps most important, the cultural departure from Christian anthropology, which, after all, essentially contributed to the disappearance of slavery in Christianized lands. If the law should help man become virtuous, virtue itself is impossible in a world of pure precepts and detailed ordinances, where in the scheme of things habits are more mechanical than rational. The progression of the citizen’s incapacitation in the face of Leviathan’s omnipotence precedes the Western man’s abdication of his own civilization, including a healthy understanding of freedom. The entire history of European legal systems largely boils down to balancing the power of authority with the rights of the empowered individual, where the golden solution is determined by justice and the common good. It is true that for the sake of the common good, all technology, including artificial intelligence algorithms, should be coupled into a system of security for both nations and individuals, but this cannot come at the expense of objectifying human beings in the unspeakable form of modern, indeed, more comfortable than in the past, albeit still slavery and Orwellian control.
This article was published in January 2023 in “Do Rzeczy” weekly.
