EMERGENCY !!

[First published April 29th 2023]

Why everything is defined as urgent...and why this is mostly a mind game. Try using this information filter: "90% of the actionable political movements claiming what they are active in is an Emergency would disappear the moment their cause would NOT be treated as an emergency, but as a problem."

[Usual disclaimer: nothing in this article should be construed as “advice” under present EU financial legislation, your mileage may vary]

I admit that I follow mainstream media less and less, but at various points in recent past I wondered about the reason why. Of course, both the average and median quality is appalling, but that's not it. Until it finally dawned on me.

Because it's depressing.

Before the “blinding flash of the obvious” memes appear, let me rephrase it. I may be mistaken, human memory is an overrated instrument since we basically rewrite it all the time, albeit not at the level of Netflix promoting the idea of Cleopatra being “African” in the modern US sense; rather, we apply the lens of the sum total of our experience to our personal recollection of the past, both recent and distant, hence when we look at our teen years with the decades of life some of us have already elapsed (I am currently sixty), the kind of introspection and reexamination changes the view on things and OF things. A bit like more advanced instruments have improved our knowledge of planets without changing them in any way, experience doesn't change history but changes the granularity and analysis. And experience, at its very core, it's the ability to remember pain and how to avoid it: “mistakes were made”, and the fact that further mistakes WILL be made is absolutely no reason not to try to live fully.

So WHY we are currently in a depressing mood? The fact that current events are objectively more difficult than they were barely two decades ago explains a part, but not all.

What in my opinion changed is that it's always a kind of emergency situation, and humans are not built to use higher brain functions under those conditions, by design: Mother Nature won't allow it since we're hardwired to ensure continuity of the species in usual, more “natural” emergencies, so She cuts off higher brain functions in an high enough percentage of the population to ensure a sufficient number of eligible young people trample over the weaker and older in order to have a next generation. Ancient Greeks described that in their myths, and the name, “Panic”, comes from that.

But what if that actually had been used as an instrument of governance instead of a natural “all in” response common to all animals including us?

There IS a rationale behind that anyway: all human ventures are in a way measured on their success, and success is a fickle beast which requires luck at all times, but more often than not also an ability to prepare for eventualities: as a person familiar with the works of Professor Nassim Taleb, I am familiar with the concept of “Black Swan”.... and the misuse of that concept to hide personal or professional ignorance. What happens when it's POLITICAL?

The Climate Change agenda has been promoted basically as an emergency since the 70ies, and one of the possible frames to analyze it is the one I am using now, and as usual trying to dismantle.... with very little success so far: that as all “Emergencies”, it changes the discussion, especially the political one, from “efficacy” to “effort”. And effort, be that at a big corporate level or the political level (if any border still exists between the two domains) is catnip for bureaucrats. It creates importance, money and job positions all willfully paid by an unthinking public.... and if the thing is as successful as it has been in the past decade, suppression of doubting voices is further made simpler by the very call for “emergency” that was the rallying cry of the cause from day one.

Why I am currently using that filter on reality, until it gets conclusively proven false? And HOW or when will I know it is a distorted and wrong framing of underlying realities?

Well, there are “tells” on when that “emergency” technique is used, some weak, some strong tells. The weakest is this one:

1. what is described as an “emergency” had already happened multiple times, or was well within the realm of possibilities, or both.

Going back to climate change... Climate changes all the time. Within the meager realm of history (and art, and lore) we have lots of examples of multidecadal change, up and down, in environmental conditions. We take for granted that it is an urgent priority and that it is not only man made but that it is actually controllable because we have been SOLD by the “emergency” faction that those assumptions are not only true, but cannot either be questioned or checked against progress. In fact public opinion has been radicalized in that regard: there is a crowd which takes it as Gospel, and it is telling that they idolized an teenager teenager, and another that can and would produce sheaves of previous forecasts of disasters made by the same promoters of urgency, peppered with questionable methodologies and short memories.

Ditto for the COVID reaction: NBC threats (Nuclear, Bacteriological, Chemical) threats were ever present during the cold war, yet the pinnacle of western civilization had no plans, had not prepared individual citizens (in spite of the fact that some individual countries at least had some civil defense information in place,Sweden being an example), and the famed or infamous World Health Organization can be viewed from opposite sides as a bumbling accomplice of politicians bent on putting in place limitation of freedoms per se or a pillar of sanity.

2. There is a not so discrete effort to manipulate, hide, or deprecate PAST information and practices relevant to the situation at hand.

This is relevant also on the financial side of the current situation, on which I am less free to air my views publicly since I am a regulated entity... and that's part of my filter since what I actually do for a living is not particularly amenable to any sensible regulation, and the one that's being applied to me is... of questionable value. Suffice to say that it can be made readily apparent that no evaluation of impact or usefulness has ever been done by any knowledgeable person who had no interest in creating an artificial pie of which he could have a slice later. But going back to other domains, has anyone ever followed up on past predictions of the preachers of climate change? Of course, Al Gore has disappeared from the screen, but John Kerry has an official role on that yet months can elapse without any information of what he is actually up to, at least as far as EU media go. And as to COVID, Fauci et al. Are busy rewriting history to make it seem that they let people free to make their own decisions. Other notable contenders for rewriting the past are of course Italian government officials, and Justin Trudeau.

3. There is a clarion call about “academic consensus” that is used to silence criticism.

At some point, SCIENTISTS with stellar track records in relevant fields started to get deprecated for straying away from the path that the political side that feeds academia had set in stone. Many information outlets, notably Twitter, which being no “News organization” at all should have been a champion of free speech but under Jack Dorsey wasn't, DID indeed mute and kick out many of them for “apostasy”. 

Now, mark my words: I don't give a whit about orthodoxy on or being personally right, I DO care about freedom of opinion. And “freedom of opinion” is simply not there if they cannot be aired by the people who have them: mainstream media by design have an editor, and as such self select for opinion, that's why we need “free press”- This does NOT mean that individual journalists are free: they get regularly booted out for not toeing the party line, or because property of the media changes hands. The important thing is that if they find someone to bankroll them they can and DO find their place. Joe Rogan wouldn't obviously find a spot at the New York Times if he paid for it himself, but he has over ten million subscriber on his podcast.... which, at the time it was acquired as a Spotify exclusive drew an uproar by the woke employee base there, as you can read from the link. Oh, and while you are at it: try searching for “Joe Rogan Spotify” in Google and in Duckduckgo news.... and you will see what I mean. Two VERY different kettle of fish.

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1651646413275557889?s=20https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1651646413275557889?s=20

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1651646413275557889?s=20