World Order 2021: Afterward

by Steven Yates

My magnum opus of two weeks ago was a bit of an experiment. For one thing, Lew Rockwell usually doesn’t publish fiction; for another, I have less experience with fiction than commentary. But over the years I’ve been involved with these ideas, a couple of worries have sunk in and taken root. I cannot shake them.

First, however clear I am of my own conclusions about the potential benefits of economic liberty for the world, coupled with smaller and less intrusive government, the plain truth is, huge numbers of people simply aren’t interested in liberty. It isn’t that they draw government paychecks that would be instantly threatened if a libertarian society into existence (although some do). They don’t oppose liberty – openly, anyway. But so long as their paychecks keep coming in, from whatever source, they just aren’t concerned. Government can expand its police powers at home and impose its will on other countries abroad, and they don’t sense the danger. They aren’t especially interested in what does not seem to affect them directly and immediately. The problem isn’t any more profound than that.

Second, and no doubt related, is the fact that many people seem impervious to logic and experience. Applying logic to economic situations is not easy. (For that matter, applying history to economic situations is not necessarily easy.) Consider how many people continue to say, "Bush ought to do something to fix the economy." Top-down presidential actions do more damage than good to the economy. History shows this; Austrian school economics explains why. Or consider how many people believe that such things as tax breaks and other incentives including "public-private partnerships" are good for business and for the economy because they "create jobs." It takes thinking things through to understand the "broken window fallacy," for example, and why sound economics involves the distinction between what is seen and what is not seen.

It isn’t that these people are stupid; most are quite adept with their own affairs. Many of their instincts are sound. They can run businesses, for example. They are often smart enough to realize something is wrong with, e.g., the tax system, and with government regulations they must spend thousands of dollars complying with. But they can be faulted for never trying to see the big picture. Those who take little or no interest in what does not affect them directly and immediately are susceptible, by a kind of cultural osmosis, to the kinds of illusions academic and government "economics" creates and which are reinforced in the dominant mass media. They believe whatever Dan Rather says. They don’t want to go to the trouble to do the cognitive labor it takes to understand, say, the logic of free market economics – or why the larger government gets, the more havoc it actually wreaks as We the People are transformed into dependent, complacent sheeple.

Such folks might not be much interested in commentary that challenges the prevailing statism. But a few might well pick up an engaging work of fiction that communicates the message indirectly. In fact, I’m counting on it. Few libertarian commentary writers dare give up their day jobs. Science fiction, however, sells like hotcakes! There are science fiction writers earning reasonably comfortable livings cranking out novels at the rate of one or so a year. Moreover, some of these books pull in libertarian themes, often tied into intricate plots worked out against the backdrop of statist disasters of one sort or another. James P. Hogan’s novels Saturn’s Cradle and the more recent Paths to Otherwhere are current examples. And of course, there are old stand-bys like L. Neil Smith’s many novels, a few of Robert A. Heinlein’s works, and a few others such as F. Paul Wilson’s colorful An Enemy of the State (republished more recently as the opening segment of a larger volume entitled The LaNague Chronicles). No doubt there are quite a few others.

People who have unknowingly embraced disastrous ideas may well come to question them if they are shown their consequences – in, for example, works of dystopian science fiction. Most science fiction has traditionally been optimistic about the future. But there has always been room for warnings about what the future might become if we make the wrong choices in the present. Ordinary people have what it takes to pick up on these messages even if they can’t quote Mises on what is wrong with statism. Consider the classics. It was, after all, Orwell’s Animal Farm, required reading in my eighth grade English class, that first alerted me to dangers of word manipulation by that minority in any population that wants power. Later, 1984 portrayed the world Orwell feared would come about when those who wanted power assumed it. Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 offered a society in which reading books is literally illegal. Huxley’s Brave New World – the granddaddy of them all – served up a (to my mind, anyway) far more frightening vision of a society in which the government doesn’t have to ban books. Everyone is satisfactorily entertained and "somatized," so no one cares. Huxley’s vision plays against the backdrop of something very much real: efforts at behavior modification occurring particularly in government schools today. Writers such as B.K. Eakman document these efforts extensively in works such as The Cloning of the American Mind.

WO 2021 was not prophecy. At least, I hope not. It was a warning. Fortunately, most readers who sent me email saw this. WO 2021 drew exclusively on tendencies – economic, political, educational, and technological – that are either in place now and advancing apace or are easily imaginable. As one reader put it in an email, "You need to move your date down to 2003! This nonsense is already here!" Another said, "A good story, I pray it’s only a story – but in my heart of hearts I know it’s not."

The issue, for those who are serious about liberty, is how to keep "New Richmond" from ever being built.

Several things are necessary. None of them will be easy. Enormous financial resources are already being poured into the creation of this type of world, usually courtesy of tax-exempt foundations such as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, among others. WO 2021 depicted a fully globalized society run by a global government – essentially, a successor to the United Nations. It is important to recognize how influential the globalists in the UN are, how much of this influence is carefully concealed from the public, and how globalists use certain issues, especially those pertaining to the environment, to advance their agenda which includes total control over the world’s natural resources.

The same day that WO 2021 went up, Henry Lamb’s article "UN Influence in Alabama" appeared. Lamb’s articles ought to be required reading because he also has the UN’s number and always supplies readers with all the links we need to follow up his main claims with our own research. His main claim here is that an innocent looking "forest management plan" being developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alabama is actually in accordance with the UN’s agenda. It will leave huge tracts of forestland in that state under the direct control of internationalist interests, undermining both state and national sovereignty. Such moves certainly don’t have Constitutional sanction. The U.S. Constitution does not recognize the authority of any global bodies.

Alabama is hardly alone, however. Land is being handed over to globalist interests in every state in this country. Currently, the UN and the Bush Administration seem at loggerheads because Bush went into Iraq without UN approval. This, I am convinced, is Hollywood stuff, prepared and disseminated to the masses – to those people who believe everything Dan Rather says and get all their news from the city newspaper (whose syndicated columnists are typically either New York Times or Washington Post types). The global elites in both the upper echelons of our government and the UN are working closely together. Check out how many of Bush’s top people, how many neocons generally, and how many media moguls are members of the Council on Foreign Relations, arguably the most important body in this country with a longstanding plan of internationalization: undermining U.S. sovereignty, what little is left of Constitutionally-limited government, and preparing the way for a world government that would have us all under the iron control of a ruling elite.

WO 2021 depicted a highly feminized society, i.e., a society in which radical feminists have completely taken over – perhaps in the wake of something that would be truly dangerous, a Hillary presidency (projected in my WO 2021 timeline as beginning in 2008 – although with the slate of insipid mediocrity’s lining up to oppose Bush in 2004 so far, it might not take that long!). In the WO 2021 world, women are everywhere in positions of authority. The use of spelling changes (womin for the singular, womyn for the plural) indicate their utter independence from men who are permanent second-class citizens, working in low-paying clerical jobs, as drivers, or regarded as cannon fodder to be sent off to die on foreign battlefields. Working men such as Jason’s father are demoralized, and have given up hope of ever being any more than they are. But look at what this world has done to the women in the story. The lady cops near the end may be the descendents of feminism, but they sure aren’t feminine.

One need only read Angela Fiori’s brilliant essay "Feminism’s Third Wave" to see not just what radical feminism has done to men but what it has done to women. Contrary to the legions of radical feminists many of whom haven’t spent a day outside their university cubicles and classrooms, radical feminism has horribly damaged the family unit. (One reader wondered if I had lapsed into anachronism by having the Sandborn "guardians" married to each another. Possibly so.) It has left the adult "dating scene" in a complete shambles. It has destroyed men’s and women’s capacities to respect and trust one another. It has left many men, especially intellectual men, or just men who refuse to be dominated, remaining single almost as a matter of choice. I wonder if it occurred to Fiori, as she was writing, that one reason there are so few men for the women in the age brackets about which she seemed most concerned that are both decent and available is that many of the men have looked at the Palm-Pilot career women she describes and decided they are not interested. (Speaking only for myself as a one-time aspiring academic, I learned long ago how few academic women of any age bracket I can stand to be around for any length of time.)

These results threaten our culture because when men choose not to marry and women do not have children, our culture does not reproduce itself. It is diluted, and potentially overwhelmed, when immigrant cultures do. This was one of the more ominous tendencies Patrick J. Buchanan charted in his The Death of the West. Buchanan may not always have his economics right, but he shows convincingly how European whites and European-descended whites are slowly being submerged in masses of immigrants. This is due not just to suicidally lax immigration laws but because whites are not having children in sufficient numbers to maintain their percentage in the overall population. The primary blame for this must lie with a radical feminist movement that has impelled women to have careers in record numbers instead of children – remaining single, because "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It must also lie with the affirmative action programs that routinely promote women ahead of men in every occupation. The effects on boys and men of an increasingly feminized society are already showing. The day after WO 2021 appeared, a 60 Minutes episode reran last fall’s segment on the solid evidence showing how boys are falling behind girls in school at every level from grade school through graduate school. Girls increasingly outnumber boys on college campuses, with boys more likely to drop out. What was amazing was the sense on the part of 60 Minutes that something mysterious and inexplicable is going on. Folks, this isn’t rocket science. An increasingly institutionalized radical feminism is going to lead silenced boys to speak with their feet. They aren’t going to attend institutions if they’ve already sensed, while still in high school, that the whole educational system is hostile to their interests.

And speaking of education, WO 2021 depicts a world in which education is controlled in every detail by the state – and in which the individual is watched at every minute, with every detail of his life in a government database. Again, enormous resources have been poured into the creation of this kind of system, one in which education to produce independent thinkers and solid, Constitutionally-minded citizens who will be watchdogs on government has been replaced by training to produce workers according to predesignated job categories. School-To-Work education, which came of age in the 1990s, is by now well known – as did that phrase, the global workforce. The new version of this sort of education for the 2000 decade is George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, the most sweeping federalization of government schools ever. We are already well on our way towards the kind of system seen in that New Richmond school, in which fractions are taught in the eighth grade according to a bizarre form of "new new math." There is plenty of evidence, moreover, that this dumbing down has been part of a deliberate campaign going back decades – back before the last turn of the century, in fact. One need only read Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt’s the deliberate dumbing down of america or John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education for the details. Home schooling – at present the fastest growing education movement in the country – presently tenders prospects of an escape from government schools that are no longer seen as educational or safe. But if home schooling becomes influential enough, it will begin to face determined opposition from people who will do whatever they can to stop it in its tracks, including making it illegal once more if they are allowed to do so. My warning here is that it will not be sufficient simply for Christian parents to pull their children out of government schools and home school them or place them in private schools. They must stay engaged with the larger system and remain informed and vigilant – ready to respond immediately if they believe their children are threatened. (Fortunately, this is already happening here in South Carolina, and no doubt in other states as well. But we need more!)

WO 2021 also depicts a world, finally, in which not just homosexuality but also pedophilia is accepted – as just one dish in the smorgasbord of "lifestyle choices." Many readers may not be aware that at least one writer, Judith Levine, has penned a book entitled Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex. University of Minnesota Press published the book, which sports an introduction by Dr. Joycelyn Elders and contains material that argues for a reconsideration of society’s abhorrence of "adult-child love relationships." Need I argue where we are heading with this, given the evidence of continued efforts to normalize homosexuality in the government schools (even among highly impressionable elementary school children!)?

Such things may be horrifying, but none of this goes to the heart of the issue. Is there any way off the road we are presently on, which can lead only to Huxleyan dictatorship over "somatized" masses who may well accept adult-child relationships because they stopped questioning what was happening? One of my readers was abjectly pessimistic, and offered the following speculation which takes us back to the issue I raised at the outset: "The crux of the problem does appear to be that the vast majority of people are functionally indifferent to serious issues of liberty…. As someone who doesn’t believe human nature is any different now than it was two or three thousand years ago, I’m inclined to think that what’s afoot in the USA only reflects what happens when human nature combines with a certain set of external conditions, especially a particular level of technological development…. I gravely doubt that the general run of humanity really possesses much suitability for freedom except under quite favorable circumstances that foster the spirit of independence. It’s a sad comment, but to me it seems probable that the USA’s initial 80-odd years of comparative republican vigor and relatively high freedom were an aberration substantially owed to external conditions such as a limited level of technology, in conjunction with abundant room for expansion, etc. When less propitious circumstances obtain, the few to whom liberty is important are largely dragged down along with the indifferent majorities who have less celestial fish to fry." If this is true, then our particular culture is indeed in a state of decline, the marches toward global empire and cultural degradation are irreversible until nature takes the unpleasant course of bringing them crashing down. In this case, the best believers in freedom can do is keep the ideas alive, underground if necessary, until conditions for their re-emergence are right again – or until the Second Coming, whichever happens first.

Is this gloomy outlook justified? The only way to find out is to continue the existing efforts to advance the cause of liberty while exposing the essential hollowness of state solutions (to economic problems, educational problems, and so on). The Free State Project, mentioned indirectly in WO 2021, offers one intriguing possibility worth watching closely. This is the effort to select a single state where libertarians can move to concentrate in sufficient numbers to influence and then capture state government – then demonstrating the benefits of liberty through a better economy and a more honest state government. The Project, though, faces the same dilemma as home schooling: to the extent that it is successful, it will threaten the growing hegemony of our would-be ruling elites. They have more than enough resources to come after libertarians, and since they already control the mainstream media, the latter cannot be counted on to present the story of the rise of a libertarian state government accurately and honestly. Most likely, the libertarians will be depicted as dangerous anarchists, as people who threaten "job creation," as members of "antigovernment hate groups" or even, given the temper of our present times in the poast-9/11 world, as potential terrorists.

So what do we do?

Well over 200 years ago, the Scottish philosopher David Hume remarked in one of his most famous essays that:

Hume is observing that governments of whatever sort, and no matter how powerful, retain their legitimacy through maintaining favorable opinion throughout the population. This is why politicians and bureaucrats are so desperate to retain control over education, and why they seek the favor of those in the elite media. It is up to us – We the People – to see to it that they do not maintain such control. One way to do it is the way we at LewRockwell.com and the many LRC readers are already doing, which is to read, study, learn, and then disseminate these ideas far and wide through our own organizations and networks. And then to make our voices heard against such abominations as No Child Left Behind, Total Information Awareness and Patriot II – and preparing to yell bloody murder at the top of our lungs if an effort is ever made to seize control over the contents of websites. I know that spam is a nuisance and that online porn is bad news, but as always if we open the door to the use of state power to get rid of them we shall never close that door again!

Remembering this is the key to the solution. The legitimacy of any and all government measures is based on the maintenance of opinion. We, however, have the truth on our side, and an unquenchable will to remain a free people. We do not have to be a numerical majority. Numerical majorities have never amounted to anything. As Samuel Adams once observed, "it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." The question remains: will enough people get informed and then rise to the occasion? If they do, the globalist movement could be stopped in its tracks in a matter of a few years, shown to be out of accordance with the U.S. Constitution and delegitimized – just as an irate minority stopped the Soviet Empire from within. We could also turn back the tides of the radical feminist movement and of political correctness generally, which exemplifies the institution of opinion by means of propaganda and intimidation. If these realizations are not used to unlock the gateway back to freedom, than there will be no solution except, paraphrasing the grandfather in WO 2021, to ride this whole thing out.

June 7, 2003

Steven Yates [send him mail] is an adjunct scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. A professional writer and editor with a PhD in philosophy, he is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1994). His latest book manuscript, In Defense of Logic, is undergoing revisions. He works out of Columbia, South Carolina.

Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com

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