The Existential Threat of the Existential Threat.
Image by Gerd Altmann
The Existential Threat of the Existential Threat.
Climate change is an existential threat.
Misinformation is an existential threat.
Inequality is an existential threat.
The next pandemic is an existential threat.
Our democracy is facing an existential threat.
And everyone must be prepared for each of them and prepared to do anything to stop them.
That’s the current line, at least – the line that is driving global society at all levels just up to the edge of sanity and cohesion.
And that’s on purpose, because it’s much easier to push someone over the edge when they are already standing next to it.
Each of these false threats are being intentionally inflicted, becoming comorbidities on an already weakened body politic, making it even more vulnerable to its destruction and its eventual death.
Being told you are going to die is devastating. Being told you and your family are going to die is monumentally awful. Being told everyone is going to die is…numbing. It creates a state of utter helplessness, a state in which you are far more pliant.
Your situational awareness dims, your flight or fight sense slows, and you just stand and stare until someone puts their arm around your shoulders and leads you away.
And those invoking that dread are waiting nearby to do just that – take society by the shoulder, offer it comfort on the form of entertainment, medication, and basic sustenance, and lead it away.
Each of the threats is aimed directly at the first principle of Western society – the primacy of the individual. All the threats, all of the communitarianism being foisted upon the culture – including the claim that it is what group a person is a part of, not the person themselves, that is the most important defining human characteristic – have the same underlying message: the elimination of the idea that society is made up of discrete individuals with personal agency.
And from not acknowledging individual agency to not permitting it at all is a very short step.
That is the actual existential threat of the false existential threats now bouncing around the globe, clattering into people and families and societies and cultures and intentionally causing so much chaos and disruption that just standing in one place is not necessarily an irrational decision.
Of course, none of the current coming catastrophes are existential threats – they aren’t really threats at all but the vanguard of the global socialite socialists statists has made sure the public thinks they are, under penalty of ostracization, job loss, and censorship.
Besides not being actual threats, they cannot even remotely be described as an existential threat. An existential threat is – in part – defined as a threat to the very existence of a thing or a system. It is terminal, global, and transgenerational. It is not transitory, it is not political, it is not determined by the people making the claim: to be an existential threat something must be real and unprecedented and permanent.
But the term – which seems to be important-sounding because it actually is – can be misused by people and groups to heighten the impact of their statement, no matter what it may be, because the actual definition is either not widely known or purposefully ignored by the people using it and the media that reports what they are claiming.
This opens the door to anything being described as such a threat.
There is also the issue of the origin of the term – existential philosophers focused on subjective ideas of thought and emotion and action as they relate to existence while the more concrete “threats” described when the term is used are putatively real and specific. That is an additional misleading element of the use of the term.
In other words, the term is used to apply a thin veneer of intellectual certainty to the threat that it is claiming actually exists.
Despite the protestations of the greenocracy, the real global existential threat is not fossil fuel or proper food or basic human mobility or all of the other aspects of the material economy.
The real threat is from the ethereal economy of government agencies, civil society actors, non-governmental organizations, foundations, and academia, all aided by the information cabal. Together they do, in fact, currently have the power to foist something upon civilization that truly is transgenerational, global, and terminal.
And the never-ending pretense of emergency is a powerful tool in accomplishing that goal:
What happens when that dreaded decision whether to jump right or left in the face of an oncoming car is not a once or twice in a lifetime decision, but a daily question? That constant state of trepidation grinds on people, placing humans into a state of making most if not all decisions from a place of panic instead of reason.
And it is during that constant state of nervous exhaustion – a state manufactured out of whole cloth by its potential beneficiaries – when those who wish to wield power in society strike.
What is being offered is a society in which no one can fail. But a society in which no one can fail is also a society in which no one can succeed, especially to the point where they can threaten the existing power structure.
And it is that threat – which is an existential threat to that spider web of profitable tyranny – that is being targeted by the global fear noise.
The democracy being threatened is “their” democracy, not “our” democracy.
The climate being threatened is their silver sheened scrubbed personal environment – the actual environmental destruction that is occurring is out of sight, the denigrating of the sub-Deltas who inhabit other places, is immaterial.
The information being threatened are the lies being told to prop up the societal transformation.
The equality being threatened is their right to be more equal than others forever.
And the pandemic being threatened is the right to declare a pandemic on a whim, terrifying the public into ceding basic rights in the name of safety.
The means and the ends are interchangeable, creating a Mobius Strip of dehumanization on which every degrading tactic can be hidden – unless you know exactly where they lay, they are visible only out of the side of the eye, an oblique uncertainty, and can be easily dismissed as figments, as conspiracy theories.
It cannot be known exactly what will be touted as the next existential threat.
What is already known is whom it will benefit.
Note – it may seem a bit odd, but then again really not, but it could behoove all of us to take the advice of Hannibal Lecter when considering what the societal serial killers are seeking:
Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License courtesy of The Brownstone Institute.
