fusangite – StuartParker.ca

From South Chicago to Lower Post, BC: The Contemporary Relevance of Richard Wright’s Native Son

Orthodoxy and Un-Saying
People often mistakenly call Wokeness and its component parts “ideology.” While there are certainly ideological aspects of this godless religion, they are often not the most salient characteristics. Certainly, there are religious doctrines associated with this cluster of social movements, but the mechanisms by which they are defended or justified are not ideological in character. Indeed, when a movement propounding a religious orthodoxy takes an authoritarian turn, as Wokeness certainly has, ideologically driven argument is rarely its preferred tool for imposing its beliefs on the skeptical.

For instance, when Galileo Galilei was persecuted for propounding his scientific discoveries, the argument of the Roman Catholic Church was not that his views were incorrect. No argument was mounted against his ideas. Rather, the church argued that stating his views was impermissible and because his views should not have been stated, they were effectively un-said. No argument needed to be mounted against them at all; the faithful were not asked to disbelieve them but rather to act as though they had never heard them.

To state that Central Asian Muslim migrant communities in England are perpetrating violence against girls at a significantly greater rate than their neighbours is not a position UK Labour politicians argue against. They simply state that making this observation is Islamophobic. Because it is impermissible to make the observation, its veracity need not be evaluated. To observe that transgender-identified males are three to four times more likely to commit acts of sexual violence than other males is not a position anyone argues against. Such an observation is un-said because to make it is transphobic. To observe that the main reason that black Americans are more likely to be victims of violent crimes is because young black males are more likely to commit such crimes than other Americans is racist. The veracity of the observation is irrelevant. The problem is not vulnerable black Americans being assaulted; it is people talking about who is assaulting them.

These practices of orthodoxy enforcement, of un-saying, do not impact all of us equally. As you can see from the paragraph above, this kind of retroactive censorship hits the most vulnerable people in our society the hardest, working class teenage girls, incarcerated women and black seniors are just some of the constituencies whose victimization it is impermissible to talk about. Furthermore, if we expand our optic, we might also consider how ill-served young black men or men compelled by an untreated mental illness to mutilate themselves also are by this state of affairs.

Author Wesley Yang cogently observed on Twitter last week that, thanks to this phenomenon, “the best way to obtain immunity from consequence in today’s media environment is to make one’s wrongdoing aligned with dark stereotypes adhering to one’s group—so that a neutral description of what you actually did violates a taboo against exclusionary tropes.”

This “shoot the messenger” policy is today so vigorously defended by those claiming to be “anti-racism” activists that many imagine these practices of silencing observations that risk reinforcing negative stereotypes have always been a practice of anti-racist movements. But this is just another example of Woke reimaginings of the past to serve the present.

Richard Wright, Native Son and the Black Communists
Richard Wright, whose grandparents had been born into slavery, whose parents were sharecroppers, who grew up in violent, impoverished homes and the occasional orphanage lifted himself out of poverty to become one of the greatest black American novelists of the twentieth century. An autodidact with little formal education, Wright did not merely teach himself the craft of writing but dialectical materialism. His credentials as a Marxist and literary giant, not to mention his membership in the Communist Party, ultimately led to his selection as editor of the Daily Worker in 1937.

Shortly thereafter, he began work on his next novel, Native Son. Its main character was provocatively named Bigger Thomas. Bigger—whose name Wright said he chose deliberately to rhyme with “nigger”—was a young, violent black criminal who epitomized the stereotypes of young American black men that are little-changed in the eighty-five years since the novel was first published. “Thomas” referred to the obsequious and weak aspects of his nature by way of reference to Uncle Tom of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Native Son was published in 1940 to great accolades from across the American left. The first novel by a black author featured by Book of the Month Club, it was praised by communists, socialists and civil rights activists; Hollywood made three movies of it, the first in 1951, starring Wright himself. Partly inspired by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Bigger, an uneducated violent petty criminal, murders a young, naïve, white communist woman and, in prison, discovers not Jesus but Karl Marx. Orson Welles directed its 1941 Broadway debut.

Much of the final part of the book is a structural analysis of the economic forces that have manufactured Thomas and his ilk that caused so many young men to become uneducated violent criminals. The fact was that too many black men were poor; too many were uneducated; too many were violent; too many were Uncle Toms.

One would think that in our Woke moment, when ideas of “structural violence,” “institutional racism,” “colonialism,” etc. seem hegemonic that Native Son with its highly didactic Marxist concluding chapters would be a much beloved text among progressives. But we all know the reality. Were Native Son published today, it would be assailed as a racist, white supremacist text that reinforced racial stereotypes. Wokes would burn copies and call for Wright’s assault or murder for suggesting, as an eye-witness, that America’s black community has problems with men’s violence that are common to all communities and has problems that are exceptional and non-universal.

You Cannot Cure What You Cannot Diagnose
If one cannot name a problem, the chances of solving it become vanishingly small. If one cannot take notice of the specific features of violence and other social problems in a place like South Side Chicago, where Wright grew up, what chance do we have of addressing these problems? We cannot protect people from today’s Bigger Thomases on their block if we cannot admit that Thomas exists in the first place.

Whether it is violence in America’s inner cities or addiction on Canada’s remote Indian Reserves, an establishment that will not let you notify it of problems because it un-says every report cannot and will note help you. It cannot and will not design rational public policy responses when its discourse insists that there is no such problem because you haven’t reported it because it would be bigoted and reinforce negative stereotypes to do so. Not reinforcing the “drunken Indian” stereotype is more important than helping indigenous communities struggling with addiction.

That is why, today, it is the local Indian Bands in places like Lower Post and Skidegate are taking extraordinary and extralegal measures to protect their communities from the blizzard of drug dealing unleashed by BC’s “safe supply” policies. They realize there is no help coming from the white progressives running the government and the cops because these coddled souls imagine that the worst thing that can happen to you is that someone says negative things about a group you are part of. Not, say, death from fentanyl or a collision with an impaired driver. The establishment is so focused on protecting vulnerable communities from having their problems named that it is doing all it can to ensure that their problems cannot be solved because they cannot be discussed.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity Race Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | May 26, 2025

“Toxic Drugs,” “Clean Coal” and Newspeak in the Era of “Safe Supply”

There are many reasons British Columbia is continuing to see record levels of drug addiction and overdoses in our province, from poorly secured and inspected ports of entry to a lack of recovery and detox beds to the provision of addictive drugs for free to citizens as young as twelve years of age to tying the hands of law enforcement through our failed decriminalization experiment. One of the reasons we keep making bad decisions is the way radical activist propagandists have distorted our language about this issue, inhibiting our ability to accurately describe the problems we face.

Activist academics and civil servants are masters of Orwellian language games, constantly changing terminology on the grounds that plain language offends or “stigmatizes” a group of people. But let’s stop there for a moment. What is stigma? Stigma is social disapproval. But apparently, it is wrong to stigmatize being a drug addict. So, our education and healthcare systems want our kids to know that being addicted to drugs is no better or worse than not being addicted to drugs, that communities of people that are based around smoking crack are just as good as communities based around fly fishing or ballroom dancing.

Any recovered addict and most current addicts will tell you this is nonsense, that standing bent-double in the street in urine-soaked garments in semi-conscious state from fentanyl is less good other activities, like playing backgammon or doing a crossword puzzle; perhaps it is even bad. Of course, there should be social disapproval associated with drug addiction. How could there not be in a healthy society in which people, especially, children, need to be educated about the dangers of certain life paths?

Next, we come to the term “toxic drug crisis” which is entwined with the term “safe supply.” Both of these terms distort our thinking about this crisis and lead to bad policies, bad decisions and bad outcomes. Here our activist academics and managers in the caring professions have borrowed a type of rhetorical sleight of hand from another industry.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, there really was a reason use the term “clean coal.” Impurities in coal and byproducts from burning it produced acid rain, a major environmental problem in the Great Lakes, East Coast and Europe. So, new technologies were developed; new laws were passed; and new kinds of smokestacks were created that cleaned sulphur, nitrogen and other acidic impurities from emissions. Today, the Great Lakes continue to recover, with growing populations of marine life. Clean coal was a success!

But in the twenty-first century, the term “clean coal” was resurrected for a much less salutary purpose. It has been suggested that “clean coal” can help to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases associated with the Greenhouse Effect i.e. global warming. This is most irresponsible. The whole point of cleaning impurities from coal-fired emissions is that the only emission, after cleaning, is carbon dioxide. The great technological achievement of clean coal is to remove impurities so that global warming gases are emitted at a greater density, ideally 100%.

The terms “toxic drug crisis” and “safe supply” employ the same illogic. No one overdoses because of impurities in their heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, etc. They overdose from the active ingredient. Getting impurities out of these drugs does not reduce their addictiveness or deadliness. In fact, delivering a purer, less adulterated drug makes it more addictive, more dangerous, more deadly.

But by framing the problem with our street drugs as their lack of purity rather than their active ingredient, an undue and wholly inappropriate legitimacy is conferred on the idea that helping addicts get purer drugs will reduce addiction and overdoses. There is no “toxic drug crisis,” there is a simple “drug crisis.” The problem is the drugs not the adulterants they are cut with. And the idea that drugs can be made safe by being made purer is ludicrous when we remember that it is the drugs themselves that are the problem. People overdose on heroin and cocaine not the talcum powder, baking powder or crushed aspirin used to adulterate and stretch those drugs. And nobody becomes talc addict as a result. While the adulterants can cause serious long-term health problems, they cannot produce ODs.

And then there is a problem not just with the “safe” in “safe supply,” but the “supply” too. As any first year economics student knows, there is something known as the Law of Supply and Demand. It is a simple set of laws on which all economics is based. Foundational to it is this simple truth: all other things being equal, if you increase the supply of something in a market and do nothing else, the following will happen: prices, across the board, will fall and the total amount of the good that people consume will increase.

Safe supply drugs don’t push other opiates out of the market. They cause their vendors to lower their prices due to increased competition. And that means drug users can afford more drugs. If they are already taking “safe supply” drugs, they can supplement them with more affordable illicit drugs. Even if they are not, prices for the drugs they buy will fall, not just due to diversion and resale but because drugs, overall, are cheaper and more plentiful. The overall supply of drugs, is not getting safer, just bigger and more diverse.

And a province with minimum drink pricing legislation in force at liquor stores and bars, with punitive cigarette pricing, already knows that keeping drug prices up is a proven and vitally important public health tool.

We need to get back to proven tools with successful track records to get this crisis under control and to do that, we need to drop our misleading, propagandistic language and have a real conversation in which we speak bluntly and honestly. We owe the victims of this crisis nothing less.

Miscellaneous Articles | fusangite | May 25, 2025

The Death of Parable: Another Perspective on the Cognitive Decline of the West

The Gaslightenment: a Multi-pronged Attack on Reason
Sometimes it feels like a zombie movie; sometimes it feels like a plague of contagious dementia; sometimes it feels like Genghis Khan has hypnotized the entire city (the only good line from Alec Baldwin’s The Shadow. But we all know the feeling, this sense that our neighbours have taken leave of both their empathy and their faculties.

We are dealing with a set of interlocking social crises that some collectively call “the Gaslightenment.” We are becoming a paranoid, unreasoning, authoritarian society especially in the peripheral states of the Anglosphere. This turn of events has myriad causes and multiple origins. It is a perfect storm of converging authoritarian and anti-thought projects and organizations.

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with those forces that concern me the most, the collapse of internal party democracy in the West’s political parties, Genderwang’s capture of our major institutions, reaction formation in response to the climate event, etc. In the coming months I am going to try to cast light a little more broadly on a wider diversity of factors that have led us here, from endocrine disruptors, to 1980s changes to firefighting practices to today’s essay on the loss of the parable.

I was in church the other day, a different kind of church than the liberal churches I had attended (I attended the Unitarian Church when I was a child and the Anglican Church in my thirties). It was a conservative, scripture-focused church in the medium-sized farming community in which I am currently residing. Consequently, people in the church were far more inclined to speak about the immediate relevance and applicability of Biblical lessons and episodes in recounting and reasoning about their daily lives.

Two conversations stood out: one was a discussion of the parable of the wheat and the tares, another of the wealth of the Kingdom of Judah in goats. In both cases, the conversation turned to the practicalities of agriculture. The actual methods and activities associated with herding, milking and slaughtering goats, the challenges of maintaining a wheat field in the face of invasive species and weeds were crucial to our conversations about scripture.

These conversations would not have been possible in the Anglican church I attended on Bathurst Street in Toronto or at the Unitarian church on Oak Street in Vancouver because most congregants did not possess agricultural knowledge or practical and obvious knowledge of the natural world. One of the reasons I want to suggest that there is so much strangeness, so much error, so much de-literalization of scripture—not just from progressive churches but most conservative ones too—has to do with the changes in our economies and patterns of settlement over the past century and a half, leading to what I term “the death of parable.”

The Decline of Natural and Agricultural Knowledge
Aesop’s Fables existed long before the birth of Christ and similar texts, illustrating abstract concepts and relationships, teaching simple and complex moral lessons existed not just in the incipient West but in all significant literate cultures. The natural world and the wild animals therein, agriculture and its domesticated animals and plants were a naturally universal language for metaphor and relational thinking. That is because such a huge portion of the population worked in agriculture or pastoralism and lived near natural ecosystems with abundant wildlife.

This was true not just of slaves, peasants and yeomen but of elites, who even if they maintained a lavish urban residence, typically drew their wealth from the agricultural land they owned and administered. So prevalent was work on the land that knowledge of local plants and animals, domesticated and wild, was effectively universal. In propounding the gospel, parables were crucially important because they employed the only available universally decipherable metaphors.

A century ago, 80% of Canadians lived in rural communities; today, only 20% do. Furthermore, the proportion of rural and remote community residents involved in agriculture and bush work has also dramatically declined even relative to the declining relative rural population. A similar demographic story has unfolded all over the world, albeit at different rates.

I think this has a lot to do with why George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1948) will be last major parable until our societies undergo a massive economic, demographic and geographic realignment. Because the rhetorical and pedagogical efficacy of a parable depend on knowledge of agriculture and nature that most people no longer possess at a deep, practical level of knowledge.

While the death of parable has harmed our societies across the board, as we have become alienated from our foundational texts, traditions and metaphorical vocabularies, the effects have been especially adverse for Christian societies, because their most important text is more reliant on parable than other traditions’ canonical texts. Consequently, our ability to use metaphors, make comparisons and engage in complex reasoning, especially moral reasoning, is stunted because the natural world is no longer functioning as an interpretive index connecting culture, text and thought.

This has additional knock-on effects, especially in a society like Canada which, as observed by one of Canada’s greatest twentieth-century novelists, Robertson Davies, much of our literary canon is awash in Biblical references its authors expected their audience to be intimately familiar with.

Exegesis Without Animals and 1980s Anti-gay Social Science
In 1988, my father took me to Kenya on a packaged safari tour. I fell in love with East Africa then and have been back three times since. I vividly remember our first day out on the Masai Mara savanna. Our jeep driver, Sammy, spotted elephants in the distance and we drove towards them as fast as we could. As we approached, it became clear that both were young male bull elephants having very enthusiastic, aggressive sex with each other, with the largest erections I ever have seen or expect I will see in my life.

Despite being an avid naturalist, hiker, photorealist wildlife artist and voracious reader of all kinds of science, my father’s reaction was not that different than that of the other under-fifty men in the vehicle. He looked stunned, shocked, unable to categorize or comment on the situation. But this was not true of the three older men in the vehicle. The “Logan Boys,” seventy-something brothers from Texas and Ray Brandyberry all began chuckling and broke into full-blown laughter when the older Logan Boy remarked, “Why I believe those would be the San-Francisca elephants!”

My father, who was not a man for pets, despite his great tolerance of my gerbil-owning period, had spent years carefully stalking and photographing reclusive and rare wild animals, grizzly bears, doll sheep and the like. But he had no sustained experience of animals living at close quarters with one another as a person living in an agrarian society would.

This generational shift, as witnessed in the safari jeep, was beginning to wreck havoc on Christian thought back home in North America as suburban megachurches and televangelists began propounding a Christianity that could not pass muster at a 4H Club.

The significance and urgency of the modern gay rights movement, which had begun in the 1960s was massively amplified by the AIDS crisis. Until the AIDS crisis, the decision by most men who slept with other men to keep that information about themselves private was a personal choice; it was also a political one, and one hotly contested among gay men. But once this openness became an important aspect of prophylaxis during a lethal global epidemic, “coming out” ceased to be a mere ritual act to recast one’s personal identity. It became an important part of a coordinated effort to stop the spread of AIDS through social prophylaxis.

There were other new reasons to come out that AIDS created, like inheritance, death benefits, hospital and hospice visiting rights. The list goes on.

And this resulted in the sense, on the part of those outside the emerging “gay community,” that it was not just AIDS that was an epidemic, homosexuality itself was. It seemed, superficially, like a contagion. Homophobic jokes, anti-gay rhetoric and gay-bashing also seemed to be reaching epidemic scale, as gay-bashings followed Andrew Dice Clay’s and Eddie Murphy’s edgy homophobic stand-up routines around Ronald Reagan’s America.

As with abortion, previously uninterested or even neutral evangelical Christians shouldered past the West’s Roman Catholics in articulating a strongly condemnatory new discourse regarding homosexuality. But this new Christian social conservatism, even though not leavened by parable, suffered the same problems Biblical exegesis was now facing due to urbanization.

For centuries, Catholic polemics against homosexuality had argued that same-sex action was bestial because animals engaged in it often and guiltlessly. How could anyone with long-term experience tending animals in groups not know this? The Catholic argument had always been that human should not engage in homosexuality because we are fundamentally different from animals, that the immaterial soul that God places in our bodies at quickening, not conception, gives us the unique power to overcome our bestial urges for gay sex.

But this newfound ignorance of the natural order allowed a new kind of anti-gay propaganda, which stated that homosexuality was “unnatural,” that it came from Lucifer, not the natural order, because this was not something animals did. Only humans did it.

Farms, Fields and Field Trips
Some people argue that the loss of the natural, created world as the basis of metaphor, comparison, analogy, etc. can be addressed through comparisons to new universals, common technologies like cars and mobile telephones, common literary and cinematic experiences like Harry Potter and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

But the problem is that these are not working systems. They are mere flights of fancy. Their rules of cause and effect, their patterns of outcome are even more disconnected from the natural world than we are because these things are the result of untethering our thought from physical reality, and more importantly, from the rules of cause and effect that underpin them and the systems of relationships they generate and are seated in.

If we want our children to understand Animal Farm, there is no short cut. They must watch pigs, chickens, horses, etc. interacting and going about their day. If we want them to understand that parable of the labourers in the vineyard, we should take them to the Hainle winery in Peachland, where the frosts came too soon and the grapes were frozen, resulting in the first modern crop of ice wine. They can hear about how, until 1978, such wine was deemed unsaleable and the panic the vineyard owner in the New Testament must have experienced as the day wore on and more workers had to be called at an ever-increasing hourly wage. You see: parables are not just a means of illustration but of reinforcement; the parable of the wheat and the tares is not just understandable; everyone would have a story of weeding, of the discernment it took them to distinguish a new weed from a new sprout.

There is no substitute for farms and fields and wild nature as the foundation of our metaphorical vocabulary, as one of the pillars, along with empathy, on which abstract reasoning rests. The dream of reinhabiting the land, reintegrating domestic animals and food crops into our daily lives is not a romantic fancy of the deep green movement. It is the only way we are going to clear our heads to face what we are facing as a species.

Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | May 12, 2025

“Sex Work” Apologism, Authoritarianism and DEI Policy: An Unexpected and Frightening Dance

Before “Trans Women are Women,” There Was “Sex Work is Work!”
When my oldest friend who would ultimately lead the cancel mob against me in 2020 first began to go funny, it was not exactly over genderwang, the issue over which our final conflict and my cancelation took place. Rather it was over an earlier but adjacent fad in the progressiverse, arguably the movement that functioned as the vanguard for genderwang.

An admirer and later collaborator with Billy Bragg, the anti-fascist turned anti-woman UK folk singer and activist, my friend returned from a stay in the mid-2010s, having had some solid face-time with Bragg and began, seemingly out of nowhere, banging on about how we really needed to “de-stigmatize sex work.”

Stigma, my friend explained, is why prostitutes are oppressed, well, that and borders. If we just had open borders, destigmatized and deregulated “sex work,” the oppression of “sex workers” would end. “But what about all the violent trafficking of women?” I asked. My friend explained that every sex trafficking bust we were reading about in the papers was a false flag operation by the cops and “big feminism.” No women were actually being violently trafficked or beaten by their pimps (this surprised me because he had been sure pimps were beating up prostitutes for the three decades preceding that conversation). It was all propaganda by organizations like ICE because the only violence sex workers were experiencing was due to the risks and violence they were exposed to because of the lack of an open borders policy.

Obviously, from this point forward, I became worried that my friend was experiencing something akin to cult indoctrination because he was developing a totalizing worldview. A totalizing worldview is one in which all evidence that would appear counter the worldview is read as evidence in support of it. The more sex trafficking busts that were reported in the paper, the greater the evidence of the scale and reach of the conspiracy against the sex workers.

Within a year, “sex work is work!” became the first of the “THIS is THAT!” ritually chanted group mantras the left took up. What was odd about this is that nobody was actually arguing that prostitution is not work. The beef that Vancouver Rape Relief and other feminists had with it was that it is work that should not be done because of its impacts on the individuals involved and on society as a whole.

Just as with “trans rights are human rights,” its primary function seemed to be an effort at strawmanning one’s opponents by vehemently insisting that something no one was arguing about was the centre of the actual controversy.

But I have, in recent months, come to realize that there is an additional sinister dimension to “sex work is work!” that had not previously occurred to me, making this mid-10s progressive fad not just the vanguard of “trans women are women,” but of the seismic shift in workplace social and legal norms associated with what is euphemistically called “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” i.e. DEI.

Prostitution’s Unique Harms
I do not want to do want to normalize prostitution as a kind of work in this essay, nor do I want to suggest that there is some kind of “degrees of sex work” spectrum. But to understand more fully the profound and far reaching adverse effects of this discourse, it is necessary to break down what components prostitution contains.

The first and most egregious component is this: like surrogacy, it is about men renting the inside of people’s, overwhelmingly women’s, bodies. There is no form of physical labour outside of prostitution in which the insides of people’s bodies are rented out so that their “client” can do things in there. This form of extension of the market into the body through an orifice and the commodification and alienation of the inside of one’s body for a set period of time is profoundly disordering for the owner of that body and produces bad effects on society as a whole.

But there is a second aspect of prostitution, which is almost as important and strongly conditions the rent that can be charged for one’s insides: misrepresenting one’s thoughts and desires. The most successful prostitutes figure out what it is that their clients want them to claim to think and feel, to lie convincingly about what they desire, what they prefer, what they enjoy. One’s client has written a detailed script that he hasn’t exactly let you read but he’s going to be very angry if you don’t know your lines.

Indeed, the ability of “high end” prostitutes to have “escorting” work as part of their gig, to get breaks from the orifice rental industry and just be paid as a companion or display object for some of their working hours hinges strongly on falsifying one’s preferences based on cold reading and the ability not only to fake preferences but to express fake enthusiasm for those fake preferences.

Timur Kuran’s Study of Authoritarianism
I began thinking seriously about the importance of preference falsification in present-day progressive authoritarianism with the emergence of Timur Kuran as a major critic of the two main cultural arms of Wokeness, DEI and genderwang. Kuran is a social scientist I have long admired who began publishing on the effects of authoritarianism on the functioning of economies in the mid-1990s. For years, I assigned his articles to my students, back when both he and I would have been understood as members of the academic left.

Kuran’s interest has, since the 1990s, been the effects of authoritarianism on societies’ prosperity and development. In 1996, he authored a paper showing that, contrary to his initial hypothesis, Islam was not, itself, producing underdevelopment in the Middle East. Comparing societies across the Islamic Levant, Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf, Kuran found that the major factor producing making societies less developed, less efficient, less prosperous, was lack freedom of expression and democratic elections.

Hyper-secular Baathist Syria and Iraq were the worst countries. Kemalist Turkey and Islamist Iran scored surprisingly well primarily because, while freedom of speech was limited in these managed democracies, where political choice and debate were restricted, simply based on the fact that some, even if not all government policies could be criticized in the press and public square.

The reason for this was simple, Kuran argued: error checking and error correction. The more citizens can report that something about their country is not working and the more power they have to punish or replace those responsible for the failure, the more likely and the sooner mistakes will be noticed and once noticed, the more likely to be corrected.

And, Kuran explained in his subsequent books and articles, the suppression of negative feedback about the state and actors aligned with it is just the beginning. Bad policies are not merely shielded from criticism; authoritarian regimes encourage constant “preference falsification.”

“Preference falsification,” is where people lie about their beliefs, desires and opinions to curry favour with those who hold power over them and will compete for status or protection with other preference falsifiers to do the best job of expressing enthusiasm not just for terrible new things or disapproval of positive or beneficial things those in authority oppose. And preference falsification does not merely affect how people talk about ideas but even to their own experiences.

And in an environment of habitual preference falsification, people do not merely become habituated to lying; they develop forms of double consciousness in which they are increasingly uncertain of what their own opinions and feelings actually are from one moment to the next.

Kuran came out strongly against DEI programs in 2023 on social media because he argued that were turning white collar workplaces into environments of constant preference falsification. People are strongly encouraged to express opinions they do not hold on pain of firing or workplace discipline. These opinions range from beliefs about individual coworkers to workplace initiatives to events in the new to electoral politics. Furthermore, when DEI initiatives fail and do not produce the outcomes they purport to desire, no one can report this for fear that they will be seen as critical of DEI itself and face shaming, discipline and possible firing.

And there is also no guarantee that workplace speech policing policies will not follow a worker into settings outside work, to union meetings, to social events, to church, to political meetings. This is especially true if one is a member of a self-regulating profession like nursing, teaching or counselling psychology. Increasingly, the main challenge of staying in white collar work is not meeting the demands of one’s actual job but of engaging in constant defensive preference falsification.

The authoritarian preference falsification culture that is emanating from our workplaces no longer extends simply to issues with which Woke thinking is preoccupied. Our whole white collar culture is becoming like that of the 1970s USSR and Warsaw Pact: any expression of an opinion different from one’s superiors’ is understood to be increasingly transgressive, even as the pretensions, claims and pageantry of workplace equality and democracy escalate. Telling your boss he might be making a mistake is viewed as ever more improper and disloyal. Instead of insubordination being understood as defiance of a workplace decision, mere disagreement is insubordinate in a growing number of places.

I was able to observe this on a small scale in a former workplace. As the toughest grader in my department, the marks I awarded were sometimes appealed to my boss, the chair of the department in which I worked. When he chose to overrule the marks I gave, which was about 80% the time, he would let me know and I would say, “no problem. You’re the boss.” Because he was. I never minded being overruled; it was the cost of doing business and being in a clear and transparent hierarchy.

But as the years went by and DEI culture tightened its grip on my university’s culture, things changed. It became increasingly important for my boss to convince me that his mark was correct and mine was incorrect. He grew increasingly insistent that I change the mark to the one he wanted because I had realized my previous evaluation had been incorrect. And yet, at the same time, he was unwilling to actually have a dialogue about the new mark. I was being indirectly asked to feign having changed my mind and to have suddenly seen the error of my thinking and the correctness of his.

White Collar Work Grows More Sex Work-Adjacent
Thinking this through in light of some recent experiences in my circle, it occurs to me that “sex work is work,” has had an additional impact, additional meaning beyond the culture of misogyny it has helped to foster. The constant celebration of “sex work,” is also about normalizing the ways in which white collar work has become, shall we say, “sex work-adjacent.”

Sure, white collar workers do not deal with the physical violence and violation of prostitutes when they show up for work. Today’s white collar workers might be the most physically coddled people in human history, but their work does increasingly resemble that of prostitutes because their main workplace activity is preference falsification and the rate at which they are remunerated, their status with the work hierarchy, their ability to negotiate professional relationships is increasingly based on one main proficiency, preference falsification.

Programs like DEI can only function in a culture that does not merely normalize preference falsification but celebrates it, as we when celebrities make tearful speeches praising “sex workers,” as a class and publicly admiring the work they do.

Authoritarianism Race | fusangite | April 16, 2025

Canada 2025: the Election that Time Forgot

Geopolitics Is Not a Schoolyard
For an election that is supposedly about how Canada will respond to Donald Trump’s trade, investment and foreign policy, nobody seems to be actually putting forward a policy framework that makes any sense. Instead, our state-subsidized news media has decided that this is not a policy contest at all but about how will “stand up” and “talk tough,” who can “make Donald Trump behave,” or “put Donald Trump in his place.” “You always must stand up to bullies, no matter what,” apparently serious opinion leaders opine.

These are folks who used to remind us that saying “we need to run the government like a business” was an infantile and immature simplification of the task of governing because the state is bigger, more complex and has a different purpose than a car dealership are now eager to tell us that geopolitics is just like a playground. Just stand your ground and punch the bully because bullies always back down in the face of courage. Because countries are just like elementary school students, even the ones with gigantic nuclear arsenals capable of annihilating all life on earth forever with the press of a button.

While Canada is on an extra-stupid tear as a country right now and we are currently living through the Gaslightenment, it is nevertheless remarkable how little this election contains any actual policy responses to the tariffs. Instead, like spoiled children, Canadians seem mainly focused on making the case that Americans owe us unobstructed access to their steel and aluminum markets, that the president of the US owes Canadians continued prosperity, even if it contributes to America’s massive trade deficit with the rest of the world.

In essence, rather than putting forward a plan to adapt to America’s new trade, industrial, migration and foreign policies our opinion leaders and most of our politicians are instead simply demanding that America change those policies back to the way they were under the Biden Administration. While the Conservative Party has, just in the past couple of days, at least begun to go beyond that, the policies on offer are not impressive.

To understand this failure in both our national discourse and in our public policy imagination, we need to remember how issues like this played out a century ago.

The End of the Progressive Era and the Rise of ISI
A common theme in my writing the past few years has been the shocking parallels between the present and the world of a century ago, reminding me of Karl Marx’s take on the history of the West, that events in our history repeat, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” So, to review, the Progressive Era (1890-1930) was a period when the economy grew rapidly, as did the gap between rich and poor.

Labour costs were depressed and housing prices rose rapidly thanks to uncontrolled mass migration policies and rapidly consolidating private capital in the form of monopolies and oligopolies. Economic growth was maintained through this period through population growth, mass migration and major increases in consumer credit and consumer debt. Curiously, when our societies are run by a small number of tycoons and corporations who control the media and the major industries and reap massive profits leavened by consumer debt, cross dressing and eugenics seem to get awfully popular.

This was not an indefinitely sustainable state of affairs. And so, in the mid-1920s, countries like Canada, the US, Brazil and the new British colonial regime in Palestine enacted sudden and dramatic reductions in immigration. These dramatic reductions were likely essential in forestalling and ultimately preventing the rise of successful fascist parties in the New World, with the exception of the Vargas regime in Brazil, destination of the second-largest number of immigrants after the US.

Following the start of the Great Depression half a decade later, the other cornerstones of Progressive Era economic policy also gradually came to lose their credibility. Growth leavened by private borrowing, free trade, unimpeded investment and what Lenin called “financialization” of developed economies stopped delivering the growth and profits they had in decades previous. Trade declined and trade-dependent economies were required to pivot dramatically in order to avoid entering into a tailspin of debt and underdevelopment.

The countries that handled this era the best and experienced not just less economic decline but, in some cases, increased economic growth and stability were those that switched first and most aggressively from liberal trade and investment policies to what are called “import substitution industrialization” (ISI) policies. Whereas liberal/free trade policies seek to enrich an economy by attracting foreigners to purchase its exports and invest in its businesses, ISI policies seek to concentrate local consumer spending power on local production by diversifying the economy and producing more finished products for local consumers.

Naturally, if one is running a liberal free trade economy, when one’s trading partners switch from free trade to ISI, this deepens the tailspin in a free trading economy by redirecting foreign investment and purchasing power into a neighbour’s domestic economy. In other words, when the world, and, in particular, one’s close trading partner, turns away from free trade and towards ISI, it is important to adopt one’s own ISI policies expeditiously before too much foreign investment and purchasing dries up.

Argentia and Brazil were especially successful in the 1930s because they switched from free trade to ISI faster than other states, acting with an immediacy and a focus that spared their societies the depths of the Great Depression other countries went through. The United States’ pivot was slower, with the Roosevelt government only beginning ISI policies in 1933 and, despite the country’s greater size, it experienced a tougher Great Depression than societies that pivoted more rapidly on trade and investment policy.

Today, we face a similar situation to that of the Interwar Years (i.e. the 1920s and 30s). An era a free trade, open borders, unrestricted investment and economic financialization is ending. Free trade is giving way to protectionism and tariff walls, genuine walls are rising along borders and checkpoints and border enforcement are hardening, pro-foreign investment policies are being replaced by incentives for domestic reinvestment and economies that were financializing and offshoring industry are now reindustrializing.

But Canada is turning out to be a far worse policy laggard than we were in the 1930s.

Canada’s Generation of Living in the Past
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Canada has become an increasingly backward jurisdiction relative to global trends. Just as neoconservatism was running out of gas everywhere else, we elected the Stephen Harper government in 2006. By the time we finally gave him a majority in 2011, his was the last neocon regime on earth.

Similarly, just as the rest of the civilized world has been undertaking course corrections on policies like Genderwang and DEI, with these policies being rolled by in Norway, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, the UK, Italy, the US, Argentina and a host of other developed countries, Canada is only intensifying these policies.

Canada’s commitment to functioning as a nostalgic intellectual and political backwater has real costs at this moment. Instead of reading the geopolitical room and moving quickly and decisively to enact ISI policies, diversifying our economy and redirecting local investors towards our economy, as is taking place in the US, we are mainly focused on explaining why we should not have to adapt and why it is dumb and wrong to bring an end to the era of neoliberal trade, investment and migration policies. Dumb or not, wrong or not, that is what is happening. And Canada has neither the credibility nor the power to arrest, never mind reverse, current global economic trends. We must adapt.

But the problem is that every single one of our national political parties has the same cutting edge 1990s neoliberal trade and investment policies. With the accession of Jean Chretien to the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1990, the party abandoned its longstanding support for ISI and wholly committed to neoliberalism. The NDP followed suit in 2006, following heavy criticism from the media for not being part of Canada’s policy consensus on trade and investment.

When the turn away from neoliberalism began throughout the Global North post-2012, the US saw the popular Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump presidential candidacies explicitly opposing NAFTA and open borders, assailing many aspects of neoliberalism and touting ISI. In 2016, we did not just see Trump take the presidency but the UK withdraw from the neoliberal Maastricht Treaty governing the European Union. And major conflicts over neoliberalism erupted in both Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party and Boris Johnson’s Tories, as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK rose in the polls, entering Westminster finally in 2024. These conflicts are playing out in Italy, France and Germany too as the different political systems grapple with the collapse of the neoliberal consensus.

While this era has seen the rise of new parties opposing the neoliberal consensus, like Germany’s AfD and BSW and the UK’s Reform and the resurgence of early 90s anti-neoliberal parties like Australia’s One Nation, Canada’s offering has been especially lame and anemic. Former Conservative cabinet minister Maxime Bernier resigned from the Tory party after losing a close leadership race and, since 2019, has been leader of the People’s Party of Canada, a party that, at first glance, appears to be Canada’s equivalent.

While it is true that Bernier’s party shares the migration, climate and Covid policy skepticism of these other parties, where it differs is that it is actually more fundamentalist in its commitment to neoliberal trade and investment policies, that its main message is that Canada needs to double down on neoliberal orthodoxy and anchor its policies more closely to the economic orthodoxies of the 1990s.

In other words, the reasons we are hearing such an utterly facile and empty debate about which leader will be the toughest and pluckiest when it comes to impotently wagging their finger at Trump or making hyperbolic threats and unhelpful personal denunciations of Trump and his cronies is that Canada has an all-party consensus in favour of continuing to beat the drum of neoliberalism, even as the number of free trading economies in the world continues to shrink precipitously.

Only this weekend did we see the first tentative efforts at a domestic self-reliance reinvestment policy with an announcement from Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre to that effect. The rest of our political class has no answer to the present state of affairs other than to demand that a time machine be built so we can go back to competing in the global economy that existed between 1989 and 2015 and, frankly, it’s not like Poilievre has an answer that is remotely good or comprehensive enough.

Of course, Canada’s failed journalistic establishment is not helping, by insisting that geopolitics is a schoolyard and that personal pluckiness, seriousness and firmness are perfectly reasonable replacements for sophisticated economic and foreign policy on the world stage. But they are not. And, thanks to an ossified and out of date policy consensus, a media composed mostly of stooges and stenographers for the establishment, Canadians are in danger continuing down an economic path from which the rest of the industrialized world is turning back. And if there is one kind of policy on which you cannot go it alone, it is neoliberal free trade and investment.

Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite | March 31, 2025

George Gibault’s and My Reviews of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twin Peaks, Decades Late

Tuesday Nights with George and Sarah Michelle Gellar

Tomorrow, I get to work on a long-delayed project, nearly a decade delayed, in fact, organizing a symposium in honour of my late friend George Gibault, twentieth-century conservative political strategist, courtier and public intellectual. For the event, I am going to be producing a series of papers about the different sides of George, the different aspects of this great man’s thinking.

While many disturbing recent events in provincial, national and international politics have made me think of George and his intellectual contributions, I feel that the atmosphere around me, the panic, the fragility, the vigilance demand that I start in a particular part of the Gibault oeuvre: speculative fiction. So, yes, this is going to be one of those blog posts where I post some massively out-of-date reviews of some cool, geeky shows from back in the day.

In 1998, I moved to Victoria, motivated, in part, by a major social faux pas that had made my native Vancouver a more awkward place to live. But I was also motivated by the fact that I had secured funding to work full-time, as BC Green Party leader, admittedly for a pittance. If I wanted to be seen as a legislator in waiting, I should move to be close to the legislature and take up residence in one of the four ridings that presented an outside chance of electing a Green.

My social circle in Victoria was small and, as my leadership of the party headed into complete crisis, it did not grow at the customary rate I experience when I move to a community. Instead, the linchpin of my week and of my social world was visiting George on Tuesday evenings to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Buffy was an important show back in the day but one that is not appreciated precisely because of how novel and innovative it was. The 1990s introduced one new major cinematic genre, the horror-comedy, exemplified not just in the Joss Whedon corpus but the Kevin Williamson Scream series. Horror-comedy was not just about the deft and clever ways that Williamson, Whedon and their ilk could use humour to release tension without destroying the ability of their films and shows to produce genuine horror and dread one moment, and a genuine belly laugh the next.

Horror-comedy also featured highly self-conscious, fourth wall-adjacent dialogue in which the characters do not recognize that they are fictional but do take active, ironic notice of the tropes and literary constructs that seem to rule their lives. The central characters, who are often supposedly adolescents, then, develop a strange speaking style in which they sound more educated, more sophisticated and more emotionally disengaged than the characters they play. This was not unique to horror-comedy but diffused out into TV and movies through overlapping stables of writers and audience expectations. In fact, Williamson’s prime time teen soap, Dawson’s Creek, despite being outside the genre, best exemplifies this dialogue style.

While the dialogue was thoroughly beguiling to us back in the day, today when one watches Buffy or Dawson, the dialogue sounds stilted, awkward. That is not because this kind of dialogue has been abandoned—far from it—it’s that we have got better at it with practice. Learning the smooth execution of this dialogue style was something still in the future when Buffy was first experimenting with this new way of ventriloquizing twentysomethings dressed as teenagers.

This dialogue style was just one of the major shifts in entertainment that Buffy unleashed. While the Six Million Dollar Woman, Wonder Woman and the old Batman TV franchise had introduced us to supernaturally strong women, the idea that tiny, anorexic women like Sarah Michelle Gellar could be highly sexualized action stars by having bodies that made no aesthetic concession to physical characteristics that make human bodies strong. In fact, Gellar’s first stunt double denounced the show, quitting over the way the star’s eating disorder was helping to send girls all the wrong messages about the human body. By using special effects, stunt doubles and importing Hong Kong wire fu filming techniques from Michelle Yeoh movies, America’s tiny, frail anorexic superheroines were born.

At the time, we had no idea that this was the second station on the train from lower strength standards for female fire fighters in the 80s to the pathological sex denialism of the 2020s, in which we pretend that we can put a man in a boxing ring with a woman and expect a fair and equal fight.

Place and Metaphor in the Pacific Northwest

But George and I were not focused on any of that. Our epiphany concerning the show was not about the implausibly yet entertainingly-talking characters or the equally implausible yet absolutely real young female bodies that kept our eyes focused on the screen. We felt we recognized something in Buffy from our shared love of the rural Pacific Northwest.

For those who did not spend the second half of the 90s glued to Buffy, let me sketch the basics of the show. Buffyand her high school friends attend Sunnyvale High School, the only high school in the medium-sized California town of Sunnyvale. Sunnyvale has the distinction of containing the “Hellmouth,” the literal gates of hell, which causes a clustering of demonic supernatural phenomena around the town. Each episode centres on a monster or other demonic force related to the Hellmouth set on endangering and threatening the town and transforming or eliminating its residents and being opposed by Buffy and her trusty band of classmate sidekicks.

Each episode typically features witty yet fundamentally unreal banter among the characters, often adjacent to the fourth wall; each also typically features cool wire-fu-style fight scenes between the diminutive 5’2” Buffy and enormous, powerful monsters or teams thereof. Each season of the show is structured around a major villain who has come to Sunnyvale to open the Hellmouth in service of some dastardly world-ending plan they spend the season putting into place.

While Buffy’s fellow students and Sunnyvale’s townspeople are always glad of Buffy and her friends’ Herculean efforts to save them and their town, their work is never acknowledged and is only spoken-of in hushed tones. Furthermore, whenever there is a major supernatural disaster in public view or an attack by a whole army of monsters, police and city officials work to cover it up, issuing perfunctory and unbelievable denials, usually blaming meth.

The reason for this is explained, to some extent, when it is revealed that the archvillain of season three, the town’s mayor, is actually a demon seeking to transform into his full monstrous arachnid form when he opens the Hellmouth, during his “ascension.”

But as the mayor is defeated, the US government moves in to begin conducting experiments on the local human and vampire populations. And it was at this point that George (mostly George) and I put together what Buffy is really about. It is about living in a single-industry town. The Hellmouth is like a large coal or uranium deposit; it kills and sickens a portion of the townspeople, an open secret that nobody can talk about. They cannot talk about it because the Hellmouth/mine/mill/smelter attracts all the outside investment to the town. Nobody would invest in the town; there would be not jobs if it did not contain the gates of hell.

And so, the politics of Sunnyvale are the politics of a town like Mackenzie, Trail or Kitimat. Lead poisoning and cancer stalk the streets, producing sickness, madness, and the jobs and investment, without which the town would dry up and blow away.

And then it hit me: Sunnyvale is, in a way, a specific town: Hanford, Washington, home to America’s most Chernobyl-like nuclear reactor. People from surrounding towns, but not Hanford itself, speak of the Hanford Necklace, a neck scar of about the size and angle of vampire bites on Buffy, from lymph cancer surgeries, which are exceedingly common for those who live near or work at the Hanford Reactor.

To this day, I have no idea how self-conscious the show was in exploring this theme or whether the structural premise of the show would inevitably describe the society of a single-industry mill town. But that was the thing about thinking aloud with George: the point was to find the predictive pattern. Such patterns were inevitably bigger than authorial intention or conscious conspiracies and schemes.

George applied the same logic, along with some possible hints in the script to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, the comedy-horror-surrealist prime time soap opera of the early 1990s. The town of Twin Peaks, which seemed to be concurrently located on some hybrid of Koocanusa Reservoir and Lake Champlain, was supposedly in the Interior Wet Belt of Washington State, mysteriously abutting an oddly Francophone region of British Columbia, which hosted a casino/brothel called One-Eyed Jacks that one could reach primarily by crossing an unnamed transboundary lake under cover of darkness.

Twin Peaks, the town, was full of oddities, an elderly bellhop and parttime giant, an extradimensional dwarf, an oracular woman with a telepathic log, portals into another dimension, known as the Black Lodge, a serial killer demon named Bob who gets around by transforming into an owl, etc. Agent Cooper of the FBI, one of the original late 80s metaphysical detectives along with Dirk Gently and the unnamed investigators of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, who uses investigative methods he has learned in a dream from the spirit of a Tibetan lama.

Twin Peaks juxtaposes all of this strangeness with images and affirmations of the simple greatness of small town America, with its wholesome diner food, donuts, drip coffee and pie. While some characters are crooks and literal demons, most Twin Peaks residents are the salt of the earth, just a tad quirky, like Big Ed Hurley’s (proprietor of Big Ed’s Gas Farm) wife who has an eye patch, superhuman strength and an obsession with silent drape runners.

All this under the old growth conifers swaying and buckling in the wind and rain, under a permanently grey sky.

George was the one to notice that there are two real world locations the show informs us are near Twin Peaks. The dialogue even tells us the approximate distance to Grand Forks, BC, if not Spokane, WA. And there is a single inescapable conclusion George felt one must reach about Twin Peaks. The original series is actually a documentary on Nelson, BC and the area surrounding it. When people would question him about this and suggest that there are no giants, dwarves or Log Ladies in Nelson, George would typically reply, “Well, obviously you’ve never spent a significant amount of time in the West Kootenays.”

BC Politics Geekery | fusangite | March 22, 2025

Fragility, Sensitivity and Canada’s Authoritarian Turn

Stupidly, I was in an argument about my support for the Freedom Convoy with an old acquaintance on Facebook the other day. I generally prefer to do my arguing on the Twitter because it’s easier to have arguments in which professional censors do not intervene. But, because it is probably the least socially partitioned platform these days, one can have experiences there that just don’t happen so much on Twitter anymore.

I suggested that, while the proponents of the dangerous ideology of Truckism might staged the longest, largest, loudest tailgate party to date, the Convoy was far less physically dangerous, far more law abiding and, most importantly, far less lethal than comparable mass protests like the George Floyd protests, the Occupy movement or the Indian farmers’ march. It lacked the open air drug market scene of Occupy and consequently did not produce the masses of overdose deaths and close calls Occupy camps did. It lacked the vigilantism, vandalism and mob violence of the Floyd protests and so, did not get anyone shot, unlike the protests sponsored by Black Lives Matter.

So, why was it so much worse than these rallies? And why was it necessary to use emergency powers against it?

My interlocutor replied that it was because of all the horn honking at all days and hours. That would be annoying, I responded. No. It’s actual torture. It’s an atrocity. It’s banned in the Geneva Convention. (Of course, so is putting men in women’s prisons but no matter!)

One of the biggest problems I have speaking across the social partition with my friends who continue to reside in the progressiverse is that I often do not credit that they sincerely hold some of the beliefs they espouse, that saying obvious falsehoods is such an important boundary maintenance practice these days that I tend to go that route more frequently and more ungenerously than I should.

But I felt a real note of urgency, of sincerity. This person could not imagine suffering more profound than a couple of weeks of frequent and annoyingly loud car and truck horn blasts through the night in a major city. This was such extreme violence, such extreme suffering, such trauma that Nuremberg-style trials should possibly be empaneled to punish the Truckists for this heinous crime!

Having just spend a year living in Dar Es Salaam with my neighbourhood’s late night bars and pubs and my apartment complex’s chickens, I was tempted to suggest that your average Canadian could not handle the noise culture of any major world city, even when a massive protest was not going on.

On the same day—yes, I managed my time very poorly that day—I found myself in an equally useful but similarly illuminating debate about British Columbia’s Bill 7, an actual enabling act, one of many tributes to the original 1933 version, very much in the style of Nicolas Maduro and other authoritarian strong men who periodically ram a bill through parliament declaring a continuing state of emergency, necessitating that the head of government rule by decree. In this case, BC’s government wants two years to rule by decree, collect personal information unhindered, restrict speech and mobility rights and enact or amend any provincial law without resort to the legislature.

Why? Well, because these aluminum tariffs really hurt BC. In fact, they are causing such unprecedented disruption, such extreme hurt that of course the government needs unfettered powers. Canada, the story goes, has never faced so great a threat as the Trump Administration’s punitive and arbitrary tariffs. Donald Trump is the biggest threat to Canadian rights and liberty because he is depriving us of our fundamental right to sell Rio Tinto’s aluminum ingots to foreigners, unobstructed.

But again, I sensed the genuine fear, desperation, need for order.

But if we didn’t need this kind of legislation when the far more impactful softwood lumber tariffs went into effect four separate times through the 1980s, 90s and 00s, why do we need an enabling act now? Because this is worse. Because the real threat is what Trump says he wants to do, to annex Canada, to punish Canada—he’s revealing his mind to us, the fact that the tanks will be rolling across the border any day now.

But we didn’t need such sweeping authoritarian legislation even when we were fighting Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo eighty years ago. Why now? Because this is literally the scariest thing that has ever happened to Canada. Scarier than Ronald “Nuclear Warning Shot” Reagan was elected, scarier than when we headed to Vimy Ridge or the Battle of the Bulge, scarier than our actual war with the US back in the 1810s.

I think people are sincerely feeling these emotions because fear is contagious but also because exhibiting fear and panic strengthens authoritarian social impulses and that is what our leaders want right now. Rule by decree is saleable only to bullies and cowards, to the extent that the two categories are separable.

In other words, I believe that core to the rise of cultural authoritarianism among Anglo Canadians has been a new politics of personal fragility, one inextricable from the rise of Justin Trudeau and the new nationalism he hawked. I wrote about this disturbing trend and where it might send us in the early days of the 2015 election campaign following a striking and bizarre moment at the first federal leaders’ debate:

I was initially so surprised by Justin Trudeau’s sudden pivot, echoed in pre-rehearsed, stage-ready tweets and Facebook posts from campaign surrogates, to immediately assert that his continued feelings of bereavement surrounding his father’s death a decade and a half ago required some kind of disability accommodation by everyone else in Canada. Gerald Butts and other Liberal surrogates instantaneously reacted to Tom Mulcair’s assertion that the NDP’s multi-generation track record of standing up for Canadians’ liberty was demonstrated in their opposition to the War Measures Act in 1971. Apparently, this implied criticism of Trudeau’s dad was dirty pool and had hurt the prospective Prime Minister’s feelings. The recent emergence of medically invalid but nevertheless popular “trigger warnings” on US college campuses had, somehow, leapt across the border and now, fifteen of the past fifty years of Canadian politics were off-limits for fear of causing one rich white man to experience hurt feelings.

But I am no longer surprised. This bullshit is totally working. All kinds of random people, veterans struggling with amputations and PTSD, precariously employed minimum wage workers, racialized populations being stripped of their citizenship rights—these people, ordinary Canadians, are getting really concerned about how Mulcair was insufficiently considerate of Trudeau’s hurt feelings. How is it that the feelings of one attractive, privileged, successful, white adult male could become the object of so much sympathy that the entire narrative of the campaign changed in one day? How could Butts and the other Liberal strategists have calculated that so many Canadians whose easiest day is tougher than Trudeau’s hardest would have become so concerned about another national leader being inconsiderate of his feelings?

In hindsight, this scene was a harbinger of what would go wrong with this country over the past decade. The man who would later unconstitutionally use emergency powers against his citizens couldn’t be grilled on the subject because to elicit his opinion about the use of the War Measures Act during the FLQ Crisis because it might hurt his feelings.

But I want to go further: Justin Trudeau’s use of performative grief, of his own tears as the linchpin of his rhetorical strategy helped Canadians slide faster towards cultural authoritarianism. You see: Trudeau’s tears functioned as both sword and shield. They could be used to indict the behaviour of others not by demonstrating its wrongness but rather by how it impacted the Prime Minister’s emotions. The tears were, more importantly, a shield. They allowed Trudeau to dodge questions, not just those he was took choked to answer but, more importantly, all the questions his tears stifled in the throats or on the lips of his interlocutors, the passive-aggressive intimidation of a very powerful man crying.

As I observed in my original commentary, there is nothing new about linking social and political rank and power to a politics of sensitivity, fragility, even. The Princess and the Pea is, in some ways, the ultimate Enlightenment description of political legitimacy, that only a true princess would be so sensitive as to feel a single dried pea through seventeen goose down mattresses.

Last week, in Nanaimo, a criminal trial took place of a man who assaulted a woman on her way home from a parents’ rights protest. More than a foot taller than the fifty-two-year-old, the man who had more than a decade and a foot on his victim explained to the court that he had to punch her in the face because she made him feel “unsafe.”

Those present to support the victim were baffled that this appeared to amount to the sum total of the assailant’s defense. But he clearly believed (and the courts might agree with him), that feeling uncomfortable or whatever “unsafe” means to an individual like this was a nothing short of a threat to his very existence.

More importantly, as with Justin Trudeau in that fateful debate, it is clear that preventing certain people from experiencing unpleasant feelings, even if those feelings might only last moments is more important than Canada’s national leaders being able to debate emergency powers legislation and its abuse. After all, stopping certain people from feeling bad is enough reason to use those very emergency powers; it is even sufficient reason to breach our society’s state monopoly on violence to permit the dozens of unprosecuted assaults against women rallying and speaking in support of their rights and those of their children.

But, of course, the problem with the success of efforts to punish, chill and silence speech high-status individuals find hard to tolerate is that the more people are protected from speech that makes them feel bad, the less able they are to handle such speech when it somehow gets around the barricades. Consequently, offense-based speech restriction produces an ever-receding horizon of offense. And that means an ever-increasing demand for new legal, social and technological tools to manage the increasingly fragile personalities.

In essence, we are becoming addicts of censorship, state censorship, community censorship, self-censorship and even compelled speech and like addicts of all things, more censorship creates more tolerance (i.e. speech sensitivity) which then requires more censorship.

Those we coddle by acceding to their authoritarian demands inevitably grow ever more despotic and fragile. People who are so used to other people preventing them from having experiences that elicit negative or challenging emotions lose their ability to manage their own emotions and become increasingly convinced that it is the job of everyone around them to manage their emotions for them. Those who refuse to be conscripted into changing their speech and that of those around them to accommodate the acquired fragility of special persons are understood to be hate criminals, bigots who deserve whatever is coming to them, firing, beating, incarceration, whatever!

As this vicious cycle of offense-taking and new forms of punishment and overreaction, we are generating a society that genuinely believes that it is the president of the United States’ duty to make sure foreigners like us are prosperous, that believes our prosperity must be guaranteed by the US government and that it is not merely a nice thing but a fundamental right. We expect coddling in a widening set of contexts.

Canadians have experienced far greater hardships than these tariffs but, when one asks why the BC government did not require the ability to rule by decree during the Softwood Wars, the Salmon War or the two actual World Wars, the answer is “but Donald Trump keeps talking about the ‘51^st state.’ Can’t you see the tanks are going to roll across the border and begin killing us!” Unlike our reaction to Reagan’s far more serious threats of a nuclear first strike, our interpretation a 10% duty on aluminum ingots, because these very fragile, sensitive folks all believe they can read Trump’s mind, is that it is identical to soldiers marching into town and shooting our family members and neighbours.

What an increasingly number of Canadians cannot handle and require unprecedented measures to handle is being taunted and trolled by Trump. Of course, we really need sweeping emergency powers because those powers must be used to prevent Trump from making us feel angry, scared, powerless, humiliated, insecure because we have lost the ability to manage those normal emotions and how need not just a media bubble lying to us about our ability to vanquish the US in a one-on-one trade war or even conventional war; we need the full coercive power of the state to shut people up, shut people down—anything to solve the emergency called “our feelings.”

Of course, not all Canadians are understood to deserve or can conscript the state and those around us into managing our emotions. Obviously, women and girls wishing to protect their sports, spaces, privacy, etc. must manage their own emotions, even “reframe their trauma,” to make sure that the Hearers of this Manichean system are the exclusive beneficiaries of this external emotion-management.

Our society is growing more authoritarian by the day and that authoritarianism is powered by inculcating novel and escalating forms of fragility, concurrent with the expectation that this fragility is everyone’s problem except one’s own. And when people see no difference between special, designated individuals hearing words they would rather not and such things as murder and assault, we know where that goes: exactly where Canada is going now, concurrently descending into both increasing vigilante violence and increasingly authoritarian government.

Sensitivity is important; empathy is important; but so is taking responsibility for one’s own emotions, even if they are a reaction to the actions of others. This country needs a corollary to Pink Shirt Day, maybe Blue Shirt Day, the day where we celebrate those who are continent and responsible, who manage their own emotions and learn the most important thing about bullying: how to stand up to a bully. Because if you don’t learn to stand up to bullies, you are fated to become one, like the petty authoritarians with whom the Canadian establishment is replete and who constantly seek new means of lawfare, intimidation, threats and violence to prevent themselves experiencing feelings they have made themselves too fragile to handle.

Cue Flight of the Conchords!

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite | March 20, 2025

The Class Contradictions of the Conservative Courtier

My old friend George Gibault, the director of Social Credit Caucus Research from the 1970s until the party’s ultimate collapse in 1994 was exceptional. He played a significant role in an internal coup against Premier Bill Vander Zalm in 1988, working with Finance Minister Mel Couvelier and Attorney-General Bud Smith to radically circumscribe the powers of the premier and place much de facto authority in the hands of Couvelier and Smith.

George’s involvement in that high-level decision was exceptional because he was a career courtier who had risen through the ranks of the party’s unelected activists and through the party bureaucracy in the Victoria legislature while it sat in government.

While courtiers have always been an important part of politics in any system of government, different social orders strongly condition who becomes a powerful courtier and how. When George was coming up politically, during the last decades of the Cold War, the most senior courtiers, especially in conservative parties, were not people who had risen through the ranks of junior courtiers. Premiers and Prime Ministers hired men—and it was overwhelmingly men—out of other careers, “successful” businessmen, academics, prominent lawyers, who would typically place their assets in some kind of trust to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest and self-dealing. They would also take a significant pay cut. The discourse was that they were “giving something back,” engaging in “public service.”

We all know that the trusts were not very blind and that the friends and relatives of the courtiers would soon find the government making decisions that improved their bottom line. Nevertheless, the public performance of virtue did condition our horizon of expectations. When these men were revealed to be self-dealers, hypocrites, we would be outraged, genuinely, because their authority supposedly came from their altruistic virtue. Men like Jimmy Pattison, the future billionaire, were given prominent jobs for a nominal or token salary; such jobs were an effective tactic for self-fashioning and virtue signaling for those wishing to graduate from a mere rich and successful businessman and enter the financial elite.

Conservative parties also had a healthy verging on unhealthy suspicion of civil servants. Indeed, provincial civil servants did not gain the right to vote in BC elections until 1972. The sense was that the civil service was a separate and hostile locus of power in a legislature. Both of BC’s major parties continued conducting gratuitous reorganizations and civil service purges until the end of the twentieth century. Political power, understood as a zero sum game, meant that every bit of power an unelected government employee gained came either at the expense of the liberty of the citizens or at the expense of the power of elected representatives.

Perhaps because of the outsized influence of Warsaw Pact refugees within Social Credit, the party, George especially, feared the political world in which we now live, in which the managerial class has become fully self-conscious and self-interested and has, as a cartel, seized state power from elected officials primarily through the courtier subset of the managerial class or, as they used to say out East, the commissars.

As the twenty-first century has worn on, our baseline has shifted and we have normalized the way that the courtier class has usurped the power of elected officials and how it has come to control its own promotion structures, making career courtiers the norm, for the first time, on the political right.

Ironically, this has also led to a decline in our expectations that our politicians, elected and unelected, will or should not engage in brazen self-dealing and looting of the public purse. If being a courtier is just a profession, like any other, expected to act in its own interests and make no pretense of a special virtue, altruism or sacrifice, how are we to object to them pursuing “their own interests.” And this has bled to our expectations of elected officials, especially as their wealth has increased so rapidly relative to the rest of the population.

But, especially since the advent of Trumpism and the other Bannonite movements around the world, parties of the right have developed a class politics utterly inimical to the courtier class. At a moment when their parties and governments, like all others, are in the vise grip of the commissars, conservative parties find themselves crucibles of class conflict. Courtiers inside conservative parties might strike the odd anti-Woke pose and try to sound like Andrew Tate but they are fundamentally motivated by the same class interests that motivate progressive courtiers and the permanent civil service.

In other words, to be a decent conservative courtier, one must be a supremely self-conscious, self-examining class traitor. At my job, I try to follow George’s example and be exactly that. But that’s the problem with neoliberalism: you cannot solve systemic problems solely through personal virtue. And so, the only other option is that conservatives must break the power of the labour system, smash its promotion structures, purge the ranks, slash the pay and install good old fashioned senior courtiers.

And this is why the managerial class hates Elon Musk more even than Donald Trump. Because the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency and Musk’s control of is something out of the Cold War, before the managerial class became self-conscious and seized huge chunks of state, social and institutional power. Not only does it place a wealthy, eccentric businessman with no government experience at its head; its primary purpose is to conduct a massive civil service purge and concurrent reorganization, seeking to break the hold of the commissars on the state.

And Musk is not the only “inexperienced” and “unqualified” Trump appointee. Nearly every cabinet nominee was assailed during confirmation for the fact that they had not come up through the supposedly meritocratic civil service. Again and again, Democratic senators implied or directly stated that a person who was not already a member of the courtier class, who had done work like this before inside the state, was simply incapable of being a cabinet minister.

Instead of concealing their belief that the state should be a meritocratic technocracy and not a popularly elected democracy, they bared their fangs, with Chuck Schumer suggesting that if the Trump Administration were not careful, they might be personally destroyed or even killed by an intelligence agency. Indeed, throughout mainstream media, we see that the term “democracy” has become its own opposite, now meaning Mandarinate. Those, like Rob Reiner, wishing to “save democracy” mainly mean by this that they wish to preserve the governing power of the commissars and protect the commissars’ authority from the democratic rabble full of unqualified people exercising common sense.

The problem for these putative saviours of democracy is that if Elon Musk or Robert F Kennedy or some other prominent wealthy outsider is actually competent to do their job and carrying it out competently, it is a standing refutation of the commissars’ claims of running an expertise-based, meritocratic outfit that produces uniquely and solely qualified experts for leadership positions.

And this is why we see such an odd political configuration: industrial workers, youth and the old school bourgeoisie in an alliance to restore some modicum of twentieth century representative democracy as the commissar class rushes to finish dismantling it. But this coalition has been able to get further in the United States precisely because, while the culture of political parties and of the judiciary has been captured, to a large extent, by the commissars, America’s robust and democratic political institutions have proven harder to tame.

A country like Canada has made substantial and devastating changes to its democratic institutions to ensure that its parties, across the spectrum, are controlled by the courtier class. As I have stated in previous essays, Jean Chrétien’s 2003 Election Act gave the office of the leader of every party direct appointment powers over candidates. And between 2004 and 2010, not only has an increasing proportion of candidates been directly appointed; all parties have established “candidate vetting” committees composed entirely of courtiers, with secret memberships that meet in secret and produce no minutes. These committees can veto any candidacy at will and without cause.

In a country like Canada, legislators do literally serve at the pleasure of the courtiers who can, with no institutional primary system, veto a legislator’s re-election bid with the stroke of a pen. And without a primary system, I do not know how Canada’s political system will confront the contradiction of interests between the interests of the conservative courtier class and the class alignment of the parties they serve. But that confrontation is coming, nevertheless. It is inevitable. I wish George were here to puzzle it through with me.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite | March 5, 2025

Is It Finally Time for Taoist Economics?

Of all the courses I taught during my career as an academic, the one I taught the most times was a course I taught for the Simon Fraser University School of International Studies on the history of the world economy. The course sought to, among other things, show my students just how long there had been something to which we might reasonably refer as “the world economy.” My course narrative began in about 800 BCE, based on a concept called the “Axial Age,” as theorized by German philosopher Karl Jaspers when the more developed areas of the Eastern Hemisphere underwent similar shifts in religious and philosophical thinking, which became more universalist in character.

Increasing claims of philosophical universality, I argued, followed rather than preceding, significant increases in travel, trade and exchange and the gradual emergence of an economy encompassing the majority of the world’s population. The economy that emerged between 800 and 200 BCE was roughly T-shaped, stretching from the Cornwall Peninsula of Great Britain in the northwest to the mouth of the Zambezi River in present-day Mozambique in the south to Japan in the northeast. While the Americas, Australia and West Africa remained outside the system, the economy that gave us Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Judaism, etc. was large and diverse enough to be meaningfully understood as the “world economy,” as distinct from the global economy that arose during the Age of Sail/Age of European Supremacy between the voyages sponsored by Henry the Navigator and Captain James Cook’s expeditions 1421-1777.

Lacking the maritime technology to affordably move staple goods in large quantities, trade in the original world economy primarily comprised three classes of good: weapons, slaves and luxury goods. While there existed some high-utility luxury goods, in the form of spices, trade in most luxury goods was largely powered by cultural and ecological differences. Cloves, cinnamon and sugarcane, for instance, could not be grown in more temperate, northern climes and so they could fetch high prices in those regions. But some luxury items, like gold, pearls and gems, simply meant more in some places than others based on purely cultural factors. The best luxury goods checked both boxes; Europeans had hunted their elephants and great cats to extinction but retained a cultural memory of those beasts and a hunger for pelts and tusks.

This meant that, while there was a world economy, the fundamental wealth on which societies were based was largely immune to interregional trade and exchange. And that wealth was in the form of food crops and livestock and the surplus that could be extracted therefrom. The riches and places were based around the floodplains of the great rivers of the civilized world, the Yangtze, Ganges, Indus, Tigris-Euphrates and, especially, the Nile.

And it was in one of the great universalist thinkers of the period that we see the beginnings of profound and powerful thinking about political economy. I am referring, here, not to Aristotle but to Lao Tsu, founder of Taoism and author of the Tao Te Ching. Lao Tsu’s fundamental insight, and one with which I agree was this: the best way to discover a rich place is to look for a concentrated population of poor and oppressed people. His argument was that societies that are closer to subsistence cannot produce the surplus necessary to finance their oppression, that oppression requires a non-productive class of oppressors to work as soldiers, overseers, managers, courtiers, etc.

When the world is with the Tao,
Carriages are used to transport manure;
When the world is without the Tao,
Armed chariots are lined up near the city gates.

Tao 46

Unlike other Chinese philosophers, Lao Tsu opposed the very existence of China precisely because it could only exist by extracting the surplus needed to maintain the armed forces required to keep the empire in place. He preferred, instead, that we live in “small countries.”

A small nation has a small population,
Yet even without state-of-the-art instruments to work with,
People would rather sacrifice themselves than migrate away.
Even though there are vessels and vehicles for travel,
None takes the opportunity;
Even though there are national guards,
They are not lined up for inspection;
People revert to simple means of measure with straps and knots.
Indulge their desires and aspirations,
Adorn their attires and outfits,
Secure their place and quarters,
Console their beliefs and customs.
Then even if the neighboring nation is within sight,
And the crowing and barking can be heard,
People retire of old age without longing to give service to the other.

Tao 80

While I am not dogmatic or simplistic when it comes to Taoist political economy, I am certain of this: we need to take a perspective more informed by Taoism when facing the fundamental questions of our age when it comes to questions of political economy as it pertains to two of the animating political passions of my whole life: environmental conservation and alleviating poverty.

There are a lot of intellectually unserious memes out there these days about billionaires, especially the world’s richest men, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. These memes propound the view that if these men just gave all their money to the right charities it would “world hunger” or “end poverty,” or some other economic shift that could, overnight, reverse the trend towards wealth concentration and polarization that has steadily accelerated over the past fifty years.

Now don’t get me wrong: the existence and power of these billionaires is an indictment our tax systems, our antitrust anti-monopoly laws, our protections against foreign control of our economies, etc. But that does not make it true that poverty can be simplistically solved by seizing an individual’s wealth, all other things being equal.

My views on the need for a more Taoist economic approach for tackling poverty shifted profoundly as a result not of joining the Conservative Party of BC in 2022 but of the year I spent living in Dar Es Salaam 2023-24.

Dar is the largest city on the East African coast. It is also one of the poorest. And it is also the de facto capital of one of the poorest East African states; the per capita income of Kenyans, for instance, is double that of Tanzanians. I did not live in a wealthy neighbourhood but instead in a lower middle class area that was beginning to gentrify. But, as a curious man who enjoyed the gratuitous mini-cab rides I could afford there and who sought to stay fit in a climate ill suited for cardio, I walked and rode all over Dar, through rich neighbourhoods and poor ones, through informal favela-like communities on the outskirts. I also visited towns tourists rarely do, Kilwa Masoko, Ikwiriri, Bagamoyo and Kilwa Kisiwani.

And in all that time, in all that travel I did not see one person sleeping rough or one person obviously unhinged from drink or drug to the point of being out of contact with reality. I saw disabled people whose physical disabilities could have been treated better in a Canadian hospital who obviously couldn’t obtain proper medical treatment when they needed it. I saw people clearly malnourished and underfed. And I saw people sleeping in shacks, stores and their vehicles. Most people in Tanzania are poor, damn poor, but not, “poor in spirit.” Until recently, we understood that simple material deprivation was insufficient to destroy a resilient person’s sense of pride, dignity, responsibility or hope. Something else has to go wrong for people to be sleeping rough, wild in the street, half-clothed in urine-soaked garments. Just Lao Tsu argued that wealth, at the level of a nation, creates oppression, I am coming to suspect that, at least in Anglo America, wealth is also creating poverty of spirit.

In contrast, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside has the highest concentration, per square foot, of wealth anywhere in British Columbia. It rains millions of dollars from the sky every day and has now for generation. Fifty years ago, the DTES was known as Skid Row and its main population were single, retired or semi-retired bush workers, most, very heavy drinkers, who lived in cheap residential hotels or small, shabby apartments and got into knife fights with upsetting frequency.

But beginning in the 1970s with the creation of the Downtown Eastside Residents’ Association (DERA), first charity money, then municipal government money, then, in the 1980s, money from senior governments began funding pilot programs, specialized interventions and local subsidies to the area. Services for certain groups also began being concentrated there, namely addicts and indigenous people.

Indigenous people, because they comprise a much larger portion of the rural proletariat than they do of other groups in Canadian society, are, naturally, over-represented among bush workers and therefore already comprised a significant chunk of DTES residents. But as Blairite Austerity took hold in the 1990s, a new logic drove the demographic remaking of the neighbourhood. An ever-increasing number of charities and non-profits joined DERA in the neighbourhood as lucrative government contracts rolled out for QuaNGOs to provide an ever increasing diversity of government services, a large proportion of them experimental or pilot programs that existed nowhere but the DTES for decades: a supervised injection site, supportive housing and a host of others.

And, as these services agglomerated, it just made sense to place services targeted at drug users and indigenous people in the neighbourhood. It was the unavailability of services anywhere else in BC that drove an increasing rate of migration into an increasingly racialized, increasingly addicted population. As specialized services for addiction, madness and poverty accumulated, as more government partnerships rolled out, as the province deinstitutionalized the mentally ill from provincial facilities and placed them in the care of QuaNGOs, the DTES became a centre of racial oppression, despair, addiction and madness.

Soon we were searching the hinterland for traumatized indigenous people for the state to send to Main and Hastings for treatment, the way the Aztecs levied sacrifice victims from the margins of their empire to sacrifice on the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in the name of their bloodthirsty religion.

The concentrations of poverty Aristotle, Lao Tsu and the other great economists of the ancient world saw in the deltas of the Nile, Indus, Ganges and Yangtze were made possible by the vast agricultural surplus which empires could use to pay men with swords and spears to take even more from the peasants and make them eat less, toil harder and have less control over their lives and those of the people they loved. Were he here today, Lao Tsu would recognize the social workers, the nurses, the bureaucrats, the commissars, the “community organizers” and “stakeholder advocates” as just another army of oppressors and looters, using the wealth, the surplus raining down on them to design and administer new kinds of misery and despair.

Am I suggesting that these people are uniformly or even mostly evil or ill-intentioned? Of course not. Like many of the soldiers for the Emperor, for Pharaoh, for the Brahmins, for the Mandarins, many are motivated by a deep altruism, a desire to help and a noble sense of mission, to defend the people, glorify the empire, make a great god-fearing civilization. But such true believers are also more likely to join, en masse, simplistic moralistic religions, bow down before idols and imagine themselves to have a special divine mission that transcends the simple morality of those in whose suffering they are implicated. The Pharaoh’s soldiers’ main work and stated purpose was not the immiseration of the fellahin but their protection from the Assyrians and the Persians. That is why Lao Tsu proposed eschewing surplus: only by having nothing to steal could looters and raiders be truly kept at bay. “Not collecting treasures prevents stealing,” he reminds us.

It is not just on an environmental front that we need to listen to Lao Tsu and keep our used car instead of buying an EV, keep our incandescent lights to heat our homes while we light them in the winter, to engage in an eco-politics of choosing to buy nothing over buying “green tech.” We need to understand that there is no way around the human race actually learning to restrain itself, to do less, to collect less, to enjoy our neighbours more and our AI server farms less. Because, ultimately, any energy efficiency technology that reduces demand just creates space for more private jets, more coal-fired server farms, more swimming pools in luxury homes.

The principle of less not more, the embrace of sufficiency and forbearance—these will not just get us out of our ecological tailspin but our civilization’s mad plunge into oppression, suffering, madness and poverty, a plunge we have taken precisely because we have never been so rich.

Miscellaneous Articles | fusangite | January 31, 2025

“Adulting” at Christmas: the Decline of the Child-Centred Festivals of the New Deal Order

“What is a woman?” has become an effective refrain for opponents of Genderwang to bust out in public hearings, townhalls, etc. to wrong-foot progressives. Progressives are reluctant to reiterate what the laws they proclaim say on the subject which is “any person who says ‘I am a woman’ at any time, at any place and for any reason.”

Certainly, women have born the brunt of a lot of terrible progressive legislation concerning freedom of assembly, movement, association and speech. They have been locked in prison cells with serial rapists, made to compete against men in the boxing ring, had the violent abusers they were fleeing admitted to their women’s refuge, forced to receive strip searches and personal nursing from men cosplaying as women. The list goes on. It is well-rehearsed.

Ultimately, the progressive idea seems to be that the ways our bodies and minds have been shaped to meet our species’ reproductive needs is unfair and, therefore, somehow untrue or is something that we can and should cause to be untrue. I would argue that such an enterprise only becomes reasonable in a society in which reproduction, itself, is, as the queer theorists would say, “de-normalized” and “de-centred.”

And at no time is this more evident to me than during my two favourite childhood holidays, Christmas and Hallowe’en. The shift of annual gift-giving from New Years to Christmas and the rise of Hallmark and the greeting card industry in the 1840s, radiating out from the US, followed by the collaborative Anglo-American invention of the modern Santa Claus at the end of the nineteenth century created a whole new deity and ritual practice for a novel secular liberal Christmas.

Hallowe’en, which arose from new forms of consumption and settlement, enabled by the decline of sugar prices with the rise of the sugar beet industry in the American Southwest and the rise of row house streetcar suburbs was, similarly, a new festival and one which, like the new Christmas moved the centre of celebration and observance from otherworldly miracles to the miracle of childhood.

There were a few reasons for this shift, not least a rapidly expanding industry producing packaged sweets, fueled by massive increases in sugar supply and declines in price as American maize and beets produced a sectoral import substitution boom, a new industry in greeting cards and the rise of urban department stores, supplanting the catalogue distributorship model.

But there were also social needs to be met. The growth of the suburbs, the immigration boom, increasingly fueled by Eastern and Southern Europeans, meant that a whole new ethos of neighbourliness had to be built. Hallowe’en was an ideal mechanism for conscripting previously unconnected people into a neighbourly activity through dynamics of pressure and shame, as well as children’s enthusiasm, in that it also allowed them to be vetted based on their treatment of neighbour children. And by inserting a strain of benign paganism, Hallowe’en could also be used to vet for civic-minded religious tolerance.

In a way, child-centred Hallowe’en was to the neighbourly culture in which I grew up, in which my mom borrowed and lent butter, flour and sugar with the other women on our block, what the hajj was to medieval Islam. Mall Santa, I would contend, functioned in a similar way: no one would look too askance on a family that missed going to church on the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth, to the extent that it was even appropriate to inquire about such things across denomination. But Mall Santa, the closest thing we have to the eponymous priest class of Pharaonic Egypt: that was the pilgrimage that every family had to make. A child could miss Jesus’ intercessory and redemptive sacrifice but not the materialist confession they made on the lap of a portly man who resembled more a medieval imagining of a man possessed by Mammon than the Saint Nicholas who punched Arius in the face at the Council of Nicea and whose bones Recep Erdogan has offered to sell us.

But worry was also a big part of what generated these rituals, twin demographic anxieties nearly identical to our own. Strange how when wealth rapidly polarizes and demand is fueled and maintained by massive increases in consumer debt leavened by increasingly conscriptive monthly instalment plans, people seem to decide that the solution is more cross-dressing and immigration. But of course, rapid, unsustainable rates of immigration were, just as they are today, part of the Global North’s strategy for maintaining increasingly precarious economic growth by creating shortages of jobs and housing, pushing down wages and pushing up rents.

The immigration increases were justified much as they are today, white Protestant birth rates were declining and, to maintain the constant growth capitalism demands, more migrants were necessary. Teddy Roosevelt propounded a natalist policy in response, seeking to ban contraception and create new incentives for families to have kids. We often mistake the “baby bonus,” like the public school system as a proto-welfare state policy that a party like Germany’s Social Democrats might introduce. But these policies are the sort we see coming out of the natalist governments of Viktor Orban and Jean-Francois Legault today. You see: public schools and baby bonuses were originally understood in natalist terms i.e. they were created because the state believed people should have more kids and sought to make that easier; they did not arise from a belief in universals material entitlements of minors to education or to clothing and shelter.

Ultimately, child-centred festivals addressed these anxieties, to an extent, in a number of ways. They had an assimilating effect on communities by conscripting them into universal activities through their children, dampening worries about immigration; both local Anglo creoles and newcomers were creating new shared civic rituals together; they helped to build trust and vetting processes for neighbours’ suitability to look out for free range kids, enabling the world of Our Gang and the Little Rascals to come into being.

The New Deal Order was only around for little more than half a century. It was largely sustained by the rise of the Soviet Union and East Bloc. Without them, there is simply no reason it was rational to keep that social contract around. It had served its purpose and won the Cold War. And universal material guarantees could be safely scaled-back.

And so, not just the material supports but the cultural and infrastructural supports for parents were stripped away. Instead of focusing gifting primarily on children and secondarily on other relatives at Christmas time, the idea of a nebulously-defined self-selected “family” of friends was relentlessly popularized in media, entertainment and popular psychology, making who was to receive a gift less clear and more fraught with anxiety likely to produce over-purchasing. Besides, with their knowledge and expectations, adults tend to prefer more expensive gifts. It made good money, good sense to replace a child and family-structured Christmas with voluntarist liberal associational Christmas.

The changes in Hallowe’en I found personally upsetting. I watched the festival from one centred on children to one centred on twentysomethings and then on adults in early middle age. It took me decades to outrun the damn thing. Every time I thought Hallowe’en parties would become age-inappropriate in my circle and stop being major events, they suddenly became age-appropriate for even older people, again a move relentlessly pushed by popular media.

Furthermore, as laws and the culture of the caring professions shifted in a more individualistic, neoliberal direction, on the one hand, and, on the other became gripped by an irrational safetyism that sought to shut down the very idea of free range kids, the Hallowe’en’s hajj-like properties declined. Instead of being a block-based processional festival, individual children were driven, by their parents, to the homes of trusted, pre-vetted people. Childless newcomers to neighbourhoods ceased putting out decorated pumpkins and buckets of candy. And so the integrative and vetting functions, crucial to the maintenance of neigbhourliness, disappeared. In its place were parties focusing on novel and fantastical forms of display by young women as wire-fu, manga and superheroines came to define new fads in my generation’s male sexual imaginary.

But today, on our streets, it is not young women with blue hair and shiny clothes that are exotic. Free range children sent to the Safeway to buy extra tomatoes, unsupervised kids on buses, kids on bikes: these are the surprising and transgressive sight of this society. Free range kids are not just a scary verging on impossible idea for us because we no longer vet our neighbours and there are no more “block parent” signs in houses’ windows.

They challenge us because we no longer believe that an adult behaving as an adult is an essential part of the social contract. When you live in a society where people have no experience of children, who have had their natural instincts to care and look out for kids beaten out of them, who believe not that a child is a protected class of person but that being a child is a right. Only a society that thinks about childhood as a privilege or right to which they can subscribe, that a person can pick up or put down, would verb the word “adult” and congratulate themselves on social media for “adulting” that day. Of course, this is a society that is engaged in trying to tell us that the “adult baby” fetish is benign.

Similarly to womanhood, childhood is being transformed from a particular embodied location in the human reproductive and developmental process into a feeling, a state of mind. How else can we explain our government’s insistence that children as young as twelve can and should obtain lethally dangerous drugs like Lupron and Fentanyl, behind their parents’ backs and at state expense? How else do we explain fifty-two-year-old York University professor Nicholas Cepeda being permitted to participate in middle school girls’ swim meets and wave his dick at the twelve-year-old girls in the locker room? His right to be a child trumps their right to experience the protections normally granted to children, just as his right to be a woman does.

While Cepeda is an outlier—although not as much of one as you might hope if you read the news on Reduxx—his entitlement speaks to where our horizon of possibilities has gone as our contact with children and, relatedly, our experience of age-appropriate behaviour has steadily declined over the course of my adult life.

It is not that progressive Canadian society has some sinister idea of what a child is, exactly. It is that it has absolutely no idea what a child is. And if you don’t know what a woman is, you can’t protect women. And if you don’t know what a child is, you can’t protect children.

In the crescendo of Tom Waits’1980s surrealist auctioneer song, Step Right Up, Waits chants “It turns a sandwich into a banquet / Tired of being the life of the party? / Change your shorts! Change your shorts! Change your life! / Change into a nine-year-old Hindu boy and get rid of your wife!”

Now that’s an option, a present you can buy yourself for Christmas after a hard year adulting.

Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | December 30, 2024

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