Subterfuge

When economic swagger and nationalistic machismo no longer deliver Sri Lanka’s wherewithal and instead serve as a basis for global humiliation, then naturally, more populist persuasions will dominate 

We are all being buffeted by multiple varietals of fraud. There are just different iterations of them. 

For years we were told, don’t worry about opioid addiction. You can keep printing money and no bubbles will form in the housing market. You can “eliminate” an airborne virus that has been in circulation already by “locking up” the healthy along with the sick. And untested mRNA injections with incomplete animal trials and no testing of vulnerable populations will keep you healthy and safe. And so on… and our worlds are sent into tailspins.

Eventually though, people’s “scepticism monitor” kicks in, and even many of those still obliged to wear pointless face nappies, shake their head in stupefaction at being compelled to do so. 

So, there is first the overarching question from researchers like Steve Kirsch: “How do we sway the minds of those who refuse to see negative data?”

And this is a real question. After all, Sri Lanka’s economic collapse, happened in plain view, the data points of unsustainable debt, inadequate exports, foreign exchange shortages, bloated Government and more, were horrifyingly evident, crescendoing over years of chronic mismanagement. But of course, “magical thinking” was there to provide chloroform.

In turn, initially “manufactured” crises create very real ones. The Sri Lankan Government intervenes in climate change by an overnight, draconian cessation of chemical fertilisers which plunges the economy into a tailspin, impedes production of food, and essentially decimates the main export industry, tea. 

Not to be outdone, the German Government intervenes, also allegedly due to climate change, by insisting on a commitment to 100% clean energy which produces dangerous instability in terms of current availability of “actual energy”. This is tantamount economically to national suicide with some help from the Nord Stream shut-off valve, which “prognosticator” Donald Trump warned about back in 2018! 

The Dutch Government tries to join the sweepstakes by limiting agricultural production, but Dutch farmers revolt (hidden from view by the mass media lest any “news” actually leak out of course), so the outcome there is still uncertain.

Stupid interventions

Here on these shores, we ban items that it seems come from a “catalogue” a wayward clerk pulled haphazardly out of some database and have to reverse these weekly as new resulting economic tsunamis are warned against by the hospitality sector, IT, SMEs and so many more. 

On that front, you can get exemptions, but then your energy goes into “negotiating” with the bureaucracy and “paperwork” calisthenics rather than running a business. One Galle Face mall now has at least achieved the national aspiration of no toilet paper! Bring on the tourists!

You see, Sri Lankan food supply was just fine. Dutch agriculture was just fine. Our old pandemic playbook up until 2019 was just fine (globally adopted and field tested). But then the Government discovers a new religion and intervenes when actually their inertia would be a great blessing. Literally doing “nothing” unexpected in these areas by the potentates would have been far better – the simple choice not to perform witless interventions. 

The entertainment industry globally is in free fall. Netflix, despite “lockdowns” is in free fall due to its “Woke” infatuations. No matter how “locked down” you can’t compel people to watch mandated central programming ideologies. Hollywood has successfully achieved a catastrophic loss of audience too. In fact, Netflix, Warner Brothers, ABC Television, HBO – it seems an equal opportunity clown show for sure.

Whereas California’s once admired Sherman Oaks neighbourhood has Fox News broadcasting neighbours hurling faeces at fences (literally!). When the famous quote by Robert Frost “good fences make good neighbours” was minted, this is clearly not what he was hoping to highlight. The social contract, no less the capitalist “bull’s eye” is being undermined as we are trying to go against the grain of our human instincts.

Which is it?

So, on the one hand, how do you jog people awake from their stupor, in the case of evident mishaps clearly stockpiling and suggesting we are on a clear path to calamity? 

On the other hand, despite the chorus of mRNA cheerleading, as Alex Berenson reports, “mRNA injections for young children are stone-cold dead.” Of 19 million US children under five, less than 2% are “fully vaccinated”.

While there is immense resistance to being shown the stark data, to seeing that these horrific products cause considerable harms that (at best) outweigh their emphatically modest and transitory benefits, nevertheless “the statistical equivalent of every parent in America” refuses to assault their young children with the very thing everyone is refusing to accept the data for. 

So why has a whole country of parents finally drawn a line in the sand and said, “Hell no”? Because they all know. 

The “social pretence”, the PayPal and Venmo and Square “unpersoning of sceptics and critics continues. Social media will deplatform you and HR will lead the vigilante mob to your desk, and the legions of true believers will keep virtue signalling. But people stop “behaving” as if the garbage was a gourmet delight eventually and they stop acting delusionally… finally!

And so, the exhortations aside, we stop listening to the rhetoric. In both directions. Say you are protecting national recovery here, yet eventually people look to see if you are actually dropping useless layers of government, dismantling pointless committees, bringing genuine best practice aboard. Or are you perpetuating stale, stultifying past paradigms? 

Or perhaps it is just that you are unwilling to take a public stand for the revolution you are surreptitiously leading? That too can work, as you can get on with it, rather than take PR stands and pretend pointlessly rather than get on with being a “stealthy” change agent.

The “Woke” farce

Vivek Ramaswamy has written a blistering expose of “Woke” vacuities. He recalls advising a young man who was applying to Harvard. Vivek suggested he highlight aspects of his life and aspirations that would help him “stand out.”

This 17-year-old had it covered. He had started a non-profit to fight against sex slavery. Surely remarkable! Well, it sounds stirring. Years later, when Ramaswamy ran into this scion of venture capitalists, the “sex slavery” interest was a footnote, a barely remembered fragment having served its earlier “utilitarian” purpose.

Corporate ESG posturing is too often a social justice “scam”. Ramaswamy himself has some serious credentials though; a Harvard grad, a Yale Law grad, former hedge funder, and a former Pharmaceutical CEO.

He points out that a hallowed company (and it is “hallowed” here in Sri Lanka too) has been passionate about “intersectionality”, serving women of colour. They partner with UN Women on “gender equality and empowering women.” These are all heartening commitments. 

However, in Kenya, dozens of women who work on a tea plantation run by this company were gang raped and a dozen murdered, and they have declined to provide any appreciable support or assistance. 

They are cowering behind legalities, insisting this was “unexpected” and therefore they could not be held liable. Their own executives of course “unexpected” or not, were safely spirited away in private jets and via other arrangements.

So, these public postures provide “moral cover” and people discount these allegations thinking they must be extreme and biased. But we discover, over and over, that these social stances are too often “strategic” and not “moral”. 

There is an “arranged marriage” between “wokeness” and corporate capitalism flowing from the bowels of “Occupy Wall Street.” It is so much easier to not speak of thorny thickets like TARP (Troubled Asset Relief) for example and so much easier to take aim at easy targets like “white privilege”.

Pulling the plug on manipulation

And so, we come face to face with a choice. We can either keep fighting the farce, or we might realise this isn’t after all a militantly evil “empire”. These are people parlaying manipulative levers, and if those levers go out of style, they will ditch them and move on. So, while you can still cash checks decrying “white privilege”, so it shall be. 

When that fad has flown, and people cannot be “credentialed” that way into a cultural or economic status group, they will switch the slogans they chant and the rituals they enact. These are anyway, as being practiced, empty and devoid of congruence. 

When economic swagger and nationalistic machismo no longer deliver Sri Lanka’s wherewithal and instead serve as a basis for global humiliation, then naturally, more populist persuasions will dominate. Humility will come more to the fore, greater transparency, attention given to the marginalised. And we should try  all of this. And we might seek to actually embed these gifts into our national psyche, and reflexes and priorities. 

So, we need to opt out of “perpetuating crisis”, actual or just asserted. Our villains may be as shallow, and “performance” infatuated as the current debased culture they are recycling. So, a frontal assault on the Death Star isn’t needed, enough global headlines will do the trick, and a groundswell of intelligent scepticism or even outright mockery will finish the job. 

So, fixating on your N-95 mask while confessing to HR the date of your latest, pointless booster, while gorging on some flippant mangling of history in the name of ideology, while subsidising companies that continue to wreck our economy, as we pretend the next consumer gadget will fill the fissure in our inner lives, we need crisis to jolt us awake here. And these crises can be tantamount to confusion or a catalyst. 

They can confuse and derange by detaching us from realities or by facing us to confront facts in order to transform them, they can catalyse fresh choices. 

In the seeking of real challenges that are worthy of real solutions and which therefore yield real benefits, we have hope. Surely, we are overdue to choose the nature and calibre of crises we will confront, and with them, the faculties that will get flexed and the futures that will become manifest.

(The writer is the founder and CEO of EPL Global and founder of Sensei Lanka, a global consultant with over 30 years strategic leadership experience and now, since March 2020, a globally recognised COVID researcher and commentator.)