Clutched by the Economic Hand of progress…
“On one occasion, Stalin called for a live chicken and proceeded to use it to make an unforgettable point before some of his henchmen. Forcefully clutching the chicken in one hand, with the other he began to systematically pluck out its feathers. As the chicken struggled in vain to escape, he continued with the painful denuding until the bird was completely stripped. “Now you watch,” Stalin said as he placed the chicken on the floor and walked away with some bread crumbs in his hand. Incredibly, the fear-crazed chicken hobbled toward him and clung to the legs of his trousers. Stalin threw a handful of grain to the bird, and it began to follow him around the room, he turned to his dumbfounded colleagues and said quietly, “This is the way to rule the people. Did you see how that chicken followed me for food, even though I had caused it such torture? People are like that chicken. If you inflict inordinate pain on them they will follow you for food the rest of their lives.” -Ravi Zacharias
This story of Stalin has stuck with me for quite some time and helps me reflect on who I am following for scraps of wisdom, leadership, and governance.
The economy before the pandemic was the hand clutching us all, plucking our feathers of labor to benefit the billionaire class. This is not an attempt to compare billionaires to Stalin, it’s to illustrate the hierarchy of the economy we are being asked to go back to work for.
Our world has been given an opportunity to reflect on the pain caused by economic gain. I could take the next countless words to list all the environmental devastation, animal extinctions, and climate catastrophes, but we have heard it all before and continue to ignore it.
What can’t be ignored right now is the power we have to go, or not to go, back to “normal”.
What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again. It will come from brands, it will come from government, it will even come from each other, and it will come from the left and from the right. We will do anything, spend anything, believe anything, just so we can take away how horribly uncomfortable all of this feels. -Julio Vincent Gambuto — Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting*
Normal is the cliff we are collectively heading toward. To go back to the way things were is a confirmation that we are Generations of plucked chickens following the economic hand.
My dad would often say — “Where there is chaos, there is opportunity”. This pandemic has created the greatest opportunity for us to see the cliff clearly. We are all on a conveyor belt with the momentum of infinite growth no one could contemplate stopping. Yet here we are.
This Great Pandemic Pause is the last, and maybe the only chance we have to step off the conveyor belt of disastrous progress.
I have spent the better part of the last decade writing, speaking, and framing our future through the lens of technology and optimism. The power we have to transform and transcend this world is evident wherever we look. How we transform this world has been beyond any one individual, yet that is where this power is generated.
The earth will take care of itself, it will heal and find balance. We need to do the same. We must use our power for personal responsibility and sovereignty as first principles. “Radical self-reliance” is a tenant of Burning Man, and it is the only scalable solution going forward that I can see. Big Government, Big Agriculture, Big Pharma, have all been shown to be incompetent and incapable of the promises they proclaim in the name of progress.
“When civilization falls away, we catch a glimpse of human nature in the raw. When the authoritarian structures supposedly protecting us from our dark Hobbesian nature collapse into dust and chaos, more often than not, all heaven breaks loose.” Christopher Ryan, Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress
