The Critical Mass of My Righteous Fury

The West right now seems absorbed in pushing such idiocies as the finer intricacies of transgender and critical race theories, the claim that defunding the police will help poor blacks (yep, really), a sort of zero-risk, precautionary principle on steroids approach to life and to governing citizens, and the notion that indirect quotas are a good idea as long as you dress them up in the insidiously seductive language of ‘equity’ and ‘diversity’. That means you find some desirable jobs and educational opportunities and then insist there be a near 1:1 correlation between (1) the numbers in the wider society with particular reproductive organs or types of skin pigmentation or preferences in bed, and (2) the numbers from such groups filling these jobs or university places etc – so basically it’s a type of Marxist equality-of-outcome outlook dominating not just universities and the public service but now all big corporations too. 

Moreover, it’s an outlook that indirectly lowers diversity of viewpoint, because conservatives make autonomy and individual choice key. And because they don’t want to play the identity-politics game, they largely don’t get these jobs or places or promotions.  The result over time is a monolithic orthodoxy of outlook, on campus, in the boardroom — heck, even in the Liberal partyroom.  This destructive, navel-gazing wankery in the West is very depressing.  Of course, the rest of the world is busy showing us that the great British philosopher Thomas Hobbes was right.  Humans have, do and always will live in a dangerous world, one chock full of bullies, thugs, religious zealots and hard men who know only the lessons of the schoolyard (by which I mean the schoolyard when I was a kid at a pretty tough state school in Toronto, where bullying meant being beaten up, not today’s schoolyard where ‘bullying’ has been emptied of all content and appears to mean someone has said something that might reduce self-esteem a few points on the ‘might I possibly be offended?’ scale).

In that sort of Hobbesian world you have to be prepared to defend yourself.  Weakness is lethal.  Woke, PC, navel gazing wankery is a path to national ruin.  And anything emanating from French deconstructionist philosophers has be treated as ‘taking the piss’, not made the central tenets of a university degree in the social sciences, Arts, education, and law or implicitly put at the heart of a self-loathing national curriculum.

ARE ANY readers succumbing to the temptation to laugh at the black humour involved in the Joe Biden administration still spending some US $22 million per day on Russian oil while at the same time sending some US $350 million in military aid to the Ukraine?  Another way to make that point is to say that the US is presently bankrolling both sides in this war.  What could possibly have led to such a crazy outcome?  And the answer is ‘net zero fundamentalism’.

President Biden is so much in thrall to the far left of the Democratic party that in the very first days of taking office he cancelled pipeline permissions, ended new drilling for oil and gas on federal lands, put the brakes on fracking, and turned America from energy self-sufficiency into big time importer of oil and gas.  That means some of it — 10 per cent, according to the latest figures — from Russia.  You can quote me on; this mad green fixation will also drive him to cut a pathetic deal with Iran to end sanctions and get their oil into the US.  Who cares about Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions?  Not Slow Joe, who is petrified by the spectre of inflation; it’s already at a 40-year high before this war in the Ukraine and will only get higher.  That’s obvious to every sentient being not paid to sit on a central bank and set interest rates.  Those central bankers are addicted to easy money and petrified to turn off the taps.  Future generations who have to pay back the debt and live with the incredible asset inflation be damned!

SPEAKING of asset inflation and how virtually all policy settings across the Anglosphere are set for oldies not youngies, I was talking to my mom in Canada recently.  She’s in the same house she and dad bought in 1966 in the east end of Toronto and she reminded me that they paid $19,000 in Canadian dollars.  I looked up the average male wage back then and it was $7,400.  My dad then had a junior economist’s job in the Ontario Treasury department.  Back then, unlike today, public service jobs were paid notably lower than in the private sector because you were trading job security for less pay.  You didn’t get today’s insanity of public servants getting all the perks of life on the public teat plus salaries comparable to, or even higher than, what’s on offer in the private sector.  Query:  How is that going to work out for our already incredibly low productivity growth or innovation or anything else desirable?

But back to my main point.  Let’s be conservative and say that my dad was earning $8,000 a year.  That meant a young couple with two young kids could move out of a rental apartment and buy their first house and the cost would be just under two-and-a-half times the sole earner’s yearly salary.  I won’t tell you what my mom’s house is worth today, but if you didn’t do high school mathematics in Australia in the last fifteen years you’ll be able to work it out because a family with a joint income of $250,000 a year would be looking at paying about seven times their yearly income.  That jump from a multiple of 2.5 to 7, is asset inflation at work.  That, dear readers, is just one way in which we are screwing over the young and favouring the rich with our easy money, big immigration, big debt to be paid by the kids and pretending increasing yearly GDP means that GDP per capita is going up anywhere near the same. It isn’t.

The young are being slow roasted.  Amazingly, they’re so badly educated (again, our fault not theirs) that they don’t seem to realise this.

THROW in what we’ve done to the young with despotic COVID policies these past two years and it’s enough to make you weep.  Oh, and did you see that the Center of Disease Control in the US just released the data for the entire pandemic period, when most of that time the young were not vaccinated.  Know what the CDC said the chances were of anyone under the age of 15 dying of COVID?  It was 1 in 2.34 million.  Call it zero really.  Less than the chances of being murdered, dying in a car, dying of the flu, even of being hit by lightning.  For that we cancelled two years of normal school most will never make up.  We made young people parade around in masks.  We locked them in tiny apartments while the wealthy enjoyed their palatial home arrest. We screwed the young over completely.

I’m filled with fury and indignation about all this. It won’t go away. I want every politician in office the last two years who didn’t fight this illiberalism to be voted out, regardless of party affiliation.  Can’t help it. I’m feeling very Old Testament.

James Allan is Garrick Professor of law at the University of Queensland