In commenting on the many absurdities of the Corona regime, and asking what their purpose could possibly be, I’m often told that “it’s about power” or “it’s about control.”
I confess that I don’t find these explanations convincing. I think they’re grounded in a mistaken view of how western states exercise power and the constraints they face in this. The idea seems to be, that states accumulate the potential to act, which potential is however constrained by the law or popular opinion; and that they are forever striving to escape these artificial constraints through subterfuge and deception, in order to transmute more of their accumulated potential into real-world prerogatives.
I see it otherwise. As far as I can tell, neither laws nor popular opinion limit the action of modern states in any serious way. There are constraints, but these lie elsewhere, mostly in the area of coordination. As I’ve written several times now, our governments have become profoundly demobilised. Political power has accumulated at ever lower levels, with the press, academia and in the bureaucratic institutions. This process represents a kind of political decay, and yet it has distinct advantages for the senescent elite: It ensures broad consensus across all major corporate, government and media factions, shielding them precisely from things like popular opinion and judicial review.
The monstrous institutional apparatus can only act effectively if enough of its widely distributed nodes are activated and aligned behind the same agenda. This requires some kind of (in most cases external) stimulus. Corona has revealed how powerful modern states can be, if only they can get enough of their decentralised distributed substance to back a given programme. Laws become totally meaningless in the face of such coordination; the ensuing propaganda campaign overcomes popular resistance easily.
(The problem of coordination is also why I think the lockdowners and the vaccinators had a much harder time in the United States than in Europe. American [unlike German] federalism is a real force, which fragments the various parties to power still further. Coordination for the American government is thus much harder than it is in Europe, or New Zealand.)
Even in a condition of high coordination, though, the exercise of power or control by the state represents exertion. It’s like running, or lifting a weight. Modern states, with their multitude of international adventures and national initiatives, are fully committed here. The more the various arms of the state have been stirred to action, the more power it has to act in the moment; for a time, the stimulation of SARS-2 provided enough surplus energy to bring vaccine mandates within the realm of possibility. With Omicron, though, the enthusiasm and with it the coordination faded, and the exertion was no longer worth it. They could have still done it, but it would have meant redirecting resources from someplace else and not doing some other thing.
Anyway, that’s my basic model of how state power functions. It’s like the Eye of Sauron: It can’t look everywhere at once, it can’t do everything. And when it’s looking at you, the purpose isn’t just to control your life for the thrill of it. If that’s all the state wanted, it could look anywhere.
States act with purpose, towards specific goals. Their constituent pieces function like a distributed intelligence, which is always striving for something, and – especially when policies become bizarre, clearly unattainable, or circular – it’s worth trying to figure out what that something might be. It might not always be obvious; we shouldn’t assume that states will have goals or aims that make all that much sense to humans.
In fact, while they’re made up of people, western states often behave towards bizarre and alien ends, like an extraterrestrial or a sentient machine: They insist on human uniformity, they’re indifferent to children, they’re hostile to traditional cultures, they hate pathogens, they’re wary of real-life social interaction, they’re mildly wary of the natural world, they like buildings made of glass, steel and concrete, they abhor death, they like to count things, they dislike the rural environment, they prefer the highest possible degree of networking and interconnection.
