How America’s predatory state has left China behind in the dust
- Embarrassing congressional testimony by the Canadian self-help guru Jordan Peterson may have been better directed at US rather than China
Some 7½ minutes into his congressional testimony video clip, Canada’s world famous self-help guru complained: “Do I have my five minutes or do I not?”
One thing you can always count on with Professor Jordan Peterson is that if he can make a short speech, he will make it much longer, and speak in long sentences when shorter ones will do. He always makes simple and pedestrian ideas sound so complicated.
Here are two typical sentences from his congressional testimony, which he was asked to summarise by a panel member who interrupted:
“… the ultimate fascist collusion between gigantic self-interested corporations and paranoid security obsessed anti-human governments.”
“We are already selling our souls to the superstate for the purposes of immediate gratification and convenience, while being enticed to do so by fearmongering ideologues, guaranteeing to us the security which we so desperately and increasingly crave.”
It’s not clear why a psychologist was asked to be one of six witnesses before the House judiciary select subcommittee on the subject of “Weaponisation of the federal government”.
I can only surmise that US Congressmen are like journalists: they call up specific people for the testimonies they want, just like the quotes we hacks need to file a story. Witness expertise is an excuse. Reassuring or reinforcing opinions and ideological conformity are what these congressional hearings really seek. That’s exactly why so many random rioters and protesters from the 2019 riots in Hong Kong ended up testifying in Washington in recent years as if they were all some young Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jnr.
And Peterson duly delivered. He began by denouncing China’s techno-totalitarianism which is killing people’s individuality, liberty and privacy, and ended by quoting Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”
Actually, in England, the birthplace of parliamentary democracy and common law, there was an old judicial saying, “Bring me prisoners and I will find them law.”
The same sentiment about presumed guilt was expressed, among many others, by Maximilien Robespierre of the “Reign of Terror”, which came out of the French revolution, arguably the single event that gave us the modern notion of liberty. Given the quote’s meaning and history, it’s neither here nor there when it comes to weaponising the federal state.
Peterson said his own country, Canada, is increasingly taking after China in destroying freedom, and warned other Western democracies are following suit. Presumably, the United States is our last hope.
For me, though, at least China’s techno-totalitarianism offers clean and safe streets at night. That’s not something that can be said about the streets of London – which reportedly have the most public security cameras of any city in a democratic country – or many other British and American streets.
Peterson seems to think the “weaponisation”, that is, collusion between government and corporations, is something new.
Some scholars have long argued it’s at its most advanced stage in the US. Instead of Peterson, read economist James Galbraith’s 2008 The Predator State, about its affinity with militarisation and financialisation, that is, the military-industrial complex and Wall Street.
The corporate capture of “the state apparatus” means the government is not representative of the people’s interests, but an uneasy coalition for “regulated” industries, resulting in the revolving door for senior people in the public and private sectors.
They allow not only the depletion of natural resources, but public ones such as government-funded patents – mRNA biotech for Covid vaccines, for example – for corporate profit.
In fact, if you read the late Marxist historian Gabriel Kolko’s Main Currents in Modern American History, the industrial capture of state regulations was nothing new, but began long before with steel, oil and rail. But I doubt members of Congress would invite Galbraith to talk about their predatory government.
