Charles Hugh Smith
A corrupt Orthodoxy devoid of new ideas, an Orthodoxy devoted to maintaining the wealth, status and power of insiders regardless of cost, is a brittle, fragile, unstable system.
When the ruling Elites sense their control of the populace is waning, they seek to regain full control via the imposition of a strict Orthodoxy, enforced by an Inquisition. We are living in just such an era. Everywhere we turn, a New Orthodoxy reigns. Dissent is blasphemy, and any narratives outside the approved Orthodoxy are heretical and subject to suppression and punishment.
New Orthodoxies abound, and woe to those who fail to signal their virtue publicly. One New Orthodoxy is that one's sexual and ethnic characteristics are all-important signifiers of identity. This orthodoxy is critically important to the ruling Elites, as this fragments the populace into tribes warring over their relative degree of victimhood and indignation.
This orthodoxy insures the populace can never gain class consciousness, i.e. an awareness that the ruling Elites and their apparatchiks (the Federal Reserve, Big Tech, the security agencies, et al.) are their class enemies, as the Elites rule at the expense of everyone beneath them.
Questioning the ruling rentier "solution" to climate change--carbon credits that trade like CDOs, securities, etc.--marks one as a dangerous heretic.Anyone questioning the rentier skim of carbon credits is labeled a climate-change denier, and run through the media/social media Inquisition.
Questioning the corrupt clergy is also taboo. Just as the Catholic Church collected wealth via selling indulgences, a paid pass into Heaven that expiated one's sins--the larger the sum paid, the greater the sins that could be atoned, modern-day sinners donate money to foundations, universities, NGOs, think-tanks and other philanthro-capitalist indulgences--and to virtue-signaling politicians, of course.
Today's corrupt clergy can be found operating the modern-day equivalent of indulgences in government, higher education and other institutions. Corruption and incompetence are overlooked if one's obedience to Orthodoxy is unquestioned.
Enormous donations to Orthodox politicians, foundations and think-tanks are accepted with blessings from wealthy parasites and predators, and the corrupt clergy conveniently overlook their crimes, for example, reaping billions of dollars in profits from selling addictive drugs that were marketed as non-addictive.
Thousands of corporate cases of fraud, embezzlement, misrepresentation of facts and insider trading are given wrist slaps, while whistleblowers are hounded to the ends of the Earth.
Anyone who questions the value of a college diploma or sickcare's standards of care is on their own. Institutional punishment includes being sent to Siberia (a remote dead-end for one's career), being shunned professionally and socially, de-monetized by Big Tech (Facebook, cough, Google/YouTube, cough), or if someone becomes a real pest, executed via suspicious death or faked suicide.
The new wrinkle in the New Orthodoxy is that the corrupt clergy denies there is an Orthodoxy and an accompanying Inquisition to enforce silence, complicity and obedience, even as they silence heretics and demand public virtue-signaling approval of the New Orthodoxy.
One trademark of the New Orthodoxy is that those publicly signaling their virtue deny they are kow-towing to the New Orthodoxy. This is of course the full flowering of Huxley's loving our servitude while denying our servitude to a corrupt, self-serving clergy.
This institutional suppression of free thought, inquiry and dissent has a systemic cost. A corrupt Orthodoxy devoid of new ideas, an Orthodoxy devoted to maintaining the wealth, status and power of insiders regardless of cost, is a brittle, fragile, unstable system, and all the efforts of the corrupt clergy to impose uniform acceptance of the goodness and rightness of a debauched, corrupt, self-serving status quo will only increase the scale of its eventual collapse.
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