Uber Uber Alles

Riot on Nevsky Prospect, Petrograd, 1917.

Richard Fernandez writes, for PJ Media, that the MSM are missing the big story while they fixate on Trump’s impeachment. The world is on fire: rioting in the streets of Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile, Spain, France, Iraq, Sudan, Russia, Uganda, Peru, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Iran. Something is going on.

Fernandez does not say what it is, other than the people being fed up with the establishment. What I say is going on is the democratization of information flow thanks to the Internet. The ability of folks to organize through social media, and to access information online, makes the traditional establishment largely redundant. We have gone, for example, from the rigid organization of the traditional taxi company to the free form flow of Uber.

Structures are now more often than not getting in the way. Accordingly, people are less inclined to listen to their authority, to defer to them, and to pay for them.

The initial reaction of the establishment has been to try to batten down the hatches, and expand the role of government in order to squelch this perceived disorder. This, I think, is suicide.

The future is for less government. Whatever jurisdictions first realize this shall inherit the earth.

The Death of the Professions

The numbers in this article are startling.

The tide is going far, far out.

I did not expect to see this sharp decline in law yet—I thought medicine was more vulnerable. But nobody comes from China or the Middle East to the US to study law, because American law does not apply back home. So the law schools are being hit by a student shortage that is masked in other disciplines by rising numbers of international students.

It seems that, with so many legal forms available online, and with Internet search capabilities, a lot of the traditional lawyer’s job is no longer necessary.

Makes me wonder what we are all going to do for a living here in North America, with manufacturing all gone overseas, service gone to call centres abroad, storefronts closing due to Internet shopping, and the professions being replaced by the internet.

The obvious answer is that we are all going to work on the Internet. But there will be no more advantages to simply living in North America—you can log in just as easily from Mumbai as Manhattan.

Science is Dead, Not God

I have a strong suspicion that the current “Climategate” affair is a bigger deal than we can yet imagine. Polls are already suggesting the death of “climate change” as a marketable political issue. But I think it has implications beyond the “climate change” issue itself; it speaks to the public prestige of science. In the past several centuries, that prestige has been so great and growing that “Scientism” has become, overwhelmingly, our true majority religion, worldwide. “Scientism” is the belief that science has a unique claim to truth, produces final answers, and can, at least potentially, “explain everything.” From this, “scientists” and those who claim to be “scientists” have derived an odd moral prestige, as if they were a priesthood supernaturally protected not just from error, but from sin.

Bad enough; it produces a class system, and an unregulated, very powerful, elite. But “science” has also been invoked as an authority in areas where it is of no value, with absurd and harmful results: most notably, the “social sciences.” Marxism, feminism, Fascism, Freudianism, all have had a good run on an absurd claim to be “scientific,” killing and destroying lives in incalculable numbers. Most recently we have the “new atheism,” scientism reaching the apotheosis of arrogance, demanding the elimination of all competing forms of belief.

However, just as the invention of the printing press lifted the veil on the sources of Christian doctrine, letting every interested layman see it for themselves, with rather dramatic results in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Internet is lifting the veil on the sources of scientific doctrine, letting every interested layman get a good look. The results are likely to be similar. The united and unchallenged authority of Scientism is likely to crumble. And, just as Christianity was eventually replaced with “Scientism” as the de facto religion as a result, now Scientism in its turn is likely to be replaced as the dominant religion.

Perhaps, with luck, by a return to true religion. Scientism was not just “a religion like the others,” but a false religion: a religion of materialism, with no morality, no God, no spirit, no philosophical validity, no concept of man's inner being. It blocked the path to true religion, while offering no alternative. I doubt it will survive public scrutiny nearly as well as Christian doctrine did.