Cryptocurrency: Freedom Protests and Crypto Freedom Trigger Panic In Governments

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https://brownstone.org/articles/society-vs-state-canada-reveals-the-core-conflict-of-our-age/

Society Vs State: Canada Reveals The Core Conflict Of Our Age

Justin Trudeau’s confrontation with the Canadian truckers may be the
single most significant event of the Covid pandemic – not because of
its eventual outcome, whatever that may be, but because of what it
symbolises. It captures, in perfect microcosm, the tensions between
the competing imperatives of the age: freedom versus security; the
rule of law versus flexible ‘responsive’ governance; the priorities of
the workers versus those of the Zooming bourgeoisie; the need for
real-world human interaction and belonging versus the promises of
splendid online isolation; the experiences of the common man, who
knows where it hurts, versus those of the professional expert class,
who know nothing that cannot be expressed as a formula.

More than all of that, though, it gives us a lens through which to
view a much deeper, much older conflict of much larger scope – one
which underlies not just the struggles of the Covid age, but of
modernity itself. On the one hand, the state, which seeks to make all
of society transparent to its power. On the other, alternative sources
of authority – the family, the church, the community, the firm, the
farm, and the human individual herself.

For centuries, the state has waged a quiet war against those
competitors, and bent them to its will. It has done this not through
conspiracy or deliberate strategy but merely through the single-minded
pursuit, across generation after generation of political leaders, of
one goal: legitimacy. Governments and other state organs derive their
legitimacy, and therefore their positions of rulership, from
convincing the population that they are necessary.

They do this by suggesting that without their intervention, things
will go badly; left to their own devices, ordinary people will suffer.
The family, the church, the community, the firm, the farm, the human
individual – these are inadequate to the task of securing human
well-being. That task, only the state is equipped to achieve, for only
the state can keep the population educated, healthy, safe, prosperous
and satisfied. Since this is the case, only the state is fit to deploy
power – and only those who govern the state are fit to rule.

The logic of this argument is writ large, of course, in the Covid
response across the developed world. What will keep us ‘safe?’

Certainly not traditional sources of succour, such as the church or
the family. Certainly not individual people, who cannot be trusted to
behave responsibly or assess risks for themselves.

No – it is only the state, first with its lockdowns, then with its
social distancing, its mask mandates, its vaccine programs, and lately
its vaccine mandates and ‘passports.’ It is only the state’s power
that saves and secures. And since only the state can save, it is the
only legitimate source of authority – along, of course, with its
leaders.

The state portraying itself as saviour in this fashion is patently
false and absurd given what has taken place over the past two years.
But as false and absurd as it is, it remains the subtext behind all of
Covid policy. Justin Trudeau must derive his legitimacy from somewhere
to maintain power. And he senses – political animal that he is – that
he can derive it from displaying the Canadian state (with himself at
the helm, of course) as the only thing standing between the Canadian
public and suffering and death.

It is the state, remember – in this case with its vaccine mandates –
that saves and secures. Without it, the reasoning goes, the population
would suffer and die as Covid ran riot. The political logic is
inescapable. For a man like Trudeau, without principle except that he
alone is fit to govern, there is only one path to follow. Insist that
it is the state that saves and secures, and that anything that stands
in its way – truckers beware – must therefore be crushed beneath its
heel.

The truckers, for their part, represent everything that the state
despises. They have a social and political power that is independent
from it, and hence form one of the alternative sources of power which
it hates and fears. This power derives not from some institution which
the truckers dominate, but simply from their status amongst what I
will refer to as the yeomanry classes – almost the last bastion of
self-sufficiency and independence in a modern society such as Canada.

In a developed economy, most of the professional classes – doctors,
academics, teachers, civil servants and the like – derive their
incomes and status entirely or partially, directly or indirectly, from
the existence of the state. If they are not civil servants, their
status is built on regulatory apparatus which only the state can build
and enforce. This is also, of course, true of the underclass, who are
often almost totally reliant on the state for the meeting of their
needs. The members of these classes pose no threat to the state’s
legitimacy, because, simply put, they need it. It, as a consequence,
is perfectly happy to tolerate their existence – and, indeed, it
wishes all of society were that way inclined. A population entirely
reliant on the state is one which will never question the necessity of
the growth of its power and hence its capacity to buttress its own
legitimacy.

But in the middle are those people, the modern yeomanry, who derive
their incomes from private sources, as sole traders, owners of small
businesses, or employees of SMEs. Independent-minded, seeing
self-sufficiency as a virtue, and relying on themselves and their
relationships with others rather than the state, these modern yeomen
represent a natural barrier to its authority. Simply put, they do not
need it. They earn their money through the use of a particular skill
which others value and hence pay for on the open market.

Whether or not the state exists is immaterial to their success – and,
indeed, it very frequently stands in their way. These are the type of
people who, seeing a problem, tend to want to find a solution for
themselves. And they are precisely the kind of people who want to make
up their own minds about whether to take a vaccine, and to assess
health-related risks in general.

The modern state has waged incessant and covert war against the
yeomanry in particular. At every step, it seeks to regulate their
business affairs, restrict their liberty, and confiscate their
prosperity. There is always a purportedly ‘good’ reason for this. But
it contributes to an incessant whittling away of their independence
and strength. It is no accident that they are described in British
parlance as the ‘squeezed middle’ – squashed as they are between the
welfare-reliant underclass on the one hand, and the white-collar
professionals who draw their wealth, directly or indirectly, from the
state on the other.

It is also no accident that these modern yeomen have gradually seen
their political representation diminish over the course of the last
100 years, in whichever developed society one cares to name; the
politicians they would elect would be mostly interested in getting the
state out of the way, and modern politicians’ incentives all incline
in the opposite direction. Their interest is in the inexorable growth
of state power, because that is from where their legitimacy derives.

Justin Trudeau’s contempt for the truckers is therefore genuine and
profound. He sees in them not an obstacle to Covid policy or a
potential threat to public health. Not even he could possibly be so
stupid as to think it matters whether or not these people take their
vaccines. No: he identifies in them a barrier to forces in which his
political future is entwined – an ever-increasing scope and scale for
governmental authority, and the opportunities to buttress his own
legitimacy that would follow from it.

And his contempt for them is outweighed, of course, by his fear.
Because he surely recognises that his authority is wafer-thin.
Legitimacy cuts both ways. If he fails to suppress the truckers’
revolt, the entire edifice on which his authority rests – as the
helmsman of the Canadian state and its purported capacity to protect
the population from harm – will come tumbling down.

This conflict is therefore not about Covid – it’s existential. Does it
matter if the truckers win or lose? No. What matters is what their
efforts have revealed to us about the relationship between the state
and society in 2022.