Point Deer, Make Horse

Point Sniffles, Make Plague

I wasn’t too happy with one of my previous posts, it was one of those things where the idea was super clear in my head but struggled onto the page. So I’m gonna quickly write a little expansion on the same theme. Hopefully it clarifies the basic principle.

The history of Imperial China often reads like a masterclass in machiavellian skulduggery. Having an enormous population, an ancient and technologically sophisticated economy and some of the worlds choicest real estate has served to host a seemingly never ending battle of high stakes political intrigue and ruthless psychological manipulation.

One of the most illuminating examples of this is found in Sima Qian’s ‘Records of the Grand Historian’, in an episode memorialised by the proverb ‘Point Deer, Make Horse.” It describes the role of a court official, Zhao Gao, in the downfall of the Qin Dynasty of early China. The story is as follows

Zhao Gao was contemplating treason but was afraid the other officials would not heed his commands, so he decided to test them first. He brought a deer and presented it to the Second Emperor but called it a horse. The Second Emperor laughed and said, "Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse?" Then the emperor questioned those around him. Some remained silent, while some, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, and others said it was a deer. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law and had them executed instantly. Thereafter the officials were all terrified of Zhao Gao. Zhao Gao gained military power as a result of that.

In case it wasn’t obvious, the genius of this gambit is that it allowed Zhao Gao to test the loyalty of the other court officials whilst maintaining plausible deniability. Without such a gambit, the range of strategic choices available to Gao would have been severely restricted. Without knowing who we could count on for loyalty and who would oppose him, every move he might have made would have been shrouded in uncertainty and doubt. Conversely, any direct attempt to gauge the loyalty of his fellow court officials would have instantly resulted in his exposure.

The Russia Connection

If you look throughout history, you will find that it is replete with countless variations on this theme. The Soviet Union is perhaps the richest such source. The status of truth in Soviet Eurasia was immortally characterised by Solzhenitsyn:

We know they are lying. They know they are lying. They know we know they are lying.

A reasonable question to ask of this quote: Why lie if the lie is convincing to nobody? Why not simply admit to the failings of the system and maintain some shred of credibility. Were the men who ran the Soviet system simply a bunch of fools? Not likely; if they were fools they would have been quickly displaced by more cunning competitors.

Try and see this from the perspective of such a shadowy string-puller. You’re trying to administer an enormously large territory, one with an extraordinary degree of cultural and ethnic variation.

Within living memory, the system of which you are a part has been responsible for some of the gravest crimes in history.

Where the previous tsarist regime had both the ancient gravitas of monarchy and the spiritual weight of the church as sources of legitimacy and your enemies in America have the easily digestible principles of Democracy and Liberalism, your system has no real source of legitimacy beyond the largely ignored, poorly understood principles of Marxism; a joke few even pretend to believe in.

To make matters worse still, the economic political system over which you preside is a completely dysfunctional mess. An Augean stable of corruption, nepotism and ideological mismanagement for which no socio-political Heracles is forthcoming. In other words, a complete fucking mess unlike any other since the days of Rome.

Clearly, the goal for anyone working within such a system for any length of time is not to fix the system but to simple keep one’s head above water and maintain the system in some kind of semi-functional state.

In this context, it becomes clear that one of the primary objectives our shadowy controllers is to avoid a bloody counter-revolution. And this is where the utility of egregious lying becomes evident. Assaulting the population with a constant barrage of easily dis-proven lies serves as a way to identify potential dissidents with ease. Any soviet citizen who might be psychologically inclined towards threatening the system would almost certainly expose themselves long before they could come to understand the true nature of the system they were opposed to.

Of equal importance is identifying the kinds of people who can be useful to the regime. While many will protest the lies, others will enthusiastically repeat them. Some will legitimately be naive enough to believe the Party over the evidence of their eyes, others will simply be playing a game of shrewd cynicism in order to win power and influence. Both types are useful to anti-human, totalitarian systems like Soviet Union and in this egregious barrage of lies, we have a useful filter for identifying such types without giving the game away to the peasants.

The Horse Goes West

If you’re even remotely awake then you’ve probably already gained an inkling of how this connects to covid. Permit me to make the connection ever more explicit. One of the most baffling things about this whole covid affair is the way in elites in politics, media and professional circles continue to treat covid like it’s the new Spanish Flu. It is truly maddening. Anyone with half a brain can see that covid is little more than a nasty flu for anyone who isn’t already on death’s door. Yet the cloud people persist in keeping this ridiculous meme alive for as long as they possibly can. The question is why?

Excluding the possibility of some pharaonic, top-down conspiracy to turn the world into a giant prison planet¹, we have to ask what exactly is going on here. Maybe the powers that be² are just morons who unironically believe it all. But once again we are faced with the basic Darwinian problem that any such person in a desirable position of power would quickly be outfoxed by those more cunning than they are³. So what’s going on here?

I believe that the most prosaic reason for the durability of the covid narrative is that it is just too useful to too many powerful people. For bureaucrats and politicians, it is an evergreen excuse to arrogate more power to themselves. For corporate hacks, it is a convenient way to crush smaller competitors under weight of unmanageable regulations and lockdowns. For the global technocrats it is an opportunity to remake the world in their image. I could go on. Most importantly, it serves as “Point Deer, Make Horse” gambit. It is an effective way of identifying potential dissidents whilst identifying those who are sufficiently pliable to make themselves useful to the neo-liberal regime, all without giving away the game to the peasantry.

Think back to late 2019. I know it seems like a whole world away, but do your best. One of the more interesting things that has since been memory-holed was the massive upsurge in violent anti-government protests across the board. The yellow vest protests, the Hong Kong rebellion, mass rioting in Lebanon to name only the most prominent examples of what, at the time seemed to be a sort of global version of the Arab Spring⁴. Add to that the usual suspects of Trump, Brexit, Le Pen et al we see a pattern of extreme discontent with the current global system. Without question, the oligarchs who run most of this planet could not help but see the spectre of mass uprising on the horizon. Why else would they so furiously police dissent against the system? Such hypersensitivity to criticism is not the sign of a muscular, prosperous and resilient political system but of a sclerotic, dysfunctional and massively over-leveraged house of cards barely holding onto dear life.

In order to maintain this system, and the positions of power and wealth held by its beneficiaries, radical changes will need to be made. The majority of the population will need to accept a much lower standard of living. People will have to work longer for less money. Free speech and the right to privacy will be considered too risky to be allowed for the plebs. Almost every aspect of human life will be increasingly subject to bureaucratic intervention as the metaphysics of human existence shifts from the medieval vessel of divinity to Yuval Noah Harari’s hackable animal. Most importantly, people need to be convinced that this in their best interests, perhaps the greatest challenge of all.

It goes without saying that this will be an undertaking unlike any other in recorded human history; the Tower of Babel would be a mere sandcastle in comparison. Such an undertaking will require an enormous range of expertise in just every field imaginable and all such people will need to be committed to the goal.

And this is where covid comes in. Notice that belief in covid as a deadly plague is a clear proxy agreement on a host of other issues. When I see someone wearing a mask outside, well above the nose, I can be quite certain that such a person can’t wait to own nothing and be happy. That such a person will eat all the bugs on their plate and ask for seconds. I could go on. The point is that an affected concern for covid as something other than the sniffles serves as the kind of signal to the global elite as pointing to the deer and calling it a horse served to Zhao Gao.

It may seem silly to many, especially the introverts among us. But anyone who has studied any history or politics knows that the central, dominating concern of any ambitious striver for power is the friend-enemy distinction. In an ordinary social milieu, amongst decent people, such concerns are minor and tangential at best; the stakes are not much more than some hurt feelings, maybe a few lost opportunities. But when one swims with the sharks, when the stakes are power and wealth beyond imagining and the slightest misstep can mean financial ruin, exile or death, the question of who can be trusted and who cannot becomes the most important question you can ask⁵. Consequently, mechanisms for efficiently determining loyalty assume an enormous degree of importance in elite circles, especially in times. This, I submit, is the best existing explanation for the bizarre covid performativity that has taken over elite political and social circles across the West with such rapid uniformity.

1. For the record, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to this notion but it is at best, a wildly oversimplified picture of a dazzlingly complex network of events stretching over many decades if not centuries

2. Or perhaps more accurately, the critical nodes in the power network

3. It ought to be remembered, of course, that formal divisions of power are not always reflective of the actual division of power c.f. Bush and Cheney. Thus, if a person in a position of apparent power gives every impression of being a fool, they are either putting on an act or they are the pawn of someone else

4. Except that it wasn’t clearly engineered by the American Government

5. This a something a lot of business owners can also sympathise with. Hiring is expensive, hiring the wrong person can be absolutely ruinous to a growing business, especially in a regulatory environment where lawsuits can come hard and fast from just about any direction. Hence why businesses tend to be so picky about hiring and increasingly prefer to hire from informal networks where potential hires can be vouched for by trusted people.