I have talked a lot about technocracy here at the plague chronicle, but I realise I’ve not thought nearly hard enough about it.
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There is an approving view of technocratic politics, which holds that it is good for politicians to “follow the science” in as many areas as possible. Because I doubt that there is anything like a unified Science that one could follow, and that our rulers would never be able to follow the directives of an oracular Science even if it existed, I find this view is superficial and naive. It is rather science which follows politics, and it could not be any other way.
Climatism is the shining example of technocracy and the most threatening technocratic construct that we face. The political and institutional relationships that define climatism, however, were built over decades, which means that they are enormously complicated and very hard to sort out. Covidiniasm is useful to study because it is like a lower-resolution and less-sophisticated climatism – one that was thrown up in the space of a few months in early 2020. Here the underlying relationships are much more straightforward, and as nobody is deeply invested in virus containment at the moment, we also have an ever-growing corpus of leaks and document releases that allow us to gaze directly upon the inner workings of technocracy in its simplified incarnation.
What we see is a malign and secretive system, one in which nominal experts clamour for access to the halls of power and tell politicians what they want to hear, in which politicians pre-order the Science they intend to Follow, and in which all involved have a direct interest in concealing these arrangements from the public.
Back in March I wrote that the Robert Koch Institute (the German CDC) were forced to release over 2,500 pages documenting the meetings of their “Covid Crisis Team,” after losing a long legal battle with journalists at Multipolar Magazine. Despite heavy redaction, the documents cast the German pandemic response in a terrible light, revealing pandemic managers providing ‘fictitiously accurate’ R-values and overstating virus risk on the explicit directions of their political overseers in the Health Ministry.
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The redactions sparked criticism even from elements of the press, and our dumbass Health Minister Karl Lauterbach soon promised to release the agendas and minutes in substantially unredacted form. That finally happened at the end of May. My initial impressions, comparing the redacted to the unredacted releases, is that the redactors acted with the competence typical of German bureaucrats, which is to say they were idiots. They fought to preempt embarrassing revelations with their black markers, but they did a poor job and left far too much out in the open, thus landing themselves in the worst of both worlds. They attracted the attention and scrutiny of the press with their flagrant efforts to preempt embarrassing revelations, while nevertheless releasing more than enough to prove the pandemic response was every inch the farce it seemed to be. Things are very bad, but at least we are ruled by fools. Imagine how much worse it would be, if these people were good at their jobs.
In the unredacted release is a new revelation that has made the rounds on German Twitter and that Elke Bodderas highlighted at Welt last week. It is especially interesting because it reveals in a nutshell the entire system and how it functions. It is every inch as bad as you expected.
