Food is Freedom
The Pandemic Response is NOT Necessarily Like Anything Else That's Terrible
Food is freedom.
Meeting that most basic need regularly is how human civilization began and how it will be able to continue.
From that point of comfort is where everything we now consider important started, including the ability to think and act as a person and to being able to consider the vastness around us.
In other words, we could be both discrete individuals and be active parts of the society we inhabit.
There are always dangers to this sense of community and individuality – in fact, the globe experienced – and is still experiencing - one of the most direct challenges to it during the pandemic response.
International government actions and dictates and mandates transformed the relationship between the self and society in a way that the self – in many cases and undoubtedly millions of future cases as the children of the pandemic grow – was radically altered.
Obeisance was inculcated, as was the trepidatious feeling that anything and everything about a society can change practically instantaneously. The once-hitherto isolated by national borders imposition of a totalitarian regime became possible anywhere because it had been put in place anywhere.
The pandemic was about enforced scarcity – freedom, choice, societal interaction, were all curtailed. The response denigrated life to mere survival, an attempt to get through the day, every day. And the apparent “success” of the model is the primary reason why so many globalists are trying to repeat it, or at least skim off the methods of control instituted.
Abundance is feared by the global hierarchy because it allows for choices, for risk, for innovation, for the rise of the new.
Scarcity does not.
And as the pandemic was about scarcity, using it as an analogy for other events, causes, movements in history does not necessarily work. Especially if the target of the comparison is not about scarcity at all, but its opposite.
Take, for example, a recent comparison of the pandemic response to the Green Revolution in global agriculture.
The Green Revolution has nothing to do with the current political meaning of the term “green,” but the post-World War II movement to increase yields through improved crops, fertilizer use, technological enhancements, irrigation, and scientifically-sound farming practices. The movement is credited with literally saving more than a billion lives around the globe in the past 70 years and led to one of its chief architects, Norman Borlaug - who famously said “You can’t build a peaceful world on empty stomachs” - to being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (back when that actually mattered.)
Borlaug’s revolution is now a very specific target of many climate activists, “sustainability” fanatics, and the various international government agencies and NGOs that support them. That is precisely because of the globalist will to impose limits, of creating shortages in order to justify the need for technocratic hierarchy to decide who gets what – and when.
Borlaug may have passed away in 2009, but another quote regarding such groups seems apropos: “Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”
If anything, the covid pandemic response can be appropriately compared to the international ESG racket and the on-going attempt to try to get people – for the first time in human history – to get used to and accept as a necessity of having less in the future.
The argument that “if consumers were willing to spend a larger slice of their individual incomes on what they eat” to purportedly increase “sustainability” is exactly out of the socialist socialite statist playbook. That concept promotes accepting diminishment and it hews closely to the World Economic Forum’s idea of the “rental life,” that you will own nothing and “be happy.”
The intent of the Green Revolution was to increase food production to be able to feed a ballooning global population, in large part to promote peace and individual freedom by at least lessening the insecurity of hunger. While there are clearly shortages in different areas around the world, those shortages are not caused by a basic lack of enough food to go around. They are caused by war, bureaucracy, theft, corruption, and, to be fair, the profit motive.
The Green Revolution has fulfilled its mission – feeding the planet.
The covid response did not fulfill its mission – protecting the populace. That is, unless the actual mission was to test how far the current power structure could go before the public had had enough (turns out, pretty darn far, actually.)
As to intent, the difference is stark. Green Revolution – feed the world. Covid pandemic response – control the world.
And people worried about where their next meal is coming from are easier to control (until they’ve had enough and the lid blows off and everyone is upended, especially those in charge.)
As to sustainable – there is a pull to that word, an implication that we can just keep doing the same thing and everything will be fine.
But that is not physically possible as “organic” farming produces less than half the amount of food per acre/per labor unit than the production the Green Revolution has made possible.
Basic staple abundance allows for choices. t allows for organic farming, it creates the space to innovate. But scarcity leads to a mere state of survival, effectively closing off those avenues,, which is exactly what the world saw during the pandemic.
And it is a warning that should be heeded. Less is more, you can do without, you eat stupidly, anyway are not clarion calls for a better future. They are the basis for the supplication of the populace…for a time.
The diminishment of the Green Revolution – let alone its comparison to the covid response – is not an issue to be taken lightly.
And there is a real-world recent example of what happens when one tries to turn off the Green Revolution: Sri Lanka.
In 2020: a beautiful, agriculturally self-sufficient island nation full of tea and tourists and holder of the highest “Environmental, Social, and Governance” (ESG) investor rating in the world.
And then, as part of the larger “green” effort spurred on by international Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), woke capital, and, seemingly, a desire to sit at the big table at the various and sundry global initiative conferences, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa banned the use of manufactured fertilizer in order to create a more climate-friendly sustainable farming sector. In April, 2021, the country went all-organic overnight.
What could possibly go wrong?
Within a year, Sri Lanka became unable to feed itself, prices for food (especially rice) and fuel and other daily basics skyrocketed, the tea crop – and the hundreds of millions it earns in international trade – was decimated. The nation defaulted on its foreign debt, had rolling power blackouts, the tourists are staying away in droves, and Sri Lanka, already wracked by corruption, spiraled out of control.
The public’s response? Even though the fertilizer ban had already been partially rolled back, shortly thereafter Rajapaksa’s presidential palace was stormed by thousands of everyday Sri Lankans. The then-president had to catch a copter to Singapore.
As seen from the pandemic response, public limiting can become a private tunnel vision which spirals into a loss of self-worth, a destruction in one’s confidence, and a despairing “just leave me alone and I’ll do what you say” approach to life.
And the subjugation is complete.
Only by refusing to accept imposed scarcity can society once again govern itself as a collection of individuals voluntarily bound together by empathy, respect, and a common vision that allows people as much freedom to fail – and succeed – as possible.
And that’s why the Green Revolution is not like the pandemic response.
Note - this piece does draw heavily on the articles linked above.