I’ve been struggling for weeks to describe and understand what has been happening in the country I live in, Canada. I live a mere two hours from the capital, where the “Freedom Convoy” has been allegedly protesting vaccine mandates. The convoy made a pit stop in my town on its way nearly a month ago, so I even had the opportunity to see and hear from them directly. My opinion here is not second hand at all.
It is not a protest. As Leah Gazan spelled it out recently through a twitter post, sharing her words from parliament, even the purpose and message touted by this movement is not what it seems to be. There is something deeper and more insidious taking place.
This pandemic has been challenging for me not because there is a new disease on the scene that can dish out severe suffering and death upon large amounts of the human population. It has been challenging because it has forced humans to look at things they have spent decades, centuries, even millennia avoiding and dismissing. Cultural and systemic problems that have been left to fester for ages. Worse yet, those problems have been encouraged.
The problem is of sophistry and rhetoric. It is of people manipulating other people. Those who have the skills and abilities to see and understand have, by and large, been manipulating those who cannot see or understand (or who chose not to) to perform functions and activities that are against the best interests of people, society, and the world as a whole. There are people in this world who seems to simply want to see the world burn.
The problem is the lack of a level playing field. We are not equal. We simply cannot be equal. There are things I am good at, and there are things I am not good at. Similarly, there are things you are good at, and there are things you are not good at. Given a particular situation, I may out perform you, but given a different situation you may out perform me. Neither particular situation suggests that you are better than I am, nor that I am better than you are. However, what should be taken from this knowledge is that we are different, and that there will be times one of us can leverage the situation to our own advantage.
The wealthy are wealthy for three reasons: their skills happen to be focused in an area that is conducive to the accumulation of wealth, they are a part of an inter-generational effort aimed at the generation of wealth, and they are lucky.
The first reason generally flows from the second reason, which in turn follows from the third. Their skills and abilities are conditioned and trained in them from their relatives and ancestors (with varying degrees of success I might add). Their parents understand that to be wealthy requires certain traits, and so their parents train them to develop those traits. Traits like viewing people through the lens of a class system, where not all humans should be treated equally. By convincing them that people who are not wealthy simply choose to be that way. They are definitely not trained to cook or to clean; after all, that is the work of the lesser classes.
The accumulation of wealth generally does not take place all at once, but over time. The more time one has to spend on the accumulation of wealth, the more they are able to do so. As is so often demonstrated in works of fiction, if an individual could be immortal, they could simply place their savings in the most basic financial institutions at virtually the lowest interest rates, and after several hundreds of years, a small amount will have become a large amount. Douglas Adams even jokes about this when suggesting that everyone can afford the insanely expensive restaurant at the end of the universe, because all they needed to do was to put aside mere pennies in their current time to do so.
While there are no immortal humans that I am aware of, there is another sort of immortality that exists to allow for such accumulation of wealth to take place: names. Family names to be precise. Blood lines. When a family works cooperatively over the course of many generations, they are able to save and invest for the future generations. The common term for this is “old money.” If a family has this sort of forethought, it will be important to train their offspring in such a manner to continue the future facing investment.
Finally, there needs to be luck. By luck, I mean that the situation and circumstances these people find themselves in must be such that they are able to continue their long ranged plan. Those in the front lines of war have a rather high risk of injury and death, regardless of their level of wealth. Thus, if one wants to ensure the continuance of their blood line, it would be helpful if they were able to somehow prevent their offspring from being selected to participate in such dangerous activities. Or, if they will be expected to participate, they should be given skills and abilities that allow for them to take jobs that could be a bit further away from all that danger.
Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about luck. Luck, to me, is simply a fancy way of describing how one has leveraged decisions in order to minimize the risk of detriment, and maximized the possibility of benefit. The common phrase of “being in the right place at the right time.” With practice and training, one is actually able to control their own luck, to some degree. I have witnessed this first hand in others, and have even figured out how to do this myself.
The point of all this is simply that those with power and influence and wealth have not gotten to where they are by magic or destiny. They have through hard work, patience, and luck. They have, over many generations, spent their time learning to manipulate and influence others in order to position themselves and their friends in such a way as to preserve their way of life. We have records of this going back to ancient Greece. This is precisely the concern raised by Socrates himself (of the problem of sophistry being used to push agendas without the support of evidence).
The “Freedom Convoy” is a well orchestrated movement created by those of wealth, manipulating those without wealth to push their agendas. What’s most disheartening is that the individuals who have (and continue to) participate in this movement do not realize they’ve been manipulated. They honestly seem to believe they are fighting for their own freedom, when they are in fact fighting for the freedom of the elite. You’d think that being charged criminally, their assets and personal wealth being confiscated, and their lives ruined would be enough to show them this.
It is not a protest at all.
We have a way of describing people who take other people, strap bombs to their chests, and instruct them to walk into heavily populated areas and detonate. The sacrificed individuals are told they will reap the greatest of all rewards in heaven, earning thousands of virgins and an afterlife of bliss.
The “Freedom Convoy” is a terrorist movement.