Busybodies Never Sleep

by Kenneth Francis (July 2024)

 

Remember how the old liberals of yore used to condemn the Nanny State and call for less interference in our daily lives? That is no longer the case. Over the past 15 years, the New Woke Liberals have ‘jumped into bed’ with the State, more enthusiastically since March 2020, when they whored themselves out to the entire Establishment on every fiscal and social dictate imaginable.

No doubt some of them mean well, but as the saying goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. I’m convinced the majority of them are virtue-signalling bullies who hate old-style Conservatives, especially Christians, whose ethos clashes with their embracement of moral autonomy and hunger for power.

Many of ‘Them’ are tax-funded NGO quangocrats and career politicians, who are less about saving humanity and more about being predators for special interests, maximising their income, salaries, and perks. They also seem hell-bent on dramatically changing what used to be the breezy laidback culture during the past 50 years. Nowadays, in the USA, it seems the last thing such bureaucratic busybodies want is to “Make America Great Again.” It is the same in the UK, where a couple of ‘Just Stop Oil’ eco-protesters last month ,prior to the Summer Solstice, sprayed, with orange powder paint, a number of Stonehenge rocks. Other fellow eco-nuts doused precious artwork with orange paint and gate-crashed a West End performance of Les Misérables. So much for making Britain great again.

As for the future regarding entertainment: Many eco-forecasters believe festival music gigs, in 2050, will feature bands playing remotely using holograms and low-latency streaming to reduce carbon footprints. Revellers attending such concerts, will be treated to alternative-meat ‘treats’ which reduce carbon footprints, with plant/bug-based and lab-grown burgers to munch on. This news will bring great comfort to normal senior citizens who fear death.

But back to the NGO Green Movement. The policymakers of these quangos (and there are millions of them in the West) demand enforcement of the right ways of thinking and chosen lifestyles, and punishment of the wrong ways of thinking and living.

Such unhappy, emotionally aggressive people who are ‘woke’ and oblivious to the suffering of others, also despise having fun and humour, especially satire (the lefty TV show hosts who tell unfunny PC jokes are responded with canned laughter. There probably isn’t even a live audience in many shows).

They also have disdain for the predominately Christendom society of the past and feel the need to turn traditional norms into an inverted, postmodern sewer pipe. And the longer one lives in a sewer pipe, the less one smells the stench of rotten waste. That is why so many ‘blue-pilled’ people lacking political and sociological discernment who are enveloped in such an anti-culture, are docile and compliant. Same regarding the physical behaviour of SeaWorld-captured whales, when they continue to swim in circles in the ocean when released.

Catholic writer, Ann Barnhardt, said: “The broad populace is too far fallen morally and intellectually, and the oligarchs, and especially satan their master, knows it. They know that a massive percent of the population will believe pretty much anything anyone tells them.”

The decadent West erupted in 1965, and just look at how morally inverted it has been evolving—especially over the past 25 years. If one is being programmed—thus constantly lied to by the media (especially TV) for their whole lives, then such a person can’t see the forest for the trees. Isaiah prophesised this current situation in 800 BC: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (5:20)

But back to the busybody bureaucrats. The main culprits of this army of tyrannical do-gooders were summed-up quite well by C.S. Lewis, when he wrote: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. (God in the Dock, p. 292).”

Today, the busybodies in Lewis’s quote seem to point to the Green$ (sic…and morally sick), whose politicians and activists never sleep or leave us alone. They are always introducing policies that make us poorer and our lives harder, and have, over the past 15 years, caused untold misery, especially via taxation, to people in financial difficulties, as well as destroying the aesthetic of the countryside with tens of thousands of ugly wind turbines. Then there are the draconian regulations that stifle small business, as well as banning some guilty pleasures that many of us occasionally enjoy.

In 2017, a league table of nanny state regulations put Britain at the number two spot as the second most meddlesome country in the EU, behind only Finland, a country with the highest rate of schizophrenia in the world. Finland now is one of the most heavily regulated countries in Europe, regarding drinks, food, alcohol, tobacco, e-cigarettes/vapes and much more. The findings were published by the Institute of Economic Affairs and the European Policy Information Centre. I would not be shocked if some Green zealots suggested putting dog cones around Finnish pooches necks to prevent them from eating chicken or red meat that fell on the floor during mealtimes.

But it is not just Finland: Ireland, France and America are not far behind, especially regarding the net-zero scourge of ‘Climate Change,’ leading to high rates, high taxation, and ‘red tape,’ something the current Irish Green Party leader, Eamon Ryan, who has recently announced his resignation, knows quite a lot about during his 10-year reign of busybody madness.

During the first wave of the so-called pandemic in March 2020 when Ireland was the biggest gulag in the world, Green Party leader Ryan stood up in the Dail (Parliament) and gave an impassioned speech about how people should start growing “salads” (lettuce) on their window sills in order to boost food reserves in case things got very bad.

He said: “Let’s get every south-facing windowsill in this country and we’ll plant our seeds in the next week so that if there is any supply crisis in food in two or three months’ time when this really hits hard, we’ll have our salads ready to go!” (I am not making this up.)

Worse: In October 2019 before this daft quote above, Ryan called for wolves to be reintroduced in Ireland almost 250 years after the species became extinct in the country. He said he believed that wolves should have a place in Ireland’s environment and would contribute positively to the ecosystem and the State’s national habitat. Really? The only positive contribution wolves would make for busybody politicians is the culling of chickens and other agri-livestock, which would prevent the rural Irish people of self-sustainment, thus dependent on government for food handouts.

And what about Irish residents who live in close proximity where many rural houses are merely a stone’s throw away from one another? Ireland is not Alaska with vast tracts of uninhabited wilderness, where the odd cabin-dweller is hundreds of miles away from his nearest neighbour. The sight of roaming packs of wolves outside one’s house in little Ireland could be a cunning lockdown tactic.

The Greens seem to love lockdowns and deserted roads and towns. And they are very concerned about endangered species, even slugs. It reminds me of a quote from the film, A Man for All Seasons, when the character Richard Rich tries to advance himself politically at any cost, by accepting the position of attorney-general for Wales by betraying his friend, Thomas More, who says: “For Wales? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Wales!”? In the case of the Greens when they prioritise certain things instead of focusing on financially impoverished humans: ” …But for snails?

The good news is, their schemes have backfired, and now after four years in government, the Greens are back on the endangered species list. Even the hardest Leftists are sick and tired of them. In Ireland last month after a defeat in EU and local elections, Aontú Party leader, Peadar Tóibín, said that the Green Party are the architects of their own downfall, and that the “stick” the party had used to change behaviour was “now whipping them.”

They also use the “stick” in preventing SMEs from starting-up. In the USA, as in the EU, there are Green governmental polices, of which environmental regulations stifle many businesses and are not always about environmental protection.

According to environmental expert, Rich Trzupek, in his 2011 book, Regulations Gone Wild, in recent years, more than ever, regulations seem to have been designed by activists rather than scientists. Does this indicate that the Leftist Green movement and Big Nanny government have united to stifle productivity in the West and hamstring innovation, not by design, but as the inevitable consequence of pursuing a utopian vision of environmental purity? Regulations gone wild, indeed.

Statista’s more recent findings (Feb 22, 2024) reveal that there are two-million NGOs in America. Not all of them stifle Mom-and-Pop businesses with red-tape regulations or interfere unnecessarily in the daily lives of ordinary people, but many of these State-funded psycho Mary Poppins’ clones-on-crack continue to torment the lives of normal people. And to think that we are nearly taxed out of existence to pay for the ‘privilege,’ while counting our every carbon footprint, as they lecture us with unpragmatic hogwash about the dangers of cows’ farts.

In the words of St Paul: “Besides, they get into the habit of being idle and going about from house to house. And not only do they become idlers, but also busybodies who talk nonsense, saying things they ought not to.” (1 Timothy 5:13)

Fast-forward 2,000 years: They still torment us ‘for our own good’ and will torment us without end. The only thing that they don’t want us recycling are memes. And if the eco-nuts ever go away, don’t think it’s the end of busybody tyranny. The Victoria state of Australia has appointed a special official charged with improving men’s behaviour. Looks like it is time to de-ball all the Crocodile Dundees Down Under and mould them into Jasper McFlea’s. These macho Aussie men could lose their appetite for masculinity and end up being kangaroos: T-Rex deer. And all because busybodies never sleep.

 

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Kenneth Francis is a Contributing Editor at New English Review. For the past 30 years, he has worked as an editor in various publications, as well as a university lecturer in journalism. He also holds an MA in Theology and is the author of The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth (St Pauls Publishing) and, most recently, The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd (with Theodore Dalrymple) and Neither Trumpets Nor Violins (with Theodore Dalrymple and Samuel Hux).

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