German Political Scientist Robert Michels (1876– 1936) theorized the "iron law of oligarchy" during his attempts to explain exclusive organizational behavior. It is as follows:

All forms of organization, regardless of how democratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop oligarchic tendencies, thus making true democracy practically and theoretically impossible, especially in large groups and complex organizations.

Within the past few weeks, we have been seeing a series of events that make the common citizen wonder why they hibernated for a year. Small retail business owners lament having to close or go bankrupt because of a lack of foot traffic during the lockdowns. Commercial real estate brokers are now wondering what the next step will be in office reuse, with remote work shrinking the viability of office/commercial real estate in large downtowns.

We are discovering we were not told the entire truth about the virus as we trusted the science. I am a big fan of stochastic interpretation when judging events. Unfortunately, the events over the last few years do not appear random. The virus isolation seems to be pretext.

I participated in the '60s as a member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and then later embraced the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) sometime in early 1971. Believing all nationalism is reactionary, including the nationalism of oppressed minorities within the oppressor nation. Fast forward to today I now consider myself a nationalist (I am Caucasian).  A nationalist in the sense that I am not a globalist capitalist and believe we should not lower our citizen’s expectations because some global capitalists have embraced the Chinese model.

The Iron Law was introduced to me by the West Virginia State College political science department chair, Dr. Robert L. Clark, and I started to look for it when I did a project. I learned a lot by looking at situations and remembering the iron law. I took a series of jobs seeking to help the underserved and learned where to push and when to push back. Change attempts often failed, but the interaction was random. Fortunately, many of the outcomes were randomly successful as they fell within the bounds of the tolerance level of local oligarchical (the petite oligarchs).

As a student of change, I paid particular attention to the Cultural Revolution in China; by the late ‘70s becoming puzzled about conflicting truths or changing truths reiterated through the Cultural revolution. If there are conflicting truths, no one knows the objective truth as implementors of the Cultural Revolution dictated the narrative.

When introducing a new order, it is imperative that one ensures the old order lessens their impact and move to destroy the educated gentry, who had been vital to transmitting public ethics from one generation to the next. The next step will be to question obvious truth to destroy the concept of objective truth. 

So, I ponder events as they happen… How stochastic are Upper Atmosphere balloons floating over the country and then experiencing vast snow accumulation in Los Angeles that was hit by an Upper Atmospheric River? Would a railroad derailment happening when the Norfolk Southern president is speaking on the toxic derailment in East Palestine be a coincidence? Is the US executive branch of our country honoring a biological male from Argentina with an award for women an attempt to obfuscate objective truth? 

So, what is the objective truth about the virus? We will probably never know, but the path is bumpy, with many twists and turns. We isolated ourselves from friends, relatives, and co-workers based on Neil Ferguson's analysis in the Imperial College Report, which vastly overestimated the extent of the problem. The report stated that people over 80 years old were 100 times more likely to die from the virus than people under 50, and people under 30 were at very low risk. Remember in the beginning nursing homes were reporting numerous deaths that led to widespread panic by killing off the older people.

Something did not feel right about what was happening. We were killing our diverse economic base and devastating cities and small towns across America, forcing us to rely on the internet utilizing technical innovation. People were losing the capacity for the critical distance between our loved ones and companions. 

To make sense of this isolation, I found a professor from Belgium who had an explanation. Mattias Desmet called this process Mass Formation. We were developing a social bond by following science. Yet, we were all isolated, feeling social atomization (his term), loneliness, and disconnectedness. The common thread was isolation; the answer was don't kill your grandparents and stay in your home. Instead, communicate through Twitter and Facebook, which we now find to be monitored and censored by the Federal government to perpetuate the narrative.

We were disconnected from the natural and social environment and the single engagement point of the George Floyd murder (did not deserve to die). A narrative evolved, which was one-way and guided by intelligent bots who would shout down anyone with a question that did not fit the narrative. We turned against each other, embracing the narrative while we trusted the science.

Desmet speaks of how this is a "group think," with an obsessive drive to impose an ideological fiction on society. He recounts that where the totalitarian Nazis and Communists failed, the now new ultimate totalitarianism is technocratic totalitarianism. A Technocratic Transhumanistic ideology, a belief in human perfectibility and governance by reason, can validate technocratic authoritarianism.

The first 20th-century totalitarian society developed in the Soviet Union in 1930, and the second in Nazi Germany in 1935. This happened when resistance went underground and stopped speaking out in public spaces. I read how Victor Fankel describes a search for a life's meaning as the central human motivational force. He outlined three philosophical and psychological concepts; freedom of will, will to meaning, and meaning of life. Freedom of will asserts that humans are free to decide and can take a stance toward both internal and external conditions.

I have synthesized this information in light that I, and others, are being shouted down with the help of the information and technology giants with a transhumanistic view which is becoming an oligarchical source of lies.

The only way to address the situation is to speak up, speak freely and speak often.  Address the truths and as we watch our way of life disappear and our freedoms vanish… we MUST trust the science.

Barry Cassidy is a freelance grant and economic development consultant. He can be reached at barrycassidy@comcast.net.