Going up the Country
Why I left urban liberal hysteria behind - and in the process thwarted the plans of the World Economic Forum
“We need the tonic of wildness -“ Henry D. Thoreau
When writer Meghan Daum left pandemic New York City in April 2020 and wrote her “I Left New York for Greener Pastures - and a Puppy”, she was deemed “morally impeachable” by writer Claire Fallon in the Huffington Post. For Daum, “a veteran in the standard Why I Left New York essay”, was bound to spread cooties all over the place on her several acres of farmland-AirBnB. Also, hmm, she moved to Appalachia, which is Native Land. Was Daum even aware of the nature of her many offences?
Naturally, Daum’s essay itself was not free from virus anxiety: “I brought a copy of my health care proxy in case, god forbid, I ended up on a ventilator in that hopefully-not-overrun hospital. I dropped my rent check in the mailbox on the way out of the building, holding the envelope with the Clorox wipe I’d used to lock my door and push the elevator buttons. Then I met my friend in front of the building, put the puppy in the car, and made a 10-hour drive.” But I somehow can’t shake off the impression she already knew at that point how ridiculous she sounded. And probably that was her whole point: escaping from the ridiculousness of the New York urban elites and their hygiene totalitarianism. And although escaping CNN “and a three-way split screen between Anderson Cooper, Sanjay Gupta, and Anthony Fauci radiating through the glass like a laser beam” isn’t easy, it was at least worth a try.
I have recently left the city - not New York City, but what I would call its European equivalent in terms of demography by age, class, (left-liberal) political persuasion, rich elites, and abundance of art galleries: Zurich. I left it for the countryside, where I now live as free as a Prairie Falcon and as happily as I haven’t lived in Zurich in the 13 years that I tried hard to but could never fall in love with it. With the rise of the Covid regime, Zurich became gradually unbearable. My workplace, my daughter’s school. Parents telling me she should put on a mask for an outside play date, the teacher urging children not to take so many sips from the water bottle, because that would require pulling down the mask. When I noted the irrationality of the “no drink rule” for a whole-day musical event involving the children’s choir - the 100 or so kids weren’t allowed to drink, but would stand together closely singing Christmas songs, unmasked - the reaction was zero in the school class’s WhatsApp chat. I expected at least one righteous urban liberal parent to stand up for the “no drink rule”. But the Zurichians know how to deal with their outspoken enemies: ignore them and hope they will go away (quite similar to liberal academic Marxists, actually). Because confronting them would mean to exchange arguments, to show one’s colours, to stand up for one’s position. By a far stretch the weakest characteristic of the average left liberal Zurichian, or Swiss, or left liberal person in general.
The city depressed me. Precisely for its pastel-coloured shop windows and its “streets upon streets upon streets” (Morrissey), the park picnics and friend gatherings, public transport and cafés, the whole Goddamn meekness and safety-obsessed philistinism that stood in weird contrast to street lamps bearing stickers saying “System change not Climate change” or “Kill all TERFS”[1]. I knew at one point that in order to survive the cotton candy vulnerability of these über-lib monsters, I had to get away. The time had come. I found a really nice place not much more expensive than the tiny downtown Zurich flat we occupied for 8 years in a beautiful village outside of the city, and off we went for good.
From my room’s window, instead of not having a room of my own at all, I can see what I would call a landscape now: an apple orchard and a vast sunlit spring garden that belongs to the neighbours’ who sometimes dwell in their little pergola. Their house has a magnificent old half-timbered architecture, with rounded shingles and wooden shutters. It surely once was a home to more than a human family, with stock and animals living inside, and now neatly remade and refurbished. Even the wild range chickens have a clean and well-kept barn floor to themselves. From my window, I can also see fields and meadows stretching far into the distance, rolling green hills and snow-covered mountains framing the horizon. And hawks and red kites, dozens of them circling in the sky (and sometimes a craw freeloading on the raptors’s prey). Every evening after sundown, which is mostly spectacular, I stand at my open window and admire the pastoral calmness, the unattachedness of being, and it soothes me after a long day at work in the city.
The village does not have a lot of businesses. It belongs to a bigger municipality which sells all the everyday things one needs, just beyond the bridge and another stretch of fields. The village presents craft work exhibitions instead, there are locksmith and carpenter workshops. The sound of these words already puts me in a different place from the view of shrill graffiti yelling “ACAB”. In the city, everything seeks attention by trying hard to be casual. Here, nothing seeks attention. It just happens to be around: the green of the grass, the pink of the blossoms, the endless paths around the horse stables and the farmers’ little vegetable beds. It is very Midsomer Murders, in a way, well, except for the Murders.
But country living, as we are told, is the new intifada.[2] At least from The WEF’s point of view. As is well-known, the WEF wants you to own nothing, while its stakeholder capitalist members own everything. And if you don’t like that, let me present you with how an utterly abominable idea can be groomed into something that might sound weirdly attractive to the urban human monads the WEF caters to. Danish MP and WEF member Ida Auken, for example, has published a piece of propaganda for Forbes magazine that is a land mine of cognitive manipulation, or, as we say, mind fuck. Although I assume they are the words of a well-developed writing program rather than a human being, Auken presents the “city of the future” of 2030 in the algorithmically titled “Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy, And Life Has Never Been Better”, saying
“In our city we don't pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.”[3]
Now imagine your living room is being used for business meetings when you’re not there.
You will not want any socks lying around. Better still, you will want no personal items lying around at all. You will want your living room, maybe even your whole apartment to look as sterile as an IKEA showroom. And why not?, you ask. What’s so bad about a clean and tidy space without any personal character at all? In my mind’s eye, I can see Klaus Schwab tenderly squeezing your shoulder at the thought.
Auken goes on to fantasise about flying cars and using a rented pasta-maker (because a rented kitchen item, rather than an owned one “won’t cram your space” that you have left to Unilever business meetings), and she confidently asserts that
“[e]verything is designed for durability, repairability and recyclability. Environmental problems seem far away, since we only use clean energy and clean production methods. The air is clean, the water is clean and nobody would dare to touch the protected areas of nature because they constitute such value to our well-being.”
How can these words not be associated with the thought of a bottomless pitch of naked lust for evil, murder, and destruction in which a reified version of “nature” (clean energy, clean production methods) counts for everything, and human lives count for nothing? Ach Gott, Herr Schwab. You should really get Adam Tooze or someone of his format to build in at least a challenging proposition like “This may sound like a socialist utopia, but we can make it happen!”.
But even Ida Auken worries that “once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.” But she concludes, in an astonishing non-sequitur: “All in all, it is a good life”. We must imagine our Winston Smith as a happy person.
And yet, despite Auken’s deep and earnest Eloy-ish infantile love for an anti-humanist utopia, Ida Auken is concerned. Very concerned. For there are people our there who refuse. Unbelievably so, but yeah. Imagine that. So Ida makes a sad face:
“My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.”
The enemies of progress have turned their backs on the cities - “those we lost on the way”. Everyone who refuses to leave up their apartment to Blackrock meetings and wants to own their own waffle maker - how dare they. Self-supplying communities! Leaving behind a voluntary surveillance agreement 24/7 (though “Surveillance is not the right word”, another WEF acolyte, Benjamin Bratton, says) for a small 19th century village? Irresponsible.
It’s funny how the liberal scare of self-organised defiance is exactly the vibe I get from my former acquaintances: urban playground daddies, mask-obsessive teachers, climate change conjurers, I-support-the-current-thing graphic designers, and cultural studies students who, in a remarkable move of psychological projection, scoff at the countryside, its “backwardness” and populist party-voting, implicitly racist, implicitly intolerant, “uneducated”, and bigoted population. “Oh, I could never live in the countryside!”, like they have spent their lives at Eton and own the place, too, when in fact they are scared shitless of their forthcoming unemployment/UBI and CBDCs, and deep in their hearts know that the wreckage of the bourgeois subject, of dignity, of decency, of social, and therefore human life itself, is what neoliberal rule has always been about and therefore the exact image of their own future. Faced with the decision to “turn against the political system” or go along with every new authoritarian measure, even become egregious authoritarians themselves, they consistently chose a side. Remember how liberal elites used to feel shame for their authoritarian tendencies? With Covid, they became proud of them.
It would seem that the conclusion would be that in order to save society, we must leave the city, and, like in that mellow Canned Heat classic, “go up the country”. Alan Wilson wrote the song in 1968 referencing his plans to escape a military draft to fight in Vietnam. In order to escape the WEF draft into IKEA showrooms, we may think of it as a good idea - even more prevalent today than in the late sixties.
And I’m here for it.
Cover image: cutting from the Roxy Music LP Country Life (1974)
[1] Kathleen Stock poignantly remarked that it is predominantly trans activists who could use some “fresh air”: “Encourage them … to run around, take their shoes off and paddle, get muddy and out-of-breath, and generally to reconnect with their physical bodies and the natural world.” At https://unherd.com/2022/04/five-rules-for-dealing-with-transactivists/?=refinnar.
[2] I thank Chad Kreuzer and his Youtube-channel for highlighting the deep connection between the WEF and urban living. Legit Christian guy, check him out.
.
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/shopping-i-cant-really-remember-what-that-is-or-how-differently-well-live-in-2030/
You cannot escape
https://dai.ly/x1uz4ov