In the last ten weeks, we have seen the degree of resistance against tyranny. There hasn't been any. That is because there is no deep-seated philosophical or moral resistance to the expansion of state power in our lives.
The supreme mark of our surrender as a nation is not the lockdowns. Rather, it is the yellow school bus. I wrote about this in 2004 for Lew Rockwell. I reprinted the essay in 2018: "A Tale of Two Buses".
Parents have consented to send their children into the tax-funded schools. They have consented to allow state and local governments to pass laws imposing compulsory education. They have not consented reluctantly. They have consented enthusiastically. They have demanded such laws. They have demanded such taxes. They have voluntarily voted yes on school bond issues for as long as I can remember. There is no resistance. There is confirmation.
Think about the lockdowns. Why did Americans consent to this? Because they have been trained from the age of six to consent to it. Their parents demanded that they consent to it. For about eight hours a day, children are locked down. At lunch, they get tax-funded meals. This is nothing new. I have never known anything else in my lifetime. My parents went through it, too, although there were no subsidized meals in those days.
The mark of this has been the same for over a century: compulsory schooling funded by public taxes. That really is the bottom line. It has been the bottom line since the late 1830's in the state of Massachusetts. The state abolished tax-supported churches in 1833. Within four years, it created a system of tax-funded public schools, which were the ecclesiastical replacements of the liberal Congregational churches that had been de-funded in 1833. The Unitarians took over the public schools, and the Trinitarians cheered. They still cheer. The difference is, they cheer at Friday night football games. But it's basically the same religion in the classroom, made even more consistent. These days, the Unitarians of 1837 would be considered threats to the curriculum of the public schools.
Our enemies know exactly what they are doing. They have known exactly what they were doing ever since 1837. Conservatives and Christians have not understood what their enemies were doing. This program was self-conscious. Doubt me? Read my father-in-law's book, The Messianic Character of American Education (1963). It's free here. Read John Taylor Gatto's book, The Underground History of American Education (2000). It's free here. They both tell the same story, but from a different perspective. Rushdoony followed the ideas. Gatto followed the politics.
NOT A NATION OF SHEEP
It is easy to call Americans a nation of sheep. We are not a nation of sheep. We are a nation of Pavlovian dogs.
Large, dangerous dogs can be trained if the trainer starts early enough. There has to be a system of training. There has to be a system of sanctions. There are rewards. There are punishments. Over time, an efficient trainer can get dogs to do his bidding.
The smarter trainers are called dog whisperers. There are plenty of these people. The public schools are run by them. They ring bells. From the day that students begin to specialize in their educations, and potentially are smarter than the classroom teachers in at least one field, the schools impose a system of bells. The students move from class to class according to the bells. They are trained to get up from their desks, grab their books, and move to another classroom. This is conveyor-belt education. It works. It breaks down resistance. Students learn to move rapidly between classes. The bells command them.
This is Pavlovian education. Why would anyone imagine that it isn't? I'll tell you why: because they consent to it. They pay the taxes to fund it. They send their children into it. They do not complain because they have been trained by the system not to complain. They cannot imagine education apart from this system of bell-ringing.
Gatto's book describes the system. It was designed to train low-productivity workers for big business. It created in them an inherent obedience to a system of bells and whistles.
RESISTANCE
There are conservatives today who say we should resist the lockdowns. They say this is a matter of principle. But they long ago surrendered to the system of bells and whistles. They pay for it at the local level. This is the political level in which they might conceivably stop it. But they won't stop it. In any case, the state governments would not allow them to stop it. The courts would not allow them to stop it. Public religion is as secure in the public schools as it was in Massachusetts in 1642, when the first public school legislation was passed by the Puritans.
All over the world, every government knows that the central institutional means of controlling the population is the public school system. This is why it is sacrosanct. This is why no one is allowed to take his children out of it unless he meets the regulations imposed by the government.
The lockdowns are peripheral. They indicate the extent of the public's Pavlovian obedience. It has been a test to remind the leaders of America the nature of the power they possess. It has been a reminder to the public of just how dutiful the public is. But the public has the same reminder nine months a year, except for Christmas and spring break. The public knows who is in control. The public voluntarily turns over its children to these people, and there is no resistance.
It is inconceivable to me that anyone could believe today that there will be a resistance movement against the tyranny of the lockdowns. The greatest single benefit of the lockdowns has been the fact that the governors actually shut down the public schools. This is the greatest single move against the state in my lifetime. Nothing else comes close. I wrote about this on March 14: https://www.garynorth.com/members/20866.cfm. I wrote:
Nobody is talking about this one: the end of school buses. There is no way that the existing fleet of school buses can maintain social distancing. But without the school buses, delivery of the students to the schools and pick up after school will become nightmares. The parents can't pick up the kids. The parents are at work. Even if the parents are at home, enjoying their free money from the state, there will have to be a complex system of picking up children. The schools can't just turn those children over to anybody. They're going to have to check who is picking up the children, one by one. This will be a kidnapper's dream otherwise. Can you imagine the chaos?I can. The more I think about it, the more delighted I get.
Yes, we have done what we have been told to do. So what? We've been doing what the educators have told us to do all of my life. My parents did it all of their lives. That was so ingrained in the thinking of all Americans, including conservatives, that there has never been any successful resistance against it.
A tiny handful of religiously oriented parents do pull their kids out of the schools and send them to parochial schools run by parishes. But, beginning in the 1970's, the bishops began to turn against the parochial school system. A much smaller percentage of Americans pull their children out for religious reasons. They are Protestants. Lutherans do it through the eighth grade, but then they have sent their kids into the public high schools. They have not gone to the expense of running privately funded high schools. The Amish resisted, and they were the only ones to beat the system. The Supreme Court finally let them loose in 1972: Wisconsin v. Jonas Yoder. Dutch-American Calvinists have maintained independent family supported schools. They were high quality schools educationally, and still are. But there are not many of them, and the Dutch have sacrificed to do it.
It's possible for conservatives to educate their children at home, but even so, only about 2 million families do it. It's still a very small operation. They could do it, but they won't do it. That's because they believe in the state. They believe that tax-funded education is the best way to educate their children.
Today, families are locked down. They are beginning to rethink online education. That doesn't mean they're going to let their children be educated by such a system. It already exists. The Khan Academy is a good program -- far better than the public schools. It is used by millions of families around the world. But it is not being adopted widely by American parents who are locked down with their children. The parents stick with the jerry-rigged online educational programs of the public schools.
The public schools have made the transition. They have thereby admitted that online education is legitimate. That is a major admission. That was a turning point in American education. But it is going to take lots more pressure than the lockdowns and a long-term recession or even a depression to convince parents to abandon the public schools.
SPORTS
The greatest threat that the educators now face to the lockdowned state of Pavlov's dogs is this: the cessation of football and basketball. They have to get these programs back in operation. This is the source of the cheering. This is the source of the commitment of parents to the educational programs. They really have bet the farm on football and basketball. But will the public consent this fall to the conditions required? How can you have cheerleading with social distancing? The public schools don't know the answer to that yet.
I am not exaggerating. I really do think that sports are the liturgical commitment of parents to the public schools. Every religion has to have a liturgy, and the liturgy of modern state-funded education in America is football and basketball. To a much lesser extent, there is track and field. Maybe in the Northeast there is hockey. But, essentially it's this: football and basketball. Take away these, and you take away the liturgy that is essential to the maintenance of a religion.
As you know, I developed the Ron Paul Curriculum. I knew that it could be done because Salman Khan had done it. What I do not understand is this: there are still only two 100% online homeschool curriculum programs. The Catholic Church could have done it. The Lutherans could have done it. The Mormons could have done it. They didn't. Why not? They have the economic resources. It can be done in a matter of a year or two if you hire the course creators. But they didn't do it. Why didn't they do it? Because they are Pavlov-trained lapdogs.
The Pavlovian system works. The Prussian state was the master. Prussians were the hardest-core statists in Europe in 1800. They were worse than Napoleon's statists. They were reacting against Napoleon's troops. What France did to the academies at that senior level, the Prussians did to the entire educational system. The Unitarians in Massachusetts self-consciously imitated it.
"IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WON'T COME"
Why doesn't every libertarian parent use the Ron Paul Curriculum? They know about it. This is not some secret. But they don't sign up. The same thing is true of conservatives. Parents don't want to break with America's only established church. They are bought off. The school-church gives them free babysitting eight months a year. That is sufficient. The state taxes them. They don't revolt. They don't organize to get the local school board filled with people who are ready to cut the budgets. They just don't care.
That's why I am not impressed by the chatter about some looming resistance movement. There is no looming resistance. Pavlovian-trained voters do not resist.
There will be a resistance movement at some point. It's going to come when governments at all levels go bankrupt. When the money no longer comes to fund the public schools, parents are going to find alternatives. They don't want their children uneducated. They just want to send out somebody with a badge and a gun to stick in the belly of their neighbors, compelling their neighbors to pony up the money to give their children free educations. This strategy is officially opposed to the official ideology of the libertarians. But ideology does not count for anything when money is on the line. What counts is this: whether or not the state is going to give free babysitting to Billy Bob and Jenny Sue. The ideology is irrelevant.
Pavlovian training has worked. It has worked for over two centuries. There is only a brief flickering of opposition to this system today.
CONCLUSION
Forget about the lockdowns. Forget about the closed businesses. The lockdowns will be partially lifted. Some small businesses will recover. But the welfare checks will go out, and I estimate that half the population receiving the checks will not go back to work until the checks stop coming.
That's the key to understanding American politics. The state can buy compliance for as long as it can afford to send out the checks. That is the lesson of lockdowns.
The state doesn't use the bells. It uses monthly checks. The dogs will respond as trained until the checks stop coming. No more treats => no more rolling over.
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