Jocelynn Cordes’ latest essay examines the aftermath of the Great Reset, when a reduced population assisted by artificial intelligence will create and maintain the New Normal.
Just How Do They Think Things Are Made?
by Jocelynn Cordes
After every essay I read that in some way touches on the plans of the globalists, I find myself posting the same response in the comments section over and over again.
They haven’t thought this through.
I accompany the typing of this sentence with a sad shake of the head, deeply disappointed by the elite’s folly and complete absence of imagination.
There are two specific subjects which elicit this response: the first is the globalists’ stated intention to reduce the world’s population, a goal usually supported by claims that the well-being of the planet, currently in dire straits from man-made carbon emissions, requires such a reduction. The second, in startling contradiction to the first, is our rulers’ visible effort to supplant white Europeans with replacements from the ever-fecund third world. The latter effort is never articulated forthrightly as such, and is, in fact, weakly refuted as conspiracy theory whenever anyone has the temerity to assert this effort as fact, and further, bemoan it. But the truth of it is hard to miss in the evidence we see before us of the reckless push for open borders for every country in the Anglo-sphere — but nowhere else. One of our regular readers here at Gates of Vienna (Moon), although responding to a different but related topic — the money-hemorrhaging woke endeavors of corporations — described the future being planned out for us thus:
The motive is simply the destruction of Western Civilization generally, and the white race specifically, although it’s still quite taboo to say it. Towards what end is anyone’s guess, although I believe that it’s geared towards a return to feudalism; a high-tech neo-feudalism where the reptilians are lords and royalty with a substantially reduced population of servile devolved serfs to service them and satisfy their corporeal needs and desires.
Leaving aside for a moment the issue of the deliberate dismantling of Western Civilization, whenever I pose the question “Why get rid of the white population?” on social media, people’s answers are usually along the lines of “We’re too smart or rebellious.” If true, that certainly makes white people poor candidates for the role of “servile devolved serfs,” although our collective submission during the plandemic could possibly give the lie to that. Otherwise, I have no clue why white people have to go. It doesn’t make sense to rid the world of the best civilization-makers.
Normally I approach the subject of white erasure from a cultural perspective, moaning and wringing my hands like a pitiful Greek chorus over the treasures we’ll lose — along with the sensibility that gave rise to them — but at the moment I’m considering this looming catastrophe from the perspective of someone in manufacturing.
I don’t know how many people these days are familiar with Leonard E. Read’s essay, “I, Pencil,” but that short piece from 1958, arguing for free market capitalism, uses a very simple example to show the absolute foolhardiness behind attempts at central planning. I’m introducing that short but brilliant essay to assist in my argument that the globalists’ oft-stated ambition to achieve a “substantially reduced population” isn’t going to be adequate for manufacturing the goods no feudal overlord of the future will want to be without.
Read makes his point through the “autobiography” of a pencil, through which he guides us along the various manufacturing stages of each individual component that comprises this simple tool. If you don’t think much about the processes involved in making quite ordinary things, I strongly suggest taking a look at this essay if only to visualize the multitude of stages that are involved in the creation of something so simple. As Lawrence Reed says in his introduction to my edition of the essay, “economies can hardly be ‘planned’ when not one soul possesses all the know-how and skills to produce a simple pencil.” That’s his summary of the argument in “I, Pencil,” but for the purposes of this essay, I’d alter that sentence a bit, replacing “one soul” with “one manufacturing facility” and re-state the situation as “no one manufactory has the resources and/or capability to produce a simple pencil from start to finish.” My argument, from the perspective of the production floor itself, after observing the plethora of stages involved in the production of “simple” things, is that a reduced population isn’t going to be able to produce the goods we have come to expect in the First World.
Now, I realize that anyone reading this is very likely leaping to the conclusion that automation will intervene here to solve the problems entailed by a reduced labor force, and I will address that later on. But for now it’s important to consider Read’s breakdown of the pencil-making process in order to understand how imperative it is to have a complex division of labor in manufacturing, not just within a particular manufactory, but along the entire route from raw materials to finished product.
Briefly, and leaving out a few of the stages Read takes us through in the development of a pencil, he begins with a particular type of cedar tree indigenous to Oregon and California which loggers cut down in large numbers. Their object in doing so is obviously not to make pencils, but to provide cedar logs to whoever wants them for their own manufacturing purposes. Those logs are transported to railroads and then shipped to specific mills where they are cut down into smaller pieces, shaped, and kiln dried for a customer who does have the creation of a pencil in mind. Those pieces are then sent to the mill’s customer, a pencil factory, where they are cut in half, grooved down the middle, and fitted with a lead cylinder, after which the halves are glued together. After they are painted, a ferule and eraser are attached (each, like the lead, glue, and paint, having its own manufacturing process). Bear in mind I have left out many of the steps Read enumerates, as well as neglecting the process involved in acquiring raw materials.
His point is that none of the factories involved in making any one of these parts of a pencil exists for the purposes of pencil-making, but that all of these facilities work with a material that can be directed toward satisfying a particular requirement of the pencil maker — as well as others. And most importantly for Read, they all exist independently of each other and produce goods for each other without the deliberate coordination of their efforts.
We encounter the very same scenario when we consider the manufacturing involved in making most of the objects in our lives. In the same way that no single production facility is going to be able to perform all of those steps that go into making a pencil, no single manufacturer is going to be able to make all of the elements that go into creating a slightly more complex item, such as an insulated glass window. It’s certainly not feasible for one organization to make glass, metal, rubber, and plastic, and then in the same factory, fashion those different materials into the components necessary for constructing a window (glass panels of varying thicknesses, metal separators in specific sizes, rubber seals, plastic frames, etc.). That’s not even considering the large-scale cooking process required to temper glass, in addition to the assembly of all those components into a window itself. As Read makes clear in his example, individual components (for example, the pencil’s ferule or eraser) are most efficiently produced by organizations devoted to crafting related things out of similar materials, which is why all of those separate components I listed for the window are created by individual manufacturers, and assembled together at a point somewhere along the chain deemed most suitable.
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Bat Ye’or is a Counterjihad emerita.
