Just people like ourselves, who strive, err, admit error and learn!

Richard Fernandez writes,

Like Russia, China’s rulers are trapped by the inability to admit error.

Therefore Xi will persist against the virus, just as Putin will continue to batter against Ukraine, not in the hopes of actually solving the stated problem but because in ideological totalitarianism, fallibility is not an option. Because they are in violation of the First Law of Holes (“if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging”) the problem unsurprisingly gets bigger. Russia has threatened to deploy nuclear weapons to the Baltics if Finland and Sweden join NATO — which Putin’s invasion impels them to do. China’s COVID controls may fail to control the virus but still succeed in damaging its economy and stirring up political unrest. But no matter, gods cannot err.

In the West, the defense of the infallibility of the political class takes a different but equivalent form. There too the gods cannot err, and mistakes are never acknowledged at all. The Narrative is simply airbrushed or explained by “fact-checkers” to make it seem like the favored political line has never been wrong. Thus Germany’s energy switch from indigenous coal and nuclear power to Russian gas never funded Putin. The Biden administration’s seamless resumption of approving oil leases on federal land was never an indictment of past policy. The COVID health mandates that were always necessary just suddenly became superfluous, especially for illegal immigrants at the southern U.S. border. Barack Obama was never fooled for an instant: declaring “Putin has always been ruthless … the danger was always there,” even though people remember he mocked Mitt Romney for saying it. Nor was the Washington Post deceived by Hunter Biden’s denials: headlining “inside Hunter Biden’s multimillion-dollar deals with a Chinese energy company,” denouncing it while pointing out it was only a private matter.

If the Global World seems shaken to its foundations, China turned into a giant jail, and Russia trapped in auto-destruct, it is primarily because the rulers are too walled-in by their dominant paradigms to consider the facts.

Perhaps the real advantage of working democracies over tidy and “efficient” autocracies lies precisely in their weakness. In such societies there are no gods, no czars or emperors, no transformative politicians ready to lead the multitudes by the hand to the Green end of history; just people like ourselves, who strive, err, admit error and learn. Experience we can live with; it is only when we raise up the idol state that we stifle under the stone weight of perfection.

Read more here: https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2022/04/18/prisoners-of-our-own-device-n1589199