Trish Wood | On the Fringe
Guest: Bruce Pardy
Many of us think we are still living in a Western liberal democracy with “a fairly open economy” in a society where “there are certain values that we more or less hold to be true,” but, says law professor Bruce Pardy, “in many respects, that world no longer exists.” What world do we live in? Bruce and TNT Radio’s Trish Wood discuss at length the world the rupture of Covid revealed; a world that had long been forming but one we could not see as clearly as we were then rudely able to. Thanks to Covid, we realized at last that we are, indeed, being managed to death. The “managerial state” Covid unleashed, says Bruce, dates back to the industrial revolution and the rise of a new managerial elite (experts, technocrats, bureaucrats, academics and political actors). This elite took it upon themselves to order society in a certain way through mass bureaucracy, mass media, mass standing armies, and so on. This stew came to a head during Covid when the rule of law (as we thought we knew it) went out the window, by way of being tossed. Free of restraint, big government and big business have taken control of the post-enlightenment era and the new reality has set in: repressive tolerance. The result is a Canada that is increasingly “stupid, poor and fractured” and a laughing stock on the global stage.