The debanking of Nigel Farage demonstrates the power of a law that is already being enforced without having been formalised. Found guilty of crimes by state censors, secret committees of bureaucrats, or inscrutable algorithms, individuals can be disconnected and de-personed by institutions that they didn’t realise possessed such powers. Today it is banks terminating customers for their beliefs; tomorrow it may be primary schools and hospitals. The powerful consensus that once upheld the neutrality of key institutions as essential to maintaining peace in liberal societies is collapsing.
Belief in the value of neutrality was a hard-won product of bourgeoisie political revolutions and religious wars. Having lasted for centuries, it is teetering today under attack from two directions. On one side, a brand of political activism condemns the very idea of remaining neutral as being a cover for subjugation and exploitation. In this view, the passive act of not denying someone banking services is recast as an affirmative endorsement of their entire political outlook. Simultaneously, digital networks are thrusting formerly apolitical institutions into the general arena of public surveillance, where failure to affirm new ideological mantras is seen as an act of treason against the whole system.
Ironically, given its role as a pioneer of thought policing and financial cancellation, the Canadian government website hosts an astute paper on the techno-surveillance model pioneered by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). “Big data and the social credit system: The security consequences” argues that the purpose of the “social governance process” in China is “upholding the Chinese Communist Party’s ruling position: ensuring state security”. This is “not simply about domestic or foreign-security policy. In the PRC, internal and external are also about what is inside and outside of the CCP. The Party is protecting an ideas space not bounded by physical geography.” Security, in this context, is not measured by protecting Chinese citizens from outside attacks but, rather, by the state’s ability to exercise control over ideas, which it sees as essential to maintaining the party’s power.
The process is more decentralized in the US and UK than in China, but functionally the West’s policing of disinformation and illicit ideas, combined with punitive cancellations, achieves the same goal. Once seen as paragons of amoral profit seeking, banks now espouse “values” because they fear that to not do so would place them at risk of being deemed “distasteful” and “out-of-touch”. Those phrases, used by Farage’s bank to condemn him, are euphemisms for anything that threatens the ruling class ideology — something powerful institutions must avoid lest they be evicted from the palace of global technocracy. It is no coincidence that the most technologically advanced countries are also the most aggressive practitioners of de-banking.
PERCEPTION RESET 