What is affirmed in these recent times? At least for the many, it seems that anyone who devotes themselves to ‘common decency’ under democracy, can be easily regimented to dormant public opinion. The only telling signs of an active democracy exist in the many citations of history. Churchill, for example, said that ‘the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.’ It too can be said, in Voltaire’s words, that the problem of democracy is that it ‘propagates the idiocy of the masses’ or rather, that it’s not what is fed to government via public opinion but the opposite; that the state and its subordinate spokesmen, with its dispensary of national fables, ideals and moral lecturing, turns citizens to compete for the honour of shining its shoes. Those of whom agree with the latter mustn’t regard the following theory with suspicion that democracy, as we are commanded to endorse and to cherish, is incompatible with representative government and institution as we now see it.
Exempting our democratic ideals for the workplace and the individual, at least throughout Australia’s corporate sector, what one observes is an increase of knee benders and prostrates to the current dogma of custodian acknowledgment, of which appears as an irksome welcome in every financial firm and retail bank entrance nationwide. The acknowledgment of country and land is not only Australia’s unofficial custom throughout corporations and institutes alike, it too is our pathetic imitation of a one-party state, plagued by the tyranny of words and gestures erected unconsciously by its victims. But the franchisee in any given industry today is to suppress every notion of social autonomy and intellectual enterprise within the workplace. All common decency as is generally perceived, of which is determined by government and filtered through businesses constructed in these terms, as well as our beloved corporately owned sages (The Big Four), is exercised as functionally as a telecasted mob orator.
In regard to the lead up to the Voice referendum, the most elementary fact of the corporate arm of Australia is the coordinated placard honouring of the traditional land-owning Aboriginal. As to who authorised this peculiar artificiality of decorative, high-flown office ornament is the question that appears with a Janus-like face. Government or privatised administration itself? One can’t unsee the petty officialdom of such an installation and appeasement, as well as the convenient plugging for the ‘Yes’ case that the corporate protocol embodies. In context, the private sector of a free society, such as ours, ought to conduct and regulate its own affairs and outward representation to the consumer and, more importantly, stick to making money. If the private sector theory was absolute, then there needn’t be any political toadying as there needn’t be any alignment to party preference, as for the interest of solidarity to national campaigns.
What will it mean if the traditional characteristics of a ‘respectable society’ are to be reversed? If it was once considered unmannerly for an individual or institutional body to intimidate their politics onto others, as it was to wear religion on the sleeve – whilst respecting one’s right to belief and expression – then respectability, at this time, has taken the form of one who plays the pontiff. The fact reflects itself in the general character of the professional job holder in the land: these men and women who constitute a faux benevolence of public spirit and take it to be their moral obligation to intrude their neighbour’s letter box with a deluge of conscripted doctrine. Demonstrably, those who notice this virtual signal of acknowledgment see a government by bounder, and a private organisation subservient to its chain gang. I am for one inclined to oppose such decoration of workplace acknowledgment, for the result is a pretence of dignity and honour in determining the tone of the national life at home and how we as a society must think. Though a class of job holder may certainly march to the tune of the corporate funding vote for ‘Yes,’ it would be almost reasonable to suggest that a hulk-load of workers and professionals, regimented and coerced into the venerating and kowtowing, are able to discern this prescribed formality as fallacy.
As listed in the Communities and Justice resource page of the NSW Government, anyone can and should perform acknowledge by paying respects to the traditional custodians of the land. ‘Should’ is synonymous with ‘shall’. ‘Must’ lingers not too far behind this coerced use of wording. The document issued here by the NSW Government reads not of sincere feeling but as an instruction to be unquestioned. Here, the ordain is admitted by the skilful advertiser, adopted credulously by corporatised vessels, and exploited on the ignorant masses, those of whom are at the mercy of this political tonguester, who has the secret of using emotional words on people who have been ordered to accept it without the means of inquiry.
I allude to the point made by Dr Jordan Peterson, last week, who confronted Australia’s national air carrier over its inflight ‘propaganda’, comparing the sacrament of country acknowledgment as to flying in North Korea or Red China. Rightly said, though I would think many of those who are sceptical of the protocol of acknowledgment would continue, unknowingly, to put their hands to their mouths, bowing, saluting, and most generally, offering worship to the latest Indigenous ornament of the State altar. Where the evidence of scepticism rests is shown with the latest of polling, which has indicated that Albanese’s referendum is to fail. If these polls are to be suggested, then there would be many of those who are employed amongst these organisations, The Big Four, Wesfarmers, Qantas, and the like, who’d hold this vote predominately and would share the coinciding prejudice yet would sacrifice their belief and honour for the sake of job holding, and for that of common decency.
Above all, the acknowledgment of country and to its traditional landowners is but a reliquary, amalgamated by the duopoly of public and private sectors. To be of minor objection to this paraded fad is to be a modern-day heretic. Though this is no stretch of the imagination, nor is it a simulation of a fascist-like mood that percolates a politically correct gesticulation, wherever one goes in Australia, it is, quite clearly, as Peterson laid out, fascistic in aesthetic. Whether this is the time in our nation’s upbringing that we are now experiencing an idolatrous society, led by that of its government, is to be put to question. We can only know through what we have once been accustomed to and to our knowledge of the world. Those with a Catholic education are familiar to this kind of iconography: As for the crucifixion of Christ above every schoolroom blackboard, the symptom of piety is as identical to the Chinese and their sanctified portraits of Mao.
Venture further and we oughtn’t wonder what the horrors of life entailed for those who lived under the apostolic traditions of the Holy Roman Empire. From every living quarter and bed chamber to commune and town square, imposed the resident to his duty of praising the images of which the Papacy and God himself represented. The habitual performing of the signum crucis (the sign of the cross), to cleanse oneself by showing truthfulness and sincerity in both personal and legal situations is comparable to the representation of First Nation acknowledgement, as incited by the pinnacle of the State and credulously obeyed by the hordes of pious men and women, top-down.
We, as a society, can only qualify as none other but image worshippers, a people subjected to unquestioning acceptance by the mandated plaques of First Nation acknowledgment. Let’s ask ourselves whether this is one of the greatest blunders of a democratic, tolerable Australia, and whether it can survive under this national conscription. Whilst lacking the instinct and precision to ask exactly what a statement of acknowledgment means before adhering to it, as we have done for far too long, we should, alternatively, trust our own suspicions and confront the word tyranny that is laced with bad social ethics, bad racial politics, and a cancerous corporate groupthink.
