When The Guardian published its ill-fated and ill-advised warning from economists about the imminent election of Argentina’s Javier Milei in November 2023, the response wasn’t one of mirth or anger. It was worse. Around the world millions of people felt as though they were staffers from The New Yorker on a Zoom call with a man called Jeffrey Toobin back in October 2020.

Thinking that the call was over, Toobin, a lawyer, quickly undressed and got to business – with himself. But his camera was still on and others on the call saw everything. We were all those others in November 2023 when Thomas Piketty and Jayati Ghosh and other activist economists saw fit to try warn everyone that resisting the Peronist status quo of intergenerational corruption and misery would be catastrophic.

Other signatories of that open letter included a woman called Diane Elson who describes herself as a “feminist economist” on her website, and Jose Antonio Ocampo, who was previously Colombia’s Minister of Finance.

But the number of names from the subcontinent and Africa betrayed the actual objective: any departure from the path to oblivion will not be tolerated by the cleverest people in the world, who know exactly what needs to happen, when, and how. Not succeeding at any point in correctly predicting events has not stopped these people from trying; clearly it isn’t enough for a social justice economist to be wrong the whole time – you must be wrong the whole time in public together (one of the signatories just signed his name as “Mustafa - Economics Professor”).

Emergency

In 2020, public health officials and professionals, by way of an open letter to various esteemed prestige media, decreed racism “a public health emergency”. This was done to ensure enthusiastic protestors around the world planning to separate statues from their plinths or burn down cities starting with immigrant bodegas or murder black off-duty cops didn’t fall foul of lockdown and “social distancing” restrictions – like a vegan declaring that they hate all meat, but make an exception for veal and moreover, insist they be the party to fire the captive bolt pistol at the poor calf’s skull.

“We are sickened by racism,” these experts stormed: “disgusted”. In a video supporting the letter Anthony Fauci said that racism was doing his head in. Peter Hotez concurred. The letter prompted officials in London – mainly white people in the management class – to declare their own institutions disgustingly racist, which was brave considering many of these institutions survive on public grants and donations – lost in this latest open letter hysteria was the idea that largesse usually meets a hard stop at the point of encountering racism - even the self-owned or self-reported kind.

The same logic appeared when 152 writers composed an open letter in the July 2020 edition of Harper’s magazine bemoaning writers being cancelled for straying too far from the approved narrative - for basically calling “women”, “women”.

In response, 160 other writers counterblasted the open letter with their own open letter, which boasted 160 writers - and basically told the original 152 signatories to piss off.

Madness of crowds

In 1841, a Scottish journalist called Charles McKay with a vivid turn of phrase published Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds. McKay had noticed something about the way people behaved together in the face of charged uncertainty – fighting, ghosts and fortune seeking, among others.

Half the title was poached by Douglas Murray for his The Madness of Crowds published in 2019 – one of his most underrated works insofar as it was prescient: the following year, many of the behaviours of groups Murray observed exploded in wholesale appearance across the academic, media, and corporate worlds resulting in division and mistrust – the detritus of which endures today.

But perhaps the most egregious application of the phenomenon occurred in October 2020 when an open statement signed by over 50 former American intelligence operatives claiming that the laptop belonging to the son of the Democrat Presidential nominee: “could be” a: “Russian influence exercise”.

This marked a considerable escalation in the madness of crowds within the mania of open letters: the state had found a way to get in on the action, and when that happens, the truth is relegated to a secondary objective – if not entirely defenestrated. Today’s management class, who largely agreed with that view of the laptop at the time, despite it being so lucidly rubbish, still refuse to acknowledge just how damaging this was to democracy and trust.

Afrikaner open letter

What makes the latest open letter debacle involving “44 prominent Afrikaners” so sinister isn’t the sneering and the hostility; contentious and immeasurable ideas passing for conviction is just mumbo-jumbo consensus activism and navel-gazing posturing popularized by European academics exiled to California in the 1940s – in other words, not original.

It is that the state responded with suspiciously high levels of efficiency – the kind witnessed in the response of the American intelligence officials to the laptop in 2020. This would speak to “opinion” weaponization at the hands of public servants who have no role influencing debate. Already the event has transitioned from odd to embarrassing – the next stop being disaster, certainly for credibility insofar as the reputations of the signatories are concerned, irrespective of whether they align with the platitudes contained.

The first of two clues that support this theory is the wild scrambling of Piet Croucamp – the need to “clarify” or “go on record” (in first principles free speech – you say what you feel, then you leave). Another is the behaviour of local transgender activist Max du Preez. Taking to social media to quash rumours of state coercion, Du Preez opted for the most vulgar and grasping kind of defensiveness - accusing critics of the open letter of being terrorists allied to the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) of 1994.

Observers view this extremity as craven and are extremely annoyed, but they miss something. In the unhinged world of pseudo-academic group-think open letters, this is normal. Ditto in the mad world where the state rounds up useful idiots to help disentangle itself from its own hopelessness and indecision.