On January 25, 2023, Ghent University banned the use of my book The Psychology of Totalitarianism in the course “Critique of Society and Culture”. That happened in the aftermath of a media storm that erupted in September 2022 following my interviews with Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. I already wrote about that in a previous essay.
Repeatedly since the beginning of the covid pandemic response, public officials, media, and celebrities encourage the public to “trust the experts.” In deciding whether to do just that, it is imperative for the public to know what an “expert” is and how the public is advised to receive their testimony under the law.
The Godly path to Adam Smith’s liberal plan is a path away from cultishness. Can liberalism be sustained in a world of waning belief in God? Tocqueville said that the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion depend on one another. Hayek ended The Fatal Conceit asking whether people in an age of waning theism will not be inclined to find meaning and validation in cultish politics.
People often ask me why I still care about school closures and other covid restrictions that harmed a generation of children. “Schools are open now,” they say. “It’s enough already.” No. It’s not. The impact to this generation of children continues. And so do many of the restrictions impacting young people.
My experience in academia and many other realms of life has shown me that the desire to humiliate others and thus putatively raise one’s cache of social capital—an impulse I can honestly say I’ve never quite understood—is a cardinal trait of many human beings, most of whom are desperately and futilely trying to use these public demonstrations of would-be dominance to very fill large affective holes within their spiritually empty selves.
All signs indicate that the U.S. and other world governments want to expand the reach and control of the globalized industrial food system, further concentrating power in the largest Big Food corporations. Governments around the world are using environmental goals to forcibly shut down small farms as they promote dependence on industrial technologies and factory foods that could make climate change and other environmental problems worse.
The widely distributed and weaponized fearporn which has driven the gross over-reaction of governments and their citizens (all over the world) was not justified. In retrospect, the global COVIDcrisis agenda and response which has devastated global economies, enabled a massive upwards transfer of wealth, and has been exploited to justify imposition of “The Great Reset” globalist agenda items cannot be justified as a credible and effective “public health” response.
In Speakeasy World, people were aware that they lived in a panopticon. But they realized that the one and only guard was probably checking TikTok on his mobile phone during working hours instead of surveilling prisoners. The prisoners made a calculated bet that the guard was not paying attention to their transgressions.
Members of the U.S. Congress are conducting such an inquiry, and their efforts require the help of physicians, scientists and public health policy experts to identify key policy decisions and provide a rationale for investigating those policies and the officials and government agencies that devised and implemented them, with the ultimate goal of meaningful reform.
Saddest of all, masks are still required at nursing homes, so the elderly, in their golden years, continue to be deprived of facial cues and the comfort of smiles, whether they like it or not. This means countless older adults with hearing loss, dementia and other age-related limitations have been forced to live in a faceless, isolated, masked world for nearly three years now; there’s no reason whatsoever it should be that long, yet they have little power to effect change.
The Covid Leviathan stripped Americans of their First Amendment rights and divided them as well. Bureaucrats worked to stifle journalists who reported on inconvenient facts, President Biden attacked his own citizens as unpatriotic, and Anthony Fauci coordinated attacks against scientists who dared to challenge his authority.
The scars that have been left on all of us by the response to COVID are incomprehensibly varied and deep. For most, there hasn’t been enough time to mentally process the significance of the initial lockdowns, let alone the years-long slog of mandates, terror, propaganda, social stigmatization and censorship that followed. And this psychological trauma affects us in myriad ways that leave us wondering what it is about life that just feels so off versus how it felt in 2019.
