I. When did the crisis begin?
Lots of writers in the Resistance try to figure out when the crisis began (the crisis being that global monopoly capitalism is trying to enslave the entire developed world via chronic illness).
Obviously the problem began well before SARS-CoV-2 was released in 2019.
Many people in the Resistance point to the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act as the start of the crisis.
But the CIA has been running the country at least since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Perhaps the crisis began when the US imported Nazi and Japanese bioweapons scientists after World War II?
Others pinpoint the start of the crisis to the creation of the Federal Reserve and the imposition of the federal income tax in 1913 that enabled the US to become a modern global empire.
I’ve argued before that Covid is just the continuation of global conquest, colonization, and empire that began in 1492.
Perhaps the problem began when we stopped being hunter-gatherers and first became farmers (in order to make beer, according to one leading theory).
When one works through a wide range of different possible points of origins one can make a strong case that the problem goes back to original sin. It’s the flaw that is unique to humans amongst all of the other animals — we are conscious of the difference between good and evil and yet we often choose evil. I actually think this is the correct answer — the problem goes all the way back to the problem of sin itself.
And so it occurred to me recently that the Covid crisis represents an extreme example of the Seven Deadly Sins.
II. The Covid disaster as an extreme example of the Seven Deadly Sins
The Seven Deadly Sins have a fascinating history.
- Tertullian first started writing about them in Carthage around 200 AD.
- The Christian monk Evagrius Ponticus expanded upon the idea beginning around 383 AD in Egypt.
- But the list of the Seven Deadly Sins that most of us are familiar with comes from Pope Gregory I in 590 AD.
According to Pope Gregory I, the Seven Deadly Sins are:
2. greed,
3. lust,
4. envy,
5. gluttony,
6. wrath, and
7. sloth.
What makes these actions sinful is that they separate us from God and introduce disharmony into society in ways that make us and others miserable.
Now think about Ralph Baric working in a lab to make viruses more lethal, Tony Fauci funding that work and lying to Congress and the American people about it, and the biowarfare industrial complex coming up with an idea that devious in the first place and unleashing it on the world. I contend that the Covid disaster is the quintessential example of the Seven Deadly Sins. Let’s review each of these sins and how they apply to the Covid debacle:
The definitions in the list below come from Encyclopedia Britannica, the analysis is of course my own:
1. “In the theological sense, pride is defined as an excessive love of one’s own excellence.”
If that doesn’t describe Tony Fauci, Bill Gates, Francis Collins, and Scott Gottlieb I don’t know what does. Alas none of them are actually excellent.
2. “ Greed is defined as the immoderate love or desire for riches and earthly possessions.”
Trying to steal $76 trillion in wealth from the Baby Boomers by making them sick certainly fits this definition.
3. What makes lust sinful is “pleasure without conscience” (in the words of M. Gandhi) or said differently, pleasure without regard for the other person.
Creating weaponized viruses and injecting 5.5 billion people with toxic substances strikes me as an extreme example of disregard for others. Also, I think Baric, Fauci, Gates, Bourla, Bancel, etc. get sadistic pleasure from this whole grotesque spectacle.
4. “Envy is more than simple jealousy because it includes the belief that another’s excellence or blessings lessen one’s own, and it makes one want to destroy another’s good fortune.”
I think the geneticists and virologists looked at the money that the frat boys on Wall Street were making and decided that they deserved that ill-gotten wealth instead. I also think the scientific class resented how hard they had to work to get through school and decided to smash the health of everyone else so that they could keep more wealth and power for themselves.
5. Gluttony is about consuming more than one needs.
I don’t know why Bill Gates thinks he needs a $650 million 376-foot superyacht but it certainly feels like an example of gluttony to me. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, who censor life-saving medical information, engage in similar exaggerated aquatic pursuits.
6. “Wrath is defined as a strong feeling of hatred or resentment with a desire for vengeance.”
Over the last several years vaccine zealot Peter Hotez has repeatedly called for the Department of Homeland Security, the Commerce Department, Justice Department, UN Security Council, and NATO to “do something definitive” to stop the people who point out the errors in his work. Sounds like wrath to me.
7. Sloth is the “culpable lack of physical or spiritual effort.”
This entire crisis stems from the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is too lazy to do proper research and development and so they just resort to regulatory capture instead. Why spend decades in a lab examining ambiguous test results when one can just buy regulators like Doran Fink instead?
I also just want to underscore the sin of idolatry — “the worship of someone or something other than God as though it were God.” The members of the biowarfare industrial complex that we are fighting see themselves as Gods. Yuval Harari and the WEF crew are pretty explicit about this. Idolatry is central to the Covid crisis.
III. Why Appeals to Virtue Are Insufficient
If the seven deadly sins got us into this mess then perhaps a return to virtue is the way to solve this problem? Some conservative scholars including Patrick Deneen have been urging a return to virtue for a long time (they are not engaged in the Covid conversation per se but rather they think a return to virtue is the solution to many of the modern ills in America).
Alas, I don’t think it’s that simple. I believe that history shows that the forces of sin are so powerful that they overwhelm traditional appeals to virtue. I would go one step further to argue that the reforms of the Enlightenment are an attempt to create structures that produce virtue out of selfishness (isn’t that the essence of Adam Smith’s claim about the virtues of markets in The Wealth of Nations?)
Free markets put entrepreneurs in competition with each other in ways that force otherwise selfish people to serve the interests of the customers.
Free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, religious freedom, and regular democratic elections put ideas in competition with each other — “iron sharpens iron” and the best ideas rise to the top.
The checks and balances in the US Constitution pit the three branches of government against each other such that the natural tendency of politicians to want to amass more power for themselves collides with the same greed in the members of the other branches of government and thus cancels out the extremism of any faction.
All of this worked, kinda sorta, for 250 years.
But now free markets are gone because the oligopolists collude with each other; political freedoms are gone because corporations and the state have merged and they use any excuse to override individual liberties; and the three branches of the US government and the regulatory agencies all work for the biowarfare industrial complex. While we should certainly shun and shame the evil doers, a simple appeal to virtue is not going to stop these monsters.
Practically speaking we need a revolution to replace the Covidians with people who understand liberty. But even once we take power and restore the basic freedoms of the past 250 years, it seems to me that we now need a set of checks and balances for science and medicine in order to protect freedom going forward.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author.