As Kant explained in 1784, the silencing of the experts drives the loop of immaturity, preventing enlightenment. We must therefore ask ourselves, what if this spell was broken? How much closer would we be to an enlightened society? How safely would we be removed from entangling ourselves in those invisible chains, preventing us from living a full life, as truly autonomous and enlightened individuals?
For I lost my “sense of claret:” I couldn’t any more distinguish between a 2005 second growth Haut-Médoc and a 2019 cru bourgeoise Graves. Both smelled like sulphur, both tasted like watered-down fruit juice gone a bit bad: I couldn’t drink claret any more.
While almost everywhere else people cowered in their homes, schools were closed, mask mandates the norm, the Swedish went on with normal life. The panic that had gripped the rest of the world left Sweden mostly untouched. The pseudo-science of ‘stopping the virus’ by masking people and locking them up didn’t affect the policies of the Swedish Public Health Agency, and despite defamation and even death threats, Chief Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell never swayed. ‘Judge me in a year,’ he said in an interview with Unherd in July 2020.
Considering how this seriously flawed article is now apparently used to suppress the dissemination of an important scientific paper, to press the Cochrane editor-in-chief into making false claims about the objective of the paper and downplay its results, and to censor a review of the findings by an important mainstream newspaper, there is clearly an urgent need to act strongly against the so called “fact-checking” industry.
The destruction of Roald Dahl’s books is yet another sign of the all-pervasive negation of reality we now face. We see this negation all around us, in literature, history, politics, economics, even in the sciences. Objective reality gives way to subjective experience, emotions, or preferences in place of what is true.
We must judge the authorities all over the world who relentlessly pumped out panic-laden, often knowingly false propaganda during the past three years, in order to provoke fear and despair, while deliberately silencing and censoring all attempts at promoting a more balanced and healthy view; how they stifled critical thinking. And it is in this light that we must view the disastrous consequences of this conduct, and how it first and foremost harmed the young, the poor; our smallest brethren.
Freedom of expression is the ultimate test of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism begins in the psyche of the extremists. Then it appears in the willingness to take away people’s freedoms. It appears in contradictions and untruths. But the opposition to free speech is what ultimately exposes totalitarianism beyond any doubt.
We must all join forces in the fight for the right to express ourselves, to think, to doubt, to come together in the public square to discuss, reason and shape society. This battle will not be easy, and there are many indications that it will soon intensify. But surrender is not an option, for what is at stake is a future fitting for humanity. We must fight for it in brotherhood, armed with compassion, courage and integrity.
We may eventually get out of the Covid panic. But as long as the soil is fertile; as long as we do not question, do not doubt, but blindly believe and obey, the sword of mass panic, and all the damage done by it, still hangs over our heads. We have to rid ourselves of this threat. What is at stake is freedom and democracy.
Woke is an immensely important cornerstone of the new fascist society Elmer fears is around the corner, not only its visible signs, such as mass compliance with mask mandates and lockdowns, but no less in the atomization based on the denial of our common rationality, a direct consequence of the radical relativism that accepts nothing as valid except individual subjective experience.
Facebook’s aim is not to make their users safe. Their aim is to make them feel they are safe, to prevent them from discovering challenging information, prevent them from thinking. They are the apostles of a new god, and his followers do not ask him to deliver them from evil, they ask him to deliver them from truth.
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