We recall those days now and wonder how and why this all happened. Not one minute has passed since that day when I’ve rested from asking that question. Every day it feels like we get closer to knowing. And yet the truth keeps being ever more elusive with every revelation of the depths of the conspiracy, the range of the players, the interests at work, and the forever toggle between fear, plot, ignorance and malice.
The overwhelming majority in all age groups in Japan got caught up in the panic generated by government officials, mainstream news media, and the medical community. For three years now masks have been worn continuously everywhere, including mountain trails and public parks. The widespread use of brainwashing here has been especially disheartening to me, since I have spent much of my time and effort over the last thirty years teaching, researching, and writing about critical thinking education in Japan.
Orwell argues that these language patterns destroy truth and beauty and clarity; they cloud thinking and collapse culture with their obfuscations. When reading or listening to such speech, we find ourselves mired in the muck of sloppy language that confuses, disorients, and depresses, and in the extreme, such language gets people killed, because if we don’t question it, allow it to frustrate and anger us, it lulls and numbs our minds.
When the facts are not with them, they have few options other than resorting to ad hominem attacks – and no such attack better fits the false inference of ill-intended opposition to state action than “far-right.” By the same token, no attack better fits the purposes of state actors with an interest in containing a minority opinion that threatens to expose their designs.
With the flip of a switch, the real world they knew ended. When they were confined to their rooms and houses, friends and music, color and life, humor and competition, all lived inside screens. Why wouldn’t they turn there to those worlds when this world could collapse in an instant? No wonder screen worlds seem better than this one. Are fake worlds better? How will we repair this one?
Theory without a reality check can make the world unlivable. This is because theorists can build beautiful models that hide grave errors, intentionally or not, and there is no means by which their mistakes are revealed until you test them against the real world. You never want them in charge of the whole project.
The extraordinary turmoil of the last three years, on the surface, is ebbing away. But the undercurrents are as strong as ever, dragging us further away from the dignity that used to be inherent in our daily lives, our encounters with others, our institutions, our nations.
One might suppose it would be top headlines that the man who crafted the Covid response for the world was merely using this as the lever to reverse 12,000 years of human history. Indeed in that sense, “going medieval” is a mere step in a long road back. Forget the Constitution. Forget the Enlightenment. Forget even the golden age of the Roman Empire. Fauci wants to take us back long before there are any actual historical records: a conjectural Rousseauian state of nature where we lived by foraging for food around us and nothing more.
None of that fracturing or mismanagement of normal history took place in the global rush to “lockdowns,” the rollout of COVID hysteria, of “mandates,” masking, of global child abuse, of legacy media lying internationally at scale and all lying in one direction, of thousands of “trusted messengers” parroting a single script, and of forced or coerced mRNA injections into at least half of the humans on Planet Earth. What is happening?
More than people right now are willing to admit, civil society as we knew it collapsed over these three years. A massive purge has taken place within all the commanding heights. This will affect career choices, political alliances, philosophical commitments, and the structure of society for decades to come. he rebuilding and reconstruction that must take place is going to rely – perhaps as it always has – on a small minority who see both the problem and the solution.
So much needs to be rebuilt after the last three years, but among the needs are serious intellectual communities. The colleges and universities have, for the most part, been taken over or smashed. The major media is captured. Our companies are forced into an obsequious stance. Our previous networks have been shattered. For lovers of freedom, we’ve experienced something of a diaspora.
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.
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