Absent concerted action on our part, our recent past is our foreseeable future, because neither the ideology nor the power-centers profiting from it have changed. At stake in our response is our liberal democracy and our humanity.
Those who favor reform that reduces the governmentalization of social affairs need a name for that Smithian outlook. Whatever name we adopt, it will be abused or stolen by those whose characters and deeds spell the governmentalization of social affairs. We should remember who we are. We should return to the great liberal arc of the last 500 years, rising out of Christendom. There is only one liberalism 1.0. Let’s recover it and stick with it.
I will argue that the spreading dominance of the woke agenda was a key enabling environment in 2020 for the Covid interventions. Wokism is a war on Western civilization. Resisting the Covid tyranny is a war to defend the products of the Western Enlightenment.
This account of Lacan’s discourse theory enables one to make sense of the discursive struggles currently occurring in global space. And once one has an intellectual grasp of one’s adversary’s ‘master moves’ in this space, one can better prepare to counter them through the hysteric’s and analyst’s discourses.
Gratitude and its rewarding expression were sorely lacking during the Pandemic. Masks, medicines, and the disease of politics created wide rifts amongst friends and family. Some of the wounds may never heal, but the holiday where we remember our dead is over. Now we move into the season where we give thanks to those still with us.
Political elites made it simultaneously dangerous to utter anything remotely disparaging of some groups and fashionable to trash other groups. Their double standard was a display of power, not hypocrisy
The prejudice observed against the unvaccinated was far from minimal. It was two and a half times greater than the exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants from the Middle East. Researchers discovered that the unvaccinated were as disliked as individuals struggling with drug addiction and significantly more so than people who had been released from prison.
Liberalism unleashes human flourishing and creativity better than any other path in history. But any theory built around the sovereignty of the individual inevitably bumps up against human weakness and human frailty as well.
Moral emergencies are the times when our principles are most vulnerable to negotiation and even complete collapse.
A plague, a pestilence, a pandemic seemed more promising. Past naturally occurring pandemics had reduced human populations much more successfully than wars. The Black Death of 1346-53 may have reduced the world population by as much as 25 percent, a much more encouraging number than the measly 3 percent from World War II. As an added economic bonus, the Black Death served as a very effective concentrator of wealth for the survivors, as it caused minimal collateral property loss.
This period of our lives has shattered the hopes and dreams of millions and billions of people, and practically buried the ideal of freedom as an anachronism in a new age of corporatist totalitarianism. The neo-Hegelians in our midst condescend to us and say that this is just how things are and there is nothing to be done about it. This is not true.
Until we have meaningful reconciliation, amnesty will merely cement the incumbents’ hold on academic, media, and narrative power, all but ensuring we repeat the failures of pandemic public health policy. Thus, for those of us who anticipated the harms to kids, we can further anticipate the harms of granting mercy to those whose trembling, intolerant hands still hold the cannons.
