The preliminary results of the mRNA vaccine randomized controlled trials (RCTs) by Pfizer and Moderna were celebrated as spectacularly successful and so governments and the media assumed that the solution had been found. A procession of leaders assured the public that the vaccines were so effective that once injected, you would not become infected or pass infection on to others.
Ethical Challenges Arising from the Grand Illusion Read More
The peoples of the Mayan and Aztec empires were surrounded by monuments to the greatness of their leaders and their faith, and they celebrated both. We too look back in awe at what they built despite what we know: their social systems were bloody and barbaric in ways we cannot imagine now. And yet when we study their histories in our own times, with the appropriate amount of humility, we face a similar problematic disorientation.
Love, kindness, honesty, respect, creativity and freedom are necessary for human flourishing. Sadly, many still embrace the mask as if it is the only truth that exists. If society is to change, all will need to see and peel away the polish. Then, we will have to work together to replace the emptiness it covers with a society rooted in genuine morality and positive human values.
We need something more than rational scepticism. We need a new ideology – something like a religious movement of our own – one that’s more optimistic about the future of humanity, that places a little more faith in the ability of people to do their own risk assessments and voluntarily adjust their behaviour if necessary.
We face the question of how to purity test our leaders—both official and unofficial—in light of all the devastation we’ve witnessed during the response to COVID-19. If you believe, as I do, that the importance of this issue presently eclipses that of any other, then every step should be taken to select for leaders who opposed lockdowns as early and as vocally as possible.
How Long Did It Take Them Realize that Human Rights Matter? Read More
The current fad of the financially fabulous is Effective Altruism, which essentially involves promising to give your money while you are still alive to causes and organizations that “do good,” while simultaneously tethering them to your whims through financial dependence. A very specific example of this is the massive money going to barely-surviving but purportedly legit media organizations (or you can just buy the Washington Post.) You get good press when you own it.
Life is a messy, risky, and at times lethal adventure, and while it’s perfectly acceptable and in fact compassionate to try to lower this risk to some extent, a complete elimination of all risk would create a dull, lifeless world devoid of conviviality and meaning. The people of Jack’s town are willing to accept some level of pain, sadness and suffering in order to reap the concomitant rewards that come with living life to the fullest.
Like any old school respiratory virus, this one made us feel lousy, albeit with a different constellation of symptoms. We handled it the same way as other viral illnesses: we drank extra water, took some home remedies, and tried to get some extra sleep. A few years ago, no one made a big deal about, or needed to categorize, being sick like this. People rode it out. No one cared what you had. Or didn’t have.
What’s at stake here is not just a debate about medical policy. What is happening involves nothing less than the fundamental reshaping of our body politic, a massive assault on the constitutional system of civil liberties and on the presuppositions undergirding that system.
We dare not relent lest the despotism we experienced only very recently be repeated and entrenched. We know now that it can happen, and that there is nothing inevitable about genuine progress. Our job now is to regroup and recommit to living free lives, never again believing that there are magical forces at work in the world that make our role as thinkers and doers unnecessary.
The way things are going at this point, the most viable alternative seems to be to get working to build a parallel social structure which can exist alongside or even tunneled within the Fascist Imperial state, and which might eventually replace it. How could such an organization be structured?
The problem in our current world is that “experts” demand our behaviors conform to their self-proclaimed expert prognostications, for which they are never held responsible in any way. No costs to those predicting the future are associated with prognostication errors. All costs of future-telling errors are borne by not-prognosticators. Those costs are borne by the people, by society, by the economy, all too often by children, etc. The rest of us bear the costs.
