Karma is already turning on the whole gang of coercive totalitarians here and abroad. While the virus is invisible, the people who dreamed up and enforced lockdowns and mandates who wrecked the country are highly visible. They have names and careers, and they are right to be very worried about their futures. First step: apologize.
Fear is a ubiquitous and essential part of the human experience. Indeed, a good case could be made that it is the driving force in the lives of many, if not most human beings.
Life is hard. Everyone I know bears some burden or other. Most do so with equanimity and dignity, and without victimizing others. It’s been deeply wrong—and extremely selfish—for Colbert, Fauci and their groupies to have externalized their mental unwellness on hundreds of millions of others by insisting on society-wide, lastingly destructive Coronavirus interventions.
Colbert, Fauci, and the Externalization of Mental Illness Read More
This is brave of Marvel and Disney. Mixing face masks and vaccines with super heroes is either very confident, or very profitable. Dress it up how you want, but bandaids on old men’s arms aren’t exactly superhero-ish. It’s a long way from muscular Thor and his hammer. And every adverse vaccine event stands to puncture the allure of the super hero like a needle through a cape.
As every great religious tradition reminds us, the proclivity to do ill to others is vividly present in everyone during the entire course of our lives on earth, and that the first and most effective step towards ensuring that this inner monster does not take control of our destinies is acknowledging its enduring presence within us. It is then, and only then, that we can shape effective and enduring strategies to keep it at bay.
Perhaps for this reason: people might start to take seriously the idea that the corona crisis was primarily a psycho-social phenomenon that marked the transition to a technocratic system, a system in which the government would attempt to claim decision-making rights over its citizens and, step by step, take control of all private space.
Here is why in our time, as in all times, there is a crying need for intellectual sanctuaries for those brave souls who are willing to stand up and be counted, risk cancellation, put their professional careers on the line, simply to say what is true. They need protection. They need care. And they deserve our congratulations, for it is they who will guide us out of this mess.
Why Did So Many Intellectuals Refuse to Speak Out? Read More
The big open question, however, is what the political fallout will be from science’s return to truth. If it helps the constitutional state turn away from its absurd noble goals – war against a virus, fight against a climate change – and make it adhere to its real task – regulating the peaceful coexistence of people while respecting the freedom and dignity of the individual – then the many victims of the Covid hysteria will perhaps not have suffered entirely in vain.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Corona, patientia nostra? Read More
Covid has laid bare a medical profession no longer with input into health policy. Financial interest influences decisions enacted by bureaucrats, driven by the pharmaceutical industry, and woven into political agendas. A cultural blindness to objectivity begins with medical journals failing to publish any article outside of the narrative.
The compassion-hacking of American churches did not in itself save anyone’s life, but it did help to break down another civil-society barrier standing in the way of governmental totalization. As Hannah Arendt warned us, authoritarian and totalitarian schemes do not work without mass buy-in from the constituency. Buy-in requires people to be isolated, lonely, atomized, and stripped of all meaning.
These are classic “controlling practices” designed to gradually leach from each and every one of us—and most infuriatingly those not yet fully socialized—what is arguably our greatest instinctual drive: the desire to weave stories of our own in the company of others that remind us not of what they tell us we are and must be for them, but of the sense of dignity that we all want to feel and, to the best of our abilities, extend to others.
This is an existential, mythic moment, during which we have to decide: what forces are we going to allow to shape our identities? Our social infrastructure? Our cultural landscapes? Do we even want them to be changed? If so, in what ways?
