Religious persons today are a threat, but not to public safety as the narrative instructs us. They are a threat to the idea that the state is to be worshipped above all else, to the religion that’s trying to take their place, to the idea that it’s possible to find a compelling and complete sense of meaning outside of the state.
Science is like a weathervane: it gives you information, which you can use to decide on a course of action, but it doesn’t tell you what to do. The decision belongs to you, not to the swirling metal rooster. A weathervane can tell you there’s a stiff wind coming in from the northwest, but it can’t tell you how to respond to the data.
In the early months, while secular folks were exhorting everyone to stay home, stay safe, mask up, and all the rest, religious leaders began pushing back against what they saw as encroachments on freedom of worship. It wasn’t just church closures or bans on choral singing they opposed. They cried out against the whole worldview underpinning the rules, a mindset that reduces people to their health and risk status.
During lockdowns and medical mandates, the power of the state and its corporate allies truly reached its apotheosis, and failed us miserably. Our times cry out for justice, for clarity, and for making a difference to save ourselves and our civilization. We should approach this great project with our eyes wide open and with ears to hear different points of view on how we get from here to there.
Keeping the peace at all costs has become a sacred and unquestionable goal among large parts of our society, especially among its more credentialed sectors. This implacably strict pose positions multitudes into a spirit of acquiescence to power, no matter how dangerous or devastating the results.
The scapegoat mechanism is a speculative device to explain how some of the human systems, in a fairly broad sense of the phrase, establish and keep their order. The most fundamental tenet is that order is attained and sustained through the cyclic sacrifice of an entity that is internally excluded.
The people who orchestrated isolation in nursing homes in 2020, who enforced malnutrition on hundreds of millions, who condemned millions of girls to servitude, are not doing so with ‘right’ or ‘wrong‘ in mind. They don’t accept that such fixed concepts exist. If there is nothing beyond the physical, then their actions are rational and cannot be wrong.
There needs to be a to-be-abolished list and any federal government institution with the word agency, department, or bureau needs to be on it. The last few years have shown us the power of these institutions and the devastation they can cause. The only sure way of preventing it from happening again is to put a hard stop on all the bureaucracies that caused our suffering. Society itself, which is smarter than bureaucracy, can manage the rest.
Steve Templeton talks with sociologist Dr. Frank Furedi, author of How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the 21st Century, about the continuity of the culture of fear in the COVID-19 pandemic response.
I’d like to send a special note of thanks to all those friends and family members who, after sniggering behind my back that I had gone off my rocker, or had suddenly become an unthinking and selfish Trumpite, sent their sincere apologies for what they said about me, and how I had fallen into mindlessly and obsessively repeating Q-Anon memes.
My Gratitude For the Apologies and Sincere Expressions of Regret Read More
If you’re an artist and you’re trying to grow your Instagram following and you start posting anything that calls into doubt like ‘The Science,’ you’re going to be shadowbanned. You’re not going to be in front of those eyeballs. Art that aligns with the mainstream narrative, however, is rewarded.
During the Covid era, we see the same schema writ large in the responses taken by governments across the globe. For the first time in human history, the availability of mass-testing allowed us to convince ourselves that we could measure the health of the population, holistically, in real time, and to generate precise statistics permitting us to do so – right down to the last ‘case’ or ‘death’.
