The Madness of Groupthink
Janis’ insights into the process of groupthink in the context of dysfunctional public policy decision making profoundly foreshadowed the behaviors observed within the HHS COVID leadership team.
Humanity as Homo Ideologicus: On Hitoshi Imamura’s Theory of General Ideology
Anyone who is alert to our past should have noticed the ire with which the stronger have striven to silence and extinguish the weaker. It should remind us of those historical conflicts in which the party that was more powerful in number, status, and force and thus passed as righteous would later turn out to be tremendously disastrous.
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In Defense of Uncertainty
We think uncertainty will expose us, put us into a distressing freefall, but in reality it does the opposite. It expands our minds by creating spaces that don’t need to be filled by anything. It lays the groundwork for innovation and progress, and opens us up to meaningful connection with others.
Proxy “Evidence” and the Manipulation of Human Perceptions
The elites’ ability to flood our consciousness with fragmentary and undigested information has increased exponentially. And they are well aware of, and quite satisfied by, the sense of disorientation this information overload causes in the majority of citizens. Why? Because they know that a disoriented or overwhelmed person is much more likely to grasp at simplistic “solutions” when they are directed this way.
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Now We Know What It’s like To Live Among Lunatics
Day after day, week after week, month after month for 28 months, I heard people invoke the shibboleth, and parrot the mantra: “Pandemic!” Uttering this magic word was intended to justify any disruption of normal life, to excuse the failure to fulfill a wide range of personal responsibilities and to foreclose any reasonable discussion/dissent that might support the conclusion that the orchestrated, opportunistic overreaction to a respiratory virus was a complete, avoidable, government and media-made meltdown.
Hope Springs Eternal…with Some Effort
It’s taken a long time to get us to where we are and it will take a comparable amount of time and effort to rebuild what we’ve lost. We can make the rational choice to hope for a better future. And we can take little steps toward that future by choosing hope right now.
Zev Zelenko, Physician and Moralist
One can only hope a counterrevolution will take place, a Great Reawakening, that will lead Westerners back to the core principles of both genuine science and the faith tradition that inspired Zev Zelenko to become a great doctor and an even greater human being.
Dictatorship Chic
The great debate between democracy and dictatorship, between freedom and despotism, between a government by the people and a government imposed upon the people is here at last. I’m glad for the clarification of terms. They are saying the quiet part out loud: they want dictatorship. All partisans of freedom should similarly stand up and say the loud part even louder: we tried life without freedom and found it intolerable. We are never going back.
Why Do We Adore Dogs and Despise People?
Our culture’s current obsession with the allegedly “human” qualities of dog, has a lot to do with our generalized retreat from the difficulties of finding enduring comfort and wisdom—and the foundational key to both, dialogue—with the always complex humans around us. That this widespread retreat from what Sara Schulman calls “normative conflict” had an awful lot to do with enabling the assaults on human dignity and freedom committed in the name of controlling Covid.
Revisiting Georges Canguilhem in a Pandemic
That attitude, requiring us to spend our intellectual resources to an extent that may be comparable with that to which Canguilhem exerted his intellect in writing The Normal and the Pathological, will exhaust us. But we must remember that is precisely what we adults should do.
Mozart, Mediocrity, and the Administrative State
While the story is fiction, the moral drama here is real and affects the whole of history. Every highly productive person – we don’t even have to speak of geniuses here – often ends up surrounded by resentful and mediocre people who have too much time on their hands. They use whatever limited talents they have to plot, confound, confuse, and ultimately wreck their betters. The demand to “comply” is always the watchword: it’s a tool of destruction.
The US President Finally Gets Covid
Despite every mandate, closure, and imposition – despite the destruction of rights, liberties, and law – the virus would have its way. No class would be protected. No profession was immune. No amount of power or pomp would make a difference. Covid would come for everyone.