We need pandemic policies rooted in human nature—policies that meet people where they are, not where some sanctimonious Twitter warriors decide they should be. Throwing the S-word around doesn’t earn respect or cooperation from the accused. Au contraire: when pelted with character-assassinating epithets, people double down.
I’m sorry to report that the entire book is a study in mysophobia, more worthy of study by a student of abnormal psychology than a public health official, much less a scientist. That no one has ever pointed this out to him is a disgrace. It’s the trouble with being so rich that you become uncriticizable.
These new digital surveillance and control mechanisms will be no less oppressive for being virtual rather than physical. Contact tracing apps, for example, have proliferated with at least 120 different apps in used in 71 different states, and 60 other digital contact-tracing measures have been used across 38 countries. There is currently no evidence that contact tracing apps or other methods of digital surveillance have helped to slow the spread of covid; but as with so many of our pandemic policies, this does not seem to have deterred their use.
Finally we come to the biggest problem of all. What kind of society do we want to live in and build? Is it based on the presumption that freedom belongs to all and is the best path for progress and good lives? Or do we want the rights of the people always to defer to the mandarins in the walled-off bureaucracies who give orders and expect only compliance and no challenge to their rule?
If this was only a China problem, surely, world leaders would be lining up to condemn the human rights crimes being committed against Shanghai citizens.
The last two years have confounded everyone who believed in the stability of American law, politics, public opinion, and the ideological attachments of both pundits and the general population. It’s all been turned upside down and inside out several times over. Anyone who thinks that we’ve all settled back into some mythical comfort bubbles of “liberals” vs “conservatives” is refusing to face post-pandemic politico-cultural realities.
Is liberalism a lost cause? Many say so. Many today dream that it would stay gone, forever doomed to be regarded as a failed experiment in a world longing for authoritarian control whether by the right, the left, the technocratic elite, or something else. Demoralized and depressed by so much “shock and awe,” and living in times of ubiquitous surveillance and unrelenting diktat, many others are inclined to give up the dream of freedom completely.
Fighting mandates on college campuses is isolating and ostracizing. When faced with giving up your dreams, the coercion is unbearable. Many students have caved under the pressure.
The struggle against this darkness will surely take many years. Who and what will keep that struggle alive? What hurt will fuel the fight, keeping the fires of resentment burning, and what hurt – real as it may have been – will fade over time and hence be only a weak ally of the soldiers of the resistance?
The free world is stuck tallying the costs of its catastrophic foray into totalitarianism. Most of these costs were predicted well before the policies were ever implemented. Hundreds of millions have gone hungry. An entire generation of children has been abused and traumatized. Young people were robbed of some of their brightest years. Small businesses and those who depended on them lost their livelihoods. Trillions of dollars were transferred from the world’s poorest to its very richest.
To impose a centrally dictated objective, and a unidimensional one to boot, on complex societies comprised of billions of individuals with extremely diverse preferences and capabilities is to wage war on human nature, and humanity. Sustaining it necessarily requires the application of massive, and massively increasing, coercion. It requires people to “choose” what they would not choose of their own volition.
The experts are nothing if not certain about what (if anything) you should know and when (if ever) you should know it. And by all indications, that’s not likely to change anytime soon. In the profound words of the multi-talentless Kamala Harris, “It is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.”
