It will be jarring for many to hear a scientist speak with such certainty. It should be jarring. We are trained to present ideas with caution, as hypotheses in need of a test. But in this case I have tested the idea and I am as certain of this as I am of anything. We are being systematically blinded. It is the only explanation I have encountered that not only describes the present, but also, in my experience, predicts the future with all but perfect accuracy.
Looking back, Daniel Bell’s “end of ideology” seems more like an attempt to draw closed a green velvet curtain that was hiding something terrible, namely that we were gradually giving up citizen control of our societies to an elite that pretended to possess wisdom, judgment, and prudence to the point that the rest of us could do no better than to outsource our penchant for exercising freedom and democracy to them. Pull back that curtain and we find ignorance, institutional interest, fraud, graft, and a shocking lack of empathy.
In mid-November 2023, Australians for Science and Freedom held its inaugural conference under the banner ‘Progress through Science and Freedom’ on the campus of the University of New South Wales. ASF is a think tank launched in mid-2023 by myself and nearly a dozen like-minded professionals from different disciplines, all aghast at the travesties we witnessed during the Covid era.
This book, which is a collection of some articles I wrote for Brownstone Institute, is designed to help us talk about this issue. Lockdowns were the turning point in our lives, our societies, our culture, and affected everything from academia to education, to science, to media, to tech, and all the way down to demographics and our relationship to our professional and personal lives. It touched everything, turning what worked into something fundamentally broken and dysfunctional.
The old distinction between civilization and barbarism has taken on a new form in the 21st century. It is from within our own “civilized” culture that emerges an inversion of the concepts of civility and savagery. It is our professionals, our academics, our political leaders, and our journalists who most ignore the standards of rational discourse, who institutionalize hatred and incite division. Today, it is the elites who are the true barbarians among us.
We forgot that we are going to die. We forgot that suffering is our lot in this lacrimarum valle. We forgot that how we approach the fact of our suffering and death is what gives our life meaning and what enables the hero to be heroic. Instead, we allowed ourselves to be trained to fear all emotional and physical pain, to catastrophize with implausible worst-case scenarios, and to demand solutions from the very elites and institutions who worked to ensure our forgetfulness.
A positive ruling for the plaintiffs doesn’t solve every problem but at least it will mean that freedom still stands a chance in this country. A ruling for the defense, which is essentially the government itself, will give license to every federal agency – including those that operate in secret like the FBI and CIA – to threaten every social media and media company in this country to delete any and all content that runs contrary to the approved narrative.
Progress involves improving on the past. Once, we used leeches to suck out an excess of cancer-causing humors, or just blamed them on the wrath of the gods. In modern hospitals, we now image such tumors deep within the body, target them with synthetic chemicals or narrow beams of radiation, or excise them with clinical precision.
As a consequence of their successful lobbying and jockeying for power, they got what they wanted – their research was heavily funded, their labs staffed, and the enhancement of potentially pandemic pathogens proliferated without requiring so much as the background check the same scientists demand for a handgun.
We call on you to join us. Become mentors, teachers, or sponsors of novacad.org or scienceandfreedom.org. Better yet, set up your own communities and organisations for those you care about. We need to start building the future we want for those we love, and stop indulging in the fantasy that the West will magically come to its senses if only we press the like button for the right articles often enough on social media and badmouth Bill Gates at enough dinner parties. A better future for our children is worth fighting for, and it is ours to build.
What is the real message behind the ruling and Governor Hochul’s words? Stay in line. Keep your head down. If we can do it to an ex-president of the United States, with whom we’ve all done business, we can do it to any one of you. Especially those of you that don’t have the enormous resources and political support that an ex-president does.
They could always, of course, decide to opt out of the ‘system,’ if they are willing to be ‘excluded from society,’ as Bill Gates infamously said about those who would refuse the digital prison that the neo-fascists have built for the rest of humanity. I certainly would, but my guess is that most people are too immersed in social media and the technical means to sojourn there – usually a smartphone, and of course the internet – to take that drastic step.
