Witnessing your fellow man descend into herd madness and stubbornly remain in spite of the evidence is enough to drive any sane person into misanthropy. As the evidence mounts that masks are actually suffocating everyone rather than preventing the spread of COVID-19, one wonders why so many continue to wear them. Yet they continue to wear them, whether driving, biking, walking, or any of the myriad activities they engage in throughout the day. The masks themselves have become almost a Woke Era fashion statement, and those that don them seem eager to inform the world that they’re with it, man. We’ve got to defeat coronavirus, so just stay home, man! It’s pandemic theater and everyone is a part of the cast. In fact, many have engaged in theatrical posturing with gusto. They love it. They appear to catwalk their custom breathing masks in public, indifferent to the fact that it has zero effect on the spread of coronavirus. What truly matters to them is the spectacle and their place in it. And so they wear the masks, shame others who don’t, and in so doing become the unwitting, free-lance enforcers of the pandemic Police State. And as the gulf widens between the woke pandemic scolds who enjoy the luxury of working from home, and the vast underclass of millions of Americans for whom working from home is not an option, the United States proceeds in a direct line toward the most destructive class conflict in history.
The newly unemployed 30 million Americans have virtually no voice among the corporate news outlets. Instead they are treated to hyperbolic fearmongering over an infection with a 0.1-0.2% fatality rate. They’ve been on the receiving end of unsolicited lectures about the necessity of staying home by upper crust, politically-connected millionaires who pose as journalists on television. These still-employed woke scolds who feel compelled to shame the commoners for not adhering to their idea of how they should behave, have no idea of the political/social pressure cooker that is now steaming wildly, bolts flying off, the volume of the whistling growing ever louder. If we continue down this path of ignoring the clear and present danger of the unemployment crisis, it will explode in our faces. By that time there will be no way to reverse the situation. You can’t unscramble an egg.
So, people enjoy authoritarianism because it massages their vanity, makes them feel important, empowers their inner busybody as well as their inner snitch. When they can rat out their neighbors for not towing the coronavirus line, when they can publicly shame others for the same, they feel more powerful than they’ve ever felt in their miserable lives. They get a pat on the head from the authoritarian government that they’ve handed their neighbors over to, and they feel warm inside. In this way authoritarianism is self-enforced.
