Jeffrey Tucker’s great article, The Decimal Point that Blew Up the World, immediately took my mind back to the climate of hysteria that began to boil out of control back in March. The WHO had recklessly reported that COVID-19 came with a 4% fatality rate, the stock market was in free fall, toilet paper was completely gone, and people were spreading the most dangerous pathogen of all, mass hysteria. Fear became almost tangible, the true plague, infecting the psychosphere and metastasizing in the collective imagination of the public.
I still can’t believe it happened. Not COVID, but the hysteria. Schools immediately shut down, entire economies shuttered, governors and mayors assuming total dictatorial power in order to combat a phantom threat.
I panicked myself, not because of a virus, but because of the economic and social tragedy that would be the outcome of shutting down a modern, complex economy. The only thing standing between us and the Stone Age is our functioning economy, and I was aghast at how many didn’t seem to understand it at all. “Just stay home!” was the refrain, usually coming from someone whose job wasn’t affected by shutdowns. How did so few people understand that, for millions of Americans, to “stay home” meant to go hungry. Staying home and not working meant not being able to pay bills or feed children. Few people seemed to understand this, and no one on TV did at all. We were shamed into accepting an economic collapse sold as a necessary mitigation measure against a virus that we didn’t understand at all.
Now, however, we do. And yet we still pretend as if some killer virus is roaming the world, and we allow our governors and mayors to continue enforcing their pandemic restrictions despite this new knowledge.
The inhumanity of forcing schoolchildren to wear masks all day is now treated as normal. Where are the adults demanding an end to it? No one wants to be labeled as “uncaring”, so few speak up. And so schoolchildren are forced to suffer under meaningless ritual, measures meant for a far more dangerous infection. This has never happened in my lifetime, or in the lifetimes of my 70-year old neighbors who suddenly wear masks everywhere. Why, after all their experience in life, are they behaving this way?
The danger of COVID is effectively non-existent for anyone under 65 and in moderately good health. Those who are dying already had one foot in the grave to begin with.
The total number of deaths in the United States this year is unchanged from prior years. And yet, we see the intentional, forced collapse of entire economies throughout the developed world.
I do not understand this, the phenomenon of national governments forcing mass poverty upon their most vulnerable populations. And this is happening despite the new knowledge that we all have easy access to regarding COVID’s true nature.
My sole conclusion is that the collective, baseline mental state of modern society is extremely brittle. The anxiety of the upper middle class, the wealthy group that has the privilege of engaging in End of Days fantasy, has increased exponentially over the past decades.
I don’t believe that an economy-destroying false pandemic could have gained much steam 20 years ago. But the people instigating it now are the same that would have instigated it back then.
I have no answers other than a deeper understanding of the fragility of modern civilization. I know that our minds evolved over a period of millions of years when we lived in a bloody, tribal state, fearing the demon-haunted world around us. I think that something within us wants to return to that state because it feels more natural, even though to do so would mean the deaths of hundreds of millions. Something about the messaging on the part of the ruling class triggered something primitive within us. It just sounded so good to be a part of a common purpose and goal, which is our inheritance from the pre-historic tribe.
We can’t let the lights go out on civilization, we can’t allow the process of re-barbarization to gain even more steam than it has.
COVID-19 is fast becoming the global economy itself. Corporations, regulatory bodies, and governments are now organizing themselves around it. But they must sustain the fear in order to do so. But how long can they keep it up, and how many more millions must suffer because of it?
