It is probably an understatement to say that the global pandemic response has been the greatest public health disaster in history. The damage caused has been immeasurable, primarily due to the fact that our governments launched a direct attack on the foundation of civilization itself. Markets, civil rights, constitutional limitations, nothing was spared in the futile war against a virus that spread regardless.
The evidence is clear: the pandemic response has been far more destructive that the virus itself. We know that now, and many of use predicted as much last March. It appeared obvious where we were headed, and that once we proceeded past a certain point, it would be impossible to reverse course.
Many nations have ventured far past the point of no return. England is just such a country. A corpse of its former self, it has existed on the fumes of the philosophical and intellectual achievements of far greater minds that it is capable of producing today. In 2020, the once-great nation snuffed any remaining respect it had for individual rights and government constrained by a higher law. It appeared to consciously descend into totalitarianism, exercising direct control over the lives of its citizens. The outcome is just what you’d expect: it has destroyed its economy, the lives of many of its citizens, and the future of its children.
Stories like this come as no surprise any longer: a woman is murdered on English streets, the people of England hold a vigil for the departed, and the agents of this newly formed totalitarian state arrive an disperse the crowd with prejudice. They beat and arrest peaceful women, because that’s the kind of power they’ve been given.
That power resides permanently now in England. Leviathan controls the birthplace of classical liberalism, Magna Carta, the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, John Locke, Herbert Spencer, Bernard Mandeville, and the many other immortal philosophers that made priceless contributions to a philosophy that is now dead as a doornail in the nation that birthed it. In this vacuum, and amid crisis, we’re seeing a living nightmare force its way onto our plane: the same nightmare that so horrified Cortes when he encountered the Aztecs, the nightmare that existed in Nazi Germany and lived within the minds of Soviet bureaucrats. A nightmare that has been with us since the dawn of our species.
We have had the morbid fortune of having witnessed firsthand the birth and progression of a civilization-ending evil. A once-in-a-millenia event, the eruption of a societal caldera. A purely self-inflicted apocalypse.
