If there’s one thing that we can all agree on concerning the COVID nightmare, it’s that the face mask issue drives normal people insane. The Political Class has found the perfect way to bring the ugliness of political division to the real world, to the daily life of normal Americans, creating ugly conflicts while citizens are just going about their lives, whether buying groceries, clothes, school supplies for their kids, now we are all at risk of a confrontation based on whether we wear a mask or not. Overwhelmingly, the confrontation is initiated by a busybody mask-wearer griping at a stranger out of nowhere for their lack of a mask. These self-appointed mask police don’t appear to care at all about whether the maskless individual is unable to wear the mask for medical reasons. They see non-conformity and they want to blot it out. The primitive, conformist, tribal part of the brain lights up, seeing any expression of non-conformity as a threat to the herd.
No longer can we safely keep our political views to ourselves while out in public. We are now forced to take a side: mask, or no mask. And this of course translates into Democrat, or Republican. Biden, or Trump. “Science”, or “anti-Science”. And, increasingly, “Anti-racist” and “racist”. It’s a package deal, heads you lose, tails you lose. The casino had the game rigged before you walked in the door. To not wear a mask is now seen as an offensive, politically incorrect act. “But you’re going to kill people!” Is the implication, which throws gasoline on the rage of these pathetic hall monitors. These people don’t care about the science, or the non-event of a COVID infection. They don’t care, for instance, that for someone for whom COVID poses a risk, a mask poses a far greater risk. Should people with asthma or other respiratory problems wear a mask? If so, then who are we really protecting by wearing masks?
Masks have become an ideology for too many people, a pure heroin dose of primitive euphoria, a State-sanctioned pseudo-religion, replete with a built-in dogma, Priestly class, creation story, Armageddon story, witch hunts, etc. The familiar framework, the recipe too good to resist for too many people.
Our pre-historic mind is always in the background, telling us, “Protect the herd. Protect the herd.” Mask mandates hand that voice a megaphone, giving it moral sanction. And these people move through the modern world, hating it, hating individual autonomy, hating freedom, and playing their part in the destruction of it all.
We’re witnessing the birth of a powerful new religion, one backed by the full faith and force of industry and government. And a perfectly formulated orthodoxy is consuming once-free minds by the thousands every day, attacking the psyche with lethal precision. Will it end? Will we be able to rebuild the modern world, and restore our autonomy and freedom? Or are we witnessing one of the great civilizational declines that has happened so often in history? Is this how the modern world ends, almost like Atlantis, suddenly and all-consuming, and with the screaming mad support of millions? It would be a tragedy if it did without at least a few voices raging against the rise of a new Dark Age.
