Precisely one year ago today, Buzz Hendricks, a colleague of mine at Reaction.life, wrote how farcical government diktat was goading the population into “Milgram-esque acts of mindless depravity”. Despite Hendricks’ exhortations for us to come to our collective senses, unfortunately 2021 did turn into the farcical dystopia he feared. One only has to read this GP’s heart-wrenchingly bleak diary to realise the extent of the pickle we find ourselves in. Many people do not realise the tsunami of pain that is coming our way. I maintain that it was obvious from the start that the lockdown / restrictions / vaccine saviour route was doomed to do more harm than good, but we are where we are.
And now our not-so-gallant leaders are frothing at the mouth to heap on the misery. Why? There is no need. Like all the viruses in our virome, including the four other coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 virus is now endemic – it is all around us – and will bloom in the population from time to time, mitigated by natural immunity. We will have seasonal effects, and that will mean that a small proportion of the c. 10,000 people who pass away each week in the UK might be ‘with Covid’.
It is almost as if the adage of ‘never wanting to miss the opportunities presented by a good crisis’ are being put to full use here. A ‘Nu’ variant (not Xi, of course! Why ever not?!) called Omicron, has been found on foreign shores that is ‘cause for concern’. Spare us. Today’s announcement from the harbingers of fear combines ridiculous showtime measures with dangerous coercion:
The totally pointless theatre of masks is back. As pointed out by UnHerd, this is likely to enrage both those who recognise the futility of a wet rag over their breathing organs as well as those disgusteds who, in turn, will be distraught by the lack of compliance from those who appreciate how aerosols are breathed in an out.
Despite all the warnings about the universal deployment of a leaky vaccine into the respiratory disease season, the booster is being hailed as the saviour, and punters are being encouraged to ‘roll up, roll up’ for more. How this is going to help us is unclear – the Omicron variant is infecting vaccinated people already. But now public pressure is being brought on the JCVI to expand and accelerate the injections.
There is no rational logic to these measures, not least given that the South African Medical Association points out that Omicron results in mild symptoms. Perhaps a small manufactured crisis is an opportunity to sweep aside legitimate concerns and questions being raised in the face of high rates of adverse effects from the jab, to say nothing of high rates of heart attacks in top sportsmen? It is quite frankly unbelievable that TalkSport felt the need to censor Trevor Sinclair off air in real time for having the temerity to question the cause of another professional footballer keeling over during a match.
Perhaps the machinery of government has been itching for a trigger to deploy the worst of its Plan B arsenal, i.e. vaccine passports. Frustrated at the success of common sense easing of restrictions over the summer (compare and contrast with the rest of Europe and their ‘success’ of universal mask mandates and vaccine passports), a big bad nasty threat from Darkest Africa is now being shamelessly exploited to induce further coercion.
Any of the above explanations are entirely plausible and fall into the ‘bungling politics / inept leadership’ category, but it is becoming harder to lend credence to such theories. A much darker theory is that – much like in the rest of the developed world, bar Japan (which has ramped down vaccine deployment in favour of treatments such as Ivermectin) – all these measures are being introduced to pit a compliant majority against a ‘dug in’ minority. After all, let’s be honest: there is very little ‘vaccine hesitancy’ around. The antics of governments and health bureaucracies across the world are only exacerbating the fears of those who have seen goalposts shifted time, time and again. The vaccine refuseniks have dug their heels in, not entirely unreasonably.
If it turns out that this comes to pass, we potentially have the entirely unedifying spectacle of a spiral of blame and victimisation, a poisonous backdrop that is likely to fuel the ongoing mass hysteria. This time last year I was in the process of finalising a long read article on Collective Delusions, “Western political leadership has been captured by uncritical thinking and collective delusion”:
But what is this phenomenon? How does it happen, is it a regular occurrence and – perhaps most importantly – how can it end?
Collective Delusion: An Explosive Cocktail
It seems there are standard ingredients:
Multiple people that are sufficiently connected;
Mechanisms to organise these people as per tribal allegiance (e.g. supporters of the same team or social media echo chambers); and
A collective distress, or threat (perceived or real).
If the combination of the above is particularly spicy, a frisson of scapegoating – a social phenomenon that involves the blaming of a sub-set of others for the ‘ills’ being suffered – yields particularly spectacular results.
Getting the mix of these ingredients right (or, from society’s point of view, wrong) can result in a chain reaction (a correct use of the phrase “exponential growth”). Critical thinking is abandoned and contempt for the scapegoats grows.
Sound familiar? Disappointingly, it seems that these ‘spectacular results’ can be remarkably long-lived. The article discusses the long-standing delusion of the Japanese expats in Brazil, who managed to convince themselves for decades that Japan had been victorious in WW2. The minority that accepted historical fact were violently persecuted. Little realising what was in store for 2021, I went on to conclude:
The prevalence of global networks and social media echo chambers might explain the international nature of our very own 21st century take on the collective delusion genre… actions taken in 2020 will be justified, however implausibly, as being for the greater good. But if history is anything to go by (and it usually is), then deep down, the sympathiser faction will already be questioning why it is necessary to suppress evidence and observed fact to maintain their established tribal beliefs.
Let us hope that the sympathisers – those that have hitherto played ball with the mindless restrictions – join in the throng that have been asking probing questions from the start. Who is writing the script? After all, the emergency measures seem to be benefitting the very rich. Why? There is no reason why rational debate should be stifled. Not only do we run the risk of doubling down on past mistakes, we may find that we have eviscerated the very democratic structures that put us in the position of being able to afford universal healthcare and the other creature comforts we have become accustomed to.
And that really would be disaster of epic proportions.
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