A Nothingburger that Changed the World
By Paul Collits
The madness of 2020 has changed our lives forever. We owe it to ourselves to ask how, who and why?
Whoever thought that any government would ever claim to have conquered death?
King Canute saw the challenges of conquering the sea, and acted accordingly, with proportional common sense. Yet now governments of the world all claim to be able to conquer death.
They don’t say it, of course. They just govern as if they had said it, and apparently believe it. Stopping people dying has become the primary aim of government. Some would say it has become the sole aim, wherein all other objectives of government must be considered redundant.
A question, then.
Never mind claiming recompense for past slavery. In this age of suing governments and others for past "crimes", when will the families of all those countless millions of people who died in the past from the flu sue current governments - who clearly believe they can save lives that would be otherwise lost to a virus - for their losses and the failures of past governments to take the actions then that they willingly do now?
Stacey Rudin has pondered the question of the obsession of current governments with defeating death:
One has to wonder, how did this come about? Why weren’t we behaving this way before, when seasonal influenza is known to kill up to 650,000 people globally every single year? Why didn’t anyone ever care about saving all of those millions of people? If we really can stop infections, we murdered all of them!
We murdered them all, indeed. That is the logic of the current position of governments in relation to the public health risks of Covid and their apparent policies of flu suppression.
Another question.
If someone had written a grim, dystopian novel in late 2019 describing the world that we now have – of poverty, misery and totalitarianism one year hence, a reader would have thought – what idiot would have thought the world could ever be like this?
What idiot would have bought such a book? Have read it?
Who’da thought, as 2020 rolled in, that within months governments across the world would claim and exercise the power to cancel weddings, funerals, Holy Mass, publicly watched sport, pubs, restaurants, concerts, plays, international travel, hugging in public, going to work, community events, on-campus higher education, public protests?
And that they would make people wear masks, dictate how close you can stand next to someone, impose curfews, make you stay at home, have your corporate mates censor you if you speak out of turn, thereby preventing any opposition to the regime? Freedom has been cancelled. The rights of we-the-people trampled underfoot.
And who’da thought that all this would happen in English speaking democracies rather than in evil dictatorships?
And who’da thought that all this would be driven and enacted by unelected public servants and not by elected governments? Big Brother with a medical degree and a VicPol truncheon. All with utter, submissive compliance by peoples who had previously fancied themselves to be independent and robustly free.
Finally, who’da thought that all this would be inflicted on the masses not remotely in any public health danger, so that people already past the average age of death in most countries, people already facing death from their many pre-existing health conditions, could live on for a few months or a couple of years, in loneliness and misery?
And without a choice in the matter. (Ironically, as it happens, since governments everywhere, one after the other, are offering these same old folks the choice to kill themselves by lethal injection. But never by Covid!)
Well, Sweden has had enough of condemning the elderly to a short remaining life of misery. As Fraser Nelson notes:
The elderly, they said, have suffered enough. They have spent months being advised to avoid public transport, shopping malls and other parts of everyday life. And the result? Loneliness. Misery. This is more than unpleasant: it quickly translates into depression, mental health issues and mortality.
“We cannot only think about infection control,” said Lena Hallengren, Sweden’s health minister, “we also need to think about public health.” An important distinction: focus on Covid to the exclusion of other conditions and you risk lives.
The mainstream policy approach has been, in the words of Ivor Cummins, “an own goal of spectacular proportions”. Or as John Tamny described it, a “disastrous experiment”. And the politicians just keep on digging, digging, digging the hole ever deeper.
Indeed, it has been a year of firsts, where the word “unprecedented” has been both overused and insufficient properly to describe our predicament.
Three emotions overwhelm all the others in this year of massive chaos and wanton cultural destruction. They are, first, grief at the thousands and thousands of stories of heartbreak, largely not told by the truly disgraceful Australian media, second, incredulity at the absolute gall of politicians to inflict this on us in order to save their own miserable skins, and third, sheer disbelief at the way whole peoples have rolled over in compliance in the face of the brutal, Covid enabled deep state.
On the last, Lionel Shriver has written:
The supine capitulation to a de facto police state in a country long regarded as a cradle of liberty has been one of the most depressing spectacles I’ve ever witnessed. In a matter of days, busybodies are ratting out neighbours for going for a run twice; these people would be pigs in muck in the GDR [German Democratic Republic, aka East Germany].
The absence of voices in Australia questioning the state’s totalitarian tilt, whether in the media, among churches and community organisations, or within clueless, so-called opposition political parties, has been inexplicable on its face. The whole population has caved, without apparent concern. Australians in particular should hang their heads in shame at the near total absence of any concerted push back against the horrors of 2020.
How can one begin to explain the madness of crowds in this year of living suicidally? Some great minds who have applied themselves to the task of explaining both the policy and the popular madness have come up empty. They are in open despair.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmoM1AMdd4g
The closest anyone has come to explaining the policy implosions is that, first, politicians panicked then since have found it beyond them to admit their error and to start again (David Starkey), and second, that politicians fear more wearing the guilt for having caused highly visible deaths than wearing the guilt for all the invisible (to the public) deaths (Toby Young). The latter are the suicides, the cancer screenings missed, the heart attacks untreated, and so on. These deaths will far outstrip those from Covid, it seems, but no matter. We can’t really count them and spray them all over the media each day. These two theories are plausible but still fall short, as their proponents themselves probably realise.
Let’s start with the conspiracy question in order to attempt an explanation of the mess we are all in. The default position of the 2020 questioners has mostly been “the stuff up always beats the conspiracy” position. Unless there is evidence of a conspiracy, the rational position is always to go for the “stupid” explanation. And the groupthink so evident among the official public health community certainly counts as stupidity, on a grand scale.
Groupthink is a big part of the story. The total absence of any (published) cost-benefit analysis of different policy responses to Covid is another example of stupid. And part of the groupthink is so-called “anchoring bias”, which, as Ari Joffe has explained, is clinging to one’s pet theory even when the contrary evidence starts to mount. Too much ego is invested in it all. Again, stupidity on a cosmic scale which has been there in spades during the whole Covid policy cock-up.
This is the core of the so-called “Hanlon’s Razor” position.
Hanlon's razor is a principle or rule of thumb that states, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Known in several other forms, it is a philosophical razor which suggests a way of eliminating unlikely explanations for human behavior.
No need to be looking for hidden explanations, conspiracies, out-there theories.
There is much to be said for this approach. As per Starkey, governments panicked, they do not know what they are doing, they believed the experts they themselves employed, and now they are trapped by their own initial mistakes. Those who bungled the implementation of Covid suppression strategies, spectacularly, like Daniel Andrews, have to just keep digging deeper holes in order to cover their political fundaments. By implementing placebo second phase lockdowns, for example. They have to pretend to keep up the crisis narrative.
They now must know that Covid is a merely nasty seasonal flu type coronavirus, nothing more and nothing less. We have ample evidence, six months on, that this is the case. Even if this evidence is not widely available to a submissive and wilfully ignorant public – they don’t go looking for it – it is certainly known to politicians and to their star-for-fifteen-minutes public health officials.
We now know who this virus targets, and who needs to be protected. The young and healthy, indeed, most of the population, are at no risk whatsoever. As the British writer Peter Hitchens has repeatedly said, the most frequently experienced symptom of Covid is “feeling fine”. It is a category error to regard it as anything more or different. A few of us (not many) suspected this right from the start. (25 March 2020 to be exact, in my case).
None of this suggests that nefarious forces planned it all. Which is not to say that the usual suspects – such as the World Economic Forum – didn’t immediately see Covid’s potential as a game changer suitable for implementing their own agendas. They have said as much. They are riding the Covid wave to the beach.
This is all in the open. Stated policy of those who already run the global show. Nothing is hidden.
And then there are the Chinese…
This play by the globalists is reminiscent of the long march through the institutions, a neo-marxist strategy of considerable genius concocted by post World War One Italian marxists and perfected in the 1960s by Saul Alinsky in the USA and the post-modernists in (mainly) France who set about changing institutions while not seeming to.
Even though they said plainly what they were about. The strategy of these revolutionaries was – try everything, and see what works.
The slowly boiling frog won’t know what is going on until it is too late.
Well, Covid worked. Beyond everyone’s dreams. The useful idiots are in place. They did their job.
It doesn’t really matter whether the hidden forces in plain sight “planned it”. You don’t actually require a “plannedemic” to achieve the overarching objective. Let the main actors simply do what they do – like politicians who wish to retain power, media who want to be on board with all the excitement of a pandemic, government employed medical experts basking in the prestige of the fifteen minutes of Covid glory and power, and on-side corporate tech companies that censor independently minded scientists and real experts, shadow ban sceptical voices and rig google searches.
Useful Idiots All
People far more sophisticated than the one time Obama flack and Chicago Mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who popularised the phrase “never let a crisis go to waste”, saw the opportunity. The Great Reset is the go-code for global political re-alignment on de-nationalised, green, woke, socialist lines. And they will do everything in their power to change the world post-Covid.
The useful idiots have, like all useful idiots, played their parts to perfection without having a clue, content to seek political self-preservation at immense, indeed incalculable, cost to those who elected them. There are the second rate, clueless, chancer politicians like Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison who have faced the swirling currents of the crisis, like poor swimmers caught in a flooded river, grabbing branches of trees and generally crying “help”, trying to look in control, even leaderly, as events beyond their control drive them along.
We have a political class particularly unsuited to solving wicked problems and to the call for strategic leadership and vision. They are a class that has emerged from nowhere, without worldly wise experience and wisdom. The Howard Government’s D team. A whole pack of Chauncey Gardiners. Decision-makers not remotely worthy of the name. They look for advice to the millennial public relations and marketing graduates from our mediocre universities who occupy overcrowded ministerial offices and who are clever at managing the optics of politics and not much else. The pollies themselves are mostly ex political staffers. Little wonder they don’t know what to do with this.
Then there are the Karens, the curtain twitchers, the bedwetters. Citizens of turbo-charged earnestness who supped the kool-aid. Indeed, they wolfed it down.
The stuff up and the conspiracy might both be correct, then. There are clueless governments AND forces beyond government driving events in their own preferred direction of ideological travel. And all the while, governments of moderate ability and little spine continue to blunder on, as our freedoms and economic prospects drain away.
So, the nothingburger of a virus that killed no more than a horrible seasonal flu has, indeed, changed the world. And many actors in the global game eased themselves into position to take advantage of it.
All the while, at least a sizable minority of our fellow citizens seem to believe, bizarrely, that governments can eliminate viruses. Just look at our friends across the Ditch. But then again, a sizable minority of our fellow citizens believe that governments can control the climate. Yes they do. Y2K … Exponentially growing government debt doesn’t matter … We are the most educated generation ever … Putting young children into institutions virtually from birth does no harm to them … Abortion isn’t murder …
Someone pass me the dictionary so I can look up “cognitive dissonance”. While we all strap ourselves in for a very, very long Covid.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Collits is a freelance writer and independent researcher who lives in Lismore New South Wales. He has worked in government, industry and the university sector, and has taught at tertiary level in three different disciplines - politics, geography and planning and business studies.