Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.” George Orwell, 1984
The “Covid pandemic” narrative is insane. That is long-established at this point, we don’t really need to go into how or why here. Read our back catalogue.
The rules are meaningless and arbitrary, the messaging contradictory, the very premise nonsensical.
Every day some new insanity is launched out into the world, and while many of us roll our eyes, raise our voices, or just laugh…many more accept it, believe it, allow it to continue.
Whether or not you believe the test means anything, they notionally do. In the reality they try to sell us every day, testing positive means you are carrying a dangerous disease.
So they are requesting people allegedly carrying a “deadly virus” work, rather than letting perfectly healthy unvaccinated people simply have their jobs back.
This is insanity.
But could anything more perfectly illustrate the priorities of those running the game?
We already know it’s not about a virus, it’s not about protecting the health service and it’s not about saving lives. Every day the people running the “pandemic” admit as much by their actions, and even their words.
Rather, it seems to be about enforcing rules that make little to no sense, requiring conformity at the price of reason, drawing arbitrary lines in the sand and demanding people respect them, making people believe “facts” that are provably untrue.
But why? Why is the story of Covid irrational and contradictory? Why are we told on the one hand to be afraid, and on the other that there is nothing to be afraid of?
Why is the “pandemic” so completely insane?
You could argue that it’s simple happenstance. The by-product of a multi-focused evolving narrative, a story being told by a thousand authors all at once, each concerned with covering their own little patch of agenda. A car with multiple drivers fighting over a single steering wheel.
There’s probably some truth to that.
But it’s also true that control, true control, can only be achieved with a lie.
In clinical psychology one of the diagnostic signs of the psychopath is that they tell elaborate lies, compulsively. Many times they will tell a lie even if the truth would be more beneficial.
Nobody knows why they do this, but I have a theory, and it applies to the swarming groups of little rat minds running the sewers of power as much as it does any individual monstrosity.
If you want to control people, you need to lie to them, that’s the only way to guarantee you have power.
If you are standing in the road, and I yell “look out, there’s a car a coming”, and you move just as a car whips past, I will never know if you moved because I said so, or because there actually was a car.
If my interest is in making sure you don’t get hurt, this would not matter to me either way.
But, what if my only true aim is the gratification of watching you do what I say, simply because I said it?
…well, then I need to scream out a warning of a car that does not exist, and watch you dodge an imaginary threat. Or, indeed, tell you there is no car, and watch you get run over.
Only by doing this can I see my words mean more to you than perceivable reality, and only then do I know I’m truly in control.
You can never control people with the truth, because the truth has an existence outside yourself that cannot be altered or directed. It may be the truth itself that controls people, not you.
You can never force people to obey rules that make sense, because they may be obeying reason, not your force.
True power lies in making people afraid of something that does not exist, and making them abandon reason in the name of protecting themselves from the invented threat.
To guarantee you have control, you must make people see things that are not there, make people live in a reality you build around them, and force people to follow arbitrary, contradictory rules that change day by day.
To truly test their loyalty, their hypnosis, you could even tell them there’s nothing to be afraid of anymore, but they need to follow the rules anyway.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the story isn’t supposed to be believable. Maybe the rules aren’t meant to make sense, they are meant to be obeyed.
Maybe the more contradictory & illogical the regulations become, the more your compliance is valued.
Maybe if you can force a person to abandon their judgment in favour of your own, you have total control over their reality.
We started with an Orwell quote, so let’s end with one too:
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
Isn’t that what we’re seeing now? What we’ve been seeing since the beginning?
People being mind broken into being afraid of something they are told isn’t frightening, following rules they are told are not necessary, taking “medicine” they are told does not work.
Maybe forcing people to believe your lies, even as you admit you are lying, is the purest expression of power.
There has been an unfortunate shift in Western educational practices in the past few decades away from what we used to call “critical thinking.” In fact, critical thinking was once a fundamental staple of US colleges and now it seems as though the concept doesn’t exist anymore; at least not in the way it used to. Instead, another form of learning has arisen which promotes “right thinking”; a form of indoctrination which encourages and rewards a particular response from students that falls in line with ideology and not necessarily in line with reality.
It’s not that schools directly enforce a collectivist or corporatist ideology (sometimes they do), it’s more that they filter out alternative viewpoints as well as facts and evidence they do not like until all that is left is a single path and a single conclusion to any given problem. They teach students how to NOT think by presenting thought experiments and then controlling the acceptable outcomes.
For example, a common and manipulative thought experiment used in schools is to ask students to write an “analysis” on why people do not trust science or scientists these days. The trick is that the question is always presented with a built-in conclusion – That scientists should be trusted, and some people are refusing to listen, so let’s figure out why these people are so stupid.
I have seen this experiment numerous times, always presented in the same way. Not once have I ever seen a college professor or public school teacher ask students: “Should scientists today be trusted?”
Not once.
This is NOT analysis, this is controlled hypothesis. If you already have a conclusion in mind before you enter into a thought experiment, then you will naturally try to adjust the outcome of the experiment to fit your preconceived notions. Schools today present this foolishness as a form of thinking game when it is actually propaganda. Students are being taught to think inside the box, not outside the box. This is not science, it is anti-science.
Educational programming like this is now a mainstay while actual science has taken a backseat. Millions of kids are exiting public schools and universities with no understanding of actual scientific method or science in general. Ask them what the equations for Density or Acceleration are, and they’ll have no clue what your are talking about. Ask them about issues surrounding vaccination or “climate change”, and they will regurgitate a litany of pre-programmed responses as to why the science cannot be questioned in any way.
In the alternative media we often refer to this as being “trapped in the Matrix,” and it’s hard to think of a better analogy. People have been rewarded for so long for accepting the mainstream narrative and blindly dismissing any other information that when they are presented with reality they either laugh at it arrogantly or recoil in horror. The Matrix is so much more comfortable and safe, and look at all the good grades you get when you say the right things and avoid the hard questions and agree with the teacher.
Given the sad state of science in the West these days surrounding the response to covid as well as the insane and unscientific push for forced vaccinations, I thought it would be interesting to try out this thought exercise, but from an angle that is never allowed in today’s schools:
Why don’t people trust the science and scientists anymore?
This is simple: Because many scientists have been caught lying and misrepresenting their data to fit the conclusions they want rather than the facts at hand. Science is often politicized to serve an agenda. This is not conspiracy theory, this is provable fact.
That’s not to say that all science is to be mistrusted. The point is, no science should be blindly accepted without independent examination of ALL the available facts. This is the whole point of science, after all. Yes, there are idiotic conspiracy theories out there when it comes to scientific analysis, but there are a number of scams in the world of science as well.
The usual false claim is that the average person is ignorant and that they don’t have the capacity to understand scientific data. I do find it interesting that this is the general message of the trust-science thought experiment. It fits right in line with the mainstream and government narrative that THEIR scientists, the scientists they pay for and that corporations pay for, are implicitly correct and should not be questioned. They are the high priests of the modern era, delving into great magics that we dirty peasants cannot possibly grasp. It is not for us to question “the science”, it our job to simply embrace it like a religion and bow down in reverence.
Most people have the capacity to sift through scientific data as long as it’s transparent. When the facts are obscured or spun or omitted this causes confusion, and of course only the establishment scientists can untangle the mess because they are the ones that created it. Let’s look at a couple of examples directly related to human health…
GMO Crops And The Corporate Money Train
The propaganda surrounding Genetically Modified Organisms is relentless and pervasive, with the overall thrust being that they are perfectly safe and that anyone who says otherwise is a tinfoil hat crackpot. And certainly, there a hundreds if not thousands of studies which readily confirm this conclusion. So, case closed, right?
Not quite. Here is where critical thinking is so useful and where reality escapes the indoctrinated – Who paid for these studies, and do they have a vested interest in censoring negative data on GMOs?
Well, in the vast majority of cases GMO studies are funded by two sources – GMO industry giants like Monsanto, Dupont and Syngenta, or, government agencies like the FDA and EPA. Very few studies are truly independent, and this is the problem. Both the government and corporations like Monsanto have a vested interest in preventing any critical studies from being released on GMO’s.
Monsanto has been caught on numerous occasions hiding the dangerous health effects of its products, from Agent Orange to the RGBH growth hormone used in dairy cows. They have been caught compiling illegal dossiers on their critics. The industry has been caught multiple times paying off academics and scientists to produce studies on GMOs with a positive spin and even to attack other scientists that are involved in experiments that are critical of GMOs. Research shows that at least half of all GMO studies are funded by the GMO industry, while the majority of the other half are funded by governments.
There has also long been a revolving door between GMO industry insiders and the FDA and EPA; officials often work for Monsanto and then get jobs with the government, then go back to Monsanto again. The back scratching is so egregious that the government even created special legal protections for GMO companies like Monsanto under what is now known as the Monsanto Protection Act (Section 735 of Agricultural Appropriations Bill HR 993) under the Obama Administration in 2013. This essentially makes GMO companies immune to litigation over GMOs, and the same protections have been renewed in different bills ever since.
Beyond the revolving door, the government has approved many GMO products with little to no critical data to confirm their safety. Not only that, but in most cases the government has sovereign immunity from litigation, even if they’ve been negligent. Meaning, if any of these products is proven to cause long term health damage the government cannot be sued for approving them unless there are special circumstances.
If they could be held liable, you would be damn sure the FDA would be running every conceivable test imaginable to make sure GMOs are definitively safe without any bias attached, but this is not the case. Instead, the government actively propagandizes for GMO companies and uses hired hatchet men to derail any public criticism.
I, for one, would certainly like to know for sure if GMOs are harmful to the human body in the long term, and there is certainly science to suggest that this might be the case. There have been many situations in which specific GMO foods were removed from the market because of potentially harmful side effects. Endogenous toxins of plants with modified metabolites are a concern, along with “plant incorporated protectants” (plants designed to produce toxins which act as a pesticides).
There is data that tells us to be wary, but nothing conclusive. Why? Because billions of dollars are being invested by corporations into research designed to “debunk” any notion of side effects. If the same amount of funding was put into independent studies with no bias, then we might hear a different story about the risks of GMOs. All the money is in dismissing the risks of GMOs; there’s almost no money in studying them honestly.
The science appears to be rigged to a particular outcome or narrative, and that is lying. Science is supposed to remain as objective as possible, but how can it be objective when it is being paid for by people with an agenda? The temptation to sell out is extreme.
Covid Vaccines And The Death Of Science
I bring up the example of GMO’s because I think it is representative of how science can be controlled to produce only one message while excluding all other analysis. We don’t really know for sure how dangerous GMOs are because the majority of data is dictated by the people that profit from them and by their friends in government. The lack of knowing is upheld as proof of safety – But this is not scientific. Science and medicine would demand that we err on the side of caution until we know for sure.
The same dynamic exists in the world of covid vaccines. Big Pharma has a vested interest in ensuring NO negative information is released about the mRNA vaccines because there is a perpetual river of money to be made as long as the vax remains approved for emergency use by the FDA. It may be important to note that the FDA has said it will take at least 55 YEARS to release all the data it has on the Pfizer covid vaccines, which suggests again that there is a beneficial collusion between the government and corporate behemoths.
In the meantime, anyone that questions the efficacy or safety of the vax is immediately set upon by attack dogs in the media, most of them paid with advertising dollars from Big Pharma. These attacks are not limited to the alternative media; the establishment has also gone after any scientist or doctor with questions about vaccine safety.
There are clear and openly admitted ideological agendas surrounding covid science which have nothing to do with public health safety and everything to do with political control. When you have the head of the World Economic Forum applauding the covid pandemic as a perfect “opportunity” to push forward global socialist centralization and erase the last vestiges of free markets and individual liberty, any rational person would have to question if the covid science is also being rigged to support special interests.
Luckily, the covid issue is so massive that it is impossible for them to control every study. Instead, the establishment ignores the studies and data they don’t like.
The virus is being hyped as a threat to the majority of the public and as a rationale for 100% vaccination rates, by force if needed. Yet, the median Infection Fatality Rate of covid is only 0.27%. This means that on average 99.7% of the population at any given time has nothing to fear from the virus. This is confirmed by dozens of independent medical studies, but when was the last time you heard that number discussed by mainstream government scientists like Anthony Fauci?
I’ve never heard them talk about it. But how is it scientific to ignore data just because it doesn’t fit your political aims? Again, deliberate omission of data is a form of lying.
What about the multiple studies indicating that natural immunity is far superior in protection to the mRNA vaccines? What about the fact that the countries with the highest vaccination rates also have the highest rates of infections and their hospitalizations have actually increased? What about the fact that the states and countries with the harshest lockdown and mask mandates also have the highest infection rates? What about the fact that the average vaccine is tested for 10-15 years before being approved for human use, while the covid mRNA vaccines were put into production within months? That is to say, there is NO long term data to prove the safety of the covid vax.
These are easily observable scientific facts, but we never hear about them from corporate scientists or government scientists like Fauci? Instead, Fauci argues that criticism of his policies is an attack on him, and attacking him is the same as “attacking science.” In other words, Fauci believes HE IS the science.
And doesn’t that just illustrate how far science has fallen in the new millennium. Real scientists like Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR test, call Fauci a fraud, but they are ignored while Fauci is worshiped. I can’t even get into climate change “science” here, I would have to write an entire separate article about the fallacies perpetrated by global warming academics (did you know that global temperatures have only increased by 1 degree Celsius in the past century? Yep, just 1 degree according to the NOAA’s own data, yet, institutions like the NOAA continue to claim the end of the world is nigh because of global warming).
The stringent bottleneck on science today reminds me of the Catholic church under Pope Innocent III when church authorities forbade common people from owning or reading a bible. These laws remained in effect well into the 13th century. Instead, the peasants were to go to church and have the texts read to them by specific clergy. Often the bible readings were done in Latin which most people did not speak, and interpreted however the church wished.
It was only the invention of the printing press in the 1400s that changed the power dynamic and allowed bibles to be widely distributed and information to spread without church oversight. Much like the creation of the internet allows the public to access mountains of scientific data and methodologies at their fingertips. The free flow of information is an anathema according to the establishment; they argue that only they have the right to process information for public consumption.
Cultism requires excessive control of data and the complete restriction of outside interpretations. As information becomes openly available the public is then able to learn the whole truth, not just approved establishment narratives.
Science is quickly becoming a political religion rather than a bastion of critical thought. Conflicting data is ignored as “non-science” or even censored as “dangerous.” Government and corporate paid studies are treated as sacrosanct. Is it any wonder that so many people now distrust the science? Any reasonable person would have questions and suspicions. Those who do not have been indoctrinated into a cult they don’t even know they are a part of.
When did parts of the left get so contemptuous of the principle of “bodily autonomy”? Answer: Just about the time they started fetishising vaccines as the only route out of the current pandemic.
Only two years ago most people understood “bodily autonomy” to be a fundamental, unquestionable human right. Now it is being treated as some kind of perverse libertarian luxury, as proof that the “deplorables” have been watching too much Tucker Carlson or that they have come to idealise the worst excesses of neoliberalism’s emphasis on the rights of the individual over the social good.
This is dangerous nonsense, as should be obvious if we step back and imagine what our world might look like had the principle of “bodily autonomy” not been established through centuries of struggle, just as were the right to vote and the right to health care.
Because without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still be dragging virgins up high staircases so that they could be sacrificed to placate the sun gods. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still be treating black people like animals – chattel to be used and exploited so that a white landowning class could grow rich from their enforced labours. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still have doctors experimenting on those who are “inferior” – Jews, Romanies, Communists, gays – so that “superior races” could benefit from the “research”. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still have the right of men to rape their wives as one of the unwritten marital vows.
Many of these battles and others were won far more recently than most of us care to remember. I am old enough to recall listening in the car on the way to school to “serious” debates on BBC Radio 4 about whether it was justifiable for the courts to presume a husband’s right to rape his wife.
Arguments about whose bodily autonomy has primacy – a woman’s or the foetus she is carrying – are at the heart of ongoing and inflammatory abortion debates in the United States. And protection of bodily autonomy was the main reason why anyone with an ounce of moral fibre opposed the US torture regime that became normalised in the war on brown people known as the “war on terror”.
Bad faith
There is good reason why, in western societies, vaccination uptake is lowest among ethnic minorities. The clues are embedded in the three preceding paragraphs. Powerful nation-states, run by white elites for the benefit of white elites, have been trampling on the bodily autonomy of black and brown people for centuries – sometimes because those elites were indifferent to the harm they were causing, and sometimes because they professed to be helping these “inferior” peoples, such as in the “war on terror’s” promotion of neoliberal “democracy” as the grounds for invading countries whose oil we coveted.
The pretexts change but the bad faith is the same.
Based on their long histories of suffering at the hands of western, colonial states, black and brown communities have every reason to continue assuming bad faith. It is not solidarity, or protecting them, to ignore or trivialise their concerns and their alienation from state institutions. It is ugly arrogance. Contempt for their concerns will not make those concerns evaporate. It will reinforce them.
But, of course, there is also something arrogant about treating the concerns of ethnic minorities as exceptional, patronising them by according them some kind of special dispensation, as though they need indulging on the principle of bodily autonomy when the rest of us are mature enough to discard it.
The fact is each generation comes to understand that the priorities of its ancestors were misplaced. Each generation has a powerful elite, or a majority whose consent has been manufactured, that luxuriate in the false certainty that bodily autonomy can be safely sacrificed for a higher principle. Half a century ago the proponents of marital rape argued for protecting tradition and patriarchal values because they were supposedly the glue holding society together. With 50 years’ hindsight, we may see the current debates about vaccine mandates – and the completely unscientific corollary that the unvaccinated are unclean and plague carriers – in much the same light.
The swelling political consensus on vaccine mandates intentionally ignores the enormous spread of the virus after two years of pandemic and the consequent natural immunity of large sections of the population, irrespective of vaccination status. This same consensus obfuscates the fact that natural immunity is most likely to prove longer-lasting and more effective against any variants of Covid that continue to emerge. And the consensus distracts from the inconvenient fact that the short-lived efficacy of the current vaccines means everyone is potentially “unclean” and a plague carrier, as the new variant Omicron is underscoring only too clearly.
No solidarity
The truth is that where each of us stands on the political divide over bodily autonomy says less about how much we prioritise human rights, or the social good, or solidarity with the weak and powerless, and much more about other, far less objectively rational matters, such as:
how fearful we are personally about the effects of Covid on ourselves or our loved ones;
whether we think the plutocrats that run our societies have prioritised the social good over the desire for quick, profit-making technological fixes, and the appearance of strong leadership and decisive action;
how sure we are that science is taking precedence over the interests of pharmaceutical corporations whose profits are booming as our societies grow older and sicker, and whether we think these corporations have captured our regulatory authorities, including the World Health Organisation;
whether we think it helpful or dangerous to scapegoat an unvaccinated minority, blaming it for straining health services or for the failure to eradicate a virus that is, in reality, never going away;
and, especially in the left’s case, how reassured we are that non-western, official “enemy” governments, such as Cuba, China, Russia and Iran, have thrown most of their eggs into the vaccine basket too – and usually as enthusiastically as western societies.
It is possible, however, that the way our technological, materialist world has evolved, ruled by competitive elites in nation states vying for power, means there was always likely to be a single, global conception of how to end the pandemic: through a quick-fix, magic bullet of either a vaccine or a drug. The fact that nation states – the “good” and “bad” alike – are unlikely to think outside this particular box does not mean it is the only box available, or that this box must be the one all citizens are coerced into.
Basic human rights do not apply only in the good times. They can’t just be set aside in difficult times like a pandemic because those rights are a nuisance, or because some people refuse to do what we think is best for them. Those rights are fundamental to what it means to live in a free and open society. If we get rid of bodily autonomy while we deal with this virus, that principle will have to be fought for all over again – and in the context of hi-tech, surveillance states that are undoubtedly more powerful than any we have known before.
Coerced vaccination
It is wrong, however, to focus exclusively on bodily autonomy. The undermining of the right to bodily autonomy is slipping into an equally alarming undermining of the right to cognitive autonomy. In fact, these two kinds of autonomy cannot be readily disentangled. Because anyone who believes that people must be required to take a vaccine will soon be arguing that no one should be allowed to hear information that might make them more resistant to vaccination.
There is an essential problem about maintaining an open and honest debate during a time of pandemic, which anyone who is thinking critically about Covid and our responses to it must grapple with every time they put finger to keyboard. The discourse playing-field is far from level.
Those who demand vaccine mandates, and wish to jettison the principle of bodily autonomy as a “medical” inconvenience, can give full-throated voice to their arguments in the secure knowledge that only a few, isolated contrarians may occasionally dare to challenge them.
But when those who value the principle of bodily autonomy or who blanch at the idea of coerced vaccination wish to make their case, they must hold back. They must argue with one arm tied behind their backs – and not just because they are likely to be mobbed, particularly by the left, for trying to widen the range of arguments under consideration in what are essentially political and ethical debates masquerading as scientific ones.
Tonight I will oppose both compulsory vaccines for NHS staff, and the introduction of vaccine passports. Both measures are counterproductive and will create division when we need cooperation and unity.
Those questioning the manufactured consensus – a consensus that intentionally scapegoats the unvaccinated as disease carriers, a consensus that has once again upended social solidarity among the 99 per cent, a consensus that has been weaponised to shield the elites from proper scrutiny for their profiteering from the pandemic – must measure every word they say against the effect it may have on those listening.
Personal calculations
I place a high value on autonomy, of both the cognitive and physical varieties. I am against the state deciding for me what I and you are allowed to think and say, and I am against the state deciding what goes into my and your body without our consent (though I also recognise that I have little choice but to breathe polluted air, drink polluted water, and eat chemically altered food, all of which have damaged my and your immune systems and made us more susceptible to viruses like Covid).
But at the same time, unlike the vaccine mandate mob, I never forget that I am responsible for my words and that they have consequences, and potentially dangerous ones. There are a significant proportion of people who almost certainly need to be vaccinated, and probably regularly, to avoid being seriously harmed by exposure to the virus. Any responsible writer needs to weigh the effect of their words. I do not wish to be responsible for making one person who would benefit from a vaccine more hesitant to take it. I am particularly wary of playing God during a pandemic.
However, my reluctance to pontificate on a subject on which I have no expertise – vaccine safety – does not confer a licence on others to command the debate on other subjects about which they appear to know very little, such as medical and political ethics.
The fact is, however much some people would be best advised to take the vaccine, there is a recognised risk involved, even if we are not supposed to mention it. The long-term safety of the vaccines is unknown and cannot be known for several more years – and possibly for much longer, given the refusal of the drug regulators to release vaccine data for many more decades.
The vaccine technology is novel and its effects on the complex physiology of the human body and the individual vagaries of each of our immune systems will not be fully apparent for a long time. The decision to take a new type of vaccine in these circumstances is a calculation that each individual must weigh carefully for themselves, based on a body they know better than anyone else.
Pretending that there is no calculation – that everyone is the same, that the vaccines will react in the same manner on every person – is belied by the fact that the vaccines have had to be given emergency approval, and that there have been harsh disagreements even among experts about whether the calculation in favour of vaccination makes sense for everyone, especially for children. That calculation is further complicated by the fact that a significant section of the population now have a natural immunity to the whole virus and not just vaccine-induced immunity to the spike protein.
But stuffing everyone into a one-size-fits-all solution is exactly what bureaucratic, technocratic states are there to do. It is what they know best. To the state, you are I and just a figure on a pandemic spread-sheet. To think otherwise is childish delusion. Those who refuse to think of themselves as simply a spread-sheet digit – those who insist on their right to bodily and cognitive autonomy – should not be treated as narcissists for doing so or as a threat to public health, especially when the immunity provided by the vaccines is so short-lived, the vaccines themselves are highly leaky, and there is little understanding yet of the differences, or even potential conflicts, between natural and vaccine-induced immunity.
Perpetual emergency
Nonetheless, parts of the left are acting as if none of this is true, or even debatable. Instead they are proudly joining the mob, leading the self-righteous clamour to assert control not only over the bodies of others but over their minds too. This left angrily rejects all debate as a threat to the official “medical” consensus. They insist on conformity of opinion and then claim it as science, in denial of the fact that science is by its nature disputatious and evolves constantly. They cheer on censorship – by profit-driven social media corporations – even when it is recognised experts who are being silenced.
Their subtext is that any contrary opinion is a threat to the social order, and will fuel vaccine hesitancy. The demand is that we all become worshippers at the altars of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, at the risk otherwise of being denounced as heretics, as “anti-vaxxers”. No middle ground can be allowed in this era of perpetual emergency.
This is not just disturbing ethically. It is disastrous politically. The state is already massively powerful against each of us as individuals. We have collective power only in so far as we show solidarity with each other. If the left conspires with the state against those who are weak, against black and brown communities whose main experiences of state institutions have been abusive, against the “deplorables”, we divide ourselves and make the weakest parts of our society even weaker.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn understood this when he was one of the few on the left to publicly resist the recent move by the UK government to legislate vaccine mandates. He rightly argued that the correct path is persuasion, not coercion.
But this kind of mix of reason and compassion is being drowned out on parts of the left. They justify violations of bodily and cognitive autonomy on the grounds that we are living in exceptional times, during a pandemic. They complacently argue that such violations will be temporary, required only until the virus is eradicated – even though the virus is now endemic and with us for good. They silently assent to the corporate media being given even greater censorship powers as the price we must pay to deal with vaccine hesitancy, on the assumption that we can reclaim the right to dissent later.
But these losses, in circumstances in which our rights and freedoms are already under unprecedented assault, will not be easily restored. Once social media can erase you or me from the public square for stating real-world facts that are politically and commercially inconvenient – such as Twitter’s ban on anyone pointing out that the vaccinated can spread the virus too – there will be no going back.
Political instincts
There is a further reason, however, why the left is being deeply foolish in turning on the unvaccinated and treating the principles of bodily and cognitive autonomy with such contempt. Because this approach sends a message to black and brown communities, and to the “deplorables”, that the left is elitist, that its talk of solidarity is hollow, and that it is only the right, not the left, that is willing to fight to protect the most intimate freedoms we enjoy – over our bodies and minds.
Every time the left shouts down those who are hesitant about taking a Covid vaccine; every time it echoes the authoritarianism of those who demand mandates, chiefly for low-paid workers; every time it refuses to engage with – or even allow – counter-arguments, it abandons the political battlefield to the right.
Through its behaviour, the shrill left confirms the right’s claims that the political instincts of the left are Stalinist, that the left will always back the might of an all-powerful state against the concerns of ordinary people, that the left sees only the faceless masses, who need to be herded towards bureaucratically convenient solutions, rather than individuals who need to be listened to as they grapple with their own particular dilemmas and beliefs.
The fact is that you can favour vaccines, you can be vaccinated yourself, you can even desire that everyone regularly takes a Covid vaccine, and still think that bodily and cognitive autonomy are vitally important principles – principles to be valued even more than vaccines. You can be a cheerleader for vaccination and still march against vaccine mandates.
Some on the left behave as if these are entirely incompatible positions, or as if they are proof of hypocrisy and bad faith. But what this kind of left is really exposing is their own inability to think in politically complex ways, their own difficulty remembering that principles are more important than quick-fixes, however frightening the circumstances, and that the debates about how we organise our societies are inherently political, much more so than technocratic or “medical”.
The right understands that there is a political calculus in handling the pandemic that cannot be discarded except at a grave political cost. Part of the left has a much weaker grasp of this point. Its censoriousness, its arrogance, its hectoring tone – all given cover by claims to be following a “science” that keeps changing – are predictably alienating those the left claims to represent.
The left needs to start insisting again on the critical importance of bodily and cognitive autonomy – and to stop shooting itself in the foot.
Recorded history is the history of adults–generals, statesmen, explorers and scientists–but all of those adults began their path as children. And running beneath this official history is the unofficial history of childhood games and rituals, many of which were passed down for generations; children inhabited a separate universe of traditions, contests, solemn rituals and codes of honour, like a Viking horde living in your house unnoticed. It was in this world that every future general first learned to lead, every future scientist first turned over logs to delight in the tiny nightmares underneath, and every future explorer first plucked up the courage to enter the haunted woods. Elderly people here in Ireland, who grew up without electricity or many cars, still remember the feral exploration and creative play that was once the birthright of every child.
“Children today don’t have to think much about games given to them – we made up our own,” said one elder. “We played spin the top, marbles, hoop the hoop, hop scotch, conkers, kick the can, scut the whip, jackstones, and box the fox. Hop scotch has survived to some extent, but only among girls … Even when the dark evenings closed in we played ‘Battle In, Battle Out,’ and ‘Jack jack show the light.’”
The games varied widely from person to person; villages only a few miles away could apparently have very different game-traditions. City streets, perhaps because they drew families from so many rural villages, seem to have been a vast melting pot of such games; when British novelist Norman Douglas published his whimsical overview of the children’s games of London in 1916, he spent dozens of pages–most of the book–just listing games. Not dozens of games, mind you–dozens of pages of lists of games, any of which could be as complex as any video game today and most of which were known to most children.
The games, rhymes, and rituals children invented were so ubiquitous, and so often out of sight of adults, that they were little remarked upon or recorded, and only now, when they have almost disappeared, can we look back and see how remarkable they were. In the 1950s the husband-and-wife team of Peter and Iona Opie interviewed children on playgrounds around the UK and found that, instead of being silly and spontaneous, children’s rhymes and stories actually preserved historical traditions their parents had lost.
“Boys continue to crack jokes that Swift collected from his friends in Queen Anne’s time,” Opie wrote. “They ask riddles which were posed when Henry VIII was a boy. . . . They learn to cure warts . . . after the manner which Francis Bacon learned when he was young. . . . They rebuke one of their number who seeks back a gift with a couplet known in Shakespeare’s day. . . . and they are [perpetuating stories] which were gossip in Elizabethan times.” They re-discovered the observation of Queen Anne’s physician John Arbuthnot, who said that “nowhere was tradition preserved pure and uncorrupt but amongst school-boys, whose games and plays are delivered down invariably from one generation to another.”
This is especially remarkable since most of these rituals were not taught by parents or grandparents, who might have learned them decades earlier, but by other children who could only have known them for a few years. Since they were re-transmitted over years rather than decades, their transmission signal should have decayed more quickly. Instead, the children proved stronger at retaining historical knowledge than most adults–not in the sense of reciting facts, but in treasuring their past.
Some of their superstitions, like a blister as proof of lying, date back at least to the 1500s, and they chanted a rhyme that apparently dates back to the era of France’s Henry IV in 1610. Most interestingly, country children still wore oak leaves or an acorn in their button-holes on 29 May to remember the return of Charles II in 1651–and could explain why they did so–at a time when few adults remembered the date.
Keep in mind, also, that few people were writing in the 1500s, most writing was not about children’s games, and much of what was written then has been lost–so if a ritual was first recorded in the 1500s, it could well be much older. Oral traditions can endure for thousands or even tens of thousands of years; Australian Aborigines have traditions about the sea level changing that seem to date from the last Ice Age. No one knows if any children’s rhymes and games date back so far, but Douglas believed that one chant stretched back to the time of Nero, and the Opies seemed to agree.
Their games and rituals were still very local, even in the 1950s when mass media was already washing away the local cultures of villages and neighbourhoods. “While some children roll eggs at Easter,” the Opies wrote, “or nettle the legs of classmates on the 29th of May, or leave little gifts on people’s doorsteps on St. Valentine’s Day, or act under the delusion that they are above the law on a night in November, other children, sometimes living only the other side of a hill, will have no knowledge of these activities.”
Here, too, Ireland held onto this heritage later than most countries, and a radio documentary of children playing in a Dublin school-yard in 1977 showed them using their own complicated musical chants. They weren’t all local traditions–one chant cited Shirley Temple, “the girl with the curly hair”–but even that showed the staying power of these songs, as this was two generations after she had been famous.
The Opies also noted that children spontaneously adopted a “code of oral legislation”–cultural institutions for testing truthfulness, swearing affirmation, making bets and bargains, and determining the ownership of property–the adult legal code in miniature. These codes universally included a practice absent from adult law, however–that of asking for respite, what we recognize as “calling time out,” and what today’s children reportedly call “pause,” a usage imported from video games.
“Throughout history, bands of children gathered and roamed city streets and countrysides, forming their own societies each with its own customs, legal rules and procedures, parodies, politics, beliefs, and art,” the blog Carcinisation pointed out. “With their rhymes, songs, and symbols, they created and elaborated the meaning of their local landscape and culture, practicing for the adult work of the same nature. We are left with only remnants and echoes of a once-magnificent network of children’s cultures, capable of impressive feats of coordination.”
This seems to have been true of all human cultures–anthropologists report it in hunter-gather tribes, and Zechariah 8:5 said that “the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing.” Certainly it was true among people I knew in Ireland or the USA in living memory. To see how recently outdoor play was assumed, look at a map of most American cities; anything built before World War II is typically a grid for easy transport, but post-war suburban streets curl like tossed spaghetti and end in cul-de-sacs in order to do the opposite, to slow and discourage traffic to be “safe for families.” The sprawl that covers much of America looks the way it does because it was made to be safe for children to play in the street–which in 1945 was exactly what they would be doing.
If the returning GIs who first moved into these homes could be transported to the present day, however, they would be puzzled. Aside from the fact that the future never happened–no flying cars or robot butlers–the most glaring difference would be the absence of any children. To a time traveler it would seem like the beginning of a Twilight Zone episode, and they’d would demand to know what happened–was there a plague? An alien invasion? Are the children grown from pods now? Are they marched to an altar and sacrificed to a dark god? Or is this some horrific science-fiction future where children grow up staring at glowing rectangles, and are drugged when they get restless?
“Even the idea of a children’s game seems to be slipping from our grasp,” Neil Postman wrote in 1982. “A children’s game, as we used to think of it, requires no instructors or umpires or spectators; it uses whatever space and equipment are at hand; it is played for no other reason than pleasure. . . . Who has seen anyone over the age of nine playing Jacks, Johnny on the Pony, Blindman’s Buff, or ball-bouncing rhymes? . . . Even Hide-and-Seek, which was played in Periclean Athens more than two thousand years ago, has now almost completely disappeared from the repertoire of self-organized children’s amusements. Children’s games, in a phrase, are an endangered species.”
The decline began a few generations ago, when television steamrolled over children’s cultural traditions, and that screen has now multiplied into a billion hand-held ones. When children everywhere carry all the world’s pornography in their pocket, as well as electronic games psychologically designed to addict people as powerfully as heroin, few future leaders will organise their mates, and few budding scientists will turn over any logs. Moreover, children today grow up under effective house arrest, as local ordinances, paranoid neighbours and police conspire to prohibit children from venturing far outside. They grow up learning no lessons, organising no peers, and exploring no territory, unless it be shifting electrons around a screen, and the screen becomes their world.
This unnatural state takes all the power of modern society to maintain, and it does not have to be inevitable or permanent; even now some parents keep their children unplugged and gather with other parents who do the same. If they don’t live near the country themselves, they might visit family who do. They teach small children some games from old books, and let the children take it from there. How this guerrilla action proceeds will depend on the situation, but it needs to be done. Otherwise, today’s children will live in a country filled with the most dependent and least self-sufficient humans who ever lived, polarised and paralysed by their screens, and facing a difficult future. We will need a new generation of people who can strategise, negotiate, and work together again, and to do that we need children to experience childhood once more.
And so, as 2021 goose-steps toward its fanatical finish, it is time for my traditional year-end wrap-up. It’s “The Year of the Ox” in the Chinese zodiac, but I’m christening it “The Year of the New Normal Fascist.”
But this isn’t just a story about New Normal Germany, or New Normal Europe, or New Normal Australia. And it isn’t just a story about mass hysteria, or an “overreaction” to a corona virus. The “New Normal” is a global GloboCap co-production, a multi-trillion-dollar co-production, which has been in development for quite some time, and this year has gone exactly to script.
Given all the drama over the past 12 months, it’s easy to forget that the year began with the occupation of Washington DC by thousands of US (i.e., GloboCap) forces in the wake of the “Terrorist Assault on the Capitol” (a/k/a the “January 6 Insurrection,” or the “Attempted Coup,” or some such nonsense) carried out by a few hundred totally unarmed Donald Trump supporters, who were allegedly intent on “overthrowing the government” and “destroying Democracy” with … well, their bare hands.
This was the long-awaited “Return to Normal” spectacle that had been in the pipeline for the previous four years, the public humiliation of the Unauthorized President (and the “populists” who put him in office) and the GloboCap show of force that followed. Here’s how I described it back in January:
“In other words, GloboCap is teaching us a lesson. I don’t know how much clearer they could make it. They just installed a new puppet president, who can’t even simulate mental acuity, in a locked-down, military-guarded ceremony which no one was allowed to attend, except for a few members of the ruling classes. They got some epigone of Albert Speer to convert the Mall (where the public normally gathers) into a ‘field of flags,’ symbolizing ‘unity.’ They even did the Nazi Lichtdom thing. To hammer the point home, they got Lady Gaga to dress up as a Hunger Games character with a ‘Mockingjay’ brooch and sing the National Anthem. They broadcast this spectacle to the entire world.”
As I assume is obvious to everyone by now, the “Return to Normal” was a “Return to the New Normal,” which the global-capitalist ruling establishment was already imposing on the entire world. The message couldn’t possibly be clearer. As Arnold Schwarzenegger succinctly put it, the message is, “screw your freedom.” The message is, shut up and toe the fucking line. The message is, show me your fucking papers. Use the fucking pronouns. Eat the fucking bugs. Get the fucking “vaccinations.” Do not fucking ask us “how many.” The answer is, “as many as we fucking tell you.”
The message is, there will be no more unauthorized presidents, no more leaving the European Union, no more “populist” rebellions against the global hegemony of global-capitalism and its soul-crushing, valueless “woke” ideology. GloboCap is done playing grab-ass. They announced that back in March of 2020. They informed us in unmistakable terms that our lives were about to change, forever. They branded and advertised this change as “the New Normal,” in case we were … you know, cognitively challenged. They did not hide it. They wanted us to understand exactly what was coming, a global-capitalist version of totalitarianism, in which we will all be happy little fascist “consumers” showing each other our “compliance certificates” in order to be allowed to live our lives.
I’d like to end on an optimistic note, because, Jesus, this fascism business is depressing. So I’ll just mention that, as you have probably noticed, more and more people are now “waking up,” or relocating their intestinal fortitude, and finally speaking out against “vaccine” mandates, and “vaccination passes,” and social segregation, and all the rest of the fascist New Normal program. I intend to encourage this “awakening” vociferously. I hope that those — and you know who you are — who have been reporting the facts and opposing the New Normal, and have been ridiculed, demonized, gaslighted, censored, slandered, threatened, and otherwise abused, on a daily basis for 21 months, as our more “prominent” colleagues — and you know who you are — sat by in silence, or took part in the Hate Fest, will join me in applauding and welcoming these “prominent” colleagues to the fight … finally.
Oh, and, if you’re one of those “prominent” colleagues and you start beating your chest and sounding off like you’ve just rediscovered investigative journalism and are now leading the charge against the New Normal for your YouTube viewers or your Substack readers, please understand if we get a little cranky. Speaking for myself, yes, it’s been a bit stressful, doing your job and taking the shit for you out here in the trenches for the past 21 months. Not to mention how it has virtually killed my comedy … and I’m supposed to be a political satirist.
But there I go, getting all “angry” again … whatever. As the doctor said, “buy the ticket, take the ride.” And it’s the season of joy, love, and forgiveness, and publicly crucifying dissidents, and paranoia, and mass hysteria, and persecuting “Unvaccinated” relatives, and, OK, I might have had one too many. Happy holidays to one and all, except, of course, to the New Normal fascists, especially the ones that are torturing the children. God, forgive me, but I hope they fucking choke.
“It is the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures. Alienating yourself from your inclinations can only lead to pain and disappointment in the long run, and a sense that you have wasted something unique.” ~Robert Greene
How do you become a prime mover? How do you become more self-determined, more self-aware, more responsible for your lot in life? How do you become your own boss, fully volitional, fully responsible, fully engaged, with more creativity, more adaptability, and more courage? How do you become a master?
It begins with self-apprenticeship. You must create your own momentum. Don’t be afraid of becoming an autodidact. Read a lot. Connect the dots. Seek out the shoulders of giants, not just to learn, but to see further than they did. Seek help, expertise, guidance, and wisdom from others, but then you must take responsibility for your own improvement. Take a leap of courage out of faith. Create a scaffold of knowledge. Its foundation is curiosity. Stay curious. Be Curiosity. As Joseph Campbell said, “follow your bliss.”
Mobilize your mind:
“Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” ~George Bernard Shaw
The immobilized mindset is a handicap. Living a full life requires movement. What does not move is dead. Let the mind move, let the mind flow, let the mind grow.
Don’t let your mind settle. A settled mind is a closed mind. A settled mind tricks you into believing that you have figured things out. It inadvertently sacrifices reason for anti-reason. It uses anti-reason to buttress itself against new knowledge.
Remember: knowledge is always your master. Don’t let your ego fool you. One does not master knowledge; one only learns it. The mind is simply too fallible, too inflexible, too imperfect to become a master of knowledge. True self-mastery is understanding that knowledge will always be your master.
Which is all the more reason to keep your mind active, fluid, flexible, and mobile. Don’t get comfortable. Take risks. Embrace change. It’s when you fight against change, when you deny it, repress it, ignore it, or rage against it that you suffer unnecessarily. When you embrace change, however, you’re in flow with it, dancing, flexible, and empowered, even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts. Because you know, pain is information. Pain is a teacher. Pain is a guide. Pain is merely procrastinating power. In the long run it will make you stronger.
The ability to loosen your mind, to alter your perspective, to reimagine imagination is one of the most amazing powers you have as a human being. Cultivate it through mindfulness. Activate it through No-mind. Avoid fixation. Avoid attachment. Avoid belief. Ponder what is absent to create a flexible open-mindedness that can persistently overcome itself.
As Jeremy Hammond said, “Your mind is programmable—and if you’re not programming it then someone else will program it for you.”
Embrace the almighty metaphor:
“As our eyes grow accustomed to sight, they armor themselves against wonder.” ~Leonard Cohen
Reality is a great mystery. Honor it. Let it continually fill you with awe. Don’t seek certainty. Just seek. Be with the curiosity. Be hunger. Be love. Be on the edge of your seat, flabbergasted and entranced, astounded and gobsmacked, dumbfounded and engaged, detached and aloof with the interconnectedness of all things.
Certainty is the creativity killer. Certainty murders mystery. Certainty cripples mastery. Avoid it at all costs. Being certain gets you nowhere but stuck in a box, closed off in a mental paradigm, stifled by a tiny comfort zone, or blocked by an inflexible boundary. It puts eye guards on when peripheral vision is needed.
Employ strategies of awe. Plant a maze in your mind and watch it grow into a labyrinth. Explore it. Transform your eyes into Over Eyes, your mind into No-mind, your soul into Soul Craft. Transform your life into a Hero’s Journey. Confront threshold guardians. And when your mind becomes fixed and settled, strategically plant a minefield in the mind field. Then sit back and enjoy the explosion, as your mind is blown into new ways of seeing the world.
Everything in life is Metaphor. From shapeshifting comes worldmaking. Life becomes art, and art becomes life. Forget genes. Forget memes. Carry mythemes and astonish the world.
Embolden what makes you unique:
“I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.” ~Rousseau
Carl Jung stressed that an individual’s proper goal is wholeness, not perfection. You will never be perfect, but you will always be unique. Let notions of perfection roll off you like water off a duck’s back. Then double down on your uniqueness.
Real power is emboldened uniqueness. Uniqueness is true power. Everything else is moonshine. Everything else is smoke and mirrors. Focus on what makes you unique, what makes you come alive. Split the smoke. Shatter the mirrors. Let your authenticity boldly blast through it all.
You are a slice of Fate. You might be made up of the same ingredients as other slices of Fate, but your slice is arranged in a way that has never occurred before nor will it ever be repeated. You are a one-time phenomenon. You are beyond a force of Nature. You are a force of Fate. Use it. Fuel yourself with it. Be the tip of the spear and pierce through your life with purpose and meaning.
Becoming who you really are is shedding the skin of who you were conditioned to be by culture and then embracing the new skin of your reconditioning. It’s shaving away the superfluous and embracing the numinous.
When you are able to do this, you unleash your calling, your inner voice, your primal howl. This voice is intuitive, inquisitive, and hungry to be heard. If you listen intently, you will feel your own potential and your deepest longing to create and express your own uniqueness. This uniqueness is your life’s purpose. But it isn’t there for a reason. You must give it a reason to empower you.
Use probability to stay ahead of the curve:
“Consider nothing impossible, then treat possibilities as probabilities.” ~Charles Dickens
Truth or delusion is both a tripwire and a balancing wire. Either way you go, it is precarious. One man’s truth is another man’s delusion. Fortunately, there is validity and probability that you can use as a benchmark, as a way to measure what is more likely to be true.
A good rule of thumb, when faced with potential invalidity, is to ask: “Sure, it’s possible, but is it probable?” True mastery comes more from embracing and being fascinated by mystery and less from intellectualizing and labeling it. It’s more of a detached obliteration of “baskets” than a codependent clinging to them.
The key is to keep your eggs free of all baskets. Don’t settle on any single bedrock of thought. As Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Just flow through it all. Keep questioning. Keep swimming. Keep searching. Use probability as your Occam’s Razor.
Because nobody is off the hook for being wrong. The best we can do is get better at recognizing the hook for what it is so that we are less likely to get dragged away by it. By developing and practicing disciplined strategies for cutting the line and negotiating the hook before the Fisherman of Closemindedness can reel us into his Boat of Dogmatism.
Real mastery sharpens itself against probability. Keep using the sound tools of logic, reasoning, and probability. Keep deflating self-important seriousness into authentic sincerity. Have fun with it. Laugh at it. Play with it. Tease it. Dance with it. Reimagine it in ways that shock your soul into heightened awareness. Shoot yourself in the foot before someone else does, or before the passage of time deems your work outdated or uncouth.
Ever tried. Ever wrong. No matter. Try again. Be wrong again. Be wrong better. This will keep you ahead of the curve. It will keep you sharp against entropy. As it turns out, you are more likely to be right by admitting that you are more likely wrong than by declaring that you are absolutely right.
Allow healthy skepticism and an intimacy with probability to become your shifting bedrock, your foundational quicksand, your liberated measuring tool. This is the apprenticeship. When you are free to swim in the waters of uncertainty rather than remain chained to the pillars of certitude, you are more likely to achieve mastery.
People who spread misinformation on Covid-19 vaccines are “criminals” and have cost “millions of lives,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a rather shocking interview on Tuesday. His comments are in line with a sentiment being pushed by the rabid mandatory vaccine crowd and sadly enough, they are being embraced by many.
Ironically enough, these comments were made to Frederick Kempe, the CEO of the Atlantic Council — you know, the NATO propaganda arm responsible for sewing wild conspiracy theories about “Russian meddling” and acting as the censorship arm for big tech — yeah, that group.
“Those people are criminals,” he told Kempe. “They’re not bad people. They’re criminals because they have literally cost millions of lives.”
During that same interview, Bourla also stated that they are “getting briefings from the CIA and FBI” — indicating just how deep their tentacles go into the federal government.
.@pfizer CEO Albert Bourla: People who share "misinformation" on vaccines' efficacy are "criminals."
"They're not bad people. They're criminals because they have literally cost millions of lives." pic.twitter.com/VjIXs5rQCg
After Bourla called vaccine skeptics “criminals,” Kempe closed out the point, adding that “they should be treated like criminals as well.”
Take a second to think about what these two people just discussed. They are advocating for treating people like criminals for “spreading vaccine misinformation.” By these standards, Pfizer should turn themselves in.
As we reported last week, the British Medical Journal published an incendiary report exposing faked data, blind trial failures, poorly trained vaccinators, and a slow follow-up on adverse reactions in the phase-three trial of Pfizer’s Covid jab. Is that not misinformation? What about the CDC director stating that the vaccine is 100% effective? Or Fauci saying not to wear masks and then telling Americans to wear two masks?
Of course, none of that misinformation will ever be acknowledged by those who purvey it. In realty, the medical industrial complex, in coordination with the federal government is waging a massive campaign to control the narrative on the vaccine. Those who report being injured by the jab or who express legitimate concerns are censored into oblivion as the establishment keeps shifting goal posts with booster shots and even changing the definition of vaccination.
Misinformation is entirely subjective and as we’ve seen over the past two years, what is previously deemed misinformation and censored into the darkness, often turns out to be true down the road. Making posts skeptical of the vaccine online could easily be deemed misinformation and people could go to jail for their free speech if Bourla and Kempe have their way.
What’s more, as this Big Pharma shill refers to vaccine skeptics as criminals, he and his supporters are ignoring Pfizer’s actual criminal background.
As TFTP has reported, Pfizer has paid out billions in health care fraud fines and in fact was party to the largest health care fraud settlement in US history.
“Pfizer violated the law over an extensive time period. Furthermore, at the very same time Pfizer was in our office negotiating and resolving the allegations of criminal conduct by its then newly acquired subsidiary, Warner-Lambert, Pfizer was itself in its other operations violating those very same laws,” Mike Loucks, acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts said at the time.
And these are the people calling you a criminal for vaccine skepticism.
But that was only a single case, this company has a track record dating back decades that includes everything from bribing government officials to illegally testing products on children to making false claims about drugs and illegally marketing them — leading to multiple deaths. Despite making the largest payout in history, Pfizer has continued to be called to the carpet since 2009 multiple times for misleading the public about their drugs — up to and including vaccines.
Nevertheless, many Americans have short memories and seemingly couldn’t care less about the criminal past of this company. Instead, those who ignore Pfizer’s criminal history, shout down others who are hesitant to take the jab and become useful idiots in shilling for a company they once looked at with scorn.
Social psychologist Roy Baumeister begins his bookEvil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, with a proposition that will be counterintuitive to many: “Evil usually enters the world unrecognized by the people who open the door and let it in. Most people who perpetrate evil do not see what they are doing as evil.”
Dismissing evildoers as “insane” is an attempt to absolve both them and you of responsibility. Baumeister observes, “People do become extremely upset and abandon self-control, with violent results, but this is not insanity.” If only “insane” people commit “evil” acts, you might reason there is no need to strengthen spiritual and moral muscles. You might skip the reflection, study, and practice that builds spiritual and moral strength.
Would you, Baumeister asks, “obey orders to kill innocent civilians? Would you help torture someone? Would you stand by passively while the secret police hauled your neighbors off to concentration camps?” Baumeister writes, “Most people say no. But when such events actually happen, the reality is quite different.” Today, to the point, will you obey orders to fire upon people who refuse to comply with mandates?
The men of Police Battalion 101 were not specially selected psychopathic killers. Initially, the Battalion was set up to enforce Nazi rule in occupied Poland. Eventually, their mission changed, bringing them to be the genocidal murderers of Jews they were charged with rounding up. Browning explains, “The bulk of the killers were not specially selected but drawn at random from a cross-section of German society, and they did not kill because they were coerced by the threat of dire punishment for refusing.” Mostly they were “middle-aged reserve policemen.” Battle had not driven these men to depravity, “they had not been fired on nor had they lost comrades.”
Browning explores one of their initial murderous actions, “shooting some 1,500 Jews in the Polish village of Józefów in the summer of 1942.” Major Wilhelm Trapp addressed his men before the shooting began: “Pale and nervous, with choking voice and tears in his eyes, Trapp visibly fought to control himself as he spoke. The Battalion, he said plaintively, had to perform a frightfully unpleasant task. This assignment was not to his liking; indeed, it was highly regrettable, but the orders came from the highest authorities.”
Trapp provided a “justification” for the coming slaughter—Jews were damaging Germany and threatening German troops—but then Trapp “made an extraordinary offer: if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out.” The task, Trapp outlined, was the immediate killing of all women, children, and the elderly.
Only twelve of the approximately 500 in the Battalion initially took Trapp’s offer to “step out.” Browning estimated “10 to 20 percent of those actually assigned to the firing squads” extricated themselves “by less conspicuous methods or asked to be released from the firing squads once the shooting had begun.” Yet for most of the police, killing became second nature: “Many reserve policemen who were horrified in the woods outside Józefów… subsequently became casual volunteers for numerous firing squads and ‘Jew hunts.’”
Browning’s research provides insights into the mindsets that fueled obedience: “Who would have ‘dared,’ one policeman declared emphatically, to ‘lose face’ before the assembled troops.” Another said, “No one wants to be thought a coward.”
Not all who followed orders lacked moral consciousness: “Another policeman—more aware of what truly required courage—said quite simply, ‘I was cowardly.’”
Some rationalized their atrocities: “It was possible for me to shoot only children. My neighbor then shot the mother and I shot the child that belonged to her, because I reasoned with myself that after all without its mother the child could not live any longer.”
To escape moral culpability, others offered the excuse of what difference could they make: “Without me [shooting] the Jews were not going to escape their fate anyway.” How many managers are saying today, what difference can I make? If I don’t fire the unvaccinated, someone else will.
Browning explains, “The men’s concern for their standing in the eyes of their comrades was not matched by any sense of human ties with their victims. The Jews stood outside their circle of human obligation and responsibility.” Today, hospital administrators are firing workers with robust natural immunity who faithfully served during the pandemic and refuse the vaccine. Like the men in the Battalion, these administrators are just following orders.
What would have happened that terrible day in 1942 if more policemen recognized the humanity of the “other” and had the courage to not conform? Today, what would happen if more businesses, like In-N-Out Burger, refuse to obey government edicts? In October, Stephen Davis, a Florida fire battalion chief, “was fired for refusing to discipline department employees listed as unvaccinated.” What would happen if more managers had the courage of Chief Davis? Without obedience, tyranny fails.
During this time of Covid, we can learn lessons from Browning’s book about how we treat people who make choices different from our own. We can notice when we fail to see the humanity in others. We can become aware when we justify an us vs. them mindset. We can question our perceptions. To wait for Biden or Fauci to change first is to ignore our power of choice.
Lessons Learned
Browning reflects on the actions of the Battalion and asks, “If obedience to orders out of fear of dire punishment is not a valid explanation, what about ‘obedience to authority’ in the more general sense used by Stanley Milgram?”
Browning wonders if there is “a ’deeply ingrained behavior tendency’ to comply with the directives of those positioned hierarchically above, even to the point of performing repugnant actions in violation of ‘universally accepted’ moral norms.” Browning explains,
The notions of ‘loyalty, duty, discipline,’ requiring competent performance in the eyes of authority, become moral imperatives overriding any identification with the victim. Normal individuals enter an ‘agentic state’ in which they are the instrument of another’s will. In such a state, they no longer feel personally responsible for the content of their actions but only for how well they perform.
Browning recounts, “Milgram made direct reference to the similarities between human behavior in his experiments and under the Nazi regime. He concluded, ‘Men are led to kill with little difficulty.’”
Importantly, “Milgram himself notes that people far more frequently invoke authority than conformity to explain their behavior, for only the former seems to absolve them of personal responsibility.” Yet, in the Battalion case, “Many policemen admitted responding to the pressures of conformity—how would they be seen in the eyes of their comrades?—not authority.” Based on his research, Browning concludes, “Conformity assumes a more central role than authority at Józefów.”
The Covidocracy demands we all conform and shames those who make different choices. Browning explains the dangers of a culture of shame: “The shame culture, making conformity a prime virtue, impelled ordinary Germans in uniform to commit terrible crimes rather than suffer the stigma of cowardice and weakness and the ‘social death’ of isolation and alienation vis-à-vis their comrades.”
The segregation of Jews was an enabler of evil actions. Browning points to pervasive banishment of Jews from German society “and the resulting exclusion of the Jewish victims from any common ground with the perpetrators made it all the easier for the majority of the policemen to conform to the norms of their immediate community (the battalion) and their society at large (Nazi Germany).”
For some policemen who did not shoot, their commercial ties shaped their view of human beings. One said, “Through my business experience, especially because it extended abroad, I had gained a better overview of things. Moreover, through my earlier business activities I already knew many Jews.”
Harvard social psychologist Gordon Allport developed his famed contact hypothesis in the 1940s: “Increasing exposure to out-group members will improve attitudes toward that group and decrease prejudice and stereotyping.” Commercial ties bring people together.
Recently Tim, a reader and business owner from New Zealand, sent me his powerful testimony in an email:
Fifty odd years ago, as a young child I went to Ranui Primary School in suburban Auckland. There were two Māori boys in my class of 9-year-olds. Sometimes through the day they would make short comments to each other in Māori.
If the teacher heard them do it, he would keep our entire class in detention after school for 15 to 30 minutes. I always hated it because one of the boys was my friend, and a regular playmate of mine after school. The other one, used to walk home from school with me too, they were my friends.
But most of the class blamed these two Māori boys for us all being locked in after school. The majority of the kids disliked and bullied them in my class.
I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t dislike them because they were my friends. Perhaps even then as a boy I could see what our teacher was doing.
Our teacher was using the rest of the class as a weapon against those two young boys by encouraging the spiteful and discriminating attitudes towards them.
Tim’s choice to not conform to social pressure made all the difference to his Māori friends. Did Tim’s ability to see the humanity in others help him become a successful entrepreneur? After all, entrepreneurs succeed when they help serve the needs of others.
Tim continued his testimony:
Today, 50 years later, I am again feeling the same way as I did back in my Ranui Primary School class. The teacher is telling us all that we will continue to be locked in until 90% (or whatever) of the country is vaccinated. And further, we are told that it is the fault of the 20% (or so) that have so far chosen not to accept the two shots in the arm.
As a country, we are all encouraged to heap blame and hate towards anyone who has decided to not vaccinate.
Regardless of my own vaccination status, I have friends and family who I refuse to hate or blame.
I lay the blame exactly where it belongs. At the feet of my Primary School teacher for our detentions, not my two boyhood friends.
And at the feet of our Prime Minister for her lockdown rules, not my friends and family who have chosen to decline an injection that they don’t trust, rightly or wrongly.
Be like Tim. Be like the 10-20% of Battalion 101 who didn’t conform. Our scorn should be towards those who demand our obedience and split America into an in-group and an out-group. Become more aware when you allow your thinking to be hijacked by propaganda.
Many in the Battalion didn’t understand their crimes until decades after the war ended. Don’t wait to reflect until a future historian writes a book about how you supported tyranny by placing conformity above human rights.
Today Charles Eisenstein points out, “Many people trust the authorities and willingly comply with their rules. They face no dilemma, no initiatory moment, no self-defining world-creating choice point, not yet.”
Conforming, lacking courage, will not spare you from choices that life will demand of you. Eisenstein challenges us: “As the authorities’ narratives devolve into absurdity and their rules devolve into oppression, more and more of us face this choice: … To do what you know is right, or to cave in to the pressure, consoling yourself with words you don’t believe. ‘I had no choice.’”
We all have a personal responsibility for preserving freedom. The price of abdicating our responsibility is high. As Browning puts it, Germans paid a high price for “placing uncritical trust in the ‘firm leadership’ of seemingly well-intentioned political authority between 1933 and 1945.”
After the Crash 