“Western governments and ruling classes can easily afford Religious Freedom for the commoners because they no longer use religion as the primary means of justifying their power. Temporal authorities force upon the populace the belief systems that they control and that they use to justify their power, which are now science and democracy as defined by the state.”
—Nevermore Media
In a tiny silver lining, I resumed correspondence with three old friends with whom I hadn’t spoken in years. We expressed collective awe at the current level of crazy, and it was good to hear that other people were making some kind of noise, even if it wasn’t in my precise neighborhood.
Despite my own strong feelings about the rationale behind and (lack of) evidence supporting the mandates (first for masks and curfews, and later for vaccines), I still strongly believed that it’s quite important that you do you. If it turned out the orders given by the Department of Defense and the CDC et al were the actions you personally deemed correct for your own self and your family, then you should have every right to do that which was right for you.
The disturbing thing about it was (and still is), even dear friends and family were (and still are) actively excoriating and excluding those who didn’t fall into lockstep and follow the rules. And nobody I know has apologized.
The message from the political left now sounded a lot like this: Do and Think the Right Things, Be A Member of One of the Few Marginalized Identity Groups We Protect…or stay well hidden so no one knows I associate with you…or go to hell.
News, as opposed to propaganda, should consist of information. News stories should not consist of political messaging and instructions for how to think and behave upon receipt.
Like 1984 but in real life, the left wing pressure to Goodthink in 2020 become so immense and sudden and suffocating that when I contemplated the reality of keeping my current social circle - vs. letting go of relationships and support I had imagined would endure for a lifetime - I stopped being able to cry. The grief and anger was way more than I wished to share with my kids, but it oozed from my pores for months. Years, actually.
We moved across the country in September, and I learned that while there were a few other homeschooling families in our new hometown, with kids the same ages as mine, the progressive liberals among them “weren’t seeing new people.”
Had the left always been this way, and I’d never noticed? Or had the strangeness been building for a while, only to burst into its true political firestorm of colors right now? According to The NY Times et al, there were two points of view about any given topic: the right one, and the wrong one. The narrative, and the conspiracies. The democrats, and the racists. The people who did what they were told, and the people who did evil things.
I could barely believe it. And my life was privileged! My husband hadn’t lost his job due to lockdowns. We had been homeschooling for ten years already. Each day, I woke up in my home to a strangely quiet Groundhog Day, and then there would be meals to cook, and children whining. “When can we see people?”
“When will this END?!” one child in particular would cry every day, before dissolving in an I-give-up slump of depression and rage. Then maybe there would be yet another tantrum, followed by a session with a new graphic novel on the couch.
Out in society was the deluge of new rules, and almost all of my friends and family - plus supposedly, half the voting public - who supported the existence of such rules. And this was NOT right. This wasn’t I-do-me, you-do-you. These were freaking authoritarian orders, the number and exact specifications of which mostly depended on the political orientation of your state’s governor and/or your town’s mayor. It was not enough to spontaneously begin signaling your belief in an entirely unproven theory of preventing the transmission of respiratory virus aerosols by wearing masks; according to the as yet unwritten yet absolutely-understood progressive rulebook, it was entirely reasonable to label someone a fascist and a grandma-killer if she didn’t wear one, and do that “labeling” out loud and in public. Just as suddenly, the toddlers were wearing masks too. We were supposed to understand that any and all authoritarian behaviors could be excused because someone Felt Fearful and Oppressed Enough.
American Heritage Dictionary: “socialism - any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.”
I pointed out again, to whomever would listen, that no evidence apart from mathematical “models” existing once again only in Theory could find a correlation between mask usage and a reduction in serious respiratory illnesses or deaths. I still couldn’t find any studies indicating that masks could prevent illness from covid or any other virus transmitted via aerosols.
But that was no problem! To be on the safe side, said the chipper newscasters, it would be better for everybody to hide in their houses until the vaccine was ready. Voila! Perfectly confounded epidemiology at its finest: Practicing masksandsocialdistancing proved that masks and social distancing are Very, Very Important in avoiding covid and every other infectious disease, even while the importance of understanding the difference between dying With covid vs. dying From covid seemed to be forgotten, along with any attempts to calculate an IFR and CFR based on actual population-testing statistics. Not to mention that there was a thousand-fold difference in mortality risk between a chronically ill senior citizen and a child - most of the latter of whom were still being confined to their homes to avoid getting a virus that many of them had already had.
Meanwhile, suffering from chronic diseases like diabetes was actually correlated with an enormously increased risk of dying from covid. Also, I wanted to yell, so many chronic diseases are firmly correlated with dying, and we never barely EVER talk about these on the news! For the first time in a century, this current generation of children was projected to live shorter lives than their parents, because average lifespans in the developed world were actually going down.
But masks were super definitely absolutely totally important! Whereas changing one’s diet to reduce sugar and processed foods, which can significantly improve blood sugar numbers in as quickly as six weeks’ time, was never even mentioned as relevant by any bureaucrat anywhere. Imagine how our collective health might have improved if we’d cut out processed foods and sugar for the past year of lockdowns…
When I pointed out this logic, people who had known me for decades called my opinions “dangerous” and “hurtful,” and rebuked me for my failure to comply with The Rules, which I surely would do if only I understood that “people are scared” and one must “believe in science” in order to “get back to normal.”
If my kids express interest, I tell them that there is plenty of disagreement about the exact definitions of various political terms, but some agreement as well:
Wikipedia: “authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting. …States that have a blurred boundary between democracy and authoritarianism have sometimes been characterized as ‘hybrid democracies’, ‘hybrid regimes’ or ‘competitive authoritarian’ states.”
As far as I can tell, there are many types of authoritarianism. A single supreme dictator would obviously qualify; totalitarian regimes are by definition authoritarian; and fascism refers to a form of authoritarianism that particularly enforces citizens’ nationalistic behavior and loyalty.
Merriam Webster: “fascism - a political philosophy, movement, or regime…that exalts nation…above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.”
Merriam Webster: “totalitarian - of or relating to a political regime based on subordination of the individual to the state and strict control of all aspects of the life and productive capacity of the nation especially by coercive measures (such as censorship...)”
I found this comment on Quora.com:
“Totalitarian rule is called this because the power of those who govern extends to every aspect of life and society; in other words, total rule. They tell you what to say, what to think, where to live, what to study, where to work, etc. Obviously, because of the difficulty of controlling large populations minutely, no pure form of totalitarian government has ever existed. However, Soviet Communism, German Nazism and Italian Fascism attempted to be totalitarian, but for very different reasons.” https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-similarities-and-differences-between-authoritarian-and-totalitarian-theory
Citizens in an authoritarian regime (say, under the reign of a dictator) do not necessarily support the intrusive rules of the state, but totalitarian situations can evolve almost organically, no dictator needed, when citizens are totalitarized: that is, when a majority of citizens become willing to not only submit to but actually internalize and enforce the intrusive rules of the state.
According to Matthias Desmet in “The Psychology of Totalitarianism”, a large percentage of a population must be experiencing four things in order for totalitarianism to achieve momentum:
1. Lack of social bonds or meaningful relationships.
2. Lack of meaning in the world (for example, having meaningless jobs).
3. Large amounts of free floating anxiety, which in some cases has no discernible cause.
4. Large amounts of unvented frustration and aggression.
As the months went by, into and through 2021, I daily explained to my kids that I still didn’t totally understand what was going on, and that nobody else really seemed to either. I explained that a lot of people were still very scared, even though it had been over a year of the same fear campaign with few updates, and the virus was _still_ not nearly as bad as those in charge kept saying it might be, and none of the so-called Public Health Authorities would share their proprietary definitions of how bad “bad” needed to be in order to qualify as Bad, anyway.
Maybe there were a ton of other people just as skeptical I was, but Social Distancing guidelines were doing a good job of destroying what remained of communities everywhere, and I wasn’t meeting many. I told my kids that it was a crime, how all the information about effective ways to treat severe covid were still being censored in every form of media. I told my kids that a lot of things were very wrong: adults were confused, and children should be allowed to play with each other.
Some of my kids were so depressed about not having much social interaction, and so tired of me talking about covid policy, that they just glared at me darkly each time I spoke. And I just kept parroting words about “truth” and “right and wrong” because I had to remind my own self, in addition to my kids, what the point of it all was, anyway.
In March, Biden extended the State of Emergency for another year. He did so quietly, with little fanfare. How easy it seemed to dismantle a republic while consolidating control! I couldn’t imagine any president going forward who wouldn’t similarly want to keep such a State of Emergency going indefinitely.
Desmet reinvented the wheel, as far as I can tell. I think Fromm already said it in his 1941 /Escape From Freedom/.
And we must keep in mind that the vocabulary (e.g. totalitarian, fascist, socialist, etc.) is imposed upon us by our narcissistic & sociopathic Ruling Class, i.e. “the winners write the history books.” Just like domesticated grass seed-based religion, these economic & political “science” 😂 technical jargon are entirely self-referential - arbitrary, even capricious, but definitely **propagandistic** - not scientific.
There’s no science in PolySci, alright? 😂The Soviets had their versions of Economic **science** & PolySci, too.
Neolithic socioeconomic systems & Neolithic religions are self-referential for precisely the same reason: because they ignore the 40,000+ Paleolithic years that our species existed - actually it thrived! - as physiologically & psychologically Modern Man.
I’ll briefly digress, in a probably vain attempt, to disarm any churchgoers in the audience by saying that I do tell my children that God is real - they’ve already begun bringing the There-is-no-god pop cultural filth into the household (!) - but I tell them that nobody can tell them who God is. Plus, I tell them that religion is a strange way to believe in God 😂
That said, all these Neolithic modes of being & ethnocentric biases are self-referential. That’s why they cannot predict.
Science 1) explains & 2) predicts.
Neolithic Ethnocentrism limits the mind; it’s anti-scientific. It prevents accurate explanation & accurate predictions.
Anyways, all of the PolySci & Economic technical jargon is synonymous with each other, e.g. capitalism & collectivism are synonymous. Another perspective: Whether Mesopotamia or pre-Colombian Meso-America, the USSR or the USA versions of Intensive Agricultural Civilizations, __all__ socioeconomic systems can be described as
“pyramidal, hierarchical, socioeconomic structures of slavery & servitude unto concentrated, privatized, dynastic wealth.”
Today’s China, Mao’s China, same difference, and same as we are, here in the God blessed USA 😂
The technical jargon is all synonymous. And our academic & religious & pop cultural “educations,” literally indoctrination, is foisted upon us by the narcissistic & sociopathic Ruling Class. Ironically, their perverse souls are as much a product of dysfunctional plant-centered dieting as we downtrodden Workin’ Stiffs’ perverse souls.
This is what plant-centered dieting does to culture - to the human body, mind, & soul. Always the same: the same Wild Goose Chases, the same Moral Detours from “God ‘n’ Mother Nature’s intention.”
Those mid-20th century “overcrowded rat” experiments (that kids might be introduced to in high school Psychology class or Psych 101 at university) eloquently 1) explain & 2) predict how ‘n’ why Intensive Agricultural Civilization perverts the biological wild-type Human Spirit.
Just like those poor experimental rats end up acting in very uncharacteristic ways for their species under conditions of overcrowding + malnutrition, so we, too, are perverted from our True Nature by capitalism-collectivism, whatever terminology you choose - because it’s all Neolithic plant-centered dieting socioeconomic structures.
These millennia-old conditions are:
1. chronic overwork,
2. chronic malnutrition, and
3. chronic overcrowding, which invariably & predictably & very **understandably** results in
4. chronic STRESS !!!, which
is NOT native to our species.
Our clever species evolved under conditions of acute + periodic stress, which sharpens the mind - and Mother Naturally develops a Grateful Soul unto “God,” however you might understand God.
Chronic stress is the Farmer’s lot in life, but we Modern Workin’ Stiffs, today, wouldn’t know it except for 20th century anthropology, which reveals that our native work week was about 20 hours 😂, not the farmer’s 80 hours 😂 which is still the contemporary suburbanite’s work week, including house work, shopping, cooking, commuting, paperwork, etc..
—> Our species is supposed to laugh ‘n’ play many, many more hours per week than we work. Thus is the scientific explanation for “the better angels of our nature.” Unfortunately, Copper Age & Iron Age religion is profoundly ignorant of the **fundamentals** of human psychology & physiology. <—
I’ll end here. Obviously I’ll talk your ear off, but I can’t tell if anyone’s interested (interested in stepping out from Psychologically Comfortable Ethnocentric Biases and into Real Science, not the TV set’s fake “science”), but anyways, I do enjoy this opportunity to validate myself; we’re all adrift in a Sea of Ignorance. They call it the “Curse of Awareness” for a reason, you know 😂
But Matias’s four points were already made in Fromm’s work, which I reiterate in my four points above. Briefly, these conditions that predispose the sheeple to “authoritarianism” or witch burning or “democracy” are __ever present__ under Mother Unnatural conditions of Intensive Agricultural Civilization.
They don’t come ‘n’ go. They’re always present; we’re always surrounded by fxxxing morons 😂, more accurately & precisely defined as “Grain Brains,” or as dispirited, tamed animals in captivity, “free range humans,” mockingly describing to our 21st century serfdom by referring to free range chickens 😂
But Jesus & the Buddha, etc. were correct: you’re more than what you think you are, but you’re not, today, who ‘n’ what you’re meant to be 👍❤️
Thanks,
Gerald