My kids rarely appreciated any of my diatribes, but I shared my thoughts with them anyway, since it’s my parental duty to educate: instances of totalitarianism look different depending on the particulars, I told them - it’s not always anti-Semitism and racism, for example, but systemic perversions of power always include significant “Othering” of specific groups. And similarly, revolutions are rarely successful, and they look different too, depending on the particulars of the moment. “Then why even try, Mama?” my kids asked, disinterestedly. “If you can’t win, what’s the point?”
Well, because by now it was clear, I was sad to tell my children, that the political left - whom (I thought) used to espouse values similar to ours - and the progressives who had once been the voice of minority groups who wouldn’t ordinarily be heard, were now the ones in bed with the regulatory agencies who were sleeping with the pharmaceutical companies, and were actually fanning the flames of rising totalitarianism. (Actually, maybe the political left WERE the flames now. Or at least the lighter fluid.)
Anecdotal reports - the only sort of reports that existed, since Big Pharma had ended all vaccine safety trials after just a few months - were pouring in. Friends, relatives, friends-of-friends, and neighbors were reporting many more side effects and injuries after their shots than from covid itself. They were also all getting covid.
Our local community college, DelTech, announced their vaccine mandate in the same week that a sprinkling of news articles reiterated the fact that covid vaccines do not prevent infection nor transmission with covid. The college president issued a statement that all students and faculty must be “fully vaccinated” in order to set foot on campus.
The president refused to meet with angry faculty, students, and parents, nor justify his policy. During the protest outside of the office of the president, several dozen people stood around with signs, chatting with campus police officers. A long-time teacher at the school was next to me, calmly explaining how his religious exemption - signed by two members of the clergy at his church - was denied by the college with no explanation. Another young woman, who held an administrative position in the college offices, was told she could no longer bring her two-year-old to the campus daycare during work hours unless the toddler was vaccinated.
DelTech’s president continued to refuse to meet with anyone to discuss the topic, and failed to respond to letters and phone calls from students, faculty, parents, and community members.
About a month after our protest, the president received a raise for his Exemplary Handling of Covid - in addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars for DelTech, earmarked inexplicably for “covid relief” - from The State. Later in the season, Due To Reasons, the college withdrew their vaccine mandate entirely.
A revolution is unlikely, Kiddos of Mine! But investigating truth and standing up for it in small ways, and with great love, might be more important than ever. In a debate, your goal is not to convince your opponent, but the people observing your conversation. We must stand up for what is true and right, I told the kids, because it is the right and true thing to do. And because it shows others that standing up is still possible.
In a remarkably short time, lockdowns but now especially mandates had waged authoritarian-style economic warfare, definitely on any “counterculture” types, but most especially on working-class persons, ironically including people of color, the elderly, and other vulnerable populations. And progressives didn’t seem to mind at all.
It is quiet violence, but it is violence nonetheless, when the government removes economic privileges and jobs from those who do not comply with their rules; forces people to make a non-choice between complying and being unable to feed ones family; and censors and censures those who dare dissent from the Mainstream Narrative (“covid is so bad that we must do anything in order to stop anyone from getting it, no matter the cost; covid is so bad and there is no way to save lives except to wear masks and develop a vaccine for it; covid is so bad that even though the vaccines don’t prevent transmission nor infection nor severe symptoms and actually have significant risk of serious side effects and even increased risk of severe covid infection, we must mandate these shots and exclude from society all those who won’t get vaccinated”).
Also suddenly, having the luxury to be able to comply with the left wing political agenda was only possible if one was wealthy - such a strange switch, seemingly unseeable by those scared enough or willing enough to obey. It was certainly noticeable to all those coerced-enough to comply. The left used to be the downtrodden, the poor, the hippies! And now the left was mostly…the Rich and Powerful.
My now politically-homeless friends and I exclaimed in awe at how many of us had been taken in by the propaganda, and had seemingly lost our minds. Because it wasn’t like our own personal morals and ethics had changed over the past couple years, while it seemed as though what remained of the political left had abandoned the ideals that had once undergirded the counterculture.
And don’t even get me started on the proliferation of vaccinated-only social events, birthday parties, and weddings...
I had never felt so lonely in such an enormously inhabited world.
“…the most important thing for the State is to ensure ‘social cohesion’ — even if it takes some official lying to coax the population into lockstep. Hitler could hardly have put it better.”
—Michael Lesher
More people unsubscribed from my tiny email list than ever before. “Your views are dangerous,” said one. “I can’t see how you are anything besides a Trumper,” said another. “You hurt my FEELINGS,” stormed a third. “You might want to do a teeny bit of extra checking to see if you’ve been taken in by sources responsible for conspiracy theories,” patronized a fourth. “You’re a troublemaker.” “You’re somebody who cares about their health, but not everyone does, and we all have to stay home most of the time to protect the vulnerable people who can’t stay home, since nobody can always stay home - staying home shows solidarity.” “The vaccines don’t prevent transmission, and they don’t reduce cases, but they might reduce viral load in the nose, I think, so it makes epidemiological sense for everyone to get them to protect public health by slowing the spread, according to epidemiologist expert professionals.” “You need to stop confusing people, and keep the message simple.” “You should be wearing TWO masks right now because you should FOLLOW THE SCIENCE!!!!!”
It was almost funny, but mainly it was too surreal for tears, and I couldn’t cry anyway. Plus in October, our whole family was down and out with covid, an un-fun flu-type illness that made me personally feel surly and rageful and vengeful and sick for eight days. Who needed friends who’d unfriend you after decades of friendship for disagreeing with them? Not me, not meee, not meeeeeeeeeeee….
Big Brother is also an emergent social phenomenon. The social pressure that maintains norms, which in a healthy society embody compassion and responsibility for life, is crucial for the administration of totalitarianism. People become agents of the state, reporting on each other, censoring themselves, and by their obedience creating an appearance of universal loyalty even if, privately, they may wish to rebel.
The tendency to do evil in the name of good hints at a problem. The evil that appears to us so insane, the hunger for power that seems so monstrous and which invites the elemental label “evil” to begin with, is actually very rational. It is the inevitable conclusion of the crusade for good and against evil. Good, as an absolute concept, justifies any measure to achieve it. Evil, as an absolute concept, justifies any measure to destroy it. If you are on the side of Good, then the more power you have, the better. Power therefore becomes an end in itself…
What usually escapes commentators is that the source of this seemingly mad vision is purely rational. It is not a senseless evil. The logic is that power must have no limit when it is in the hands of us. And recall the deep taproot of the concepts of good and evil: Us is good. Them is evil. Therefore, we must, regrettably, turn even art, even sex, even science toward the ends of power. As Mussolini put it, “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”
Charles Eisenstein
If you have ever learned anything about dog training (or conversed with someone like me, who might’ve possibly at the time been pretentiously extrapolating other-animal-behavior to explain human psychology), you have likely heard the term “alpha male,” and of the innate drive for wolves to form hierarchies and dominate each other. This means you have indirectly heard about a scientist named David Mech, who has spent most of his life studying the behavior of wolves, and whose own book popularized early research on wolf pack behavior.
The only problem is, the extremely famous research findings, popularized by Mech himself, are completely false. Mech has been begging his publisher to stop publishing his 1970 book that perpetuates the falsehoods, but as of 2022 it is still in print.
The basic problem is that the original (very small amount of) research on “wolf pack” behavior, conducted in the 1940s by Rudolph Schenkel, were studies of exclusively unrelated wolves living in zoos.
In his research, Schenkel identified two primary wolves in a pack: a male “lead wolf” and a female “bitch.” He described them as “first in the pack group.” He also noted “violent rivalries” between individual members of the packs. “…small fictions of another type (jealousy) are not uncommon. By incessant control and repression of all types of competition (within the same sex), both of these “alpha animals” defend their social position.”
Thus, the alpha wolf was born. Throughout his paper, Schenkel also draws frequent parallels between wolves and domestic dogs, often following his conclusions with anecdotes about our household canines. The implication is clear: wolves live in packs in which individual members vie for dominance and dogs, their domestic brethren, must be very similar indeed.
…Schenkel studied two packs of wolves living in captivity, but his studies remained the primary resource on wolf behavior for decades. Later researchers would perform their own studies on captive wolves, and published similar findings on dominant-subordinant and leader-follower relationships within captive wolf packs…
After Mech spent his early years similarly studying and popularizing the behavior of wolf “packs” in captivity, he spent some time studying wolves in the wild - and the first thing he noticed was that the behaviors he observed were completely different from those observed by Schenkel and other watchers of zoo-bound wolves.
The concept of the alpha wolf as a ‘top dog’ ruling a group of similar-aged compatriots,” Mech writes…“is particularly misleading.” Mech notes that earlier papers…examined the potential of individual cubs to become alphas, implying that the wolves would someday live in packs in which some would become alphas and others would be subordinate pack members. However, Mech explains, his studies of wild wolves have found that wolves live in families: two parents along with their younger cubs. Wolves do not have an innate sense of rank; they are not born leaders or born followers. The “alphas” are simply what we would call in any other social group “parents.” The offspring follow the parents as naturally as they would in any other species. No one has “won” a role as leader of the pack; the parents may assert dominance over the offspring by virtue of being the parents.
While the captive wolf studies saw unrelated adults living together in captivity, related, rather than unrelated, wolves travel together in the wild. Younger wolves do not overthrow the “alpha” to become the leader of the pack; as wolf pups grow older, they are dispersed from their parents’ packs, pair off with other dispersed wolves, have pups, and thus form packs of their own.
https://mexicanwolves.org/blog-why-everything-you-know-about-wolf-packs-is-wrong/
In an article in 2008, David Mech noted that it takes 20 years before new research fully sinks in. I wonder: was he being overly optimistic?
By the winter of 2022, almost everyone I knew, vaccinated or not, had either had covid or was having covid. I knew more people who had gotten seriously ill or injured after the vaccine than had suffered from any lasting complications from covid itself. Once again, this could only be noted anecdotally. Hard Numbers seemed like an ephemeral idea that would be forever lost to history, since every time I looked it up, I found the sands shifting underneath Covid Death Counting Protocols, Covid Case Reporting, Changing Cycles of PCR Sensitivity, Viral Evolution, Definitions of Fully Vaccinated Persons, and Censorship of Anyone Trying To Tell Their Story Concerning and Receive Medical Care for Vaccine Injury. Justification for draconian policies, and a high IFR/CFR, now seemed - already years into our “pandemic” - to be completely unnecessary.
We must stand up for what is right, I told the kids, just like the truckers are doing in Canada: 90% of them are vaccinated, yet they recognize that totalitarianism is bad for everyone, regardless of political affiliation or vaccine status.
Once again, in March, Biden renewed the State of Emergency for one more year. Lots of governors did the same, and Canada certainly seemed happy to lead the parade. I could find barely any news stories about this continuation of the cancellation of our constitutional rights, just tons of headlines explaining how blocking traffic was violence even worse than actual violence, while truckers demanding meetings with elected officials to discuss unconstitutional mandates was a horribly racist situation, and that peaceful block parties in sub zero temperatures justified arrests and imprisonments, police brutality, and the government freezing people’s personal bank accounts.