CORONAVIRUS LOCKDOWN, MASK AND VACCINE FAILURES REVEAL THE ARROGANCE OF HUMANISM

When I worked in a law office, a co-worker named Brian often dropped in, uninvited, to chat. Brian was a tiresomely liberal Democrat, an office gossip and a pedantic busybody. One day, Brian unilaterally decided that a picture on my wall was slightly askew. Without asking, Brian walked up to the framed farmscape, turned it and stepped away. As he did, the print fell to the floor, breaking the glass and leaving a lasting, six inch vertical scratch on the wall.

Humans have often worsened the world with their ham-handed interventions. Via technology and ever-growing central governments, opportunities to intervene in a top-down manner have inexorably broadened and deepened. The magnitude of damage caused by mass-scale efforts to control human affairs has grown commensurately. Consider military invasions to “change regimes/build nations.” Think about “urban renewal” projects that have wiped out functioning neighborhoods across America and rural development projects in other nations that have annihilated cultures, devastated natural resources and destroyed local economies. Recall the “wonder drugs” or chemicals that have sickened, killed or disfigured people and become the subjects of plaintiffs’ law firm infomercials. This list is much longer.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Innumerable works of non-fiction have directly so observed. Some I’ve read include The White Man’s Burden, The Best and the Brightest, Bringing Nature Home, Algeny, The Power Broker, Medical Nemesis and The Arrogance of Humanism.

Even Hollywood movies promote the notion that single-minded focus on some seemingly worthy cause: apprehending a criminal, winning a military battle, succeeding in athletics or finding a romantic partner, will be rewarded, and that the costs of such efforts are invariably worth the trouble. In Up in the Air, George Clooney’s co-worker earnestly asserts that if they’re trying to do the right thing, nothing can go wrong. Clooney disdainfully replies, “Is that your theory? Because I can poke holes in it.”

Those who control the media, the Democrat Party and Big Pharma saw Coronavirus as a grand opportunity to oust Trump and to consolidate power simply by scaring people. By distorting statistics and showing images of individuals on hospital stretchers, they cynically, successfully stoked fear.

An American military officer in Vietnam infamously declared, “We had to burn down this village to save it.” American politicians and their “expert” operatives have effectively said and done the same thing for the past 18 months: they’ve wrecked the country, ostensibly to save it.

The problem has been this: tens of millions of gullible Americans have uncritically bought the overreaction. They embraced the false premise that the Coronavirus would kill endlessly and indiscriminately if all did not obey elected officials and their “scientists.”

Those whom the experts and politicians duped succumbed to toxic humanism. Humanism is the notion that people are kind and wise and and can thoughtfully, actively manage and improve their world. Nothing is more important in today’s culture than to think of oneself as “nice” and “smart,” and to have others think of you this way.

But humanists lack humility. They fail to perceive the limits of their knowledge. They don’t understand that societies, economies and ecosystems are irretrievably complex. They fail to see that, as Edmund Burke observed 275 years ago, and many others have echoed since then, taking one action often causes a cascade of consequences, many of them unintended and negative.

For 18 months, the NPR listening/PBS watching/NY Times reading humanists have naively trusted a random cadre of purported, double-talking experts and government officials and bought the nonsense that if we were “all in this together,” we could “crush the virus.” We only needed to stay at home (and subsequently obey a bottomless list of ludicrous social distancing rules), wear masks and all submit to experimental injections. Throughout, the naive humanists have expressed anger at those who questioned the limits of human intervention, especially as such interventions are applied to natural systems.

Fundamentally, government, media and Big Pharma conned legions of naive, scientifically unsophisticated humanists to tolerate—and even stridently advocate— these destructive measures so that the humanists could see themselves as nice. It was especially easy for self-identifying nice people to require young people to give up vital, life-shaping interactions and experiences; most humanists were over 35, had money in the bank and/or could work from home.

Neither lockdowns, masks nor “vaccines” could possibly have crushed the virus, even in theory, much less in practice. Viruses are unimaginably small and ubiquitous, and they mutate repeatedly. Though humans travel into space and back, they haven’t conquered common cold viruses that resemble the most recent Coronaviruses.

Further, many Americans are unhealthy, principally because they are old or obese. Humanists have pretended for the past 18 months that the old, sick and obese were not at elevated risk of dying, whether infected or not. But that’s not how real life is; the old, sick and obese were, and are, at significantly higher risk.

Sanctimoniously locking down and masking up have failed. The most locked down, masked up states and cities have had the most deaths. Locking down and masking up also slowed the development of herd immunity via natural exposure. Such immunity is many times stronger and more durable than vaxx effects.

Further, as the highly credentialed anti-lockdown scientists who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration have observed, these measures have imposed vast, massive economic, social and psychological costs. In the process of ostensibly attempting to slightly extend the lives of old people— whom they never visited in nursing homes—humanists have stolen 18 irreplaceable months from hundreds of millions of Americans, especially young people. Humanists also severely damaged a world economy that serves many human needs, causing, for example, tens of millions to go hungry. These multifarious forms of damage will persist indefinitely.

Vaxxes are also in the process of failing; their limited effect wears off within a few months. And vaxxing the healthy/under 60 never made sense. The virus never seriously threatened that huge cohort. Reasonably healthy people survived infection before the vaxxes. Following the vaxx crusade, the same is true. The vaxxes have already killed tens of thousands of people and injured far more than that. Long term vaxx effects could be far worse.

The vaxxes are political cover: an attempt to justify the failed lockdowns, social distancing and mask mandates. When infections and death rates fade naturally, via infection-driven herd immunity, those who advocated the aforementioned three-prong attack will claim that the vaxxes saved the world. This will be a lie. But the larger the number of people who don’t vaxx, the harder it will be to sell that lie.

Those who bought the Coronavirus panic and the foolish notion that humans could “crush a virus” have been wrong at every turn. But lockdowners/maskers and vaxxers will never admit their errors. Because doing so would reveal that, by supporting these naive, failed and harmful measures, the interventionists/humanists weren’t as nice or as smart as they like to think they are.