“…It is clear that nothing resembling the dual-track process I have just sketched out took place among those directing the US government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. And when we consider recently published in-depth accounts of the behaviors of the people involved in these efforts, such as those of Dr. Scott Atlas and Robert Kennedy Jr., there is every reason to believe that the imposition of what could be called “policy-making autism” was carried out by design.
Indeed, this intentional bad faith was clear to me as early as March of 2020, not because I then knew anything about the serial treacheries of characters like Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield and Christian Drosten—I didn’t—but because I had spent much of the last quarter-century studying the pedagogy of nationhood; that is, the processes and mechanisms by which society’s sign-making elites seek to create and deploy new and embracing notions of “reality” among the general populaces nominally beholden to their power.
The first dead giveaway, as it usually is with such culture-planning operations, was the rigid lexical uniformity, and uncanny simultaneity of media messaging, especially in regard to the long-term historical significance of what is taking place.
No one with a modicum of proper intellectual restraint, or insight into the often serpentine routes of history, would ever deign to make prognostications about the dawn of a “new normal” in the midst of a crisis. That is, of course, unless he or she had a clear interest in establishing a narrative that through its early and frequent repetition, would effectively foreclose in all but the most hardy and self-confident thinkers the desire to pursue other interpretive possibilities.
The second was the absurdly open-ended nature of the new “war” in which—whether we agreed to it or not—we were now all said to be immersed…
And
…In the matter of rising Covid “cases,” it is similarly implied that a really negative process is underway. But the exact extent of the threat, who is most likely to suffer from it, and how severely are all left unsaid. This is the malign genius of making so-called “cases,” deprived of any worthwhile context, the fulcrum of the Covid discourse.
Responsible policy-making and policy implementation in a democratic society rely heavily on public pedagogy, which in turn, can only work in a context of respect for those to be taught.
Those tasked with leading the government effort to combat Covid (Drs. Birx, Fauci and Redfield) had ample opportunity to demonstrate that respect by carefully and frequently providing the public with the context needed to make precise sense of those vaunted case numbers. If we are to believe Scott Atlas, he effectively implored them to do so in each of his personal encounters with them.
However, they resolutely refused to do so.
There are only two possible explanations for this. a) these people are much dumber than they seem and honestly did not comprehend the grave semantic deficiencies and spiritually-damaging effects of the term “cases” in the manner they were deploying it, or b) they were quite happy to repeatedly, indeed obsessively use this floating signifier with its clearly foreboding connotations, but near complete lack of articulated relation to what most people would want to know about palpable risks, as a means of training the public to effectively detach public discourse from its empirical moorings. For me, at least, there is little doubt as to which explanation rings more true.
Once this “mini-course” in fear-tinged mental disjunction was offered to the public and accepted by it with little visible pushback in the first weeks and months of the crisis, Fauci, Birx and Redfield, along with their chosen spokespeople at the CDC and in the media, were in effect, “off to the races.”
With the basic template we rely on to make reasoned risk assessments about our lives effectively shattered, millions lapsed into the mental state that has always been the programmatic end goal of those, like Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, who design torture programs for the US government: “Learned helplessness.”
When an individual enters this regressed mental space, the stature of all those presented to him as authority figures—no matter their actual level of competence or coherence—rises dramatically.
Indeed, considerable research suggests that a lack of coherence or predictability in such authority figures only enhances the now psychically helpless person or group of persons’ estimation of the “authority figure’s” irreplaceability and excellence. This suggests that there may have been more than a little “method” in the apparent “madness” of Fauci’s notorious flip-flops on key policy issues.
For a certain part of the population, perhaps bereft of rituals and practices designed to help them transcend the crude, cruel and ambiguity-generating rhythms of our now largely transactional culture, the surrendering the self to authority can take on an almost religious allure.
In this state such people find a certain sort of peace and meaning, and in homage to it, they begin to gleefully spout, and enforce the sanctity of, the very disjunctive logic previously used by the leaders of the cult to render inert their normal critical faculties…”
