This year has given us a new ideology with totalitarian tendencies. It has a vision of hell, of heaven, and a means of transition. It has a unique language apparatus. It has a mental focus. It has signaling systems to reveal and recruit adherents.
Its vision of hell is a society in which pathogens run freely. Its heaven is a society managed entirely by medical technocrats whose main job is the suppression of all disease. The mental focus is the viruses and other bugs. The anthropology is to regard all human beings as little more than sacks of deadly pathogens. The people susceptible to the ideology are the people with various degrees of mysophobia, once regarded as a mental problem now elevated to the status of social awareness.
2020 has been the first test of lockdownism. It included the most intrusive, comprehensive, and near-global controls of human beings and their movements in recorded history. Even in countries where the rule of law and liberties are sources of national pride, people were put under house arrest. Their churches and businesses were closed. The police unleashed to enforce it all and arrest open dissent.
And remarkably, after all of this, what remains missing is the empirical evidence, from anywhere in the world, that this shocking and unprecedented regime had any effect on controlling much less stopping the virus.
One of the most famous practitioners of Lockdownism is Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes for Health. His vision of the future includes restrictions on who you can invite into your home, the end of all large events and family get-togethers, perhaps an attack on family pets and the effective dismantlement of all cities. He has even gone so far as to issue a Manifesto.
According to Fauci’s distorted vision for society as a whole, society must change their behavior, a change he admits could take decades, in order to “live in greater harmony with nature.” Society must “rebuild the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues and prioritize changes in those human behaviors that constitutes a risk for the emergence of infectious diseases.” Chief among those changes is the “reduction of crowding at home, work and in public places as well as minimizing environmental perturbations such as deforestation, intense urbanization, and intensive animal farming.”
And that is not all, we must “end global poverty; improve sanitation and hygiene by reducing unsafe exposure to animals so that potential human pathogens have limited opportunities for contact.” He reminds us that many deadly pandemic diseases either didn’t exist or were not a significant problem until international travel which allowed bacteria in regional ecosystems to spread.
This realization, he write, “leads us to suspect that some, and probably very many, of the living improvements achieved over recent centuries come at a high cost that we pay in deadly disease emergencies. Since we cannot return to ancient times, can we at least use lessons from those times to bend modernity in a safer direction? These are questions to be answered by all societies and their leaders, philosophers, builders, and thinkers and those involved in appreciating and influencing the environmental determinants of human health.”
Reading his utopian plan for a society without disease helps explain one of the strangest features of lockdownism: its puritanism. Notice that the lockdown particularly attacked anything that resembles fun: Broadway, movies, sports, travel, bowling, bars, restaurants, hotels, gyms, and clubs. Still now there are curfews in place to stop people from staying out too late — with absolutely no medical rationale. Pets are on the list too. If an activity is fun, it is a target.
Did you notice Fauci’s subtle references to the U.N.’s Sustainable Living agenda scam regarding population control, and the reduction of consumption of meat?
Fauci’s Manifesto is sheer fanaticism, a kind of insanity wrought by a wild vision of a one-dimensional world in which the whole of life is organized around disease avoidance. And there is an additional presumption here that our bodies (via the immune system) have not evolved alongside viruses for a million years. No recognition of that reality. Instead the sole goal is to make “social distancing” the national credo. Let us speak more plainly: what this really means is forced human separation. It means the dismantlement of markets, cities, in-person sports events, and the end of your right to move around freely.
His entire argument rests on a simple error: the belief that more human contact spreads more disease and death. In contrast, Oxford’s eminent epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta argues that globalism and more human contact has boosted immunities and made life vastly safer for everyone.
The lockdowners have had surprising success in convincing people of their wild views. You only need to believe that virus avoidance is the only goal for everyone in society, and then spin out the implications from there. Before you know it, you have joined a new totalitarian cult.
The lockdowns are looking less like a gigantic error and more like the unfolding of a fanatical political ideology and policy experiment that attacks core postulates of civilization at their very root.
It’s time we take it seriously and combat it with the same fervor with which a free people resisted all the other evil ideologies that sought to strip humanity of dignity and replace freedom with the terrifying dreams of intellectuals and their government sock puppets.
Source: Lockdown: The New Totalitarianism by Jeffrey A. Tucker, American Institute for Economic Research
