Who Will Stand for Freedom?
The public have come to associate freedom with death, and lockdown and restriction with life. But the data doesn’t support this association. So why is it so pervasive?
In the year of our Lord 2020, an entire global civilization turned its back on freedom.
Freedom will kill everyone, we were told. The World Health Organization gushed praise for the way China had handled its outbreak, and tough as it might be, we all had to do the same — China was the model.
Lock down, hard and fast. It was the only way.
And, after all, it was only temporary, right? A brief pause, just a few weeks of authoritarian rule, the virus would cease to be, and then we could go back to being free again.
We complied. We were frightened. After all, this could be another Spanish Flu, which killed 50 million people, and they kept telling us we were “due” for another. We regarded a temporary loss of freedoms as regrettable but necessary. We closed our schools and offices and restaurants. We shut down our air traffic, closed our borders. We stocked up on some things. We stayed home. We swallowed a bitter pill.
We did this willingly. No one, to my recollection (at least no one we need take seriously) ever made the case that we ought to die free, rather than live locked down.
Lockdown meant life, so we did it.
But as the weeks wore on, we learned some things:
● The virus is ten times less deadlier than the initial models showed. But it’s also way more deadly than we thought. (Wait… what?)
● It really only kills people who are immune-compromised, unhealthy, or dying of something else. But it can strike indeterminately and kill anyone. (Hmm…)
● Most people have broad cross-immunity from other coronaviruses. But this is highly virulent and new (“novel”) so no one has immunity to this.
● Asymptomatic spread is extremely rare and never the main driver of epidemics. But asymptomatic spread is our biggest enemy right now and everyone is a potential spreader.
● Staying inside is awful for your immunity and makes you obese and more susceptible to infection. But don’t go out of your home unless necessary, “self-isolate”, and interact with the world through a web cam.
● There are proven things you can do to naturally boost your immunity, so do those. Except those things are unproven and crackpot science, so definitely don’t do them.
● There are safe and effective treatments, and many countries are using them, just as they’ve been using them for a wide variety of conditions for decades. But all those are unproven and crackpot and now we’re making them illegal, because pharmaceutical science is the only proven science. Also the doofus-in-chief mentioned them in a press briefing, so they’re now forbidden. (You don’t want to be a doofus do you?)
● The man way we can stay healthy and slow the spread is by covering our faces in cloth, which definitely, for sure, sometimes, maybe works, except it when it doesn’t — and has never worked in a randomized control trial. But do it as a symbol anyway. “We’re all in this together”.
Etc.
Okay.
How, we thought, is the rational layperson supposed to make sense of all this?
“Trust the science,” we were told.
But when you unpack what that really meant, it was: “trust the authorities”. Because, taken literally, “trust the science” meant trust a endless stream of conflicting (sometimes wildly conflicting) viewpoints… which means, in the real world, everyone will just “trust the science” they want to trust. Which gets us precisely nowhere.
But at least all this was being being discussed and fairly debated in an atmosphere of cooperation and open scientific inquiry, right?
I hear you laughing.
No, this information was fought over, sometimes viciously, in an atmosphere of mismeasurements, misunderstandings, misinterpretations, misrepresentations, accusations, outright lies, corruption, vast wealth transfer, doublespeak, flip-flopping, ass-covering, virtue signaling, name-calling, censorship, de-platforming, fear-mongering, fear of speaking out, lost careers, vilification, propaganda, and political maneuvering.
Phew. Deep breath.
So, who to trust? More and more, the answer seemed to be: no one.
Some of us began to voice concerns, and suggest, in our wee-est voices: “Hey, of course we want to be safe and all, but is anybody else wondering if total lockdown of the entire populace, including the healthy, is necessary? After all, humanity has never done that before. And shouldn’t there be, I don’t know, rules as to what elected (and unelected) officials can and cannot do, even in a supposed “crisis”? And when will this “temporary” situation be over? Is anyone else concerned that we’ve signed up for a more-or-less permanent loss of liberty here?”
“F*** your rules!” was the refrain, “And f*** your liberties! People are dying!”
Okay, we sighed. And we went on complying. (If a little more suspiciously).
The weeks wore on to months.
Some of us suggested we at least discuss a measured approach, such as the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated protecting the most vulnerable while having the least impact on the rest of society. Not every country locked down hard, we pointed out. Some countries like Sweden and Japan took a more measured approach, and seemed to be doing no worse, and in some cases better. Also weren’t the lockdowns in direct violation of the WHO’s own written rules regarding pandemic response, which specifically say that interventions have to be measured against the enormous cost to society?
No, came the response. Lies. All those “moderate” countries are evil and killing their citizens horribly. And the dissenting views are “conspiracies” and “misinformation” and “anti-science” and dangerous and to be scrubbed from the social media platforms.
Woah. So we’re really only considering the C.C.P.’s way of doing things, I guess… including rigidly controlling access to dissenting viewpoints via the Internet, since people are too stupid to think for themselves and must be spoon-fed only state-authorized information?
Is it time to be concerned about our freedoms, yet?
“Nope. Not in the least. Temporary.”
All right…
Of course you can’t really scrub information from the Internet entirely, so, we continued to learn. Most importantly, we learned about the unintended consequences of lockdowns:
● billions of days of lost education worldwide, especially for the poorest children
● 110K US businesses closed permanently
● bankruptcies up 40%
● 15K additional Alzheimer’s deaths
● increases in cardiac arrests (but decrease in EMS calls, owing to fear of going to hospital)
● projected increases of cancer deaths over the next five years
● 82% global increase in food insecurity
● 168K child hunger deaths predicted in Africa
● Globally 12K additional hunger deaths per day (including 6K children per day)
● 50 million new Americans with food insecurity (including 17 million children)
● 70K New Zealand children pushed into poverty
● 2 million UK families pushed into poverty
● 150 million people globally forced into extreme poverty
● 2 million new Filipino families starving
● suicide rates at record high levels
● the highest ever drug overdose death rate in any twelve month period, ever
● record murder rates
● 500K additional deaths related to HIV
● a doubling of malaria deaths to 770K per year
● 1.5 million additional tuberculosis deaths
● an estimated 2.3 million additional child deaths in the next year…
(These are just some of the (ghastly) highlights. For a truly horrifying read I suggest you check out Rational Ground, which is filled with data and science that you are not hearing on the news.)
“Enormous cost to society,” indeed. And the award for massive understatement goes to the WHO.
So…
Game over, right? We tried, but time to admit we screwed up. We are now, in the name of “safety”, causing deaths in the millions. We turned a public health concern into a full on global catastrophe with our response. We panicked, understandably so, but time to dust ourselves off, admit we messed up, restore society and get on with life and business and freedoms. I mean, no one could possibly look at that list of not only economic devastation and crime and poverty, but deaths, far, far outstripping virus deaths, and continue, in any good conscience, or logic, to support lockdowns…
Right?
Even the WHO, standing in the ruins of the civilization it ordered destroyed, reluctantly admitted: “We really do appeal to all world leaders, stop using lockdown as your primary method of control.”
But the world was past hearing it.
Freedom was the enemy. And anyone speaking up on behalf of freedom (or even raising the conflicting opinions of more moderate scientists) was attacked as viciously selfish, in favor of people dying a horrible respiratory death, a “denier”, a “conspiracy theorist”, and even a “domestic terrorist”.
Now we stand, a year and change into our “temporary” loss of freedoms, in a worldwide police state controlled by righteous heads of state bellowing for even harsher lockdowns. Closed borders. Travel prohibitions. Curfews. You may only leave your home for one hour a day. Do not go further than one mile from your home for any reason. Outdoor mask mandates (even though not one variant has been showed to spread outdoors, ever). Forbidden assemblies. Police in riot gear invading churches to ensure compliance. Quarantine camps for those who test positive…
Are we talking about China and Russia and Iran here?
Nope. We’re talking about the UK, New Zealand, Australia, Spain, Italy, Germany, France, and Canada.
So much for the free world. The “free world” has taken what we use to think of as “oppression” and tripled down on it. They’ve made China and Russia look like gardens of laissez-faire by comparison.
And, somewhat bewildered, we’re left here in our new “safe” societies holding data we can point to showing that there is absolutely no correlation between harsh lockdowns and good outcomes like reduced hospitalization and deaths.
And that worse outcomes have everything to do with geography, prior health and immunity (i.e., vulnerability), and nothing whatever to do with lockdowns or lockdown stringency.
And that some of the harshest lockdown states have had some of the worst outcomes…
We shake our heads in bewilderment as an important press conference gets removed from YouTube citing “misinformation”. What misinformation? Simply that statistics (from the CDC, mind you) show that mortality and hospitalizations have been worse in California (a harsh lockdown state) than they have been in Florida (a no lockdown state), despite Florida having a more elderly and vulnerable population.
So the CDC now, according to YouTube, is a source of “misinformation”. And was this information brought to light by a bunch of cranks and conspiracy theorists? Well only if you consider a national health care policy advisor, an infectious disease epidemiologist and professor of theoretical epidemiology, a researcher and professor of medicine, and a biostatistician, epidemiologist and professor of medicine to be “cranks”. And only if you consider the places they hold positions: Stanford University, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Oxford, to be hotbeds of “conspiracy”.
So, we’re left with:
a. Data showing no correlation between lockdowns and good outcomes (and in some cases showing much worse outcomes);
b. data showing the horrific effects of lockdowns across the rest of society, including deaths of millions to poverty, suicide, and other diseases that we, for some reason, now have ceased caring about;
c. an overwhelming support of lockdown as a strategy, in spite of experts (and even the WHO) recommending against it;
d. an atmosphere of silencing anyone who questions it.
But the “F*** your freedoms, people are dying!” chant goes on.
Why?
Why Freedom is so Reviled Now
In a word, fear.
The fearful will always run headlong into the arms of tyranny.
Any would-be tyrant knows this. You don’t become a successful tyrant by crushing the populace under your fist — that’s how you create resistance. Instead you trade on people’s fears, vilify an enemy, propagandize, and convince the populace it will be much safer in the soothing shadows of your fist. And pretty soon they are scrambling to squeeze between your fingers.
But good thing we all recognize propaganda when we hear it, right? Good thing we see vilification and fearmongering and censorship as blatant manipulation. Good thing we live with healthy skepticism, and courage, and never comply to corporations, elected office holders, and media who want to control our minds and behavior, right?
I hear you laughing again.
Fear is the human default. It has never not been.
For years, I didn’t understand this. I could not piece together why so many people felt this impulse for restriction and control over their fellow humans. Couldn’t they see that we are our happiest and most prosperous when we are free?
Then I read Eckhart Tolle. He explained that chronic fear comes from ego-identification, and the ego is constantly broadcasting one overarching message: that it is afraid of not existing. This constant fear of ego-death controls every other aspect of our lives, especially our social lives. It makes us see other people, especially those we don’t agree with, as a threat that must be wiped out or controlled.
This fear is pervasive in humanity.
The solution to that threat is to exercise power over Them. This is why Eckhart Tolle says: “power over others is weakness disguised as strength.” Much like a schoolyard bully, it is weakness, ego-created fear, which makes someone seek power over others.
For decades now, in our silence, we’ve been cultivating a fertile garden for anti-freedom sentiment to grow, tilling it and fertilizing it with fear. The media, in particular, have become masterful at this. No surprise then, now that the garden has bloomed, people have eagerly handed away their freedoms, en masse.
Fear of the Other is at a historical zenith. We’ve been taught to fear every other human around us, to see every Other as a source of pathogen and death, even to wear a visible outward symbol on our faces, obliterating any possibility of connection through facial expression, dehumanizing them, reminding us that everyone who is not us, every single one, represents non-existence, threat, Death.
The fearful, egoic mind has never felt so “right”, so justified in its terrified view of the world.
And what, to the egoic mind, is the answer?
Control.
Lockdown. Mask. Restrict travel. Close businesses. Close schools. Meetings are illegal. Family get-togethers are illegal. Religious services and funerals are illegal. If anyone defies this? Ostracize them. Heap scorn and shame on them. Spy on them. Teach your kids to report on them. Attack them. Pepper-spray them. Fines. Bans. Arrest. Imprisonment. Quarantine camps. If you’re a really enterprising tyrant, you can even execute people for defying your restrictions.
Fear and control.
It’s for the “good of the community”.
Said every tyrant, ever.
But, There is an Awakening
I’ve heard some suggestion that governments have put themselves in a sticky bind: they portrayed the virus as far more deadly than it was, but now they cannot admit the error. To admit this would be to admit all the suffering was for nothing and the public outrage would be massive. So they need an out to say that everything is swell again without ever admitting having done anything wrong. Enter the vaccines. Vaccinate enough people and they can claim the “crisis over” and restore freedom.
Sure, that might happen. I hope so.
But what about the next “crisis”? And the one after that? What about seasonal resurgences? What about outbreaks that will surely crop up here and there?
From the beginning of the pandemic I’ve heard people say, almost as if they’re trying to convince themselves rather than me, “This too shall pass. We will get to the other side of this.”
But think of what we’ve backed ourselves into here. The rule we’ve tacitly agreed to is that any time there is anything for us to be afraid of (which, let’s face it, is always) it’s fine for our heads of state, public health officials, representatives, governors, county judges, local law enforcement, you name it, to become barons and kings and overlords and stormtroopers, effectively suspending our liberties until they deem fit to return them.
Constant “emergency powers”, for any reason, and for as long as they see fit.
Whatever that is, it’s not freedom.
Freedom, at its essence, is the acknowledgment that force is the wrong way to deal with people. You know… what we teach to our kids, but somehow forget as adults.
The other thing we forget is that we’re not alone.
“Freedom is the language of spirit, control the language of ego. Spirits want to be free.” I heard this the other day on a podcast, and it was like a bucket of ice water to the face.
The speaker, a comedian, reminded the audience that if we only pay attention to the news media we may get the impression that everyone around us is a zombie or mindless slave willing to go along with whatever the authorities say is in our best interests, and that we’ve hit a species-wide swift eject button on critical thinking. And you, who are concerned with your vanishing liberties, are alone.
That comedian reminded us, it’s just not true.
There are billions of like-minded people out there who are silent, all despairing in the belief that they too, are alone.
But the silence is breaking.
People are opening their businesses in defiance of lockdown orders. Local law enforcement are standing up to their state governments, refusing to enforce the tyranny (even when threatened with defunding). There are some states in the US that are opening (though one wonders for how long, given the media backlash against them.) People are holding their religious observances, and defiantly driving the authorities from their property. Petitions to remove such formerly-lauded governors as Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo from office have reached signatures in the millions. Protests have sprung up in the UK and Germany and France and Spain and Israel and other places.
Most importantly, I think, people are turning away from traditional media and seeking out their own information.
The world is wakening to the tyranny. They are starting to realize that these “temporary emergency measures” are nothing of the sort. They are beginning to see the widespread authoritarianism not as a regrettable and temporary necessity, but as a slippery slope to all-out, and permanent, despotism.
Still, we hear the “F*** your liberties, people are dying!” argument, from people who believe they are standing on moral high ground. I’m sorry, but at this point, that ground has turned to swamp. The hidden premise is: “freedom kills”, but we know this just isn’t true. It’s a false association people have come to accept, largely without questioning it. The data shows no such correlation. We have data with some freer states showing better outcomes (or at minimum, no worse outcomes). We have the science that shows deaths are associated with vulnerabilities and geography, not with restrictions or the lack thereof. And we know that lockdowns generate poverty, suicides, hunger, and untreated diseases…. yet we have flagrantly embraced them. We should, with full knowledge that we are standing on the moral high ground, say:
“F*** your lockdowns, people are dying.”
Remember, lifting lockdowns doesn’t mean we have to “let it rip”. We can be smart, take moderate measures, protect the vulnerable, as many scientists have been arguing now for months (and as the WHO recommended in their literature). But the rest of us have to get back to living and opening our businesses and creating the material prosperity that keeps us out of poverty and hunger and disease.
Police in riot gear breaking up religious services is not a way to fight a virus. Not in any kind of society that makes sense. That is a society gone mad with hysteria.
I understand the lure of force. It’s an expedient. It’s a fast way to shut down someone who frightens you. Lord knows there have been times when I’ve wanted to pass a law or lock someone up or open their head-casing and yell into their brain in order to change what they think. If that were enacted by an entire society it would mean that “might makes right”, i.e., whoever is the most forceful gets to tell you how to live and think. If that sounds fine to you, ask the Muslim Uyghurs, Falun Gong practitioners, and Tibetan Buddhists how they feel about living in such a society.
Putting your fellow human in chains is not a solution. It is a capitulation to the egoic god: fear.
I believe that humans have rights, and they’re not privileges granted from an authority when they feel like it, or when everything is going really swell. They are natural rights. That means they apply with or without an authority, at all times, and specifically act as a check on that authority’s power. We all possess them, regardless of who is in power, or what’s going on in the world, whether our society is fearful or not, or has turned tyrannical or not. Freedom is not a luxury of the affluent or applicable only in good times. It is necessary, for all people, in all times.
If I could scream a warning at humanity right now it would be that we are racing, in the name of “Safety”, away from anything resembling civil rights or individual liberty or self-determination. We have entered, willingly, into a Black Mirror world, controlled and monitored by tech companies, functioning by permission of health authorities. Things we once regarded basic rights — the ability to open our place of business and have it patronized by willing customers, the ability to congregate with whomever we wish, the ability to speak our mind and not have it censored, the ability to move freely from one place to another — now only happen at the permission of authorities and large corporations and media, and absent that permission, we reside in chains.
Humans cannot function in chains. We wither and die. It is already happening.
Have you ever read about some awful tyranny that came to be in some distant past, and wondered: “How did people go along with it? How did no one stand up and fight it?”
Look around you. Look at all the fear. This is how.
History will judge us, in turn.
Some of us will go on standing for freedom. Sneer if you wish, but if you should one day find yourself in chains, wondering how you got there, remember when you sneered.
And remember you might have stood instead.
“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.” — Benjamin Franklin
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” — CS Lewis