Motus Mentis

Two motives must be kept in mind as we debate public policy regarding this lockdown:

First, elected politicians have one universal and overriding priority, which is to preserve their seats, and so to minimize short-term public risk. If they are faced with a choice between, say, liberty and security, they will consistently, and quite naturally, choose security. They will always find it easier, in retrospect, to defend “an excess of caution” than a reasonably taken risk that went the wrong way. This is especially true in a society such as ours, which is far beyond its advancing era of vigor and conquest, and is now in a senescent stage of addiction to ease and comfort.

The second is inherent in the nature of our dominant “progressive” cryptoreligion — the truncated soteriology that has collapsed the hierarchy of heaven and earth, and so must work, for salvation, to do the impossible: to build a perfect world from imperfect matter. This combines beautifully, and symbiotically, with the nature of electoral politics. Because the goal is always out of reach, there is always more that must be done — and because the framework is in fact a religious one, involving what passes in a secular cryptoreligion for actual salvation, and therefore the only correctly oriented aim of the faithful, it becomes the foundation of correct moral choice as well. To resist the grant of power to the State that is necessary for our collective atonement and redemption is to be a limb of Satan — and the abstract State, in its actual instantiation, is simply our government officials. And what better job security can there be than an open-ended warrant to solve a problem that can’t be solved?

So far we have had a succession of such crusades in American life: the Revolution, the abolition of slavery, the First World War, the expansion of the voting franchise, Prohibition, the civil-rights movement, environmentalism, “climate change”, and now the constellation of intersectional-grievance “justice” movements that have gripped every stone in Western civilization like a strangler fig.

The Wuhan Red Death fits into this sequence perfectly: it provides an opportunity for collective, sacrificial atonement, while at the same time giving a plausible predicate for consolidating government power, and increasing the authority of officials at every level. Moreover, it does something else that is very attractive indeed: it reorients all of society from the horizontal to the vertical, by suppressing all horizontal interactions: individual economic activity, private and civic associations, and even the physical connections between families and friends. In doing so it changes, almost at a single stroke, the social system from a “peer-to-peer” arrangement to a “client-server” model — with the State, and therefore your elected “representatives”, as the “server”.

There is, then, an overwhelmingly powerful motive to make this crisis as deep, and as lasting, as possible. At first the ostensible goal was merely “flattening the curve”, so as to protect the hospitals from being overwhelmed. We obeyed, and the goal was achieved. Now we hear, though, that the tourniquet must stay in place until there is a vaccine, or a cure, or the virus is eradicated — things that, just like the end of racism, or complete equality of outcomes, may never happen at all. It’s all for our safety and security, of course, whether we like it or not, and the proposition that ruthlessly locking everything down was the right policy is almost perfectly unfalsifiable: if the death toll turns out not to be particularly catastrophic after all, then of course we have the lockdown — and the officials who imposed it — to thank.

If all this were merely a question of public policy, it would be open to debate. That it has become instead a matter of morals — and therefore, under the hood, a matter of religion — is demonstrated by the extent to which dissent has become heresy. That dissent has in fact become heresy is shown, in turn, by the censorship of people like Dr. Knut Wittkowski, who thinks we have gone mad to be responding as we have, and whose video making this case was taken down by YouTube. (You can watch it here.)

So: motive and opportunity. The motive has been there for centuries. Rarely, though, has there ever been such an opportunity.