“I trust the science”.
This statement has killed more conversations than the mobile phone. Yet, we have been enchanted by a story more magical than scientific.
On 22nd February 2021, we were offered the first of a range of miraculous products to combat the Sars-Cov-2 virus (hereon known as Spike). These shamanic offerings carried strange names and no limits to what they could do.
They were all safe and effective so there was no need to test them. “Nothing up my sleeve”, was good enough for our statutory bodies.
We had to take these mercurial elixirs to save the lives of everyone we knew. Each of us channelled Jesus as the saviour of humanity.
Our sacrifice didn’t end there. We had to offer up our reason to be boxed and stored for magic to be free and do its work. We’d retrieve it later, in more rational times. For now it must be locked up and stored on a high shelf. Its place would be taken by credulity and viral sprites.
A rapidly shifting official rhetoric urged us on to a first life-saving injection which presaged a second and then a third and ……
Unencumbered by reason, we straddled each new, contradictory demand of the changing narrative.
This was about the time normal left town
In Australia, this was around the time normal decided it had had enough. It and new normal weren’t getting on.
A new fractured logic told us as long as people were unprotected and uninjected we were all in danger. These were the virus strapped suicide bombers who filled our streets, our schools, our work and our shopping centres. All with an itchy finger on the detonator..
The bombers comprised two groups. Firstly, the earnestly compliant and anxious who were ready to join any line for any injection as long as they got one. Secondly, intransigents who failed to box their reason and seem to revel in their status as terrorists.
At first, media tried to calm us and explain there were no intransigents or if they existed they were laughably small in number and sense. In this world, it was perfectly possible for them to exist and not to exist. Most of us were compliantly happy jabbers anyway.
Meanwhile, astonishing stories of the relative safety of some injections led to confusion, concern and official porkies. Suddenly, the jabs weren’t equally safe and effective.
This confusion frustrated our national desire for martyrdom. We needed to wait until our Therapeutic Goods Authority could reassure us that all of these “vaccines” were equally excellent. What would they decide? The anticipation was agonising. Happily, “vaccines” that were fairly safe, possibly unsafe, quickly became very safe because our country had this brand in abundance.
And still danger lurked and lurked. It lurked in all of our interactions with the world. There was no choice. We must shut off all contacts with our families, our friends, our schools, our work, our shops, our empathy and our curiosity. Strangely, despite being boxed, reason had shrunk to the point where empathy and curiosity easily fitted into the same box.
You will comply
Extreme urgency conveyed to the anxiously uninjected the need to address their inadequacy immediately. The intransigent were heartless, deluded, selfish victims of fake news and pseudoscience. A campaign followed to encourage the first group and bludgeon the second. It was then decided we would all be punished because some kids in the class had been naughty or negligent.
Masks carried “we are useless against Spike” warnings on the side of the box. We put on two. We adjusted as officials told us masks were useless then essential then an inspired divination told them the bashing and charging of the unmasked might help.
While the rest of us, with chins proudly pointing skywards, masked our children.
Yet Spike and his conjurers weren’t finished making demands. The shamans who had spent their lives studying (some nasty people say inventing) Spike and his friends, had made a remarkable discovery.
Though he was a prodigious leaper for his size, a 1.5 metre bound was beyond him. He would fall short of his target and be trampled under foot. Only the growing number of bootlickers that these times have uncovered would be vulnerable.
Just as we relaxed, reports came through that Omicron had the ability to hover.
Next we had to stop touching each other. Here, masks helped by reducing the charms of our most attractive. We had all become red, grey, yellow, black and brown topped versions of the same product.
Disturbing reports came through that Africans continued to sing and dance throughout this pandemic while maintaining low injections, low infections and low death rates. Were they madly irresponsible? What magic were they using? What diabolism was this? We would follow the righteous path laid out by our priestly caste. Not a note, not a step.
The Fear at the Core
And then there was the special ingredient that allowed this sorcery to do its work: FEAR.
Fear thrives in the absence of reason, empathy and curiosity. Media and government hobgoblins charmed us into a state of fear using insights gathered from their ever-expanding understanding of our nature. New and ingenious ways of manipulating us followed.
A closer examination of this might explain why so many people of a leftish bent, even now, have kept a fear-laden, death-like grip on “the science”.
One of the books I have been reading in trying to understand the Covid-19 era is Sheldon Solomon’s “Worm at the Core”. He analyzed our fear of death and its triggers. The two year, international Covid-19 campaign has invited this skeleton to spring high-kicking out the closet any time we relaxed. Fear has rarely been far from people’s minds but how has it been used?
Solomon describes conscious and unconscious death thoughts which he labels proximal and distal. Without a way of dealing with these spectres we would face an existential paralysis. We have to find ways of managing them.
The proximal thoughts are those that invade our conscious mind on a regular basis. We have a range of tricks to distract ourselves from them. What are yours?
The distal or unconscious ones creep up on us, influencing our thoughts and actions in ways that are less obvious even to us.
Our shared cultural worldviews—the beliefs we create to explain the nature of reality to ourselves—give us a sense of meaning, an account for the origin of the universe, a blueprint for valued conduct on earth, and the promise of immortality.
“The Worm at the Core” by Sheldon Solomon
page 17
I’m right, you’re wrong
Immortality? These are pretty high stakes. We often like others to reflect our values and opinions. When these are challenged we can feel threatened, angered and even a loss of self-worth. You doubt me. Spend a day or two on social media where passions often find expression in abuse and we’ll talk again.
Tests conducted by Solomon and his team describe a link between these distal or unconsciously evoked notions of death and their influence on our behaviour. He also describes people with fundamentalist views who have those beliefs reinforced when primed by thoughts of death. In turn, they may judge others outside the faith more harshly.
For some, these thoughts evoke a desire for luxury items and more money. One test showed people asked to draw coins drew them much larger when urged by skulking thoughts of death. Tests also showed that this priming prompts people to draw closer, sit nearer people who look and think like themselves.
Solomon also reflects on the rigidity or strength with which these views are sometimes held. When they are intolerant of other perspectives they may challenge another person’s life force leading to conflict. These elements have been clearly displayed and encouraged by officialdom during the current debate.
Back to our leftists, could it be that conscious and unconscious fears reinforce their notion of solidarity. Do they draw a strength and purpose from this association (see Mattias Desmet on Mass Formation)? Is that why they felt those who resisted this call for unity were not behaving as they should. This was certainly the message pushed at us, relentlessly, by mainstream media narratives and advertising.
The left doesn’t know what it doesn’t know
Another book that has shaped my thinking is Iain McGilchrist’s, “The Master and His Emissary”. I will have more to say on this in future writing but his observations on left / right brain function have a special relevance here.
McGilchrist dismisses, emphatically, the simplistic depictions of hemispherical brain activity of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, he points out modern research acknowledges stark differences that cannot be ignored.
While both hemispheres are engaged in all activities in their respective roles, the right brain’s inclination is to open, wide, vigilant attention. While when the left is dominant, it demands a narrow focused attention that locks onto something it has already decided was important.
A deeper understanding requires the study of the corpus callosum that divides the hemispheres. He suggests one of its key roles is preventing them from interfering in each other’s function. Another of McGilchrist’s observations is the tendency of the left hemisphere to dogmatism because of the way it engages the world.
In short, the left hemisphere doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. It is more interested in using the world than understanding it. It is incurious as to the true state of things outside of their utility.
Could there be a better description of the myopic, bureaucratic, controlling perspective of the current world leadership and its drive to central bank digital currencies? It seems to me this perfectly describes our relationship with the Schwabs, Gates and Trudeaus of the world.
The Bewitching
Similarly, the modern political left seems profoundly incurious. Their attention has been ever so narrowly focused on Covid deaths and they missed completely those that injections caused. They haven’t asked what is in them. They didn’t want to know about testing. They didn’t need to understand the implications for their children.
They wore masks and asked no questions. Many mask-up even though official mandates have been withdrawn. They unsocially distanced and were mute but answered calls from the police to “dob in” their neighbours.
Meanwhile, they ignored the effects of lockdowns, isolation, job losses, contradictory messaging, alarmism and masking on people’s mental state. Once again, media was of great assistance here.
They knew products like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were useless because people they didn’t like advocated them. They cheered the campaign to disparage and ban these inexpensive lifesaving drugs.
They listened to a Trusted News Initiative controlled media and believed every Covid-19 lie it told them. They didn’t ask the big question who was conducting all of this and under what authority.
They simply complied on all these matters while resenting and attacking those that didn’t.
A remarkable bewitching has achieved an equally remarkable contraction of the collective mind. Yet, there is hope that the spell is breaking. Many people have been working tirelessly to break this trance. These intransigents deserve a reward for their efforts.
We must hope that it is not too late.
It’s not about your health
This was never about your health. What Max Blumenthal and Jimmy Dore call the “lockdown left” missed that one too. In Australia, on our national broadcaster (ABC), favourites like Stan Grant explain the world to us while working for organizations like the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
Lower profile shills like Ariel Bogle and Elise Thomas also maintain links with this organization and the ABC. These two Aunty luvvies are part of a surprisingly large cabal of behavioural scientists and other spivs funded to portray those who resisted pro-vaccine propaganda as right wing mad.
So the fact ASPI is funded by the world’s leading arms manufacturers, like Thales, should be more widely understood. We should have developed by now a better understanding of what all this is about. It is about control. It is about loss of individual freedom.
And if the lockdown left think our liberty will be assured when we are shackled to a Thales digital ID wallet and the intransigents tamed, their delusion is complete.
Time to retrieve reason from that box, substitute courage for fear, put your right hemisphere back in charge and view the world anew.
You can also find this article on Katoomba Review’s substack page
Warren Ross
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