Our psychic meltdown

 This regrettable and destructive series of events is why some believe the response to COVID-19 was the equivalent of a nuclear economic and social conflagration – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara 

• The atomic bomb changed the world forever. Its use raised the greatest moral questions in modern history which rational individuals debated and continue to debate. A consensus emerged early on, which remains in place, that nuclear weapons must never be used again. And eternal vigilance is called for. COVID did nothing by comparison. But the cuckoo response, and the aftermath like the Sri Lankan economic default, certainly enabled by months of complete economic shutdown when there were virtually no undue deaths anywhere in evidence, and the PCR test fraud, with different amplification settings everywhere was providing for bogus “case” hysteria, was seismic in impact
• Our psyche needs restoration. Future inflection points will call out. And they will likely require and demand a more courageous and creative response, and we must rise to that, and not be so readily inflamed by propaganda and pyrotechnics. Through all that unfolds, we must safeguard the advances of human liberty and seek to expand them

Cinematically Oppenheimer is an epic film, and an extraordinary cinematic achievement by widespread critical consensus. Eminent scientists including Albert Einstein had warned of the consequences of the Nazis being first to develop an atom bomb, and eminent quantum physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was asked to head a team of leading scientists to ensure that didn’t happen.

The atom bomb test was conducted ironically after the German surrender, delivered by a team of remarkable scientists. The movie also covers the shameful smear campaign levelled against Oppenheimer due to professional jealousy and the Communist paranoia of the McCarthy era. 

The moral quandary of dropping the bomb on two Japanese cities and the aftermath which defined an era in and through the Cold War perhaps demands a searing cinematic representation. Though the movie perhaps is more invested in the drama of the bomb’s development and the personal undermining of Oppenheimer and less overtly addresses the moral blackhole and the suspect sanity of “mutually assured destruction” being able to invoke enough rationality to quell our warlike propensities. 

From the Cuban missile crisis, deftly navigated by Kennedy’s White House, to the bungling adventure of the current Ukraine conflict, we can see that irrationality seems to hold sway over even self-preservation, or any balanced cost-benefit analysis, even when the stakes are so existential.

The Trinity test marked a major inflection point in human history. It was a terrifying moment where our technological capabilities seemed to outstrip and overwhelm our moral firewalls. 

Perhaps the movie conjuring up the reality of that moment is a true tribute to cinematic art, where we are entertained yes, but also edified, and perhaps even horrified as we viscerally experience the mad, sad option of giving up our judgments and “trusting” that those in authority will wield such devastating power judiciously and in a way that enhances the overall human project. 

The psychic toll

Mark Twain once wrote that “Truth is stranger than fiction because truth is not obliged to stick to probability.”

What took place in Los Alamos New Mexico is so beyond comprehension that it activates our individual and collective unconscious. And today, feeling in a different way, that we are again on a brink, that we have given autonomy away and with it some of our self and humanity, this invites an inventory of recent events. So many of us feel the world is waywardly lurching forward, that our leaders are not credible, and that “truth” has been made subservient to spin. 

Writing of this, a commentator at the Brownstone Institute says, “I considered these thoughts and feelings, I developed a theory that emerges from depth psychologist Carl Jung’s famous observation:

“The world hangs by a thin thread and that is the psyche of man…WE are the great danger. The psyche is the great danger. What if something goes wrong with the psyche?”

Unfortunately, we no longer need to wonder. The so called “pandemic,” encompassing as it did flawed policy responses, skewed data, relentless panic porn and hype all being ladled into public consciousness, was uncritically accepted by too many. It represented a meltdown of our collective psyche. The fragility of the world is in part the magnitude of our gullibility. Particularly in the face of compounding nonsense that terrorised and paralysed a planet.

SARS-CoV-2 was already circulating in 2019 we now know. If it was tampered with in a lab, we can debate that, but early on, there were no objective reasons to fear widespread lethality, that was clear. The age stratification of those who succumbed to a pathogen branded as COVID, should have reined in panic. 

What facts led to projecting apocalypse and catastrophising data that was amenable to more balanced interpretation? Was it really that we indeed needed to shut the world down to reduce demand, prevent another financial meltdown which seemed to be looming?  Or was this an opportunity for a power grab for other motivations? 

Could it be that Government facing the unknown simply over-reacted and decided “locking down” was the “safest” expedient? Well, life is much safer if you bolt yourself indoors and don’t cross streets, ride cars or bikes, take airplane trips, engage in activities like white water rafting or skiing, if you don’t socially interact, or go into environments where all kinds of infections may be on patrol. 

But living is about all of that and more, and we build our resilience by expanding our aptitudes and flexing our faculties, and yes learning to recover from illness and injury and strengthening ourselves anew. We gain experience of how to navigate through both adventures and calamities, the vicissitudes of a full life.

And if governments clung to politically motivated hypochondria at least, the media, eager to stoke fear because it generates clicks, colluded to confirm a narrative that could keep people riveted, however factually ridiculous it was. 

Together, these two frequently corrupt entities stomped out rational thought, ignored data, and generated an hysterical response to a virus with a 1.1% death rate in an extremely narrow demographic (above 65 with multiple comorbidities). 

One commentator opined, “They gave birth to mass psychogenic illness (MPI) in the populace, which has proven – and will continue to prove – catastrophic for America and the world.”

Our generation’s a-bomb

This regrettable and destructive series of events is why some believe the response to COVID-19 was the equivalent of a nuclear economic and social conflagration.

From the Wuhanese theatrics of collapsing people on the street, seen nowhere else or since, to the nursing homes in Italy where the elderly and vulnerable were tragically congregated and infections could spread like spitfire. News reports created a chain reaction that coalesced into a psychic detonation, utterly detached from facts or the emerging findings from seroprevalence studies or even biological human history in dealing with viruses and pathogens.

The rolling panic during the week of 9 March 2020, as exemplified by the run on grocery stores, gas stations, and toilet paper, serve arguably as an analogue to the emotional shockwaves around nuclear scares, except Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not exaggeration, they were horrifying devastation writ large. 

Government policy and media response poisoned minds around the world. The resulting mass civil liberties abuses, the usurpation of autonomy under a never-ending “emergency” (nothing keeps “emerging” for several years) serve as the Brownstone commentator noted, to something akin to radiation poisoning. The contagion spread to our consciousness, and redefined what elected officials were entitled to command, or demand, allegedly for “our own good.”

For over 30 months, global governments and the left-leaning states of the US, in conjunction with media cronies and enablers, injected and radiated us with gloom. Daily death tolls where anyone “with COVID” was called a “COVID death.” Even then, median age of COVID ascribed death was globally 82 with multiple comorbidities.

The flawed PCR tests gave us hospitalisations galore and deranged case counts, including many symptomless ones on the unproven myth of asymptomatic transmission. 

Grim stories of “long Covid” circulated. Recent Swedish studies show 1 in 500 children may contract this, and the biggest indicator is parents with “Long COVID.” There is no proof this exists, and it is centralised in the affluent laptop class. There are no instances of truckers, or Amazon warehouse workers, or those on construction sites, or even those on the front lines of the hospitality industry contracting this. High numbers of media anchors seem to be afflicted, however. 

Dire warnings circulated that we remain “socially distant” with demands we cover our faces with masks, even though we intuitively knew this didn’t work, and that’s what all the health authorities had said themselves until a ‘magical moment’ in 2020. And this persevered despite study after study, public gathering after public gathering from sporting events to concerts, showing their futility and how unnecessary they were. 

Post-vaccination surges in “masked” countries like Israel or states like California show what common sense would have indicated. Namely, the COVID particles are smaller than smoke particles and the mask is no more effective than it would be to counter secondhand smoke. And we have eyes and face exposed, and the masks are not fitted to the face anyway, and so airborne pathogens are not likely to be deterred.

“Stay home, save lives.” “There is no treatment.” “You will die if you get COVID.” For the first time in history, we locked up the healthy. And with no substantiated instance of outdoor transmission, instead of encouraging fresh air and exercise, germicidal, lethal to viruses on the oxygen front, and encouraging health and weight management on the movement front, we were to be “imprisoned” – except those who had to deliver our food, lattes, or anything else we needed to pad our cells with. 

It was relentless. It was unavoidable. It was all the media and Government talked about and everything we were told has proven to be 100% wrong. All of it. And this fact-free policy declaration has extended to the Ukraine conflict which virtually no one sane can decode in terms of a sustainable geopolitical endgame. 

The faculty meltdown extends even here in Sri Lanka, figuring out how to make economic growth viable when the cost of a largely inefficient and ineffective government bureaucracy consumes virtually all national income, 80 to 100% of it, depending on how you do the numbers.

And as a form of economic, social, political “radiation poisoning”, as has been pointed out, there is likely generational damage. Economic volatility and uncertainty seems here to stay. Zoom “classes” have led to stunted learning. Children in terms of personality, mobility, initiative, will, have had arrested development. Mental health issues have swelled, and so has substance abuse, depression, and suicide rates. Most of this is clearly linked to enforced, extended “lockdown” with no end in sight, and then the police state theatrics of wanting to jab every human with poorly tested gene therapy.

Hundreds of thousands of businesses were destroyed, untold economic value simply wiped out, except for larger conglomerates, those in the financial sector or “big box” stores. 

The UK is in an economic free fall, and the US is manically driving up their debt and hoping not to have to pay the piper ultimately. And what do we tell people whose life’s labour and dreams were decimated over the equivalent of a median influenza strain? Or for children in developing countries plunged into poverty, malnutrition, and missing critical medical attention?

Everywhere, low-income communities suffered the worst, and there is scant accountability for this destructive farce. The global demand and supply shocks have been further exacerbated by the Ukraine war (so many people are left struggling for a pittance economically, while billions are funnelled into this martial caprice).

As one commentator observed: “Trillions in government helicopter money (and tens of billions of associated fraud), destroyed the economy and resulted in the highest inflation in decades…WEF estimates $ 17 trillion in lifetime earnings loss for students.”

Sanctioning meltdown

The Oppenheimer saga hits us so hard, as completely new moral parameters had to be explored and invented. There were pragmatic fears and human concerns. Anyone visiting the memorial museums showcasing the aftermath in Hiroshima and Nagasaki cannot emerge without being shaken to the core. 

The COVID saga has led to very little ethical stocktaking. The authoritarians continue to glibly strut about, though their public policy was a flop, COVID was not eliminated, the “vaccines” do not stop infection or spread, and it was the advent of Omicron with its high infectiousness coupled with exceptional mildness, that finally put an end to the Kabuki theatre of our global pandemic response.

Santayana once wrote that those who do not study the past are doomed to repeat it. This is doubly true for those who deny it happened. 

Our “leaders” refuse to admit that they inflicted nonsensical rules that stripped individuals of their civil rights, even though data stockpiled that lockdowns provided no net value and should never have been imposed in the form of enforced house arrest. 

It was clear, though still not conceded by these folk that virtually everyone was at nominal risk. Instead, they effectively became the marketing enforcement arm of Pfizer. They forced people to be injected with an experimental drug, that appears to increase the likelihood of contracting the virus when injected multiple times, and whose safety appears increasingly in question. They were really only designed to deal with symptoms and their adverse effects were ignored, or sidelined or rationalised, even though Government databases clearly showed they outstripped the cumulative adverse effects of all other vaccines studied. 

And all-cause mortality rose in the “year of the jab” (2021 the zenith of the craziness) across the world. 

All this for a virus for which the death rate for confirmed cases was 1.1%. Seventy-six percent of deaths where COVID was asserted were in people aged 65 and older. Ninety-five percent of patients who died with (though not necessarily “from”) COVID-19 had an average of four comorbidities, meaning they were already in poor health. And Sweden by keeping schools open showed that children were not at any discernible risk, nor were the adults who oversaw them. 

The question is what fault lines and fissures this has revealed in our psyche, what else will we fall for? Or has this finally left us with well merited healthy scepticism against centralised prescriptions? Global problems with global solutions are the authoritarian recipe book.

And the medical profession can’t answer why largely unvaccinated Africa has the best results in the planet over this period, and the epicentres of the orthodoxy, the US and Europe, had the worst. 

The atomic bomb changed the world forever. Its use raised the greatest moral questions in modern history which rational individuals debated and continue to debate. A consensus emerged early on, which remains in place, that nuclear weapons must never be used again. And eternal vigilance is called for.

COVID did nothing by comparison. But the cuckoo response, and the aftermath like the Sri Lankan economic default, certainly enabled by months of complete economic shutdown when there were virtually no undue deaths anywhere in evidence, and the PCR test fraud, with different amplification settings everywhere was providing for bogus “case” hysteria, was seismic in impact.

Alas on this topic, moral questions are debated and advanced on the fringe. The NY Times is again practicing panic porn over a “new wave”. A new wave that is being zealously ignored except by a small group invested in the narrative and unwilling to relinquish their grip on it, facts be damned. 

Over this period, rational individuals were silenced, censored, cancelled, and lost their jobs. Any consensus that the constitutional issues need litigating, the human rights issues need widespread engagement, that we need to do a sober cost-benefit analysis before paralysing a planet and careening off a cliff due to spurious modelling, is still too precarious and far from widespread.

The Brownstone Institute once more:

“Which brings us to one additional tragedy that cannot be dismissed. 

The freedom-loving response to this authoritarian crackdown was twofold. Yes, there were pockets of resistance. There were heroes of medicine who stood up for real science. There were pharmacies that filled prescriptions for forbidden medicines. There were jab-refuseniks. For the most part, however, America rolled over. 

America was founded on a rebellion against a tyrant, but a rebellion requires rebels.”

We must all advance this rebellion. We must join the stubborn, lonely and combative truth tellers who sacrificed careers and standing and were unbowed. They wouldn’t be cowed or bought off. They walked towards the fire. 

Our psyche needs restoration. Future inflection points will call out. And they will likely require and demand a more courageous and creative response, and we must rise to that, and not be so readily inflamed by propaganda and pyrotechnics. Through all that unfolds, we must safeguard the advances of human liberty and seek to expand them.

(The writer is the founder and CEO of EPL Global and founder of Sensei Lanka, a global consultant with over 30 years strategic leadership experience and now, since March 2020, a globally recognised COVID researcher and commentator.)