Those grim realities

 Free enterprise is supposed to be free but when workers, industries, and brands were divided between essential and nonessential, where were the howls? Who gets to order that your life enterprise gets decimated? 

We can “foresee” that the central planners will eventually founder, and this “experiment” will not age well in our historical recollection. And we have to trust that in time, people grating under a mandated yoke of no net benefit to society at large, will come together to reclaim the adventure and dignity that makes the human story so meaningful and compelling

We speak of inflection points, and turning points, and 16 March, 2020 looms large as an example, the infamous “15 days to flatten the curve”. Of course, authoritarian preening and presumption predates that. But the magnitude of this sledgehammer was somewhat unprecedented.

All over the world, and here at home, rights were suddenly broadly throttled. I remember running into a diplomat here, who ashen, told me he had to evacuate 50,000 expatriates immediately! And of course, for those who stayed, there was no immediate provision for where they were to get food or essential services. Far easier to proclaim a curfew than to administer one.

Worldwide, the “biomedical security state” was asserted, with little to defend it taking over all aspects of our lives. No one anticipated such a shocking development. I was told here it was for a brief period, and everyone became an armchair virologist in terms of how miraculously an airborne pathogen was to be extinguished by our locking the healthy in (for the first time in history)!

Humanity has evolved despite the omnipresence of potentially dangerous pathogens, and that is where our immunity and hardiness emerged from. But now, suddenly, life itself hinged on avoiding them and only the public health authorities could indicate the terms on which life would move forward…though the basis for this omniscience was unknown and was later predictably demonstrated to be a complete dud.

Everything changed. Nothing is the same. The trauma is real and lasting. The claim of “15 Days” was revealed to be a ruse. The asserted “emergency” lasted three years and then some. The people and machinery that did this are still, more or less, in power. The new pick to head the CDC in the United States has a long track record of enabling and cheering the lockdowns and all that followed. Immunity to facts and results seem well entrenched.

Here in Sri Lanka, people grew fatigued of the narrative, and all the draconian edicts coming from the so-called medical authorities, as wave after wave of “cases” (from flawed and imprecise tests) decoupled from “symptoms” eventually flattened the credibility of their own scare tactics.

It’s a helpful exercise to summarise the new things we’ve all discovered in these years. Together they account for why the world seems different and why we all feel and think differently now than we did just a few years ago. 

Brownstone Institute compiled this list initially and we can gain a great deal from making our way through it.

Surveillance and censorship by Big Tech

The resistance eventually found each other but it took months and years. A censorship regime descended on all major social platforms, technologies designed with the intention of keeping us more connected and expanding the range of opinion, were now deployed to track down dissent and muzzle it. 

Others could not hear us and we could not hear them. The regime now increasingly faces vocal challenges on many fronts, but it still goes on today, with all but Twitter constantly policing their networks in ways that are palpably authoritarian. We have ironclad evidence now that they are all captured or at least subverted. 

A doctor I consulted here recently said as my fever had unknown origins, I must get a PCR test. I pointed out it is a non-diagnostic test (it says so in every test’s own paperwork), and we have no national standard for amplification settings (all well-known concerns about the efficacy of this ridiculous contrivance), and he just grinned with eyes glazed. He then asked about my “vaccination” status, even though we know it neither stops spread nor reinfection and frankly any current varietals are mild (not that the original was particularly devastating with a 99% recovery rate globally for those below 70 and without multiple co-morbidities).  Institutionalised illiteracy is remarkable!

Power and influence of Big Pharm

It was April 2020 when Jeffrey Tucker recalls someone asking him if the goal of the “vaccine” produced by the pharmaceutical cartel was really behind the lockdowns. The idea would be to terrify us and ruin our lives until we were begging for shots. Why else would viable, alternative treatments be ignored, smeared, pilloried? Well, so an Emergency Use Authorisation could come through for untested gene therapy, a “therapeutic” posing as a “vaccine.” 

Leading front-line practitioners told me that in their entire medical careers, facing an illness, they had never been told, “Don’t treat” (hang on for the “vaccine” or desperately pounce if they reach a point of being unable to breathe).

Tucker thought the whole idea was insane and that the corruption could not possibly reach this deep. Many of us agreed, and we were all myopic. Pharma had been at work on a “vaccine” since January of that year before what we were facing had even been properly mapped and called in every form of purchased influence to eventually make them all but mandatory. Now we know that the major regulators are wholly owned and controlled, to the point that necessity, safety, and efficacy don’t really matter, and established best practice like not “vaccinating” in the midst of a live pandemic was ditched. 

Government propaganda by Big Media 

It was relentless from day one: the major media proved hardcore partisans of Anthony Fauci. The powers that be could tap the New York Times, National Public Radio, Washington Post, and all the rest, whenever and however they wanted. 

Later the media was deployed to demonise those who violated lockdowns, refused masks, and resisted the shots. Gone was the idea that “democracy dies in darkness” and the news outlets became propaganda outlets. 

That no cost-benefit analysis was done before we blew up society is terrifying and should require legal liability. Attempts at sanity such as “The Great Barrington Declaration” penned by three of the most eminent scientists and researchers in the world, from Oxford, Harvard and Stanford, suggesting only that we protect those most vulnerable, and let the healthy and not at risk do what they’ve always done historically, become a wall of immunity – this was met by widescale media derision. 

I tried in vain in Sri Lanka to get mainstream coverage of the Declaration, but because “presenting facts” was construed as being “anti-government” (though presumably the government’s real aims were to protect its citizens and not protect Pfizer), that could not be countenanced.

Now we get it: the mainstream media too is wholly owned and completely compromised, and the citadels of influence influenced everyone else. The hucksters already knew what to report and how to report it. Nothing else mattered. 

Corruption of public health

Who in their right minds would have predicted that the CDC and NIH, not to mention the World Health Organization, would be deployed as frontline workers in the imposition of control? Some observers perhaps predicted this but seemed initially implausible in doing so, until the reality repeatedly smacked us in the face. 

In Sri Lanka we kept hearing that billions of repeated and recurring lockdown losses would be worth it to “eradicate” C-19, though we’ve never eradicated anything but smallpox in that vein (and there only because no animal reservoirs were involved). 

But in fact it was these agencies which were responsible for all the absurd protocols from closing hospitals to non-COVID cases, to deferring actually needed vaccinations and medical treatments of desperate patients, putting up Plexiglas everywhere (airborne pathogens are not deterred by plexiglass), keeping schools closed (though Sweden repeatedly showed how unnecessary and absurd that was), demonising repurposed therapeutics with demonstrated therapeutic benefit, masking toddlers who were never at risk, sticking people inside when the outdoors are much safer (no documented cases of outdoor transmission) and lethal to viruses and forcing shots whose impacts are only now becoming apparent…and we followed their lead.

It was a topsy turvy reality where up was down, but those who had treated themselves rather casually to an usurpation of our civil liberties, knew no limits to their power. They revealed themselves to be faithful agents of the hegemon. 

Consolidation of industry

 Free enterprise is supposed to be free but when workers, industries, and brands were divided between essential and nonessential, where were the howls? Who gets to order that your life enterprise gets decimated? 

The larger companies benefited from consolidation, cartelisation, and centralisation, Same with remote learning platforms and digital technology. The biggest businesses proved to be the worst enemies of real capitalism and the biggest friends of corporatism. As for arts and music, innovation, interaction: we know now that the elites consider these dispensable and dangerous as they kindle our Promethean fire. 

The US Constitution established three branches of government, but lockdowns were not managed by any of them. Instead, it was a fourth branch, a bizarre quasi-permanent class of bureaucrats that no one elected, self-asserted “experts”, unleashed and unhinged with no check on their power, and they cranked out protocols by the hour and enforced them as legislatures, judges, army and police, and even presidents and governors stood by powerless and seemingly cowed and transfixed. 

We know now that there was essentially a coup d’etat on 13 March, 2020 that transferred all power to the national security state but we certainly did not know it then. The edict was classified. The administrative state still rules the day. 

Pusillanimity of universities

The idea of the academy is to be a haven for ideas, sanctuaries from war and pestilence so that great ideas could survive even the worst of times. 

This time, they capitulated as they are all funded by the same sponsors. And so, they locked students in their dormitories, paying customers could not get education, and all had to toe the party line. Then came the shots. Millions were jabbed unnecessarily and could only refuse on pain of being kicked out of degree programs. No facts demonstrated the unique lethality of this viral escapee from a Wuhan lab, except our globally choreographed case-flashing agitation. 

Alumni should take note and so should parents who are considering where to send their high school seniors next year. And universities and intellectuals who cannot speak truth to power or challenge dogmas asserted by those in authority, are of scant value to our society.

 Madness of crowds

There is the classic book, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” Surely a past chronicle of a mercifully bygone era? But within an instant, mobs of people fell into medieval-style panics, vilifying non-compliers and hiding from the invisible miasma. 

Mathias Desmet’s book on Mass Formation, much attacked for its self-evident veracity, now stands as a classic explanation of how a population devoid of meaningful lives, and with threadbare emotional interactions, can become ready fodder for manipulation. 

They can also be galvanised into deluded crusades. Most of us know friends and neighbours who went along. And to this day, when you bring this up, people are highly uncomfortable, some ashamed at their own gullibility, others outraged that you would dare ask them to “think.”

Sadism of the ruling class

 The kids were denied a year or two of school in some locations. In other parts of the world, they were subjected to having education taken away, and with it, their prospects and future. 

People missed medical diagnostics with mushrooming medical consequences from far more lethal illnesses. Weddings and funerals were on Zoom, a mockery of human intimacy. The aged were forced into desperate loneliness.  The poor suffered. People turned to substance abuse. The working classes were exploited. Small businesses were wrecked. And the elites partied in public and threw their masks to the wind when off camera. Large public protests were allowed with no concern and no consequence, and the “disconnect” could not be, dare not be, pointed out.

The ruling class that advertised its wonderful altruism and public spiritedness became callous and completely disregarded all this suffering. Even when the data poured in about suicides and mental illness from loneliness, it made no difference. They could not muster any concern. They changed nothing. 

The schools stayed closed and the travel restrictions stayed in place. No one could travel, except those on private jets. Nations like Sri Lanka devastated their economies and literally destroyed crucial industries like tourism (countries less “taken” by this like Morocco even in 2021 saw more than 6 million tourists!). 

Those who pointed this out were called terrible names. It was a form of grotesque sadism of which we did not know we were capable. 

The real-life problem of massive class inequality

Would any of this have happened 20 years ago when a third of the workforce was not privileged enough to take their work home and pretend to produce from laptops? Of course not. But those insulated who could get services from those who had to work and face this dread scourge, were “fine.” These workers and peasants did not have privileges and apparently, they didn’t matter much. 

When it came time for the shots, the overclass wanted their healthcare workers, pilots, and delivery people to get them too, all in the interest of purifying society of germs and preserving their own carcasses. 

Huge wealth inequalities turn out to make a big difference in political outcomes, especially when one class is forced to serve the other to keep the charade viable.

Enabling power of central banking to fund it all

From 12 March, 2020, and onward, the Federal Reserve deployed every power to serve as a Congressional printing press. And Central Banks globally, including here, followed suit. 

The US Fed slammed rates back to zero. It eliminated (eliminated!) reserve requirements for banks. It flooded the economy with fresh money, eventually reaching a peak of 26% expansion or $ 6.2 trillion in total. 

This of course later translated into price inflation that quickly ate away the actual purchasing power of all that free stimulus dispensed by government, thus negatively impacting both producers and consumers. The structure of production was further damaged by prolonged low interest rates. 

The shallowness of the faith communities

 Where were the churches and synagogues, mosques and temples? They closed their doors and kept out the people they had sworn to defend. They cancelled holy days and holiday celebrations. By and large, they utterly and completely failed to protest. And why? Because they went along with the propaganda that ceasing their ministries was consistent with public health priorities. 

They went along with the state and media claim that congregating to worship was somehow deeply dangerous to the public. This continued even when we knew the pathogen had been circulating since 2019 and you cannot “lock it down” and the “vaccines” were not able to stop reinfection or spread. 

Some courageous faith leaders took a stand, and were imprisoned, sued, harassed. Bars and gambling dens opened much earlier. In the US, if we look at those who did protest, it was the supposed crazy and odd ones: the Amish, the estranged Mormons, and the Orthodox Jews. These seemingly marginal communities were among the only ones whose faith was strong enough to resist the demands of our commercial princes.

The tolerance for segregation

“Vaccine” uptake was certainly disproportionate by race and income. Richer and whiter populations went along but some 40% of the non-white and poorer communities didn’t trust the jab and refused. 

Asia, when not jabbed, had virtually no COVID impact, and then once jabbed, “cases” and impact skyrocketed. Africa, still largely unjabbed, had virtually no COVID impact. 

The command centres of the orthodoxy, the US and Europe and eventually Australia and New Zealand when they reopened, did the worst. So why was anyone turning to them for the playbook? 

Jeffrey Tucker points out, “This did not stop 5 major cities from imposing vaccine segregation and enforcing it with police power. For a time, major cities were segregated with disparate impact by race. I don’t recall a single article in a major newspaper that pointed this out, much less decried it. So much for public accommodations and so much for enlightenment! Segregation turns out to be just fine so long as it fits with government priorities – same now as it was in the bad old days.” 

The goal of a social credit system

It is not paranoia to speculate that all this segregation was really about a nationally engineered mode of control, the one they want very much to implement. There is a manic panic to subject people to a top-down compliance regime, making social and economic participation contingent on that. 

Scripted in Beijing? Maybe. But “democracy” is too messy and having our faculties numbed and our wills sedated, alas we may not be up for it. Here in Lanka, where the exigencies are more extreme, we may yet jolt ourselves into responsiveness. So, we must pray.

Corporatism, as the system

This is more fundamental than drivel about capitalism or socialism. We have socialism and bail outs for the rich, and “capitalism” for the poor. This is where property is nominally private and concentrated in only top industries in major sectors but publicly overseen with an eye to political priorities. 

Imagine decades back, when someone on a middle-class salary could earn a living, own a home, put children through college, and still have the hope of something for retirement. Today it’s all on unbacked credit, and with two couples working multiple jobs often.

This is not traditional socialism, and it certainly isn’t competitive capitalism. It is a social, economic, and political system designed by the ruling class to serve the interests of corporate statism. We need to recover the value of a wage, and the ability of people to contribute, while having the time to treasure relationships and embrace life in all of its multi-hued variety.

Seeing and Foreseeing

And as the 19th century, economist, writer and thinker Bastiat pointed out (the society in his name has just been revived here) we have to do more than pay attention to what can be “seen”, we must look beyond to what can be “foreseen” as well. 

Almost every human disaster, from the Iraq debacle to Sri Lanka’s economic meltdown can be linked to only “seeing” what entices us immediately without “foreseeing” the ensuing challenges, collateral impacts, sustainability and thereby, what comes next. 

We can “foresee” that the central planners will eventually founder, and this “experiment” will not age well in our historical recollection. And we have to trust that in time, people grating under a mandated yoke of no net benefit to society at large, will come together to reclaim the adventure and dignity that makes the human story so meaningful and compelling.

We must rise equal to the challenges and opportunity of liberty. We must fight for our freedom and learn to also affirm and assert what we actually wish to be free for.

(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.)