It’s summer. The heat on the streets of São Paulo is over 90°F. Without a facial mask, it’s hard enough to breathe. Nevertheless, 98 per cent of people are wearing facial masks (I do a mental accounting of this percentage every day). They pass by me and I see the torment they’re going through. Many squealing under the cloth that clog his breath, with sweat dripping down his forehead. In addition, these people don’t even lower their masks to leave their noses or mouths out. They spend the days, the weeks pass, the months… It’s been almost a year, and I can’t settle for the daily repetition of this abnormal scene – with varying climates, of course, sometimes a torrential rain and there’s the unfortunate under the umbrella wearing his facial mask. Sometimes it’s the only human being on a deserted street… and he’s wearing his facial mask.
The scenario is shocking to any thinking being, although the masses do not realize and seem to have assimilated an abnormality as something normal. If many people do something abnormal, the abnormal does not become normal, but only common. What is common may not be normal. And obstructing your breathing and hiding your face for no reason is definitely abnormal.
Not only is there no evidence that mask use by the general population reduces virus infection, but there is also no deadly pandemic virus to avoid. The data is available to everyone. Covid-19 was touted as being highly fatal, an existential threat, but it soon emerged that its mortality rate was very low. As Donald J. Boudreaux reported in this article, Covid is nothing different from other risks:
COVID-19 INFECTION SURVIVAL RATES (per CDC)
Ages 0-19: 99.997%
Ages 20-49: 99.98%
Ages 50-69: 99.5%
Ages 70+: 94.6%
Seasonal Flu Infection Survival Rate (for population as a whole): 99.90%
This single slice of information should be sufficient to put Covid-19 in proper perspective. It makes plain that the risk that this disease poses to humanity as a whole does not differ categorically from the risk of seasonal flu – or, for that matter, from any of the many other perils that we humans routinely encounter. And because these figures show the estimated chances of survival of those who are infected with Covid, even for persons 70 years of age or older Covid obviously is not a categorically unique threat.
And yet, again, humanity has reacted to Covid in a manner categorically unique. It’s as if a hornet rather than a honeybee found its way into our home, and so to protect ourselves from the somewhat-more-threatening invader we commenced to frantically scour every room of our home with a flamethrower.
These data are confirmed by comparing the concrete result of the year of the “deadly pandemic” with other years: there was no increase in deaths outside the normal increase from one year to the next. And the numbers are available for anyone who wants to see. In fact, what happened was an unprecedented and inexplicable dramatic decrease in the number of deaths from other causes – an indication that probably many deaths attributed to such a virus were actually due to these other causes. Obviously, every death is something to regret, but the fact is that the vast majority of deaths of this disease are from people of age within normal life expectancy.
So even if the facial masks really offered protection against a virus, why would anyone under 70 care to wear them? However, they don’t. Before this mass human experiment, scientific studies pointed out that the universal use of masks does not decrease a viral epidemic (see here, here, here, here, here and here). And after the experiment (which is still in progress) it was found empirically that the studies were right (see here, here and here). That’s something anyone can infer. Here in São Paulo, as I said, the use of masks easily passes through 95% of the population, and the number of “cases” (which does not mean “sick”, only “positive PCR tests”) not only did not decrease but also did not decrease. Another empirical example is the case of Sweden, one of the places where no one wears a mask , not even on public transport, (and which has not imposed quarantines) and the number of deaths per inhabitants in 2020 is the same as in 2015. Despite the evidence, people around here are still wearing masks. And they do it just because they told them to do it. It doesn’t matter that the people who told them to wear a mask are the same ones that days before told them not to wear a mask. Jenin Younes comments on this article on the so-called experts’ notorious about-face on masks this past March. Having said for weeks that face coverings do not stop transmission of the virus, Anthony Fauci, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Surgeon General, and others, did a 180 virtually overnight.
Here in Brazil we also have our famous youtuber “scientist” prophet of the apocalypse doing the same thing. In this video he laughs at the facial masks saying they don’t work, just to shortly after recommending them. Now these same people change their minds again and say that the masks don’t work anymore, that now we have to wear 2 or 3 masks at the same time!
And none of this is capable of making people question the use of masks; they keep using. In an excellent psychosocial analysis, Julian Rose tries to answer why:
Wearing ‘the mask’ is for those who suffer feelings of fear and/or guilt. Think about it.
One might reject such a notion “No, no, I’m just worried about being fined, that’s why I wear it”. Or “I don’t want to take any risks, the health authorities wouldn’t tell us to wear masks unless there was some protection benefit.”
Are these valid responses? Both are based primarily on fear. Fear of what an authority might do if one was to disobey the rules, and fear of sickness should one not follow the authorities’ instructions.
Indeed, fear. However, these fears are completely unfounded, which means that the basis of this fear is stupidity. As we’ve seen, facial masks don’t protect anyone from viruses, and even if someone gets the coronavirus, the risk of getting sick is small, and of dying, even smaller. Influenza and tuberculosis, to name two airborne diseases, together kill 2,150,000 people worldwide each year (650,000 flu and 1.5 million tuberculosis). That’s pretty much the same death toll that Covid-19 has reportedly hit so far. That is to say, in general, the world is not facing any greater threat than the threats that have always existed.
Regarding the fear of a fine, at least in my region, I’ve never even heard of anyone who was fined for not wearing a facial mask. You see, I wear seat belts for fear of a ticket. What should be a personal choice based on an individual risk assessment has become mandatory in several places. I’ve taken several fines. And a lot of other people I know, too. Thousands of people keep taking this ticket. So, after being one of the great funders of the fine industry, I was domesticated by the whip of the State Master and am today a generally obedient puppy. But I don’t know anyone who got a ticket for being out without a facial mask. In fact, only 327 people were fined for not wearing a facial mask in the State in five months. With a population of 45 million this makes the chance of receiving a fine for lack of facial mask as 0.00000727%, making the fear of the fine even more stupid than the fear of the virus. (With the caveat that the facial mask could actually protect you from a fine, but not from a virus) Of course, this number may vary from place to place, but, thank God, for now, only in some places in China there is monitoring citizens by facial recognition cameras, which can identify people in the same way that license plates are identified, and fine them. Therefore, there’s still a chance to run away from these very rare tax. However, as the Communists taught the world, an even better way than ordering you to do something is to make you feel bad about not doing something. And making a stupid humanity believe the sham that they’re saving lives against a fatal virus by hanging a piece of cloth on his face wasn’t difficult.
The infinite human stupidity
A phrase erroneously attributed to Albert Einstein reads as follows: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” First, there is no record that Einstein said this, and it would really be difficult, because, as far as I can tell, Einstein died believing that the universe was finite (and expanding). And when investigating the origins of this phrase we came to several suspects, among them Alexander Dumas, Kant and Voltaire, among others who said similar things. We may not know for sure who’s the author, but this makes it clear that extreme human stupidity is repeatedly recognized by many over the centuries.
I tend to agree with Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, which holds that there are types of intelligence independent of each other (in his theory, seven). In this case, an I.Q. test would not be ideal for knowing whether a person is smart or not, because they can get along badly in the test, but still get along in life, or even be considered a genius, for example, in music. Critics of this theory say that intelligence is one thing, but regardless of which theory is correct, the fact is that even geniuses can make stupid decisions or say stupid things. Therefore, if there are kinds of intelligence, there are also kinds of stupidity.
Einstein himself is an example of this. A genius of physics, with a 160-point I.Q., considered one of the smartest people to ever live, defended one of the stupidest ideas in history: socialism. His argument is full of platitudes, clichés and non sequiturs, – as Tom Woods demonstrated – which makes it to be considered a great stupidity. So we have a great genius being stupider than a right-wing Average Joe. Of course, in 1949, when Einstein made his defense of socialism, its practical failure was not as clear as it is today, but Mises’ argument about the impossibility of economic calculus in socialism was published in 1920 and was already relatively well spread among the intellectual circles of the time (even more for a Germanic), which would indicate another Einstein stupidity: that of not doing basic research on a subject before issuing an opinion about it. Moreover, apart from economic arguments, socialism implies distortions of concepts of justice and easily perceptible incompatibilities with human nature, which makes of the Average Joe, even if he cannot refute socialism with economic arguments, instinctively smarter than Einstein in rejecting it.
Therefore, if even geniuses are liable to atrocious stupidities, we see that there is nothing unusual about the masses embracing an idea as completely stupid and abnormal as facial masks. Continuing his analysis of the use of a facial mask for fear of not following “authority”, Julian Rose discusses:
But who are ‘the authorities?’ And are their demands backed by empirical evidence that the wearing of a mask is a proven defence against infection by Covid? Will our mask wearer ask these questions? And if not – why not?
“Well, I do wonder what it’s all about – but there doesn’t seem to be much point in questioning it, does there.”
Right, in effect this is an admission of intellectual laziness coupled with an egregious obedience to the commands of ‘the authority’. This is the state of mind of those unwilling to think for themselves.
Allowing one’s self to be herded because one does not want to question the command, is a psychological sickness which presents an open book for the unchecked spread of fascistic authoritarianism.
I wonder how the same person would react if told to crawl to the shops on hands and knees, because ‘the authority’ said that these particularly pathogens only travel at head height?
Well, that’s the level of stupidity that human societies meet. And that level was not reached naturally or by chance. People are trained to don’t think for themselves and to follow “authority” for many years in state-controlled or state-controlled educational institutions. Decorate, repeat, don’t question, obey, and you’ll be fine. Only the fact that people recognize as authorities a supranational bureaucratic entity that is more political than scientific (WHO) and politicians already shows that general stupidity is very high. Nevertheless, there are more serious cases. People who practice exercises wearing a facial mask can be even more stupid, because they don’t even know what the “authorities” say. In the hierarchy of so-called authorities, governments say they follow the WHO. But the WHO says NOT to wear a facial mask during physical activities as this obviously DOES HARM to health. And this is a determination that who has not reversed; they keep saying it today:
Nevertheless, we see every day around here a legion of complete stupid people riding bikes, running or walking the streets, or practicing exercises in gyms wearing a facial mask! If the authority of the authority recognized by these people says not to use it and yet they do, their brain capacity is definitely compromised beyond any hope. It’s stupidity on top of stupidity. That’s stupider than people alone in their cars wearing facial masks. Perhaps the only thing more stupid than this are the nut parents who commit the crime of putting a mask on children, as they are more likely to die hit by stray bullets and lightning than by Covid. But I think I’m the wrong one for looking for logic in stupidity. People are stupid, and that shouldn’t surprise anyone – let alone libertarians.
When Dr. Roger Hodkinson referred to the COVID-19 pandemic, he said it is the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.” Dr. Hodkinson is one of Canada’s leading pathologists and an expert in virology; he is talking about a subject he dominates, so he could not be deceived by “authorities” to believe in stupid things; after all, he himself is a true authority on the subject. Dr. Alessandro Loiola also ranked this pandemic on the cover of his book COVID-19: The Fraudemic as “the greatest hoax of all time”. Indeed covid-19 is a frighteningly large hoax, which has caused and will still cause catastrophic economic damage. It is estimated that only the U.S. will lose $15 trillion because of the state’s actions against the virus. To put it in perspective, 15 trillion is the value of Spain. And I’m not talking about the GDP of Spain, but of the whole of Spain; all the real estate, land, equipment, everything. And all this for nothing, because the restrictive measures of governments have done nothing to stop the virus, and will cause more extra deaths than the virus itself. Is there a greater fraud than that? Yes.
Money
The fiduciary monetary system of central banks dominated the world many decades ago. The damage this system causes to humanity with its inflationary money and its cyclical crises is incalculable. The Institute of International Finance (IIF) estimates that global debt climbed to $277 trillion by the end of 2020, amounting to a staggering 365 percent of world gross domestic product (GDP). The fiat money of governments is simply a fake money. Central banks are simply a fraud. There has never been a recognized market failure to be corrected by a central bank; they were established on the basis of lies and false theories just to increase the power of governments and the wealth of connected bankers. Despite such tragedy caused to the world, the ignoble masses accept the system without question. They don’t care with What Has Government Done to Our Money? Most people who get interested in the topic receive and accept false theories that are propagated by “experts” co-opted by the state, although true knowledge is a click away.
I clicked that. I was a layman in economics, but I was interested in the subject when I saw the damage that economic crises did to me and the world. The mainstream explanation didn’t please me, so I kept researching. I came across several alternative explanations: Keynes, Friedman… until I found the Austrian theory of economic cycles,which was the one that made the most sense to me. However, I was only convinced that I found the correct explanation when investigating the epistemology of the Austrian School, i.e., how Austrians know what they know. And I learned that economics is a branch of praxeology, the science of human action. As such, it is a logical-deductive axiomatic science, i.e., economic propositions are logically derived from axioms, and unless some flaw is pointed out in this deduction (and none have ever been), they have the same status as the axiom: they are undeniable. And it is a priori, that is, it cannot be denied or confirmed by experiments. Only then did I conclude that I have come to true knowledge. However, despite the enormous tragedies caused by the crises and all their foundations have already been refuted by the Austrians, the central banks remain, since virtually no one goes down this intellectual path.
State
However, the central bank system is just one of the frauds supported by another even bigger fraud: the state. The state is nothing more than a completely unnecessary, extremely damaging, entirely illegitimate and fully criminal barbaric relic. If it was ever the least worst alternative among those available – being annihilated by an invading tribe or just being robbed periodically by this tribe, that is, a state – in today’s world it is simply the worst arrangement one can imagine. If we cannot calculate the size of the damage caused by the state’s fake money, the calculation of the damage from the state’s existence is even more complicated, as it should include the very damage caused by its monetary system imposed through its legal tender law. Society even tries to scale part of the damage with the impostometer, which shows that in 2020, while destroying the economy with its covid restrictions, the state still stole directly in taxes from the Brazilian people more than 2 trillion reais.
All this wealth is aggressively diverted from the individual who would use it to satisfy their most urgent needs to satisfy the needs of bureaucrats and their comrades. However, the greatest damage lies in the cost of opportunity; everything that is no longer produced because of the barriers and prohibitions imposed by the state. And just as the existence of central banks depends on the state, the collective hysteria of fraud would also not occur in a stateless society, as Philipp Bagus suggested in this article:
mass hysteria is possible in a free society, but there are self-correcting mechanisms. The harm such hysteria may inflict is limited by the enforcement of private property rights. The state amplifies and exacerbates mass panics, causing tremendous havoc. What are local, limited, and isolated outbreaks of mass hysteria in a free society the state can convert into a global mass hysteria. Unfortunately, there is no limit to the damage mass hysteria can do to life and liberty if it takes hold of the government, as the state does not respect private property. The unscrupulous violation of basic liberties during the corona epidemic is a case in point. The possibility of mass hysteria is another reason why the state is such a dangerous institution to have.
Since the theories that underpin the state are even more stupid than those that base central banks, such as social contracts, market failures, lack of security, etc., and that the state exists by consent of the governed, we have that the state also exists only because of human stupidity. The overwhelming majority of humans are stupid and defend or accept their own slavery. And we libertarians already knew that. I don’t know him, but statistically, I imagine that Dr. Hodkinson, who wasn’t stupid enough to be fooled by the covid fraud, is probably stupid to support, even passively, the fiat money and the state. Yes, this pandemic is a monumental hoax, and we ourselves have already referred to it as “the biggest fraud in history”, as in this article. It’s really amazing how easily politicians and the media have made healthy people agree to wear facial masks, stay at home, and even lose their jobs and go bankrupt because of a virus with a very low mortality rate. But thinking better, and amazingly enough, there are bigger scams.
As Hans-Hermann Hoppe notes:
Since time immemorial, the megalomania of politicians, born of irresponsibility, has manifested itself in the fact that, based on various key figures supplied by their respective official statistical authorities, these politicians have concocted a “scientifically based” justification for their ever more numerous and far-reaching state interventions into normal societal interactions. Up to now, however, these indicators have essentially been figures taken from the field of economic statistics, … offered policymakers a possible reason to intervene. […]
With the corona crisis, however, politics has moved on to completely new shores in this respect. Politicians have discovered that health statistics offer an even greater gateway for governmental despotism and status craving than all the indicators of economic statistics. On the basis of a virus test, which has been chosen as the official indicator of an allegedly acute or even fatal danger of infection, politics has succeeded in bringing almost our entire social life to a standstill, plunging millions of people into economic or social hardship or distress, while helping the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, i.e., for example, the manufacturers of masks, tests, and vaccines, to amass enormous wealth, and yet to emerge from the whole story, so far at least, as heroes.
A frightening, downright devastating realization.
Conclusion
Therefore, we are only facing yet another farce orchestrated by a ruling elite that is fully aware of widespread human stupidity and uses it to expand its power and wealth. But what is most impressive about this new fraud is that astonished we can see daily the overwhelming amount of stupid people who believe in it, because their opinion is displayed in their faces, or rather, in the absence of their face. Personally, I was already aware of the stupid state that most of humanity is in, and because of that, my hopes of achieving a free society were remote – being optimistic, perhaps in the next millennium. And yet the masked herd shocked me. It’s more serious than I thought. Stupidity is turning into a mental illness.
The film The Aviator begins with Howard Hughes as a child spelling the word Q-U-A-R-A-N-T-I-N-E with his mother while bathing. And she’s telling her son how diseases like cholera and typhus are dangerous and that he wasn’t safe. Apparently it was the germophobic mother who made her son develop germophobia, which worsened throughout his life. Hughes, who can be considered a genius in many ways, went on to not hold hands with people, walk around with a soap in his pocket and wash his hands until they bled, and came to isolate himself from everyone into a closed room for months for fear of illness. Germophobia, in addition to a stupidity of people who do not know how to assess risks, is a mental illness that should be treated. Again and again people who see me in the street without a facial mask crossed to another sidewalk so they wouldn’t cross me. Many people are spraying alcohol and passing cloths on all their grocery shopping. Others are even boarding airplanes with full PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). Unfortunately, there really is an ongoing pandemic in the world, but it is a pandemic of germophobia.
I can’t believe we have a chance to reverse this picture of widespread stupidity that’s already turning into a mental illness. It would be necessary for every libertarian to also become a psychiatrist, and yet it would not help because the first step to deal with such a mental condition is to admit that you have a problem, and that few would do. I think it’s one more hoax that’s here to stay. The TSA’s New Mask Mandate are an indication that the mandatory of facial masks will be consolidated in many places. They’re already saying that Covid restrictions can last forever. And in the post-persuasion era we live in, probably only those who already reject the use of facial masks will read this article, or any other material contrary to the mainstream version. These people don’t care about facts, but about narratives. And the narrative of covidioty is already winning – by far; 98 x 2 (as I see daily on the streets of my city). If they have taken out – without protests – even the carnival from the Brazilians, there are no limits to what the herd can accept.
The few who come here react by saying things like “if someone in your family died of Covid you wouldn’t say that”, or “the whole world is wrong and only the you are right”. The first reaction reveals such a stupidity that shows that the person is unable to realize that even if my entire family dies of this disease, it would not change the overall statistics at all (and although I do not believe that this data is correct – I do not even know if this virus has been isolated – I am using the “official numbers”,I am using their “version of the storie“). It is not because someone tragically loses the whole family in a traffic accident that dangerousness increases and cars should be banned. I myself could die from Covid the next day of publishing this article that nothing in it would lose its validity. An anecdotal case is not a parameter. And the argumentum ad populum of the second reaction is nothing new, as explained in this article. We libertarians are right and most are wrong on that and many other topics. But even though thousands of experts are on our side, the covidiots are the vast majority. Resisting individually is what we have left. And perhaps take advantage of the fact that we are witnessing a real-time dystopia to assess how human stupidity leads, from time to time,to such an unbelievable state of things – and perhaps find a way to use it for the sake of liberty.
Ludwig von Mises once said that “the first thing a genius needs is to breathe fresh air.” Apparently the inverse of this quote is also true; “the last thing a stupid needs is to breathe fresh air.” We are doomed to a perpetual world of fear, ignorance, cowardice and submission filled with brainless and now faceless people.
Copyright © Fernando Chiocca
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