The number of viruses in you, or any
other perfectly healthy human, at this moment outnumber your own cells by a factor of 100, as
virologist Dr. John Mokili points out: “In the human holobiont, the 10^13 human
cells are outnumbered 10-fold by bacteria and 100-fold by viruses.” Is the
world really turning upside down over a virus?
Data Is Readily Available Today Like Never
Before
We live in the age of the Internet. That
means with a few clicks, viewpoints that used to take hours of library work can
be found in seconds.
Before the corona bans were put into place,
there was vociferous opposition from all manner of perspectives as to why those
bans were an awful idea.
Despite extensive datasets against
lockdowns already existing, within weeks, the wrongheadedness of the lockdowns were
being further demonstrated using the American datasets.
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Belying
the easy access to information, the useful demonstration of why the lockdowns
were not effective was being censored from the internet. Introducing a new
disappointing low in internet censorship, Medium quickly took down the
above-linked piece by the pseudonymous Professor Hinkley. Its tech brethren
from YouTube to Amazon, Google to Duck Duck Go followed suit censoring Covid-19
debate.
The
Lockdown Took Place With Widespread Data Against The Lockdown
Dozens
of others have recounted the same experience with their Covid research, some
using publicly available data to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the
lockdown and calling for more effective policies.
Among
those dozens who made good faith efforts to perform research, provide data, and
contribute to the discussion through sharing their informed perspectives were:
The New England Journal of Medicine ran a
piece March 26, 2020 by Dr. Anthony Fauci, two weeks after the earliest
lockdowns and before some lockdowns had been implemented, that claimed in its
third paragraph a much lower death rate than was being reported: “This suggests
that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin
to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of
approximately 0.1%)…”
The CDC itself has now demonstrated
the death rate to be much lower than is being
reported in the media, yet some states are increasing restrictions while others
drag their feet in loosening them.
Large
swaths of the media including Matt Drudge, CNN, the New York Times, and
sadly a contributing editor at the Spectator report grossly inaccurate death
rates of 5.9%, using weasel words to get away with continuing to use that scary
number.
1 in
20 are not dying of Covid.
Some
of these people may claim good intentions. Those who seek to control are aided
by those who Mises in his 1947 essay “Planned
Chaos,” described as “useful innocents,” who help them do their
mischief, or “useful idiots,” as some call them. The time for permissible
naïveté in aid of tyrants has passed.
Those
Who Want To Control You Don’t Care About The Data, They Care About Controlling
You
There’s
an important detail about people who seek to control you. They don’t care about
the data. It is the desire for control that is primary. They will literally say
anything that they think will earn your submission.
There’s
also an important detail about people who seek to make their decisions based on
emotion. They are dedicated to speaking about feelings. Very few conversations
with such people will enter into the realm of evidence and reason.
Those
few conversations that do, are not likely to be the conversations that the
emotional person is emotionally charged on. That would include virtually any
remotely political conversation of our day. The range of those conversations is
surprisingly vast: from the wearing of face masks to the policing of speech,
down to the very detail of what pronoun is acceptable to use with another. No
one should be surprised if the political comes to encompass ALL human
interaction.
What
If Their Lies Are Not Mistakes, But Intentional And Malicious?
For more than a century, groups advocating
for the violent overthrow of a system of private property have encouraged the
use of both agitation and propaganda. Going back to Lenin’s “Where to Begin,”
lying to people and agitating them has been described as “the chief and
permanent task” of a communist.
Though propaganda and agitation are words
we are today comfortable around as the new normal, both words represent a great
evil that are effectively an attack on the notion of sincerity. Attacks on
sincerity undermine all human interaction.
The
Politicization Of ALL Human Interaction
For at
least five generations those groups have called for the infiltration of civil
society, referring to it by the 1960s as “the long march through the
institutions.” Church, state, media, business, academia, charity, and civil
society alike are today filled with leadership opposing property rights,
opposing the individual, demanding submission to the collective.
Does a
single institution remain that will look at the individual as the fundamental
building block to society and to demand his protection at all cost? By the Ides
of March 2020, it was evident that even the church would play no such role.
Those
Who Want To Politicize Daily Life Are Awful For Human Happiness
The
family is a front that has yet to fall. Siblings have always quarreled,
familial relations have always known bitter-sweet periods, generation gaps
happen, but there remains a special familial connection. At the core of the
question of debilitating the institution of family is “How can husband and wife
be divided from each other?”
For at
least three generations, those groups have said they will come for the family,
seeking to weaponize half the population through the
feminist movement with statements such as “There are no personal solutions
at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.”
Politicizing daily life is “political therapy” as opposed to “personal
therapy.” Women should be encouraged to reduce their sense of introspection, or
“self-blame.” There are also timeless, slogans of deceit such as “the personal
is political,” or “the private is political.”
The
personal is decidedly not political. The two words are practically antonyms.
Conflation
of antonyms is an attack on reason. Conflating antonyms in dismissal of
reasonable logic to the contrary requires insincerity. Cynicism is the willing
disposal of sincerity in one’s interactions. The word cynicism is often used,
seldom defined, and vitally important. Cynical actors claim that logic is a
tool of the patriarchy and a symbol of western oppression, so not even logic is
safe in conversation with the indoctrinated.
“Self-blame,”
is a conveniently negative sounding and over-reaching term that includes
introspection. People work their entire lives to be as insightful about
themselves and others as possible. Introspection is one of the pillars of
wisdom. To deny introspection is debilitating to the individual. Anyone who
calls for people to deny themselves introspection debilitates those who would
follow that advice. This is understandable coming from any person who does not
recognize individuals as sovereign, and instead sees only collectives.
Collectivism
calls on the individual to be a cog in a machine. At its militant edge, an edge
that has become increasingly apparent since the Ides of March 2020, these
theories seek to turn the individual and all the potential of that person’s
life into a mere weapon for a specious cause.
Having
an agitated person, willing to fill their own head with propaganda, and
committed to never blaming themselves is a recipe for individual failure.
However, it is incredibly useful to the organizer seeking to weaponize a
person. Rather than the empowerment claimed by Marxist movements, many have
willingly ascribed to an ideology that seeks to disempower and weaponize the
individual.
You
Don’t Need To Politicize Life
Joseph
Campbell, a closeted right-leaning intellectual of his day, surrounding by
leftists, during the interwar period described that in the realm of politics,
one can expect divisiveness and distraction, as is the fundamental nature of
politics.
Far
more meaningful discussion can take place in the realm of values, where there
is considerable overlap and greater importance.
In a
present-day example: Two people, who CNN would describe as having drastically
different world-views because of their voting pattern once every four years are
likely to identify that they share quite similar world-views if they can
discuss their core values. Seldom is there divisiveness in such a discussion,
especially if the two participants are committed to understanding and
respecting one another. That recognition of the other as an individual is
fundamental to love and at the roots of the Western notion of individualism.
This
level of communication, however, does not serve the purpose of the divisive
collectivists. As Thomas Luongo points out. “They want us
yelling at each other, not talking to each other.” A society made in their
image would have husband and wife shouting slogans mindlessly past one another.
The
Big Data Revolution Is Nonsense
Data
is said to be everything in our era of powerful data mining. We are said to be
in a world-shaping Big Data Revolution, a claim that is no
more accurate than the notion that the econometric revolution, or the
statistical revolution would change the world. These tools all continue to be
used for good and bad with no inherent net benefit in either direction.
A
tyrant seeking to be more of a tyrant, will do the same with econometrics or
algorithms or artificial intelligence or statistical modeling. A sycophant
seeking to empower the tyrant, will behave no differently with such tools. A
gadfly seeking to light brushfires in the minds of men, will behave no
differently with or without these tools. A free man seeking to live a free life,
will behave no differently with or without these tools.
Realizing
the futility of learning another tool to advocate for freedom in a world where
the most basic tools get the job done, it can be no surprise that those who
advocate for freedom are less likely to trouble themselves with econometrics,
statistical models, or algorithms. The modelers and technologists are largely
leftists and seeking to shift the narrative through their specious tools that
make for useful headlines. The useful tools to the free man are reason and
evidence, stubbornness, disobedience to authority, avoidance of needless
conflict, tending toward the voluntary in interactions with another, and a
willingness to physically defend one’s boundaries.
Can
you fault a person for not wanting to learn econometrics when he has not yet
mastered the philosophy to live a good life, and to think clearly on topics of
epistemology and praxeology, skills which will provide far more value?
The
Big Data Revolution Requires A Moral Devolution For It To Be Effective
In
this era of big data that has been cited, data is only useful because it allows
control over the individual. Suddenly those desiring leverage over your
personal decisions have it. This was once considered blackmail to use
information from one’s personal life in order to influence behavior. Beyond
this, data is generally not useful.
It is a lie that data is the oil of our era.
Only through the normalization of the immorality of blackmail and manipulation
is such a statement even capable of being entertained. It is mostly just
bluster from the tech sector, often called “big data,” and the intelligence
apparatus (both governmental and quasi-governmental) seeking to bolster their
budgets and their perceived importance.
The
reason data is generally not useful comes down to more of the same. Those who
want to make decisions based in emotion don’t care about data. Those who wish
to control you, also don’t care about data.
All
the data needed to have a reasonable conversation about the appropriate way to
proceed had been known by the Ides of March 2020. The people who wanted to make
decisions based in emotion showed little interest in such a conversation. The
people who wanted to control others also showed little interest in such a
conversation.
Do
Not Expect The Future To Vindicate You, This Debate May Last Decades
Nothing
has changed since the Ides of March 2020, other than we now have data sets for
the American population, though those datasets provide virtually no new useful
data. This data was not needed. This harmful experimentation was needless.
Ten
years from now (as in the case of MERS today), we will have no more useful data
about COVID-19. Twenty years from now (as in the case of SARS today), we will
have no more useful data about COVID-19. Small groups of people will continue
to have debates using that data, coming to barely useful conclusion. Vast
groups of people will selectively use data to come to the emotional outcomes
they desire. Others will selectively use data with an attempt to control
others. “Not enough data” will not be the missing portion of this equation.
Long before America’s lockdown, sufficient data had been collected. That did
not stop the nonsensical lockdowns from taking place. They were not supported
by data then, and they are not supported by data now.
To Debate With These Two Groups — The
Emotional and The Controlling — Is Futile
A vital question for the individual, at
a moment like this, is if there is power in the hands of those who would be
emotional and those who would control. Can they hold sway over your life?
To spend your days in the data,
debating those lacking good faith, merely distracts from the most important:
caring for you and your loved ones, protecting yourself from the emotionally
triggered and the power hungry, and nurturing
yourself and the remnant around you.
Allan Stevo [send him mail] writes about international
politics and culture from a free market perspective at 52 Weeks in Slovakia (www.52inSk.com).
He is the author of How to Win America, The Bitcoin Manifesto, and numerous other
books.
