Reposted from American Thinker
Social and political responses to the fears of the Corona-19 virus pandemic are news headlines, but do they deserve headlines? Of course, they are news, but they are not really new news. We have been repeatedly warned about the destructive power of fear.
Making themselves virtually unassailable, at least initially, politicians embraced the pandemic and associated public health fears it has engendered, and assumed near dictatorial powers in the name of protecting the public health. Unmasked and unhindered, some politicians’ actions have validated the descriptive term of “the ruling class.” The 1972 cult film by the same name gave one view of the dysfunctional life-style of a fictional British nobleman whose aspirations were quite noble and infused with a sense of god-like powers, not unlike some of our governors and mayors.
A less fanciful, but more philosophically grounded observation of the 1930’s was made by H.L. Menken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” No question that the Corona virus is real, not imaginary, but Menken astutely recognizes the basic urge in politicians to use fear to control the populous.
During President Roosevelt’s first inaugural address, on March 4th,1933, he said that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.
The more recent 2010 book by A. Codevilla bears the name “The Ruling Class,” and describes the outsized influence on American society by a clique of intellectuals scattered throughout the upper echelons of business, the media, political parties, and educational institutions. Constitutional rights are denigrated, as is the traditional role of religion in American daily life. These folks know that they know better than you do.
Combining a stretch of environmental-saving enthusiasm and fuzzy thinking, activists have wasted no effort in trying to link the imagined effects of climate change to its imagined impact on the Corona virus pandemic. Economic hardships and social deprivations imposed by the ruling class are said to be good for the globe, and that the necessary price to save it is a cultural and scientific retrenchment.
One author whose fictional narrative seems prescient in this current setting is Michael Crichton. His 2004 “State of Fear” is a fictional thriller whose environmental and philosophical underpinnings are well documented by him, and whose validity has largely stood the test of time. Al Gore’s perpetual predictions of global environmental disasters secondary to man-made carbon dioxide and fossil fuel use have not materialized in the intervening decade.
In a Socratic method exposition, Crichton develops the concept of fear as a tool to control the public. As one of his characters explains:
“I am leading to the notion of social control…. To the requirement of every sovereign state to exert control over the behavior of its citizens, to keep them orderly and reasonably docile…. To keep them paying taxes… and, of course, we know that social control is best managed through fear.”
He continues:
“…in reality, in the last fifteen years we have been under the control of an entirely new complex, far more powerful and far more pervasive. I call it the politico-legal-media complex. The PLM. And it is dedicated to promoting fear in the population, under the guise of promoting safety.”
He identifies the role of experts and universities in the enshrinement of fear as a political tool:
“Because they had a new role to play. They became the creators of new fears for the PLM. Universities today are factories of fear. They invent all the new terrors and new social anxieties…they produce a steady stream of new anxieties, dangers, and social terrors to be used by politicians, lawyers, and reporters.”
Fears of climate change fit that narrative, in spite of the continued failure of computer modeling of global climate to accurately predict future changes.
With the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, pandemonium erupted worldwide as fear of the unknown initially governed both social and scientific responses. Leaders abhor the prospect of telling a frightened public that they do not know how to respond to a new pathogen. Informed response would require a learning curve time-span to fully understand the clinical impact on the public, but no one wants to be the unfortunate guinea pig awaiting nature’s random death sentence.
Experts in epidemiology and infectious diseases were tapped for advice, and they turned to computer models for answers. Years of failed computer-based climate predictions would be no reason to doubt the ability of virus modeling to predict its worldwide impact. By mid-March, the computer had spoken and British scientist Neil Ferguson reported that many millions would die. “Flatten the curve” entered the lexicon of the media, though few noted that the area under the flattened curve likely contained the same area as the initial peaked curve. No small matter because if the areas are the same then the number of deaths represented would remain the same; they would just take place over a longer time interval. Subsequently, the computer derived predictions of millions of deaths proved to be grossly exaggerated.
Virologists and epidemiologists inhabit a different mental world than that of economists, sociologists, and physicians, and their recommended remedies might well kill the virus at some point, but the patient might also have been killed by the cure.
This latter scenario has painfully played out over the past few months as the collateral damage to a highly integrated, interdependent, and complex modern society from the epidemiological cure of isolation, implemented by the ruling class, has become evident.
“Stay-at-home” and avoid social contact is a simplistic fallback to stop an epidemic in the 21st century. It may have been the only answer in the form of walled cities in the middle ages; it may work if you isolate that first infected person and prevent him/her from transmitting the pathogen. However, in the present pandemic, the pathogen was well out of the bottle long before it was recognized to be a new pathological entity. This virus has shape changer variants in its clinical manifestations, and makes accurate and timely tracking difficult. The pandemic may or may not be beginning to burn itself out, only time will tell. However, there is no difficulty seeing the global destruction of human lives secondary to near economic collapse.
What also has been revealed is the latent enthusiasm with which the political/ruling class has claimed the moral high ground in issuing edicts in the name of the public good. “Stay-at-home” orders range from weeks to months with no solid scientific justification for a particular time span, but with political/legal imperative. Wearing of masks by the general public has become a schizophrenic policy issue. Numerous studies claim that they are not protective against the Corona virus, especially the homemade cloth varieties. At 120 nm diameter, these virus particles are not filtered out by surgical or fabric face masks. Wearing of such masks may aggravate other existing medical conditions. Official agencies differ in their recommendations. The WHO says no to wearing them by the general public; our CDC says yes. Wearing a mask becomes a measure of virtue signaling, albeit much cheaper than driving a “pious.” Some governors are true believers and issue orders to wear a mask, any sort of mask, else risk criminal charges and fines. Without hesitation, such politicians disregard basic constitutional rights based on personal whim and selective use of diverse scientific data.
Fear is a valuable, basic human emotion which functions as a self-preservation instinct. However, the current Coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated that members of the ruling class are adroitly curtailing our constitutional basic rights in the name of saving us from ourselves.
Charles Battig is a retired physician graduate engineer, policy advisor Heartland Institute, member of the CO2 coalition. His website is http://www.climateis.com
Social and political responses to the fears of the Corona-19 virus pandemic are news headlines, but do they deserve headlines? Of course, they are news, but they are not really new news. We have been repeatedly warned about the destructive power of fear.
Making themselves virtually unassailable, at least initially, politicians embraced the pandemic and associated public health fears it has engendered, and assumed near dictatorial powers in the name of protecting the public health. Unmasked and unhindered, some politicians’ actions have validated the descriptive term of “the ruling class.” The 1972 cult film by the same name gave one view of the dysfunctional life-style of a fictional British nobleman whose aspirations were quite noble and infused with a sense of god-like powers, not unlike some of our governors and mayors.
A less fanciful, but more philosophically grounded observation of the 1930’s was made by H.L. Menken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” No question that the Corona virus is real, not imaginary, but Menken astutely recognizes the basic urge in politicians to use fear to control the populous.
During President Roosevelt’s first inaugural address, on March 4th,1933, he said that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.
The more recent 2010 book by A. Codevilla bears the name “The Ruling Class,” and describes the outsized influence on American society by a clique of intellectuals scattered throughout the upper echelons of business, the media, political parties, and educational institutions. Constitutional rights are denigrated, as is the traditional role of religion in American daily life. These folks know that they know better than you do.
Combining a stretch of environmental-saving enthusiasm and fuzzy thinking, activists have wasted no effort in trying to link the imagined effects of climate change to its imagined impact on the Corona virus pandemic. Economic hardships and social deprivations imposed by the ruling class are said to be good for the globe, and that the necessary price to save it is a cultural and scientific retrenchment.
One author whose fictional narrative seems prescient in this current setting is Michael Crichton. His 2004 “State of Fear” is a fictional thriller whose environmental and philosophical underpinnings are well documented by him, and whose validity has largely stood the test of time. Al Gore’s perpetual predictions of global environmental disasters secondary to man-made carbon dioxide and fossil fuel use have not materialized in the intervening decade.
In a Socratic method exposition, Crichton develops the concept of fear as a tool to control the public. As one of his characters explains:
“I am leading to the notion of social control…. To the requirement of every sovereign state to exert control over the behavior of its citizens, to keep them orderly and reasonably docile…. To keep them paying taxes… and, of course, we know that social control is best managed through fear.”
He continues:
“…in reality, in the last fifteen years we have been under the control of an entirely new complex, far more powerful and far more pervasive. I call it the politico-legal-media complex. The PLM. And it is dedicated to promoting fear in the population, under the guise of promoting safety.”
He identifies the role of experts and universities in the enshrinement of fear as a political tool:
“Because they had a new role to play. They became the creators of new fears for the PLM. Universities today are factories of fear. They invent all the new terrors and new social anxieties…they produce a steady stream of new anxieties, dangers, and social terrors to be used by politicians, lawyers, and reporters.”
Fears of climate change fit that narrative, in spite of the continued failure of computer modeling of global climate to accurately predict future changes.
With the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, pandemonium erupted worldwide as fear of the unknown initially governed both social and scientific responses. Leaders abhor the prospect of telling a frightened public that they do not know how to respond to a new pathogen. Informed response would require a learning curve time-span to fully understand the clinical impact on the public, but no one wants to be the unfortunate guinea pig awaiting nature’s random death sentence.
Experts in epidemiology and infectious diseases were tapped for advice, and they turned to computer models for answers. Years of failed computer-based climate predictions would be no reason to doubt the ability of virus modeling to predict its worldwide impact. By mid-March, the computer had spoken and British scientist Neil Ferguson reported that many millions would die. “Flatten the curve” entered the lexicon of the media, though few noted that the area under the flattened curve likely contained the same area as the initial peaked curve. No small matter because if the areas are the same then the number of deaths represented would remain the same; they would just take place over a longer time interval. Subsequently, the computer derived predictions of millions of deaths proved to be grossly exaggerated.
Virologists and epidemiologists inhabit a different mental world than that of economists, sociologists, and physicians, and their recommended remedies might well kill the virus at some point, but the patient might also have been killed by the cure.
This latter scenario has painfully played out over the past few months as the collateral damage to a highly integrated, interdependent, and complex modern society from the epidemiological cure of isolation, implemented by the ruling class, has become evident.
“Stay-at-home” and avoid social contact is a simplistic fallback to stop an epidemic in the 21st century. It may have been the only answer in the form of walled cities in the middle ages; it may work if you isolate that first infected person and prevent him/her from transmitting the pathogen. However, in the present pandemic, the pathogen was well out of the bottle long before it was recognized to be a new pathological entity. This virus has shape changer variants in its clinical manifestations, and makes accurate and timely tracking difficult. The pandemic may or may not be beginning to burn itself out, only time will tell. However, there is no difficulty seeing the global destruction of human lives secondary to near economic collapse.
What also has been revealed is the latent enthusiasm with which the political/ruling class has claimed the moral high ground in issuing edicts in the name of the public good. “Stay-at-home” orders range from weeks to months with no solid scientific justification for a particular time span, but with political/legal imperative. Wearing of masks by the general public has become a schizophrenic policy issue. Numerous studies claim that they are not protective against the Corona virus, especially the homemade cloth varieties. At 120 nm diameter, these virus particles are not filtered out by surgical or fabric face masks. Wearing of such masks may aggravate other existing medical conditions. Official agencies differ in their recommendations. The WHO says no to wearing them by the general public; our CDC says yes. Wearing a mask becomes a measure of virtue signaling, albeit much cheaper than driving a “pious.” Some governors are true believers and issue orders to wear a mask, any sort of mask, else risk criminal charges and fines. Without hesitation, such politicians disregard basic constitutional rights based on personal whim and selective use of diverse scientific data.
Fear is a valuable, basic human emotion which functions as a self-preservation instinct. However, the current Coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated that members of the ruling class are adroitly curtailing our constitutional basic rights in the name of saving us from ourselves.
Charles Battig is a retired physician graduate engineer, policy advisor Heartland Institute, member of the CO2 coalition. His website is http://www.climateis.com
Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/fear_the_best_tool_of_the_ruling_class.html#ixzz6OqDh7Che
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
I have a fear of people wearing masks, especially during riots.
And the government.
But not climate change — global warming has been good news for over 300 years.
We need a new boogeyman every few years to keep us scared.
The Democrats have Trump — just before the election they plan to claim he came here from another planet.
Reading through this article was like “Deja vu, all over again.” 🙂
h/t: Yogi Berra.
Well, it’s worth saying twice, I guess…
Yep seven in the morning they was a moron wearing his mask for his morning walk, no one was within fifty feet of him and at most less than a halve dozen people would every get close to in an entire hour walk. People are truly stupid, they listen to the Lame Stream Media and have no idea the virus is not likely to infect you outdoors unless someone coughs or sneezes on you and if they for the mask does no cover you eye so you would be exposed anyway with or without it. If he had symptoms he being irresponsible being out near people anyway.
And of course cheap effective treatments are NOT allowed to the peons like us but the leaders?
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/05/president-el-salvador-announces-taking-hydroxychloroquine-says-world-leaders/
President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele has announced that he is taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventative measure against the coronavirus.
Bukele told reporters on Tuesday that “most world leaders” are doing the same and has questioned why world leaders are being advised to use it while the public is not.
“I use it as a prophylaxis, President Trump uses it as a prophylaxis, most of the world’s leaders use it as a prophylaxis,” said Bukele.
Fear the police.
Meanwhile, this is why they want the police disbanded. Antifa has taken over a several block area in Seattle with their own rules, checkpoints and armed guards. This is what numerous jihadists groups did in Syria, though on a much larger scale. Notice the borders and “walls” of a group that always rails against borders and walls.
(Click on the images for better detail)
https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1270375353614123010
I’m afraid they are right.
“Subsequently, the computer derived predictions of millions of deaths proved to be grossly exaggerated”
But they haven’t stopped making them. In an astonishing display of prestidigitatory, self-justifying, obfuscatory modelling, Imperial College has just made its comeback into the Fear Factory by telling us that there would have been about 10 times as many deaths without what they call “intervention”.
After reading “we use a semi-mechanistic Bayesian hierarchical model” I started to wonder about why the public funds these folks.
https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk:8443/bitstream/10044/1/77731/10/2020-03-30-COVID19-Report-13.pdf
It’s also available at Nature, where it comes with some mp4 videos, that won’t play on my computer:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2405-7
They reach this conclusion by analysing data from 11 European countries. Curiously, they seem to detect no significant difference between Sweden and the other 10 countries. Which makes me wonder about their ability to see what is before their eyes.
The paper has no less than 61 authors, which is a bit over-the-top even in today’s bloated academia (but no Neil Ferguson, who was presumably there in spirit, if not in body, probably off having a shag).
I just read this from the New York Times “Apart from the actual biology of the coronavirus – which we are only beginning to understand – nothing is predestined. How many people fall ill with it depends on how they behave, how we test them, how we treat them and how lucky we are in developing a vaccine.” The idiot did not know our behavior, our testing mean nothing and that a vaccine will come to late. Is our media that stupid. The virus will do what virus do, we have almost no control over them. At this date and time is that not clear to the dim-witted, let alone the New York Slime staff?
Interesting, but clicking http://WWW.CLIMATEIS.COM takes you to a page advertising the site for sale.
Ernest Benn summed it up nicely:
Although religion has been used to enslave people, it also provides a bulwark against totalitarians. “If you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything.”
Carl Jung realized that totalitarians of all stripes sought to remove the foundations of people’s morality in order to control their thoughts and actions.
“At 120 nm diameter, these virus particles are not filtered out by surgical or fabric face masks. Wearing of such masks may aggravate other existing medical conditions. Wearing a mask becomes a measure of virtue signaling”
Wow! Is this really true? Anyway, amazing post thank you. Learned a lot. Printed it out.
I learned how to handle fear in US Army, “they” really don’t want to go there with me, or around 20 million other veterans. “They” will not like the outcome of that scenario.
FBI crime statistics data for 2018 show that there were a total of 7,407 black murders that year in the U.S. which is the highest for all races in our country. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/topic-pages/expanded-homicide
The number of 2018 black murders is 22% higher than for all 2018 murders of whites at 6,068.
This outcome occurred even though blacks represent only about 14% of the total U.S. population compared to 76.5% for whites based on 2019 census data of race classification categories. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/IPE120218
Based on FBI data for single victim/single offender murder data by race shows that nearly 89% of all these black murders were the result of black on black crime.
FBI data on all police justifiable homicides of blacks for 2018 shows these occurrences represent less than 3% of all black murders with that same percentage also representing the occurrences of police justifiable homicides for whites as well.
Black on black murders dominate the occurrences of all black criminal homicides in the US with the total number of these murders representing far in excess of the proportion of blacks in US population compared to murders for whites.
The overwhelming proportion and number of black on black murders in the US compared to data for white murders along with the much smaller number of police justifiable homicides for both blacks and whites does not support claims of systemic racism in the US against blacks by the police.
Black Lives Matter and their media enablers choose to ignore the overwhelming evidence and significance of out of control long-standing black on black murders across the US in trying to push their political campaign against the police that if successful will only further exacerbate the problem of black on black murder and other black on black crimes.
This purely political campaign by Black Lives Matters is built upon deception, distortion and dishonesty. Their deceitful campaign does not even begin to address the fundamental problems that are driving the huge black on black crime reality that is destroying the lives of millions of people.
I’m not afraid! I’m just pissed off big time.
Funny thing that,you keep squeezing the “Flight or Flight” instinct,strange things happen.
Usually to the people doing the squeezing.
I have stopped wearing a mask in public places. At first, I felt naked, exposed and vulnerable. But withing two days that went away and now not wearing a mask feels normal again. It will take time for everyone to get over the psychological feeling of safety in wearing a mask.
The authors website link comes up as being for sale.
Oh really,? Touched some nerves eh.
populous is an *adjective*, the noun is populus, eg. the populus.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/populus
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/populous
Author is totally wrong about face masks. Slovakia was first country outside of Asia to generally wear masks outside home and is country with best Coronavirus results in Europe and countries from northern hemisphere moderate zone.
We can thanks only to masks that life is back to normal now. With 7 days median 0 cases and nobody in intensive care for weeks.
On the one hand, we have the Cult of Calamitous Climate, and on the other, the Cult of Calamitous Coronavirus. Now, the pandemic is a real thing, which distinguishes it from the “climate problem”, however the response to it has followed similar lines. The commonality is the total lack of reason, emotionalism, and a tendency for herd behavior. Witness, the wearing of masks. Then there are all the ritualistic cleanings of everything we touch. We do live in interesting times.
From the article: “Experts in epidemiology and infectious diseases were tapped for advice, and they turned to computer models for answers.”
Epidemiologists I believe turned to previous accumulated knowledge, of which there is much, concerning epidemics of highly pathogenic CoV’s like MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV, and low pathogenic ones like HCoV 229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1, as a starting point to understand the new unknown COVID-19.
The logic I presume was to bet on the new virus from the same large subfamily Coronavirinae, to behave similarly.
Politicians turned to computer models for answers.
From the article: “Virologists and epidemiologists inhabit a different mental world than that of economists, sociologists, and physicians”
Sorry but that’s just meaningless.
The threads above are missing a a consequence of spreading fear of social contact. In social species, denial of social interaction is a physiological stressor. Stress produces a catabolic state. Take a social species, any social species(even rats), and apply electric shocks every time they interact. What you get will not be pretty, and there is no way you could get this by an ethics committee.
This is what is being done to the aged, to kids at school, to young mothers of new infants, to all of us. The wearing of the mask is one index of the degree of fear. Another is how people shy away from each other in the grocery store. I have noticed that eye contact is much reduced in public places. If you think this does not have consequences, you are crazy.
I read somewhere that the Covid19 attacks men disproportionately versus women. Has there been a study of the added protection from wearing skirts over trousers?
Sorry,
Cheers
Mike