- It's my pleasure.
- Is it? Good. Then here's what I want to know: How did it happen that practically the whole world suddenly adopted this absolutely new social policy of lockdown, invented only months earlier by the totalitarian, oppressive government of China. Within a few dozen days half the world was locked up in their homes, their places of business and almost all public places closed.
- We've already talked about why they did it: to get the population used to repression, to crush small business and foster monopoly growth, to cover up the speculation induced bank and corporate financial crash in progress.
- I know. I'm asking how the whole world jumped in unison in the same way, towards the same repressive device.
- The answer is right before our eyes. We see politicians everywhere discovering the technique of political organization of herding people* into rituals, enacting the embattled weak self being reborn strong and new in the company of other telling themselves the same story. As the leaders need to enhance insecurity so as to drive frightened and anrgy people into ritual enactments, rituals of 'us' battling 'them' have the failing that life among the reborn 'us' is not destabilized, and therefore is a potential source of rebellion against the political machinations being practiced on the people by their leaders. Follow so far?
- Yes.
- Then the rest should be obvious: when you make a disease the 'them' that is being fought against in ritual, there is no 'us' free from becoming an object of fear and attack. Everyone is a danger, an object of fear and aversion to everyone else.
- And therefore there's no room for security in which to wake up and rebel.
- Yes.
- So the world's leaders, already practicing the tactics of fear mongering and cult building for the purposes of repression, saw immediately the advantages being offered to them by an epidemic, even one as epidemics go not especially deadly.**
- Is it? Good. Then here's what I want to know: How did it happen that practically the whole world suddenly adopted this absolutely new social policy of lockdown, invented only months earlier by the totalitarian, oppressive government of China. Within a few dozen days half the world was locked up in their homes, their places of business and almost all public places closed.
- We've already talked about why they did it: to get the population used to repression, to crush small business and foster monopoly growth, to cover up the speculation induced bank and corporate financial crash in progress.
- I know. I'm asking how the whole world jumped in unison in the same way, towards the same repressive device.
- The answer is right before our eyes. We see politicians everywhere discovering the technique of political organization of herding people* into rituals, enacting the embattled weak self being reborn strong and new in the company of other telling themselves the same story. As the leaders need to enhance insecurity so as to drive frightened and anrgy people into ritual enactments, rituals of 'us' battling 'them' have the failing that life among the reborn 'us' is not destabilized, and therefore is a potential source of rebellion against the political machinations being practiced on the people by their leaders. Follow so far?
- Yes.
- Then the rest should be obvious: when you make a disease the 'them' that is being fought against in ritual, there is no 'us' free from becoming an object of fear and attack. Everyone is a danger, an object of fear and aversion to everyone else.
- And therefore there's no room for security in which to wake up and rebel.
- Yes.
- So the world's leaders, already practicing the tactics of fear mongering and cult building for the purposes of repression, saw immediately the advantages being offered to them by an epidemic, even one as epidemics go not especially deadly.**
Further Reading:
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* See: How Could We Be So Blind?
** Germany reports virtually the same number of people dying from all causes in 2020 as in 2019. Sweden, with no lockdown, reports, depending on how the calculation is made, between 0 and 7,000 more deaths in 2020, that is, a maximum increase in number of deaths in the year of epidemic of about 1 per 1,000 population (1/10th of 1%).
