Lockdown: The New Totalitarianism
Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2020 6:34 pm
Anyone familiar with: American Institute for Economic Research?
I first became familiar with them about 20 years when I acquired their booklets and newsletter which offered a refined version of the "Dogs of the Dow" investing. They also believed in owning gold, albeit via buying gold company stocks. I did some of both . Bought some gold company stocks and bought some stocks recommended by their refined version of the "Dogs of the Dow" system. They also have a part of the institute that publishes on other economic matters aside from investing.
Here is one of them.
https://www.aier.org/article/lockdown-t ... tarianism/
Lockdown: The New Totalitarianism
And, here is the author: Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and nine books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
Finally, below are some key excerpts.
Vinny
Every political ideology has three elements: a vision of hell with an enemy that needs to be crushed, a vision of a more perfect world, and a plan for transitioning from one to the other. The means of transition usually involve the takeover and deployment of society’s most powerful tool: the state. For this reason, ideologies trend totalitarian. They depend fundamentally on overriding people’s preferences and choices and replacing them with scripted and planned belief systems and behaviors.
This year has given us a new ideology with totalitarian tendencies. It has a vision of hell, of heaven, and a means of transition. It has a unique language apparatus. It has a mental focus. It has signalling systems to reveal and recruit adherents.
That ideology is called lockdown. We might as well add the ism to the word: lockdownism.
Its vision of hell is a society in which pathogens run freely. Its heaven is a society managed entirely by medical technocrats whose main job is the suppression of all disease. The mental focus is the viruses and other bugs. The anthropology is to regard all human beings as little more than sacks of deadly pathogens. The people susceptible to the ideology are the people with various degrees of mysophobia, once regarded as a mental problem now elevated to the status of social awareness.
If Robert Glass or Neil Ferguson deserve to be called the founders of this movement, one of its most famous practitioners is Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes for Health. His vision of the future is positively shocking: it includes restrictions on who you can have in your home, the end of all large events, the end of travel, perhaps an attack on pets, and the effective dismantlement of all cities. Anthony Fauci explains:
Fauci’s entire essay reads like an attempted lockdown manifesto, complete with the fully expected longings for the state of nature and an imagined purification of life. Reading this utopian plan for a society without pathogens helps explain one of the strangest features of lockdownism: its puritanism. Notice that the lockdown particularly attacked anything that resembles fun: Broadway, movies, sports, travel, bowling, bars, restaurants, hotels, gyms, and clubs. Still now there are curfews in place to stop people from staying out too late — with absolutely no medical rationale. Pets are on the list too.
If an activity is fun, it is a target.
There is a moral element here. The thinking is that the more fun people are having, the more choices that are their own, the more disease (sin) spreads. It’s a medicalized version of Savoranola’s religious ideology that led to the Bonfire of the Vanities.
What’s remarkable is that Fauci was ever in a position to influence policy through his closeness to power, and he did in fact have a strong influence over the White House in turning an open policy into a lockdown one. Only once the White House caught on to his real agenda was he removed from the inner circle.
Lockdownism has all the expected elements. It has a maniacal focus on one life concern – the presence of pathogens – to the exclusion of every other concern. The least of the concerns is human liberty. The second least concern is the freedom of association. The third least concern is property rights. All of this must bow to the technocratic discipline of the disease mitigators. Constitutions and limits on government do not matter. And notice too how little medical therapeutics even figure in here. It’s not about making people get better. It’s about controlling the whole of life.
Note too that there is not the slightest concern here for trade-offs or unintended consequences. In the Covid-19 lockdowns, hospitals were emptied out due to restrictions on elective surgeries and diagnostics. That suffering from this disastrous decision will be with us for many years. The same is true of vaccinations for other diseases: they plummeted during the lockdowns. In other words, the lockdowns don’t even achieve good health outcomes; they do the opposite. Early evidence points to soring drug overdoses, depression, and suicide.
This is sheer fanaticism, a kind of insanity wrought by a wild vision of a one-dimensional world in which the whole of life is organized around disease avoidance. And there is an additional presumption here that our bodies (via the immune system) have not evolved alongside viruses for a million years. No recognition of that reality. Instead the sole goal is to make “social distancing” the national credo. Let us speak more plainly: what this really means is forced human separation. It means the dismantlement of markets, cities, in-person sports events, and the end of your right to move around freely.
All this is envisioned in Fauci’s manifesto. The entire argument rests on a simple error: the belief that more human contact spreads more disease and death. In contrast, Oxford’s eminent epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta argues that globalism and more human contact has boosted immunities and made life vastly safer for everyone.
The lockdowners have had surprising success in convincing people of their wild views. You only need to believe that virus avoidance is the only goal for everyone in society, and then spin out the implications from there. Before you know it, you have joined a new totalitarian cult.
The lockdowns are looking less like a gigantic error and more like the unfolding of a fanatical political ideology and policy experiment that attacks core postulates of civilization at their very root. It’s time we take it seriously and combat it with the same fervor with which a free people resisted all the other evil ideologies that sought to strip humanity of dignity and replace freedom with the terrifying dreams of intellectuals and their government sock puppets.
I first became familiar with them about 20 years when I acquired their booklets and newsletter which offered a refined version of the "Dogs of the Dow" investing. They also believed in owning gold, albeit via buying gold company stocks. I did some of both . Bought some gold company stocks and bought some stocks recommended by their refined version of the "Dogs of the Dow" system. They also have a part of the institute that publishes on other economic matters aside from investing.
Here is one of them.
https://www.aier.org/article/lockdown-t ... tarianism/
Lockdown: The New Totalitarianism
And, here is the author: Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and nine books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
Finally, below are some key excerpts.
Vinny
Every political ideology has three elements: a vision of hell with an enemy that needs to be crushed, a vision of a more perfect world, and a plan for transitioning from one to the other. The means of transition usually involve the takeover and deployment of society’s most powerful tool: the state. For this reason, ideologies trend totalitarian. They depend fundamentally on overriding people’s preferences and choices and replacing them with scripted and planned belief systems and behaviors.
This year has given us a new ideology with totalitarian tendencies. It has a vision of hell, of heaven, and a means of transition. It has a unique language apparatus. It has a mental focus. It has signalling systems to reveal and recruit adherents.
That ideology is called lockdown. We might as well add the ism to the word: lockdownism.
Its vision of hell is a society in which pathogens run freely. Its heaven is a society managed entirely by medical technocrats whose main job is the suppression of all disease. The mental focus is the viruses and other bugs. The anthropology is to regard all human beings as little more than sacks of deadly pathogens. The people susceptible to the ideology are the people with various degrees of mysophobia, once regarded as a mental problem now elevated to the status of social awareness.
If Robert Glass or Neil Ferguson deserve to be called the founders of this movement, one of its most famous practitioners is Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes for Health. His vision of the future is positively shocking: it includes restrictions on who you can have in your home, the end of all large events, the end of travel, perhaps an attack on pets, and the effective dismantlement of all cities. Anthony Fauci explains:
Fauci’s entire essay reads like an attempted lockdown manifesto, complete with the fully expected longings for the state of nature and an imagined purification of life. Reading this utopian plan for a society without pathogens helps explain one of the strangest features of lockdownism: its puritanism. Notice that the lockdown particularly attacked anything that resembles fun: Broadway, movies, sports, travel, bowling, bars, restaurants, hotels, gyms, and clubs. Still now there are curfews in place to stop people from staying out too late — with absolutely no medical rationale. Pets are on the list too.
If an activity is fun, it is a target.
There is a moral element here. The thinking is that the more fun people are having, the more choices that are their own, the more disease (sin) spreads. It’s a medicalized version of Savoranola’s religious ideology that led to the Bonfire of the Vanities.
What’s remarkable is that Fauci was ever in a position to influence policy through his closeness to power, and he did in fact have a strong influence over the White House in turning an open policy into a lockdown one. Only once the White House caught on to his real agenda was he removed from the inner circle.
Lockdownism has all the expected elements. It has a maniacal focus on one life concern – the presence of pathogens – to the exclusion of every other concern. The least of the concerns is human liberty. The second least concern is the freedom of association. The third least concern is property rights. All of this must bow to the technocratic discipline of the disease mitigators. Constitutions and limits on government do not matter. And notice too how little medical therapeutics even figure in here. It’s not about making people get better. It’s about controlling the whole of life.
Note too that there is not the slightest concern here for trade-offs or unintended consequences. In the Covid-19 lockdowns, hospitals were emptied out due to restrictions on elective surgeries and diagnostics. That suffering from this disastrous decision will be with us for many years. The same is true of vaccinations for other diseases: they plummeted during the lockdowns. In other words, the lockdowns don’t even achieve good health outcomes; they do the opposite. Early evidence points to soring drug overdoses, depression, and suicide.
This is sheer fanaticism, a kind of insanity wrought by a wild vision of a one-dimensional world in which the whole of life is organized around disease avoidance. And there is an additional presumption here that our bodies (via the immune system) have not evolved alongside viruses for a million years. No recognition of that reality. Instead the sole goal is to make “social distancing” the national credo. Let us speak more plainly: what this really means is forced human separation. It means the dismantlement of markets, cities, in-person sports events, and the end of your right to move around freely.
All this is envisioned in Fauci’s manifesto. The entire argument rests on a simple error: the belief that more human contact spreads more disease and death. In contrast, Oxford’s eminent epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta argues that globalism and more human contact has boosted immunities and made life vastly safer for everyone.
The lockdowners have had surprising success in convincing people of their wild views. You only need to believe that virus avoidance is the only goal for everyone in society, and then spin out the implications from there. Before you know it, you have joined a new totalitarian cult.
The lockdowns are looking less like a gigantic error and more like the unfolding of a fanatical political ideology and policy experiment that attacks core postulates of civilization at their very root. It’s time we take it seriously and combat it with the same fervor with which a free people resisted all the other evil ideologies that sought to strip humanity of dignity and replace freedom with the terrifying dreams of intellectuals and their government sock puppets.
