1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

> Mass psyop tool used by evils: Google Jigsaw

The people behind 1984 really do employ psychologists to
figure out how to roll out and pull off all the shit you've been
seeing around the world. Unless you study messaging
and other forces darkly applied, you'll never notice it.


The Great Demoralization

Commentary by Jeffrey A. Tucker

https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/the-great-demoralization-5498920

https://www.aier.org/article/why-this-draconian-response-to-covid-19/
https://brownstone.org/articles/what-we-knew-in-the-early-days/
https://poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-the-red-death/
https://brownstone.org/articles/clean-vs-dirty-a-way-to-understand-everything/
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-political-hierarchy-of-infection/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/coronavirus-quarantines-ebola.html

On March 6, 2020, the mayor of Austin, Texas, canceled the biggest
tech and arts trade show in the world, South-by-Southwest, only a week
before hundreds of thousands were to gather in the city.

In an instant, with the stroke of a pen, it was all gone: hotel
reservations, flight plans, performances, exhibitors, and all the
hopes and dreams of thousands of merchants in the town. Economic
impact: a loss $335 million in revenue at least. And that was just to
the city alone, to say nothing of the broader impact.
(imtmphoto/Shutterstock)

It was the beginning of U.S. lockdowns. It wasn’t entirely clear at
the time—my own sense was that this was a calamity that would lead to
decades of successful lawsuits against the Austin mayor—but it turned
out that Austin was the test case and template for the entire nation
and then the world.

The reason was of course COVID but the pathogen wasn’t even there. The
idea was to keep it out of the city, an incredible and sudden fallback
to a medieval practice that has nothing to do with modern public
health understanding of how a respiratory virus should be handled.

“In six months,” I wrote at the time, “if we are in a recession,
unemployment is up, financial markets are wrecked, and people are
locked in their homes, we’ll wonder why the heck governments chose
disease ‘containment’ over disease mitigation. Then the conspiracy
theorists get to work.”

I was right about the conspiracy theorists but I had not anticipated
that they would turn out to be right about nearly everything. We were
being groomed for extended national and global lockdowns.

At this point in the trajectory, we already knew the gradient of risk.
It was not medically significant for healthy working-age adults (which
still to this day the CDCs does not admit). So the shutdown likely
protected very few if anyone.

The extraordinary edict—worthy of a tin-pot dictator of a dark
age—completely overrode the wishes of millions, all on the decision of
one man, whose name is Steven Adler.

“Was the consideration between maintaining that money, effectively
rolling the dice, and doing what you did?” asked Texas Monthly of the
mayor.

His answer: “No.”

Clarifying: “We made a decision based on what was in the best health
interest for the city. And that is not an easy choice.”

After the shocking cancellation, which overrode property rights and
free will, the mayor urged all residents to go out and eat at
restaurants and gather and spend money to support the local economy.
In this later interview, he explained that he had no problem keeping
the city open. He just didn’t want people from hither and yon—the
dirty people, so to speak—to bring a virus with them.

He was here playing the role of Prince Prospero in Edgar Allan Poe’s
“The Masque of the Red Death.” He was turning the capital city of
Texas into a castle in which the elite could hide from the virus, an
action that also became a foreshadowing of what was to come: the
division of the entire country into clean and dirty populations.

The mayor further added a strange comment: “I think the spread of the
disease here is inevitable. I don’t think that closing down South Bay
was intended to stop the disease from getting here because it is
coming. The assessment of our public health professionals was that we
were risking it coming here more quickly, or in a greater way with a
greater impact. And the longer we could put that off, the better this
city is.”

And there we have the “flatten the curve” thinking at work. Kick the
can down the road. Postpone. Delay herd immunity as long as possible.
Yes, everyone will get the bug but it is always better that it happens
later rather than sooner. But why? We were never told. Flatten the
curve was really just prolong the pain, keep our overlords in charge
as long as possible, put normal life on hold, and stay safe as long as
you can.

Prolonging the pain might also have served another surreptitious
agenda: let the working classes—the dirty people—get the bug and bear
the burden of herd immunity so that the elites can stay clean and
hopefully it will die out before it gets to the highest echelons.
There was indeed a hierarchy of infection.

In all these months, no one ever explained to the American public why
prolonging the period of non-exposure was always better than meeting
the virus sooner, gaining immunity, and getting over it. The hospitals
around the country were not strained. Indeed, with the inexplicable
shutdown of medical services for diagnostics and elective surgeries,
hospitals in Texas were empty for months. Health care spending
collapsed.

This was the onset of the great demoralization. The message was: your
property is not your own. Your events are not yours. Your decisions
are subject to our will. We know better than you. You cannot take
risks with your own free will. Our judgment is always better than
yours. We will override anything about your bodily autonomy and
choices that are inconsistent with our perceptions of the common good.
There is no restraint on us and every restraint on you.

This messaging and this practice is inconsistent with a flourishing
human life, which requires the freedom of choice above all else. It
also requires the security of property and contracts. It presumes that
if we make plans, those plans cannot be arbitrarily canceled by force
by a power outside of our control. Those are bare minimum presumptions
of a civilized society. Anything else leads to barbarism and that is
exactly where the Austin decision took us.

We still don’t know precisely who was involved in this rash judgment
or on what basis they made it. There was a growing sense in the
country at the time that something was going to happen. There had been
sporadic use of lockdown powers in the past. Think of the closure of
Boston after the bombing in 2013. A year later, the state of
Connecticut quarantined two travelers who might have been exposed to
Ebola in Africa. These were the precedents.

“The coronavirus is driving Americans into unexplored territory, in
this case understanding and accepting the loss of freedom associated
with a quarantine,” wrote the New York Times on March 19, 2020, three
days after the Trump press conference that announced two weeks to
flatten the curve.

The experience on a nationwide basis fundamentally undermined the
civil liberties and rights that Americans had long taken for granted.
It was a shock to everyone but to young people still in school, it was
utter trauma and a moment of mental reprogramming. They learned all
the wrong lessons: they are not in charge of their lives; someone else
is. The only way to be is to figure out the system and play along.

We now see epic learning loss, psychological shock, population-wide
obesity and substance abuse, a fall in investor confidence, a
shrinkage of savings reflecting less interest in the future, and a
dramatic decline in public participation in what used to be normal
life events: church, theater, museums, libraries, fairs, symphonies,
ballets, theme parks, and so on. Attendance in general is down by half
and this is starving these venues of money. Most of the big
institutions in large cities like New York, such as Broadway and the
Met, are on life support. The symphony halls have a third empty seats
despite lowering prices.

It seems remarkable that this three-and-a-half year-long war against
basic liberty for nearly everyone has come to this. And yet it should
not be a surprise. All ideology aside, you simply cannot maintain much
less cultivate a civilized life when governments, in combination with
the commanding heights of media and large corporations, treat their
citizens like lab rats in a science experiment. You only end in
sucking away the essence and vibrancy of the human spirit, as well as
the will to build a good life.

In the name of public health, they sapped the will to health. And if
you object, they shut you up. This is still going on daily.

The ruling class that did this to the country has yet to speak
honestly about what transpired. It was their actions that created the
current cultural, economic, and social crisis. Their experiment left
the country and our lives in shambles. We’ve yet to hear apologies or
even basic honesty about any of it. Instead, all we get is more
misleading propaganda about how we need yet another shot that doesn’t
work.

History provides many cases of a beaten down, demoralized, and
increasingly poor and censored majority population being ruled over by
an imperious, inhumane, sadistic, privileged, and yet tiny ruling
class. We just never believed we would become one of those cases. The
truth of this is so grim and glaring, and the likely explanation of
what happened so shocking, that the entire subject is regarded as
something of a taboo in public life.

There will be no fixing this, no crawling out from under the rubble,
until we get something from our rulers other than public preening
about a job well done, in ads sponsored by Pfizer and Moderna.