Posted on 02/20/2023 6:09:39 PM PST by lightman
This weekend, under the auspices of Brownstone Institute, two dozen writers and scholars—lawyers, doctors, essayists, scientists—gathered to come to terms with what happened over three years. At some point, all of us realized that no one in the room is today doing anything like what we were doing three years ago. Most everyone there had changed jobs, moved, adjusted their outlook, and otherwise taken a new direction in life.
It’s happened to countless millions in this country and all over the world. The upheaval has been astonishing to experience and watch, both in its most grim elements but also in the way we’ve all learned to survive and thrive in the post-pandemic era.
We spoke about the future, yes, but we are nowhere near done with coming to terms with the recent past. It seems like a blur, which is a reason why it is valuable to focus in on the details of what we’ve been through. We recounted the silly things (one-way grocery aisles), the brutal things (closed churches and gyms), and the tragic things (friends and family members dying alone in hospitals and buried in Zoom funerals).
Each person had a story of confronting authority in their own realm and being astonished to discover how many people were willing to go along with all the nonsense.
A ubiquitous feature of these new times is the end of naivete. Trust in whole institutions and sectors is gone. Those who once hoped that something like the New York Times was biased but ultimately reliable have learned otherwise. It was this way with the whole media, which almost universally became a propaganda megaphone and still hasn’t admitted it.
Our technologies that had promised a new age of information and personal emancipation revealed themselves to be captured tools of surveillance that used and manipulated us rather than served us. Politicians proved gutless. Our friend circles and communities turned out to inhabit obsequious servants of ruling-class lies.
We never doubted our family doctors but then they started telling us things we knew were not true and asking us to engage in behaviors that were clearly bad for our health. Government officials whom we implicitly trusted with grave responsibilities have shamelessly lied to us for years now. If we only doubted their credibility in the past, now it seems like the whole business of government is nothing but deception.
The courts that we thought were there to defend our rights fell too, not meeting at all for months, deferring to executive power later, and only after nearly two years started finally to act to strike down the most egregious impositions on our liberties.
The pharmaceutical companies that have built up a good reputation over decades suddenly threw themselves into experiment shots backed by obviously implausible claims. When the public began to doubt, they took recourse to pushing for hard mandates that ended up forcing medicines on people who did not want them, in complete violation of the spirit and letter of international law. Now we are surrounded by resulting injury and death and yet the manufacturers hide glibly behind their indemnifications from liability as provided by law. Then they took it one step further to force the shots on kids to perpetuate their legal immunity.
The industrial sector also proved far too willing to go along. This is because some of the biggest out there saw that they would benefit from lockdowns, even as small businesses were being crushed. It was genuinely appalling how few leaders in industry were willing to stick their necks out to say the most obvious things, such as that the lockdowns and mask mandates—to say nothing of the vaccine mandates—were inconsistent with free enterprise.
It’s devastating to discover how much the prospect of free money and subsidized profitability causes truth to be buried. Big Tech thrived, as did streaming platforms, digital educational tools, and other adaptations of lockdown-era technology.
One example is Peloton, a company that truly drank the lockdown Kool-Aid. In our society today, people had long come to believe that health is something that you buy, not earn through better behavior. So in this capitalistic ethos, consumers pay for pills, doctor visits, gym memberships, and fancy workout clothes but don’t actually eat better and exercise.
Peloton capitalized on this with outrageously expensive exercise bikes that people bought with their stimulus checks, all with the intention of using them to stay healthy in lockdowns. They would spin away in their apartments alone and expect the working classes to drop off their groceries at their door. In reality, the new equipment just became yet another thing to take up space and a symbol rather than the reality of health.
Peloton expanded dramatically as their stock price hit $167 at the height of lockdowns, only to fall all the way to $16 today. The company and its employees truly believed that the good times would last forever. But they did not and the company is now massively bleeding money. Like everyone else in this sector of the lockdown industry, they are cutting as fast as possible.
The playbook is the same for all these once-high-flying companies that are now suffering. There is a turnaround plan, mass layoffs, and C-suite upheaval. This same thing is happening to industry across the board. For the prior 15 years with zero-percent interest rates, capital chased return in speculative ventures that were betting on long-term return. But then the long term suddenly stopped. The investment proved unsustainable.
The silver lining in an industrial sense is the killing off of ESG/DEI, invasive and bloated HR departments, and wildly inflated payrolls that had turned corporate America into an enforcement engine of woke ideology. There is a strange poetry unfolding here as the post-pandemic period is wiping out whole sectors of fakery that had come to dominate corporate culture and society for years.
Nearly every sector of society is undergoing transformation in light of the loss of trust. This includes education, media, technology, religion, and even geographic demographics. Big cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and New York are in shambles as small towns and red-state metropolises are thriving.
At Brownstone’s event this weekend, we reflected on the darkest of times but also on how the light has begun to dawn in every area of life today. It’s been painful, far too much and with zero justification, but we are headed now into a new area of reality and truth. As usual, politics will be the last to adapt but adapt it will in time. Meanwhile, there is plenty of work to do in every other area of life to build a new renaissance from the rubble of the last three years.
What disappointed me most was how many people are cowardly, shameless, “career” preserving weasels.
I still see a few diehards wearing their silly face diapers in the more urban areas of the country, but by and large, the "big bad Covid" is over and done with. Even in the subways of NYC.
I loved the part of the article that talked about people buying overpriced exercise bikes so they could exercise in their apartments while groceries were delivered to them.
I learned that lesson 20 years ago when I first started exercising every day. I bought this top of the line treadmill back in 2003, thinking I could get my five miles walked im the comfort of my home, no matter what the weather outside, as I watched DVDs of TV shows, movies, operas, etc.
That lasted about a week. The pounding noise of the treadmill made it impossible to understand what was happening on the TV and besides, it was boring as hell.
So I got a dog and did my five miles outside - in all kinds of weather.
20 years later, I still go outside and do my daily walks.
The treadmill ended up being a place for my wife to hang laundry to dry.
I lost respect immediately for all those "we are all in this together" types.
It’s like the Black Death plauge spawned the Enlightenment.
If you Survived of course
Stop dissing hard working, blood sucking weasels.
“Minions” is a better fit..
;-)
COVID-19 was a translucently pale imitation of the Black Death.
Easily survivable physiologically but the governmental OVERreaction will be psycholically scarring generationally.
I learned the same lesson when I plopped down $5 for Charles Atlas’s stuff. For 10 years, my stepfather would ask me, “have you found your muscles yet?” It was pretty brutal, but I learned my lesson.
We need to be talking about how to prevent this from happening again. The governments around the world in conjunction with their media stooges tried to make it out to be the 1918 flu.
I don’t subscribe to Dr. Malone’s “Mass formation psychosis” in the general, but in terms of public sector and corporate governance, it’s entirely operative.
They get away with it precisely because of the disconnect between the elites and the common person.
Thanks for posting. I tried to read at the link, but it says it’s a premium article. I was wondering if there was an embedded link to whatever the event was at the Brownstone Institute that is referenced at the beginning of the article.
BFL
Just wait until their next go ‘round.
😱
ping
Thank you!
#Nuremburg2
I remember getting the Bullworker, an overpriced isometric exercise tool that was supposed to have you become the stud of the beach in just eight weeks with girls surrounding you in order to melt in your arms.
It’s probably still somewhere in the attic of my childhood home.
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