My mother had Multiple Sclerosis. While I was in primary school, she had lost her ability to drive a vehicle. By the time I was in high school, she could barely walk. The Internet was the big new thing, and while it opened her world greatly from her limited mobility, her view of the world was still restricted to what she saw on TV and through an Internet Explorer web browser. It’s a terribly distorted way to see the world, and it is currently the way many people in cities all around the planet are viewing current events. For many of us who live in cities have been locked away from each other by our governments, Orwellian messaging is blasted to us from news, advertising and social media, telling us we are all responsible for the microbes in our bodies and the lives of everyone on the planet. It’s a terrible distortion of reality and is fracturing the minds of people in my country and all around the world.

Lockdowns

Dr. David Nabarro, from the World Health Organization, said in a recent interview for The Spectator, “We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus. The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it¹.”

The Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter from leading doctors, virologists and experts around the world, states that the current lockdown policies are having devastating effects when it comes to increasing poverty and deteriorating the mental health of individuals. It states that these policies will cause irreparable damage.

Despite the cries of many experts claiming we need to rethink our strategy on dealing with this virus, some of the harshest lockdowns are now being implemented across Europe, the United States and around the world. People who still have their jobs and can work from home are steadfast in believing this is absolutely the right action to take, that everyone else should stop whining and anyone who opposes this ideology is spreading false information that is harmful to society. It is a deep, tone-deaf fracture of perception; a laceration on the collective beliefs of our society where no discourse, let alone dissent, is permitted.

Theater

A friend of mine from Tennessee told me she traveled to places like Colorado and Hawaii because she wanted to feel safer; claiming her own state wasn’t doing anything. But the draconian policies being put in place may be nothing more that theater, similar to the useless role of TSA employees at airports. The feeling of safety comes at a substantial cost to peoples’ businesses, livelihoods and basic human rights. It is also part of the politician’s syllogism, a logical fallacy made popular by the 1988 British show Yes, Prime Minister. The government says “We must do something, x is something, therefore we must do x,” regardless of whether doing anything at all is actually better than doing nothing.

Governor Cuomo of New York did something horrific at the beginning of the pandemic. He placed elderly patients, sick with SARS-CoV2, with healthy people in elder care facilities. Many of these facilities didn’t even have rooms where people could be isolated, and it led directly to the deaths of thousands of people in nursing homes². Governor Whitmer enacted similar policies in Michigan which also led to the deaths of thousands³. Cuomo later wrote a book about how great he was during the crisis, and many people in America still believe that stuffing the sick with the healthy in nursing homes was the right thing to do, even though New York City had a field hospital that remained mostly empty during the height of the pandemic⁴. Both of these governors could have literally done nothing and thousands of people would not have died.

“Those advocating for lockdowns have seen the destruction and death that those policies have wrought this year, and we are living through that right now. Not only are people being deprived of their livelihoods and forced into grinding poverty as a direct result of these shutdowns, but now the undeniable truth is, that if you are advocating for lockdowns, you are advocating for some portion of the population to be consigned to death.” -James Corbett⁵

The shutdowns are complete and total madness, and yet there are still millions who are pro-lockdown. Many of them are saying “we didn’t lock down hard enough”. Maybe if we had barricaded⁶ and welded⁷ people into their homes as was done in China⁸, then we would be free of this virus. If we had just locked down harder, things would be better. This is pure an utter insanity. In 100 years, the only way historians could look back upon this era is that of the largest case of mass-hysteria the world had seen up to this point.

The American Mind

America just went through one of the most controversial elections in my lifetime, exceeding the debacle of Bush v Gore substantially. Everyone wants to blame this on the rhetoric of the current president, but those of us who were watching had questions the very day after the election, long before the orange man began squawking. As the days and weeks continued, it became easy for people to dismiss any claims of election fraud due to lots of clearly insane misinformation being mixed with legitimate election issues⁹. The main stream news media would dismiss all election fraud as baseless in their headlines, meanwhile contradicting themselves in their very own articles¹⁰¹¹, similar to what they did with Trump’s war rhetoric.

Mail in ballots were always going to be a problem. The virus was an excuse to mail out millions of unsolicited ballots across the United States, many to addresses where people no longer lived. I received a signature registration for someone who no longer lived in my apartment. Even though it was never sent in, I was still sent a ballot for this person. It would have been trivial to both mail in a signature registration and a ballot for another person in the state of Illinois. Across America there are similar reports of people receiving mail in ballots for previous residents and people who had passed away.

Testimony and video was presented of ballots being counted in State Farm Arena in Fulton County, Georgia, after observers were told to go home and counting had stopped¹². By now we’ve heard of the pipe burst which never happened, used as the pretense for removing observers and stopping ballot counts¹³, as well as the numerous fact checkers and main stream sources that find convenient explanations for what happened that night. There are numerous cases of observers being removed, counting stopping and starting, and many other election irregularities which occurred. This information is sadly muddled with the massive amount of disinformation by people like Lin Wood, who is bat shit insane, or Sidney Powell, a brilliant lawyer who seems to have fallen for both QAnon conspiracy and her own hubris.

It’s easy to dismiss all evidence of election fraud when the media can pick the most obvious cases of insanity. The voting machines themselves may simply be a red hearing, but they should not overshadow the massive amounts of irregularities recorded on video. The Supreme Court of the United States dismissed the Texas lawsuit, enjoined by six other states¹⁴, with a three sentence dismissal on standing¹⁵. Meanwhile, in the Wisconsin lawsuit, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeal accepted a Trump lawsuit as having standing, but decided the case against Trump without hearing any oral arguments, due to lack of merit¹⁶.

Courts have been wrong in the past. In 1927, The Supreme Court decided, in Buck vs Bell, that forced sterilization of the unfit and intellectually disabled, was permissible. In the Korematsu case, the Supreme Court allowed for the detention of Japanese-American citizens in the Manzanar internment camp.

Standing was always a reasonable question in the Texas case. After all, what right does Texas have to say Pennsylvanian has to enforce their own election laws? However, the Supreme Court is the only venue where a state can bring a case against another state. To dismiss such a case, backed by many states and citizens, over an election rife with controversy, with a three sentence response, reveals their cowardice.

We’ve had four years of media narrative yelling “Russia, Russia, Russia,” a narrative that led to an impeachment based on false information and anonymous sources; a narrative that ultimately proved to be untrue¹⁷. Yet despite this, there are people who absolutely believe the Russian narrative and will continue to do so no matter what facts are presented to contradict it. We will undoubtedly see the media, which previously boasted the “not my president” calls by protesters, attempt to suppress any such slogans from the American people for the next four years.

The Corruption of the American Media

The American Media, along with Big Tech corporations, have shown the true nature of their corruption. They have been using their power over Internet infrastructure to censor websites and erase pieces of the past for several years. Yet in 2020, large technology companies went further by censoring established newspapers and the US government during an election cycle, under the guise of “fact checking,” during an election.

This is where the American mind is fractured once again, where millions of people adamantly believe Big Tech companies were completely and totally justified in using their power to stop the spread of misinformation. The audacity and hubris of those who believe that censorship by private media entities is somehow a good thing, goes directly against the founding principals of America and the freedom of speech.

The Fragmentation of the Human Mind

If you’ve read this far, you might agree with some things I’ve stated. If you do not agree, I applaud you for reading this far (or possibly just skimming and skipping to the end). It’s important to continually read and be knowledgeable about arguments and viewpoints you do not agree with. In America today with the political situation, and around the planet in regards to COVID, people are deeply and ideologically more distant than ever about their view of reality and the world. If you drew a vend diagram of these issues, there would be little to no intersection.

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” -Aristotle

We are watching the formation of many new religious ideologies. Yet, people do not want to even address these ideas as such. Opposition blankets every belief and superstition they hold under the guise of reason or science, and call for the censorship of all contradictory information as dangerous. Before 2020, we could meet and see each other, learn about the controversial ideas our friends hold, and argue about delicate issues. At least in the cities, such conversations are gone now. You cannot gain the same nuance on a video conference call. We cannot navigate the delicate subjects of race, religion and politics when there are lags and delays in our connection, we can’t really see each other’s facial expressions, or when we have a fear of being recorded.

I think back to my mother, rarely leaving the house and watching the world through her laptop screen. The result of the lockdowns and isolation have damaged our social fabric. We are spiraling into a world of absolutes where all who disagree with our gospel is an enemy and a heretic. We have been prevented by our governments from being able to have a healthy observation of our world and reality.

A younger version of myself would have probably not faired as well under these conditions. I’m thankful that I’ve been able to literally travel around the world, and open my mind to how vastly wonderful and diverse our planet can be. Where my current condition is momentary, it is my mother’s strength dealing with her isolation for years, that reminds me that I can endure these current hardships. But I also worry about the other occupants of this world who are struggling, many who have lost so much and who see absolutely no end in sight to this madness.

Humanity has suffered a great and terrible collective trauma¹⁸. It has fragmented people throughout the entire world, and has led to the development of new, deeply held, ideological beliefs. Those who hold opposition to those beliefs are often seen as literally causing the death and destruction of others. It is completely and totally irrational, and all the societal means we have to sooth and address these differences have been stripped from us by our governments in removing our basic freedoms and human rights. This is not a time of honor, and it will not simply vanish with the coming of a new year. I predict there will be regions in ever nation that will still see people wearing masks five to six years from now. We are entering a new era, our minds and belief systems have been fractured into completely indiscernible pieces. It will likely take years for us to recover, and this time will be seen a hundred years from now, as the largest case of mass hysteria experienced in human history.