“Everyone Should Be Under Lockdown”

Dr. Anthony Fauci is the director of the U.S. National Institute of Infectious Diseases, which is to say he is both an accredited “expert” and a bureaucrat — two hazardous materials which, when found in combination, invariably become a lethal toxin. And Dr. Fauci, Donald Trump’s top adviser on all matters coronavirus — which is to say he is acting as the nation’s leading authority on two matters he knows very little about, namely this new virus and political philosophy.

So it is that Dr. Fauci has decided to declare, on CNN no less, that in his considered opinion, the entire United States population should be living under martial law, aka “lockdown.”

“You know, the tension between federally mandated versus states’ rights to do what they want is something I don’t want to get into,” he said. “But if you look at what’s going on in this country, I just don’t understand why we’re not doing that.”

To parse that for those whose first language is not English, the good doctor, top adviser to the alleged “leader of the free world,” is saying that the whole “constitutional republic” thing, with all that “states’ rights” mumbo-jumbo, is such a nuisance in this situation, and that if he had his druthers — implying that it annoys him that he cannot have his druthers — not a single living American (elite political hacks excepted, naturally) would be living in any semblance of liberty today.

This would be the best way to curtail the spread of the coronavirus, you see, and therefore it should happen, because of course no one wants this virus to spread.

Call me crazy, but I like Fauci’s kind of thinking — except that unlike Fauci and the immoral majority of nihilistic cowards he represents, I would apply this kind of thinking to far more fundamental and civilizationally important matters than a mere physical illness.

To cite a few examples:

As an expert on education, I strongly believe that the damage to modern society caused by forcibly educating entire populations in a progressive public school environment is far greater and more profound than any harm a mere virus could ever cause. Thus, I declare that no one should be allowed to send his or her child to public school anymore, effective immediately, and that anyone caught doing so should be regarded as guilty of parental neglect.

As an expert on the history of philosophy, I am deeply certain that no one should be allowed to teach German philosophy — Kantianism, idealism, Marxism, phenomenology, any of it — to today’s undergraduate students, except for purposes of criticism, and to demonstrate how modern civilization became unmoored from its proper and noble instincts, from its respect for the individual soul, and from its principles of political liberty, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As an expert on literature, I emphatically assert that no one should be allowed to apply late modern literary theories — Marxist, deconstructionist, feminist, and the like — in the teaching of classic literature, but rather all literature must be taught with a view to granting the author his full and independent voice, to the degree that this is possible, without predetermined interpretive methods or prejudiced moral historicism being used to distort and diminish past greatness in the name of vindicating modern smallness.

As an expert on human nature, I absolutely know that no young girl should ever be taught feminism as a means to “empowerment”; that no young boy should ever be encouraged to idealize testosterone-overloaded “he-man” or “tough guy” archetypes (athletes, rock stars, and the like); and that no child — not one — should ever be allowed to listen to any modern popular music (post-1960, let’s say) before age twenty, or to watch any video images related to such music before age forty.

I sincerely believe each of those four recommendations would vastly improve modern man, modern morality, modern thinking, and modern political community by magnitudes of elevation that easily and far outstrip any possible benefit to modernity that might be derived from forcibly restricting all people from leaving their homes to socialize, exercise, or enjoy fresh air, for an indefinite period of time, as my fellow expert Dr. Fauci demands.

There is, however, this one little difference between the two of us. Unlike Dr. Fauci, I do not believe that as one individual living among many, my expertise in the foregoing areas — no matter how profound my wisdom may be, or how truly superior to all my contemporaries I may be in each of those areas — magically grants me any legitimate authority to coerce my fellow human beings into abiding by my recommendations, by means of establishing police state practices to ensure compliance.

In short, I may be right — I truly believe I am, and that my recommendations, if followed, might have far greater positive effects on the world than saving some people from mere physical death — but who the hell am I to force everyone to act as I wish?

Physician, heal thyself, i.e., put a sock in it buddy.

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