The Real “Long Covid”

In early 2020, moved by nothing but the basest of all human motivations, petty fear of personal harm, the populations of the entire civilized world succumbed to the basest of all human inclinations, the urge to protect one’s physical existence at all costs by harming or destroying others. Lacking the self-reliance and strength of their prehistoric ancestors, however, they allowed this latter urge to be fulfilled by proxy, by ceding their amoral inclinations — and in the process also their own remaining freedoms — to the state, which for its part was both stoking their primitive fear and demanding the authority to harm and destroy their neighbors on their behalf, in the name of safety of course. In response, those being marginalized as a threat for daring to resist reverted to their own manifestation of the same primitive, fear-driven tribalism and its inherent irrationalism in a twisted form of self-defense — effectively seeking their own alternative state to impose their wills against The Enemy on their behalf.

In essence, in 2020 the advance world, with a shocking ease explicable only by decades of psychological tenderizing, was reduced by irrational fear to the complete abandonment of the minimal moral premises and mutual respect necessary to establishing and maintaining a civilized social order.

But one cannot abandon the spiritual developments of civilized humanity for two years without permanent effects. To forsake decency and forbearance, to put the amelioration of one’s immediate primitive terror above all other considerations of moral and legal restraint, and to grant governing authorities the unlimited power — unlimited both in extent and in time — to restrict and punish the normal behavior and social interaction of an entire world, establishes a new precedent, a new set of rules for social existence. The core principles of this new precedent may be stated simply as follows:

1. No one has the right to do anything that I perceive as opposed in any way to my preferences or comfort.
2. The state has the legitimate authority to ban, curtail, or regulate any behavior, choices, or statements that I regard as violating principle number 1, on any pretext it is prepared to devise and to prop up with authority-attached experts, i.e., lackeys of power.
3. Anyone, in or out of government, whose judgments of what is best, and what others may or may not do, coincides with my sense of comfort and immediate advantage, is good, while anyone whose judgments are inconsistent with my comfort and immediate advantage is evil, and must therefore be eliminated by any means possible.

The implicit adoption of these principles of living, accounting as well for the accompanying and intractable submission of individual will to an authoritarian behemoth of one form or another, we may dub “mediated primitivism,” or “the state of nature by proxy.” This condition, a pandemic of social disintegration and mass subservience, continues to spread throughout our death-stage civilization, leading, by way of the shameful sense of self-induced impotence, to increasingly unmasked and simplistic modes of collective indignation, wrath, and an unbridled will to annihilate all who refuse to submit to the necessities of our generalized, all-encompassing, fear-induced craving for safety and comfort, i.e., the “non-compliant.”

Hence our collective adherence to tribally-defined “truths” that express whims and urges in utter defiance of both reason and history. Hence our mindless deference to whichever tribally identified “experts” are presumed to represent definitive knowledge today, as though open discussion and fearless dissent were anathema to the search for truth, rather than its necessary conditions. Hence our collective calls for mandates and regulations to alternately entrench or outlaw choices and preferences in all arenas, from vaccines to votes to public statements to economic transactions to private property usage to moral opinions. Hence our continual application of litmus tests in every situation, regarding any subject, for judging the worthiness of anyone to speak, work, or even live in our midst as a fellow human in good standing.

This slavish tribal obedience, elevated to a near-universal faith, is what the world’s government-manufactured emergency of the past thirty-three months, with its resulting outbreak of unleashed irrationalism and evidence-denying certainty, has wrought. There were precursors to be sure, long laboratory experiments in intellectual loss-of-function and moral corruption on an industrial scale. But the big payoff, the catastrophic lab leak of totalitarian surrender and self-destruction that many warned would be the result of modernity’s cavalier belittlement of the soul in favor of freedom redefined in accordance with the body’s primitive instinct for mere survival and safety, has come at last. The advanced peoples of the world, en masse, now simply believe what they have been told to believe by their masters, rejecting common sense and their own eyes, whether it be the absolute certainty of a stolen election where no evidence of significant fraud has ever appeared, or absolute paralysis in the face of an alleged world-historical pandemic where the real numbers and easily visible effects clearly warrant no such terror; whether it be the unthinking acceptance of the premise that unpopular feelings may be treated as crimes, or the unblinking assertion that circumstances may warrant the suspension of dissenting opinion, wherein the government may officially brand all disagreement, regardless of the reputation and reasoning of its sources, as “misinformation,” and impose its official truth as a universal disclaimer bracketing all conversation even in private discussion forums. Tit-for-tat fear and hatred, fed by monsters and engendering new ones, has made rational discourse, a delicate flower at the best of times, as obsolete and distant as hieroglyphics.

The visible symptoms of our illness alone are severe enough to destroy lives, but the underlying disease is even worse than it appears. It is far too late for lockdowns and social distancing. The virus is everywhere, infection is unavoidable, and time has more than amply proved that the available spiritual vaccines are ineffective. Let us call this late-stage deterioration the real “long Covid.” Far longer, I suspect, than any of us would like to believe.