They wanted you to panic. They always want you to panic.

Don't ever give in to it

I have a memory, especially for scripts. I can memorize lines with ease. I should have been a movie star. Too bad I had a face for radio.

So I can recall many of the conversations I had with people about Covid - and more importantly, what the societal response to Covid should be - from February/March 2020. Those arguments are seared into my brain.

For example, I remember friends aghast to find out that I thought the NBA overreacted by shutting down. I recall being told that “this is the big one” because the CFR in Italy was supposedly 8%. Someone I had known since high school said I must not care about the life of her grandparents. It was all very emotional. Similar chats played out for weeks. Family members told me the school shutdowns and restrictions were worth the benefit of the doubt. I was assured they were just temporary. We needed to see how bad it was for kids before we opened schools. “Kids are resilient,” I was told by old women in my family that never in a million years would have tolerated a mask and plexiglass school setting when they were five. I will never forget the chat with my relatives on a family trip to Florida in late 2020. I pointed out to them, “hey look how these people live. How did the virus curve turn down with so few people following the official science?” Just dead, blank stares. One said, “I have no idea.” The rest just sat there, muted. They had just been bragging about how their children wear masks to protect the elderly.

But there is one conversation that really sticks out in my mind. It was a late night chat in early March 2020 with a very level headed, lifelong Progressive. She explained to me that this was the time to get people to panic. Without panic, she wisely pointed out, the citizenry would not follow the orders of the federal government. This was a time when panic should not just be accepted. It should be actively promoted.

Her point was spot on. That is, if you have very little faith in the ability of private citizens to solve problems. Ms. Progressive didn’t say, “the governments knows exactly what to do.” Unlike the hysterical woke Left, she wasn’t singing songs about Dr. Fauci. Instead, she rationally calculated that most people are complete, bumbling fools. But - and this is key - the government fools will make better decisions because that’s their job.

When it’s put that way, one could see her point. An epidemiologist that works for NIH or a virologist in the employment of the CDC has been studying for this kind of work for decades. What chance is there that the beer drinking, football loving, general American public is going to sort out this Covid mess better than them? And since those fat losers aren’t going to listen unless they are scared shitless, well, guess what needs to happen?

This point of view is not unique to the Progressive Left, either. One could find very similar arguments from Conservatives about foreign policy. In fact, this was nearly the exact playbook that many conservative thinkers used for the justification to invade Iraq in 2003.

A very interesting side note - much of the rhetoric for supporting Covid restrictions was identical to that used to justify the Iraq War. One just needed to substitute the virus for Saddam.

The key takeaways are this:

• Those who believe societal outcomes are better when well trained specialists make decisions have lost faith in humanity’s ability to solve problems. Although this attitude is more common on the Left, it is not exclusive to it. The Right believes the same thing, especially when it comes to foreign policy and crime.

• Thus, without key central decision makers operating in government, we are doomed. Since most people, according to them, aren’t even smart enough to know they should listen to the experts, they must be panicked into listening to them.

• Faith is placed in institutions instead of individuals. For example, the NIH spends decades and billions of dollars studying disease, so they must know what they are doing.

• Credentials and expertise within a particular field are equated with higher knowledge than the common man.

Of course, we know how it all went. People panicked like they had not done in centuries. But it wasn’t just the citizenry that panicked. It turns out, politicians and public health officials, doctors and nurses, and many others are fully capable of wetting their pants. That panic cost at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of lives in America alone. The overuse of ventilators, moving Covid positive elderly back to nursing homes, the stubborn refusal to examine early treatment options (and this is before hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin), and the panicked lock downs that isolated so many, resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Along the way we learned that these institutions which were held up as the pillar of Nation-State civilization were houses of cards. No one within the CDC or NIH appears to have the basic scientific acumen to examine medical research or real world data. The public health officials that advise politicians from Chicago to Canada are complete laughingstocks that have shown zero ability to think critically - about really anything, let alone public health. It’s one clown after another.

It turned out that the supposed knowledge inherent in the trained officials of the State simply didn’t exist. The Emperor, once again, had no clothes. Worse yet, in the panic, the citizenry clamored for these fools to weigh in on matters that went far beyond public health guidance. As a result, society has been broken in ways that we’ve never seen before.

So don’t panic. Don’t ever panic. Covid won’t be the last time this happens, because fundamentally many people still believe that trained Nation-State specialists in Western democracies have an advantage in decision making related to the general public. It is a very hard lesson to learn.

And yes, there are evil people. But the overwhelming majority of people “in service” in American government institutions actually believe they know best and should be making these decisions. They wanted you to panic because they felt it was their duty to lead you.

I’m not sure which is more horrifying - a tyranny by wicked people or one by deluded imbeciles. I think Covid gave us a little of the former and a lot of the latter.