Making no claim any of this is original with me. Just putting some scattered thoughts together.
Among the many startling aspects of how people react to the lockups and mandates is how inured a seeming majority of people are to being bullied. I don’t recall where I was reading this, but I came a cross a discussion between a couple Europeans and Americans, comparing reactions to the tyranny. One of the Americans was saying that the typical American reaction was to ignore the rules as much as possible, which is largely possible outside major cities. The tension gets released when the non-cult members get away from the insanity, or live outside the major cities. They don’t feel the pressure as much, and what stress they do have is relieved by being around other sane people. That’s why, the argument went, there haven’t been massive truck convoy in America – yet.
I don’t know if this is true. What does seem to be true, and what would need to be true if this escape and release mechanism is really operative, is that Americans have an amazing threshold for toleration of being bullied, such that we would rather escape than confront the bully. Hell, I still mask up when I shop for groceries, because it’s simpler than having confrontations with the help and Karen every few minutes. Why do I do this? Why do I tolerate being bullied? This – the whole lockdown/maskup/jab mandates thing – is bullying.
Further, perhaps, we think of bullying as typified by the larger kid who take people’s lunch money. That guy is an amateur. You need to look at more sophisticated abusive relationships to really see fully developed bullying. Threats of withdrawn affection if you don’t do this one little thing for me. Gaslighting. Overstepping limits, and then accusing you of being the problem when you point it out. That’s what bullying looks like when it graduates from grade school. Compliance is rewarded, for a while, only to have the cycle repeated sooner rather than later. The victim is left both endlessly anxious and desperately defensive – you don’t understand! He really loves me! I am the problem, just as he says!
I assume we all know of situations like this, even if we haven’t been in any personally. Yet – what is the Coof lockups if not exactly this? We are being bullied by sociopaths. It’s not that they don’t care that we suffer – they get off on our suffering, that’s the emotional component of why they do it.
As Frank Herbert put it in Dune, “All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.” This needs to be taken further. According to Purnell’s Law, all bureaucracies will be run, not by people interested in the goals of the bureaucracy, but by people interested in the bureaucracy itself. This means that the selection mechanisms – hiring, firing, promotion – within any bureaucracy will be in the hands of those seeking, first, to protect their own power. Dominating the class of people obsessing over power are sociopaths.
Conclusion: over time, a bureaucracy of any size will be run by sociopaths for sociopathic reasons. Abusing as many people as possible is the ultimate power. Fauci is a prime example of this phenomenon, as are virtually everyone in this (and, sadly all) administrations.
But yet bullies generally fold once you push back hard. The more sophisticated the bully, the harder and longer you need push back. We are dealing with very experienced abusers here. They will order us about, tell us we are bad people if we don’t do as we are told, attempt to isolate us (classic abusive relationship stuff), stalk us, and finally threaten to hurt or kill us..
Well? That paradise on earth, or at least the ‘defeat’ of Covid, has not yet arrived CANNOT be because the people abusing us are now and were always LYING, mostly via half-truths and exaggeration, but rather, like the abused girlfriend, it’s all our fault. Maybe we’re not good enough for our abusers. Maybe we should be locked up, or even killed! It will all be our fault, if it comes to it.
This should sound familiar. Lockdowns, masks, censoring and propaganda to ensure we are isolated; constant drumbeat of lies to ensure we are terrorized; prompt and brutal dismissal of any dissent. And a drumbeat of how this failure is due to the unjabbed who must be causing the jabbed to get sick. Simple, plain English, obvious explanations must be banned in favor of the latest Just So story. By definition, at least, by any definition current before 2020, if you are ‘vaccinated’ and still get the disease, the vaccine didn’t work. But that is not allowed to be said, because the focus on the badness of the non-compliant must be maintained.
Question: how did we all get so inured to bullying so described, such that probably a good 70% of us just go along no matter what. How did we come to even try to put up with bullying, rather than fighting back at square one? How come I, who have never for a moment bought any of the Coof madness, still try to work around the rules rather than simply refusing?
In the off chance that a new reader has wandered in, here we go: We learned to tolerate bullying, to even accept it as normal and good, in school. Not the bullying of the big kid who wants your lunch money – that may or may not be tolerated by the ‘educators’ – but the bullying that is used to make us comply, on the one hand, and to create emotional cripples on the other.
John Taylor Gatto, who spent 30+ years as a public school teacher in New York, pointed out that the kids who are most unmanageable, who simply will not do what the school wants them to do, are those who have been unconditionally loved at home – a very small portion of students, it turns out. Such kids, unused to being simply bossed about, unused to demands being made on them with no regard paid to what they might want or what might be reasonable, do not respond well to schooling. The graded classroom model is nothing if not arbitrary. Grades segregated by age? Why? Performing to ‘grade level’? Double why? I have to raise my hand to get permission to go to the restroom? Why? I have to study what you tell me to study exactly when you tell me study it, and stop exactly when you tell me to stop? Why? Why can’t I just keep going if I’m interested, or do something else fi I’m not? Recess? Why? Why can’t I take a break when I need it? Why does a bell trump whatever I happen to be interested in at the moment?
The kid who simply misbehaves is nothing to compare to the kid who doesn’t accept the premise that doing whatever the local adult tells him to do is some sort of divine commandment to be accepted without question. Such a kid not only can calmly question his parents (who unconditionally love him, remember) and express displeasure without any withdrawal of affection, but is used to reasonable, affectionate compliance, not blind, arbitrary demands.
But that unconditionally loved child is rare. Most of us who have gone through graded classroom schooling – including me – have accepted all sorts of Just So stories to explain to ourselves our compliance with what is the fundamental irrationality of such schooling. A look at the educational experiences of extremely accomplished people through history show a dearth of anything resembling modern classroom schooling. Newton, Franklin, Jefferson, Edison, Abigail Adams – these are among the best educated and least schooled people you could hope to find. And people of great achievement, not merely having a great collection of degrees and certifications that got them a make-work positions
The purpose of compulsory schooling is to produce exactly the behavior we see among the Branch Covidians. The control is the essential part; all the reasons given for it are backfill and gaslighting. We humans have millennia of experience learning and teaching, none of which supports the idea that kids should be grouped by age, spoon-fed predigested and utterly context-free knowledge bits, forced to ‘learn’ at the same rate as others their age, forced to switch off of something a kid may or may not be interested onto a new subject every 45 minutes, forced to ask permission to get up and move around or go to the restroom, and so on.
And we’re all gaslighted. We are told that we need to do these things – we need to do as we’re told – for our own good! 6 years old and already know how to read? Tough! You’re sitting with the other 6 year olds and listening to the lessons until all of them either also learn how to read or get humiliated and shunted off to ‘special’ classes. You have no interest in math? Tough! You will be made to feel like an idiot and shamed into pretending to pay attention – for your own good!
You can fix cars, or make dresses, or write stories or any one of the million worthwhile things people do that give their lives meaning? Irrelevant! The schools hands out the gold stars and the diplomas and degrees. Comply, or be humiliated at best.
And thus, when the nice man in the lab coat tells you to avoid all your friends and family, wear a mask, take untested drugs, and to be very, very scared, we not only comply, but defend these orders with the vehemence of someone under threat of being excluded from the tribe, or labeled a terrorist, or otherwise marked for culling. We all rush in, eager to comply, to get that gold star, that pat on the head, that affirmation that we are OK.
Reason doesn’t enter into it, and never has.
The bullying stops when we refuse to be bullied.
Yard Sale of the Mind 