**Prologue** I doubt I am alone in feeling great worry over where our civilization is headed. These last 18 months have shattered every...
I doubt I am alone in feeling great worry over where our civilization is headed. These last 18 months have shattered every assumption I had about how society worked. Despite political polarization, I always naively thought there was a bedrock foundation of personal liberty that was shared throughout the Western world that would prevent us from succumbing to tyranny. Yet here we are.
What have we seen? We’ve seen our society transform into one with laws restricting basic rights to movement and assembly, laws policing what people can wear, governments forcing land owners to indefinitely house people without consent, a neo-puritan obsession of enforced cleanliness on surfaces with no scientific basis, major world governments taking away bodily autonomy, government interment facilities for the “unclean” who dare to travel (despite the virus having reached virtually every corner of the world), militaries being turned against their people, and rampant censorship and cancel culture at every institutional level to prevent dissent from gaining momentum. We’ve seen the height of absurdity become grim and serious reality.
In this post, I want to do a few things to help bring clarity to the maelstrom of news that has come through in the last month. I think we need to take a breath and try to evaluate all that is going on clearly, and think a bit longer term about what it all means for where our civilization is headed. I’m not going to try to answer that question definitively, because the world is complicated beyond words and I lack magical powers to cut through the cosmic labyrinth of probability and possibility to achieve accurate prognostication of how an interconnected world of over 7 billion people will act. Instead, I will go through the recent trends, come up with some high level insights, and propose some scenarios. My goal is to inspire discussion.
I’m going from objective facts to my subjective interpretation now.
The first elephant in the room is that there are no goalposts left to move. They started with two weeks to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed and “flatten the curve”, then they expanded those deadlines like 5 times, then they wanted to “stall until vaccines”, and then they wanted to “wait until the vaccine is widely available”. There is nothing conceivably left; yes, I suppose you could claim they could allow kids to be vaccinated, but I don’t believe for a moment that anyone is waiting for that to get back to normal. There simply aren’t goalposts anymore. The public was sold temporary measures, but the mainstream opinion now seems to be that they should be forever.
I know this is a common point, but it cannot be overemphasized: It’s like how the TSA and Patriot Act still exist 20 years after 9/11 (even outlasting the Afghanistan war itself). Nobody is talking about ending these policies, nobody is asking whether these measures are justified. These liberties are permanently lost because the public didn’t stand up after 9/11 and fight for what is right.
If we let vaccine passports in now, they will be permanent. You never hear people even talking about when they would go away, and even if they did, we shouldn’t trust them (just two more weeks™). Once they become an accepted part of life, it’s easy to start requiring booster shots. It won’t just stop with the first round of Covid-19 shots, that should be obvious now that booster recommendations are canon. They can easily move it to include flu shots; after all, they can just say that it’s insane that we let people get infected with influenza since Covid-19 is only a few times as deadly! If they start getting IFR (Infection Fatality Rate) numbers for the Delta variant they might even start being able to say they are about equally deadly, and instead of that meaning we should just ignore both and live our lives, you know they will use that to fearmonger both at once.
So what? Surely the government will only require vaccines that are good for us! Well, even if you believe that, consider what else they could attach to your profile once they normalize it. We have a “no-fly list” right now, surely they would think to add a “no-entry list” of people who cannot be served at any business? What limits it to vaccines? They could require individuals not be “extremists” and come up with their own definition of what that means. Maybe people who hang in the wrong crowds wouldn’t be allowed service. Fact is, this sort of thing can and will be used for political opponents. We’ve seen the way censorship has come down on political lines; this is just an even stronger tool for “unpersoning” those who defect from the teachings of the mainstream. If taken far enough, it could become like China’s social credit system, where not only do your actions hurt your own social credit, but also those of your family and friends. This encourages snitching and ratting out and self-policing.
So where is our world going from here? I’m going to offer a few possible scenarios here. To leave you on a more positive note, I will start on the Eeyore (gloom and doom) end of the scale and work up to Polyanna (sunshine and rainbows). If you are in a bad mental state, you probably don’t want to read A and B. Fair warning, it’s dark stuff, but I feel that it would be intellectually disingenuous for me to ignore or downplay the bad possibilities. This is meant to provoke thought and discussion, but yes, it’s basically just wild speculation. You might even call it third-rate human species fan-fiction.
I hope you enjoyed that journey through emotional whiplash. Obviously, my list of scenarios is not exhaustive, and they’re kind of childishly simplistic. Again, the intent is to provoke some thought about what future we want for our species, and how the decisions of today impact tomorrow. I’d love to know: Where do you think we’re headed? Leave your answer in the comments below!
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