I keep returning to the SARS-CoV-2 situation as one which is in equal parts astonishing and appalling, and also because we seem to have sleep-walked into the biggest singular threat to democracy so far this century without anyone realising it.
We are in the grip of a mass neurosis: seeded by the Government, fuelled by a compliant media, and acquiesced to by an Opposition afraid to tell the truth. If you have ever wondered how Classical civilization was lost and Europe entered the Dark Ages, then look no further. This is exactly how it ended.
The nation has fallen under the spell of medical High Priests who have told us that an influenza-like virus can be ‘eliminated’, when it can’t, and that a ‘silver bullet’ vaccine will be rolled out shortly, when it won’t be, and on this pretext we have been prepared to change the way we live and work, and are governed – giving up most freedoms – permanently.
The new measures have been easily adopted because many people actually like them. How so?
Bald Marxist atheism, with its grounding in violent revolution, has always been a hard sell. Earlier this century, the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens grafted onto atheism a more appealing face, and through their aggressive rigour it gained popularity among university students, while lacking universal acceptance.
Now public atheism has a new face, but you’re not allowed to call it atheism. It’s ‘New Humanism’.
This New Humanism is not to be confused with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment humanism of David Hume, Scotland’s greatest thinker, who was central in shaping the notion of Western civilisation based on freedom.
Hume coined the phrase ‘civil liberty’, but has just been ‘cancelled’ by his alma mater, Edinburgh University – sacrificed on the altar of Black Lives Matter – because he believed in impartiality and empiricism, and opposed dogma. What we are now told to believe is that intellectual detachment, freedom of thought and respect for evidence are sham concepts, and that tolerance is not to be tolerated.
But gone from this slow revolution are the mutinous old leftists of times past. New Humanism is fronted by ‘kind’ people bursting with ‘posidividdy’ and ‘well-being’. People who give hugs and wear headscarves.
Atheism is traditionally defined by an absence, whereas New Humanism must at all costs be seen as a ‘positive choice’ which bases ‘personal morals’ on our own ‘human capacity’. Unlike the humanism of old, with its Christian roots, today’s deeply political movement promotes the idea that we can all be moral beings without external reference.
Living a ‘good life’ comes instead through collectivism, and is achieved by abandoning reason and expounding personal values such as ‘empathy’ and ‘love’. An attractive proposition, it is at once a trap and a much more cunning subversion of Biblical values than atheism itself can offer.
Climate Change religion, with its global appeal, is a near-perfect manifestation of New Humanism. It was only a matter of time before COVID-19 got absorbed into the wider narrative of Mother Earth worship and humans facing annihilation due to our ‘abuse’ of the planet.
And thus Sir David Attenborough’s latest BBC documentary, Extinction: The Facts, appears to have been produced by Extinction Rebellion, so determined is it to present a hysterical picture of apocalypse caused by consumerism and ‘capitalism’, while turning a blind eye to the far greater rape of the environment committed by the People’s Republic of China and other socialist countries.
Attenborough, whose star soared after the ‘other David’ (the more qualified, but climate-change sceptical David Bellamy) was ‘cancelled’ from television, tells us that “Scientists have even linked [our] destructive relationship with nature to the emergence of COVID-19. If we carry on like this we will see more epidemics.”
Attenborough concludes his shocking propaganda blitz by paralleling modern farming techniques with Chinese ‘wet markets’ selling bats and civet cats. By failing to put the history of human development and the natural world into its proper context, he deliberately condemns the Western world and proves beyond doubt that he has become a Greta of the Third Age.
The left-wing rump of our political class is busy making the same connection. “You can’t argue with the science!” said Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews last week. Only we ought to be able to argue with science. That is its very nature. Science is, after all, a systematic enterprise that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions.
With COVID, as with climate science, the New Order requires that empiricism and enquiry must cease. And that’s where religiosity and propaganda take over, leading us by the hand back to the Dark Ages.
We still have ‘science’, but not as we knew it. New Zealand’s own ‘Ministry of Truth’ has recently demonstrated just how political coronavirus really is. The data show, according to Jacinda Ardern, that “we’ve got better at … keeping our economy moving, ultimately outperforming countries that decided against an elimination strategy”.
Ardern implies that the science behind her elimination strategy is settled, when in fact the only way we can eradicate this flu-like illness from our shores is to close our borders to the world indefinitely – with untold consequences.
Auckland business owners, who say the streets are empty, are reportedly bewildered at treasury reports that spending and traffic volumes in the city have rebounded to a strength last seen under Alert Level 1. What they are in fact seeing is that shops are closing and For Lease signs are springing up everywhere.
Of even greater concern is the social headlock in which New Humanist poster child Greta Ardern has placed the nation. It’s not just that the psychical grip of the virus is completely illogical. It is the manner in which New Humanistic expressions of ‘concern’ are required to be played out by a captive and compliant populace: face masks on public transport and in shops, face masks worn by more than half of all pedestrians on near-deserted city streets, and bizarre ‘social distancing’ protocols.
The BFD. Social distancing for thee not me.
Yet so much of this is arbitrary, and so little of it evidence-based. Transport operators were asked at first to limit passenger numbers, and then not to. It is odd to see small groupings of masked individuals standing in the open at bus stops yet refusing to breathe fresh air.
Mask-wearing on buses is ‘required’ although no one has been fined for non-compliance, which points, importantly, to the fact that the ‘rules’ under which we are now governed have no legal basis. Intended principally to be a tool of social coercion, their operation relies on ‘humanist’ acquiescence and ‘goodwill’ virtue-signalling. Those who do not comply – and I include myself in this – are not merely seen as transgressors, but in societal terms as (non-Labour/Green voting) BAD PEOPLE.
Then there is the excessive reverence the Labour-owned media has been forced to pay to our occasional virus victims, whom they treat like the Great War Dead. Hundreds of people die in New Zealand every week. Road deaths are mentioned only statistically on the news. Our suicides go unreported. Yet every COVID victim has a ‘story’ from which goes out the call to arms and the Generals’ rallying cry.
Ardern has proved herself a functional narcissist, a smiling assassin who, under the pretext of ‘love’ and ‘concern for others’, not only wants to fundamentally transform our society and economy, but our belief system with it. By rejecting firstly, God, and secondly, reason, we are allowing ourselves not only to be subjugated to her globalist brand of political terror, but to actively court it and enjoy it.
As psychologically sickly, though otherwise ‘good people’, bereft of reference points or logic, and seemingly without knowledge of the Divine, we can expect much more of our national energy to be expended in future on visibly placating Creator-Defender Earth Mother Jacinda, upon whose breasts we collectively hang.
And as she controls successively bigger and bigger chunks of our means of production through direct government intervention, we should expect more arbitrary, and even extra-legal, decision-making around climate, farming, the workplace and public health. All will be based on ‘consensus’.
If COVID has proved anything, it is that New Zealanders are willing and able to be easily controlled. Our indoctrination into the new ideology is almost complete, and in our current neurotic state, we care nothing for the dialectics of our inherited common past. Can anyone even reach us?
As Freud said, “neurotics complain of their illness, but they [are also prone to] make the most of it.”
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