Covid Was Fake, But I Will Never Contradict You in Person
Gentlemanly courtesy? Or the fear of man?
I’m reading a lot of George Orwell lately.
He is required reading frankly.
But even if you have never read him (and don’t plan to), most people can relate to his whole schtick about how writing allows you to get at things you would not be able to express in any other way.
(Wait. Everyone says that, don’t they? Yeah. Shoot. But it’s still true. And Orwell does talk about it.)
One of the things about writing is that the reader is free to take it or leave it. (They mainly leave it. That I can tell you.)
The same is not true of interacting with other people in real life conversations.
You can’t just say whatever you think of when there is another person around, because quite a lot of what you might say could be disturbing or offensive to that person. And if that happens, they don’t have the same option they have with a book, which is to shut it up, or preferably throw it across the room.
When you say, “Well actually I don’t agree,” most people are going to be at least a little annoyed. All women will be. And an increasing number of men will be, also.
It would be one thing if people were quite stable in their creeds, well versed in them, and ready to give an answer for why they believe what they believe, while also offering charitable interest for other points of view.
This was the Christian standard in the old world.
Now we have happy morons, like the loyal party members in 1984, who will not endure any deviation from the Politically Correct line. (The novel anticipates nearly everything about Institutional Political Correctness, which was just then emerging as a movement at a place known as the Frankfurt School.)
The less well you know the other person in a conversation, the less likely you are to be able to get away with saying wild/edgy/radical/shocking things to them.
And the converse: better friends speak more frankly with each other, the closer they get. It’s not only safe, but enjoyable, to freely speak your mind with a friend; and that is just as true when the two of you disagree, as it is when you wholeheartedly agree. (This is in fact the heart of true friendship.)
You Should Not Wear Unusual (or any) Political Beliefs on Your Sleeve
The bestselling novelist John Updike once said that publishing a novel is the ultimate gesture of passive aggression.
I found that hilarious.
The thing is: writers are sneaky. They are crafty. And if they’re any good, they are so deeper than you’ll probably ever apprehend through face to face conversation.
Quite a bit of that is inevitable. It isn’t that writers are trying to be cagey. But we just have a lot going on, and that’s not always a popular personality type—especially in an era/society that is ultra-conformist (ours is that).
Immature people, especially those with an artistic bent, tend to say shocking things in mixed company in order to get a response or stimulate conversation and/or their own thinking.
This is a super antisocial tendency, and I do not recommend it. I have to fight this tendency quite a bit in myself actually, and it has been by the grace of God that I have had any success thus far in taming it.
But I will also say that it isn’t just unusual or contrarian political positions which are out of place in mixed company. They are out of place, and aggressively so. But it is also pretty obnoxious to lurch into any political topic, even if what you are channeling is the most vanilla mainstream stuff on earth.
I’m sure proles (a phrase for peasants from the novel 1984 that has since entered the language) enjoy reassuring each other of their mutually held beliefs at every turn, probably as much or more as those of in ivory towers enjoy similar hug box action.
But again: this behavior leaves out of consideration the possibility that someone in earshot might not agree with your pablum.
Covid Was Fake
Four years after the first media tremors of Covid shook the world, and long since it was all trivially refuted with our enemies’ own words and sources, MOST people everywhere still believe that it was a very real phenomenon. They all think it was:
a real virus (no)
a real danger (no)
really lethal (no)
really new, concocted in a lab (no)
something that had to be contained through interlocking, global action and coordinated government lockdowns (no)
That every country did lockdowns (no, Sweden didn’t, with zero demonstrable hazards)
So most people also hear the evil subject come up still, even now.
The fact that the media will not let go of it, and continue to keep virus headlines out there as a way to keep the meme simmering for convenient use again whenever convenient, does not help.
But even without that, everyone just rolled over and swallowed what they were being told by the government through its state-owned media.
If you don’t understand how that could happen, I advise one of two routes:
Read 1984, or
Go back and read a random sample of news articles from 2020 about the pandemic, preferably spread out across the whole year so you can see “in real time” how the narrative evolved in insanely contradictory ways which should have made trusting the media ever again impossible.
People are not generally thoughtful about society, government, the news, power, institutions, or the basic meaning of life.
That is the primary takeaway of 1984, and it was played out powerfully during 2020.
I Don’t Really Discuss COVID In Person
Someone today told me they were sick during the holidays.
They listed off some symptoms and theories about the illness, and then they hit me with, “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Covid.”
Do you want to know what I said?
“Yeah, you’re probably right.”
Technically honest, right?
The thing is: nobody has ever in my experience shown me any encouragement when I tell them that something they are saying is fake, or a hoax, or demonstrably untrue, or easily refuted with a few simple arguments.
Doesn’t happen.
Actually: people don’t like being contradicted at all.
Most people will barely endure the suggestion that they lack taste in movies or television or really anything.
And those are highly subjective things, in a sense.
Still, they take disagreement very very personally: as if you are calling into question their self-esteem, their life, their whole right to exist!
This is a very strange situation.
It is not sustainable in fact.
And Covid didn’t help.
The fragility of people’s tattered personalities and tenuous grasp of social standing was quite a bit further shredded by the lockdowns, the masks, the fearmongering, the scolding, the cops, the censorship, the stolen election, the mandates, the vaccines, all of it.
People who started out on the edge went over into the full abyss, and people who were maybe pretty stable are still not recovered from the whole nightmare.
Countless people today are now on pills, or in therapy, or fighting through impossibly painful or difficult family situations, little realizing that it was all either initiated or horribly aggravated by the fake, phony, mendacious pandemic hoax.
So.
I didn’t really say anything to the person.
And if one of you somehow brings it up to me in person, out of obliviousness, or innocent chatter, or trollishly to see how I react, what you will find is this: I am not willing to engage about it in person.
Nothing good can come of it because men (humans) HATE being disabused of their cherished beliefs.
It isn’t a manly way to live.
But it is how sad, desperate and fearful cowards live.
They don’t like challenge. They don’t really feel comfortable with their gay, spoon-fed, infantile beliefs which they imbibed from the media. But they hate even more having their cowardly ideas challenged.
So they live in a weird tension where they are constantly seeking crowd validation of their visibly ridiculous beliefs, as if such reassurance could ever save anyone from anything.
Leave them alone.
It is possible they will read a book one day and have their mind opened.
This is why I write.