Real or Imagined, it's Here to Stay

My great grandfather Harald died at a relatively young age of what started out as nothing but a sniffle and a cough. He was fit and strong. He never caught a cold. He had no medical condition that could explain it, yet he died. I remember my grandmother talking about it regularly. It was such a mystery. But that's how life is. Suddenly and unexpectedly something happens and somebody dies, very much to everybody's surprise.

These things are rare, but they happen, and until recently nobody made a big deal out of them. However, talking to my twin brother on the phone the other day, he could tell me that the current plague is very dangerous indeed because he himself knows a guy who died from it. This guy was not even sixty years old, had no medical condition, and was in good shape, yet he died. To my astonishment, my brother took this as proof confirming the hype.

My wife's aunt Augusta is sometimes mentioned in a similar manner by her family here in Portugal. The fact that she was morbidly obese and would have died of pretty much any severe cold doesn't matter. She died from the plague. That's the verdict, and hence, the plague is super dangerous.

We're not all coming to this conclusion, but a surprisingly large number of people are reacting to incidents like these as if they are more meaningful than the statistics that show the plague to be nothing more than a severe cold. Opinion on this matter is clearly driven more by emotion than intellect. Even intelligent people are falling for the propaganda. As a result, rationally inclined people are driven out of all discourse. Emotionally driven idiots are taking over, and it looks to me like this state of affairs is likely to remain for a long time to come.

Only when the consequences of all this nonsense is clear for all to see, and felt intensely by a clear majority of the population, is there any chance of a radical change back to how things used to be a year ago. The reason for this being the great comforts that can be had from the imagined struggle against the plague. The collective fight against this imagined danger has a religious fever to it. There's passion and suffering, all imagined, and all greatly enjoyed by those engaging wholeheartedly in it. The plague is the ultimate excuse for failure and suffering. It gives rationale to what is otherwise difficult to explain. As an example of this, I can mention my wife's nephew who's positively revelling in his own misery.

Life has not been kind to my nephew. His mother died from cancer a few months back, he lost his job, and his girlfriend left him. I don't know much about him as a person, but I think he's a bit of a loner. He's a little too shy for his own good. The situation is complex and not very pretty. The plague is therefore convenient in that it settles things without much need for analysis. Just about everything can be blamed on the plague. His life isn't a mess because of subtle and complex mechanisms within his psyche, it's a mess due to this overwhelming external force that threatens to crush us all. But the problem with this kind of thinking is that it very much requires us to believe our own delusions. As a consequence, our nephew has become completely paranoid and obsessed. He refuses to take off his mask, even in private.

My wife and I have invited our nephew over for an informal talk about the state of the world and how we plan to navigate through the current storm, and this is how I first became aware of his obsession. In his messages, he's clearly drawn to the idea of a frank talk, but he frets about it too. In his mind, he's concerned about our health. He doesn't want to infect us. But in reality, I'm sure it's his own delusion that he's afraid to loose. He knows in the back of his mind that he can only get out of his difficult situation by confronting the complexities of his life in an open and frank manner, and he's very much reluctant to do so.

In my latest message to him, I told him quite honestly that I don't think the plague is going away anytime soon. It's here to stay, and therefore something to accept and live with, just like any other inconvenience and danger in life. Predictably, our nephew has not responded to this latest bit of frankness from his uncle, because it exposes the lie that he lives. Truth is that if the plague is here to stay, we might as well get on with our lives. He has no excuse for his paranoid hunkering down. Only if the plague can somehow be mitigated by the lockdown and mask wearing does it make any sense to stay inactive at home. Yet the news, that I'm sure he follows closely, indicate that we're likely to see this plague come and go for decades to come. Is he really going to wear a mask for the rest of his life?

While I hope otherwise, I suspect our nephew will remain in hiding as long as it's possible for him to somehow glean a living from welfare programs of various kinds. Only a complete meltdown of the economy will lure him out in daylight in search of work, and he is far from the only one thinking like this. From what I can gather, a clear majority of the population has fully embraced the new religion of lockdowns, mask wearing and social control.

The mask of the beast