If the international money-lending cartel that runs our nations really are conducting a giant Milgram experiment (a sort of massive compliance test, sometimes referred to in everyday parlance as a "shit test") then I think it's fair to say the majority of people are failing it miserably.
I've noticed when out & about that fewer & fewer people are opting to ditch the muzzle. In fact, since the COVID-19 pandemic reached its Gompertz peak in April this year, face masks have become more rather than less common a sight, even as the pandemic has waned, thereby proving that mass human behaviour tends to correlate with propaganda, superimposed fashions & moral panics more than it correlates with the reality of the scale of the threat as revealed by the actual data on infections & deaths. Any aspiring tyrants out there must be salivating at the prospect of such a submissive & compliant population. What luck for these tyrants in waiting that so few men appear capable of thinking for themselves or resisting the urge to conform to, & hide amongst, the herd.
People are naturally conformist. They seek social validation. They don't want to stand out from the herd. The herd offers a kind of safe and comforting camouflage. This is particularly evident when travelling on the London Underground. I can sometimes go underground at one station & come up at another thirty minutes later without encountering a single person in bare face. Boy oh boy, these poor lambs better hope their rulers have only their best interests at heart, that's all I can say. Can you imagine what a malevolent ruling class could do with such extraordinary levels of uncritical & unquestioning deference & obedience?
I remember the good old days (about six months ago now I come to think of it) when the face burka was considered an overreaction & an oddity. Now I have become the oddity. And like the liberal who becomes a conservative by not changing a single viewpoint in five years, I didn't have to change a single thing about my behaviour in the past six months to go from being sane and normal to being a weirdo at best and a reckless endangerer of lives at worst. I'm thinking if I stick to my guns long enough, going face commando might become normal and trendy again!
What really makes me despondent about all this is the apparent lack of reluctance on the part of the self-muzzled. They appear to have positively embraced their new restrictions. We're seeing Stockholm Syndrome on steroids, & these willing hostages didn't even require a Maoist (or BLM) struggle session in order to fall into line. Some are even going for fancy designs on their face nappies (diapers) as if they were some kind of fashion accessory. And fashion items is what these muzzles may as well be for all the difference they're going to make when the final infection & fatality rates of this pandemic are tallied up. King Canute would have more chance holding back the tides than we would of denying Corona Chan her ultimate infection count. Our incompetent overlords have learnt nothing from Canute's lessons on hubris.
A certain critical percentage of the population has to be infected for herd immunity to kick in & starve this virus of viable new hosts. That's all there is to it. Given all the damage that prolonged restrictions are going to inflict (long term costs which will far outweigh the short term benefits), it seems to me that trying to retard or protract nature's timetable on any pandemic could only ever make sense if:
1. we were dealing with a non-mutating, steady-state virus we knew we could feasibly produce a vaccine for, &
2. we were in a race against time to produce such a vaccine because the virus in question was killing a relatively large proportion (say 5% or more) of the people it infected.
Neither of these conditions apply here. We're far from sure we'll ever be able to produce a vaccine for this virus, especially given it's a corona-type virus (the world record for getting a vaccine from laboratory to market is held by the Ebola vaccine which took five years) & the case fatality rate is less than 0.23% when weighted across all ages, a figure which decreases by orders of magnitude when you ignore fatalities above the age of 70.
This all leads me to speculate on where exactly the masses would be willing to draw the line on encroachments upon their personal freedoms. Do they have a breaking point? Is there any freedom they wouldn't readily surrender for the illusion of security? If, for example, the media repeated all day long that new research suggested that coronavirus is only present at infectious levels for altitudes of one metre or more above ground level, could they get people to crawl around on all fours all day long?.. I wonder.
Years ago, I made the claim that there's no folly so foolish it can't be made fashionable. I've seen nothing in the past six months to make me reconsider this claim. On the contrary, I've seen plenty to corroborate it.
