Back To The Final Weekender 2

"Freedom". That's ally my twitter feed reports when I dare stare into the face of the denial abyss. People don't seem to have a coherent argument; it's just emption. A cry for freedom, but from what? They don't want to be free from government, state oppression, nor capitalism. They champion the cops and argue that they are all on the same side. This is of course false; the cops are only your 'friend' when they want something from you, or when you move on from being merely a nuisance. For now the government just thinks you're all cranks (except the ones already in government of course).

This exhortation, this demand, seems to come from somewhere deeper. What is required is guidance. These people lack awareness of what is happening. Or, if they have heard the explanations, they dismiss them as 'cultural Marxism' or something lefty they have been told, repeatedly, to reject. But again, who is there to question those sources? They are educated by our toxic media which is not run nor owned by friends of the working class. Freedom isn't something they want to give you, it's a concept they weaponize to win you over. After all, what is freedom during this pandemic? Who would choose to risk hospitalisation and death? Even 60,000 cases a day are not enough to persuade people who believe lockdown is calamitous because it's having a negative effect on health care. This is precisely the double think so pervasive and so emblematic of the problem we face today. The idea that we should reject healthcare because it's deleterious to health care.

It is meanwhile looking grim across the continent. The winds of disease blow uneasiness in the people as more restrictions not fewer are forecast. If trends follow the previous waves of this virus then it is only a matter of time before we follow suit. How likely this is depends I guess on the virus. But we are in the process of moving toward opening, the thing the anti crowd want the most. We can only imagine their reaction if infections start rising again. I don't know why they don't believe the official figures; disbelief requires the existence of a vast infrastructure of conspiracy, endlessly synergistic. The more you have to consider, the bigger the lie that has to be manufactured, believed because they simply cannot accept the more mundane alternative. 

Therein lies the problem. The fantastic is more appealing, on some nightmare level, than the truth. It's like 911: the mundane reality, that the state apparatus, byzantine intrusive, unfriendly, dropped the ball when it came to monitoring the hijackers. So it is here. The reality is one that belief cannot control; an unpredictable virus blew out of nowhere, in conditions caused by the very system they have been raised to believe nurtures them. That government incompetence, elitist politics and class based disdain - even racism (see Trump) - fed into a situation that allowed a dangerous corona virus to become a global pandemic. It didn't have to be this way, and to the deniers, it isn't. Instead they are privy to a reality they can control, if only through denial and counter productive protest. They call it freedom, it isn't. It's just an appeal to restore the previous systems of control.

Still at least Corbyn isn't in charge, eh!