In response to my piece on leaving academia, a few asked me for my thoughts on Wokeness, and how one might go about doing away with it.

There’s nothing I would like more, than to have a good answer to this question. Alas, I’m very pessimistic about achieving any victory here, but I also don’t think Woke is going to be a permanent menace. Sooner or later, the forces driving this ideological cancer will try to circumscribe the Woke, and if they fail, they will themselves be consumed by it. The damage has been done and the pre-Woke world can never be re-achieved, but Wokery isn’t a stable ideological system. It is instead the mere ideological expression of a revolutionary process.

I’ve written a lot about the phenomenon of the high-low alliance. The idea isn’t original to me; a great many thinkers, from Bertrand de Jouvenel to Curtis Yarvin and others, have articulated the same basic idea in varying terms. It’s central to understanding the modern political order, and in particular leftism and the various forms it adopts.

In Antiquity, empires and kingdoms faced substantial practical limits on the exercise of their power. Even relatively sophisticated systems like the Roman Empire had to make do with a rudimentary institutional apparatus by modern standards. In the Middle Ages, depopulation and a shrinking economy simplified this apparatus further still; most people lived their whole lives without encountering a single agent of the king. A semi-autonomous aristocracy emerged to collect rents from the peasantry and provide local security. Royal power was hemmed in on all sides, and although peasants were subject to varying degrees of unfreedom and often very serious poverty, they were not all that closely governed.

As the economy and with it the institutional apparatus grew, the distance between the top and the bottom of society collapsed, and rulers availed themselves of new opportunities to extend their powers. They could present themselves as allies of the common people and the merchants, who regarded the autonomous aristocracy as their oppressors and saw in the distant monarch a more attractive protector. State agents replaced the aristocrats; unlike the aristocracy, they owed their position and their loyalty to the king. This ideological and political transformation inevitably sidelined royal power as well; notional sovereignty moved from the king to the people, on whose behalf state agents claimed to govern. The growth of technology and communications facilitated these changes by vastly increasing the reach of the state, and hence the status that the state could provide to its agents. A new political rhetoric and a new ideology of freedom, rights, and the popular will emerged – all of it betokening, ironically, a closer governance of the common man than history had ever seen before.

Now, I’ve framed this in roughly Jouvenelian terms, but the advancement of power via alliances of opportunity between the high and the low is in no way limited to the political sphere. Universities, corporations and religious institutions are subject to identical processes of administrative progression. Wherever you have less-advantaged people at the bottom, rulers at the top, and the accumulation of some independent prerogative and autonomy between them, the board is set. Nor is the tactic of the high-low alliance against the middle ever definitively finished. For one thing, there are always new people accumulating at the bottom – foreigners and immigrants, the recently impoverished, the sick, and many others. For another, no completed revolution of the high and the low can continue for very long before yielding new ranks to loot just below the top. The merchants and later the capitalists drove out the landed aristocracy, only to find themselves the target of new socialist revolutionary movements in the nineteenth century.

Ideologies have a highly important if subordinate role to play in this system, for they demarcate which groups at the bottom are unjustly disadvantaged and to whose aid the rulers or the administrators are called. The highly unstable nature of the lower classes in modern society, driven by mass immigration and rapid economic change, accounts for the volatility and malleability of leftism, which is the ideological cluster that is primarily responsible for articulating and justifying these high-low alliances. Classical Marxism promised justice to factory workers, the New Left of the postwar era shifted its focus to students, and today their Woke successors forge alliances with racial and sexual minorities. The promise is always one of a totally egalitarian society, but even when completely successful, the revolution merely extends the power of the rulers.

Wokeness first got off the ground in Anglophone universities after decades of hiring and admissions preferences had filled them with revolutionary tinder at the bottom. The expanding administration seized this opportunity, and via ever new initiatives in the area of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity, aligned itself with the affirmative action fraternity against that old academic aristocracy, the tenured faculty and their departments. That is, at base, all that Wokeness is. The basic ideological programme found purchase outside the university environment simply because immigration policies and hiring preferences provided nearly identical opportunities for high-low alliances in many other areas. Where Woke has made fewer inroads, for example in Continental Europe, the reason is insufficient immigration and the absence of long-standing affirmative action initiatives. Despite many other changes, the lower tiers here have remained relatively stable, though of course that’s changing as I type this.

The depressing but necessary conclusion to be drawn from all of this, is that an intellectual confrontation with Wokeness cannot achieve very much. This isn’t to say that there’s no utility in understanding the arguments and the intellectual heritage of the Woke, or that there’s no tactical advantage to be had in ridiculing them, but in no scenario will winning the argument cause them to pack up and go away. Everyone preaching Wokeness is either a direct, personal beneficiary of the power process it represents, or a would-be target seeking ideological cover. The end state towards which the Woke are driving, academically, is a university system where an all-powerful administration manages a wholly subordinate faculty employed on renewable contracts. At the political level, they aim to expand the managerial state still further at the expense of the native middle classes. Whatever the specifics, the goal is always to replace the ‘aristocrats’ of the prior system – which is to say, those whose status and position is partly independent of and a check upon the current regime – with a new nobility, who owe their position entirely to the administration or the state.

I doubt there is any stopping this process once it has begun, though I do see a few bright spots. The first, is that the institutions which Wokeness seizes will be worse in every way once the revolution is complete, and all of us in our own small way can contribute to their decline by withdrawing our efforts and attention from them. I know that’s not very satisfying, but I think in the longer term it will be decisive. The second, is that it’s not clear the puppetmasters of Wokeness have full control of their revolution, and there’s a substantial chance that, at least in some cases, they’ll fail to rein in their low-side allies and find themselves devoured in turn by the Woke at the bottom, as happened in 2017 at Evergreen State College. The third, related to this, is that the escalating radicalism of the Woke very much reflects their brittle and uncertain hold on power. The more they hollow out the middle for their own gain, the more they isolate themselves at the top, and their vulnerability has many expressions. We see the emergence of Soviet-style gerontocracies, as those in power come to fear the rivals they’ve spent decades displacing so much, that they can’t even countenance preparing the way for their own successors. I think the growing political obsession with the rainbow identities also arises from a growing, unhealthy demand for low-side allies that outstrips supply, because the most salient feature of these identities is that one can opt into them.

The power processes and ideologies of the high-low alliance are products of the modern world and the technological advances which have made mass society possible, but that doesn’t mean we’re condemned to permanent revolution. Institutions have developed many means of stabilising themselves in the face of these forces. The Woke world we inhabit now is the product of deliberate campaigns to undermine these stabilising defences on the one hand, and an inattention to their role and their importance on the other hand. I think liberalism is deeply implicated here, because it has blinded a lot of people to how power actually works. Key among these defences is the maintenance of substantial barriers to entry, as a means of managing the size and the makeup of the bottom tier. A university which only appoints talented faculty won’t have a pool of under-published diversity hires eager to cut deals with power-hungry administrators, and politicians who preside over countries with substantial immigration restrictions won’t have the opportunity to import regime clients. Anybody advocating for the relaxation or the adjustment of these defensive barriers is almost surely a serious enemy, for in the modern world, changes at the bottom – however they’re advertised – presage systemwide revolution within the space of a generation.

Now that my piece on Exogenous Moral Orientation has accumulated many views and comments, I want to respond in a general way to the objections raised by my readership.

When you write an essay putting forth a Broad Theory of How Things Are, nobody will read it unless it has a lede that speaks to contemporary interests and a concrete focus on current events. That’s the only reason I opened with Bill Gates and his rumoured ambition to depopulate the earth. I ought to have anticipated that this would prove as much a distraction as an enticement. In answer to the many emails and comments taking issue with my statements here, I would observe that theories of Gates and the vaccines must be brought into alignment with several basic facts: Vaccination rates across Africa and the third world are truly dismal, Gates himself has repeatedly criticised the mRNA vaccines for their inability to stop transmission, and the earth’s population has continued to increase since the pandemic began, undaunted by all public health policies. 1 If the plan is indeed depopulation via the mass administration of shitty pharmaceuticals, we can take some solace in the boundless idiocy of our shadowy overlords.

Beyond those specifics, it is incredibly important to realise that the political order of the West is marked by affinities and proclivities; it tends in specific directions. In an attempt to make sense of pandemic policy, many try to find the single point of manipulation – the PCR test fraud, the false study that sabotaged hydroxychloroquine, or the key vaccinator responsible for steering early funding to BioNTech. You must widen your view to see that these are single plots in a much broader nexus of policies and scheming that all strive in the same direction, while lacking any single point of control or direction.

What is Bill Gates trying to do? Many will doubt that he really wishes “ to create a world where every person has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life ,” but the inverse image of the man as an aspiring global depopulator will not convince very many people beyond our circles either. Like other philanthropists, Gates has very mundane and self-interested aims:

By attaching his name to initiatives that are already highly regarded – that the cultural system already prefers – he hopes to achieve broader relevance and transform his personal wealth into a form of cultural and political influence. This doesn’t mean that Gates isn’t bad or that he shouldn’t be stopped. It just means that he is a follower more than he is a leader, and that we shouldn’t expect this sad, weak, bloated man to explain very much.

I was pleased to see that some left-leaning readers of the plague chronicle happily identified with the exogenous moral orientation, more or less as I described it. They objected, however, that they didn’t recognise their own political preferences in the decisions of our elite at all.

It’s an old and extremely interesting political illusion, that for those on the left, something akin to a “corporate right” appears to be steering the world, while those on the right see the establishment as primarily leftward tending. Aware of this strange fact, both sides will often use words like “neoliberal” to characterise elite political orientation as something separate from or beyond the conventional political spectrum. The problem is that leftism is not well understood. It is actually a kind of ideological technology, optimised to displace a prior ruling aristocracy and seize control of institutions via alliances of opportunity with disadvantaged social groups. Appeals to economic justice and redistributive policies are simply a means of forming these alliances, which are then used to empower a new managerial elite. This doesn’t mean that many leftists aren’t totally sincere and committed to their vision of equality, but as in all political movements, it is the opportunists and the cynics who run the show. These kinds of people have no interest in any egalitarian utopia, were that even possible, and this gives rise to our optical illusion: From the left, the new elite, which consolidates power for its own purposes, seems to have an aura of “the right” about it, while those on the right are most sensitive to the leftist ideological tactics that brought this new elite to power.

But, that’s just leftism as an ideology. The EMO is a moral instinct prior to ideology, and it can fit any number of different ideological systems. The EMO operates as a taste or a preference, which returns specific answers to specific policy questions. These answers change easily depending upon the scope and the framing of a given problem, leading to a wealth of inconsistencies. If the choice is between the native population of a Western country and third-world immigrants, the EMO will demand that the third-worlders be favoured. If the choice is between reliable power generation in the third world and the environment, the EMO will demand that the environment be favoured. What is apparently very difficult to squeeze past the EMO, are things which look like pragmatic compromises, such as endeavouring to improve third-world conditions via conventional power plants. This path, even though it is the most promising both for the environment and for real people in the world, fails to satisfy the operative moral demands and is eschewed. 2 Contradictions like these are clues, which reveal that we’re dealing here not with any coherent agenda, but rather with moral instincts and unexamined preferences.

Various commenters insist on the reality, the urgency and even the existential crisis posed by climate change. In fact, I formulated these thoughts while reading climate change literature, and I think nothing reveals the reality of the EMO so clearly as this subject. Even if, for the sake of argument, we posit that all of the climate models are correct and that the earth is steadily warming as a result of human CO2 emissions, we still lack a good explanation for Western climate policies, which are only secondarily interested in reducing emissions, and which deploy CO2 primarily as a pretence to circumscribe human impact on the environment. German emissions would be substantially lower, had we invested the billions we put into wind and solar into nuclear power generation instead. In that case, we would have the capacity to scale heat pumps and electric vehicles without threatening to break the grid, confining emissions still further. Instead, Green policies effectively demand an indefinite, continued reliance on natural gas and coal, which is acceptable, because the danger of nuclear power in their minds is not so much the overhyped threat of another Chernobyl, as it is the very real prospect of enabling further civilisational and industrial expansion at the expense of “nature,” which the EMO cannot countenance.

Another clue that something is not quite right with climate change, is that, as an area of cultural and political anxiety, it exists only in the EMO thought-world. This is in contrast to other issues, which prompt varying responses in those with endogenous and exogenous moral inclinations. Consider the war in Ukraine. Those with a pronounced endogenous moral orientation will be sceptical of the conflict and demand that military resources be conserved for national defence. Those with a pronounced exogenous moral orientation will be more likely to appeal to abstract universals like democracy and demand empathy with out-group Ukrainians. 3 We would expect climate change, as an objective problem, to provoke endogenously oriented solutions, and we would expect these to be very extreme, given the alleged immediacy and gravity of the threat. If we are indeed on the brink of triggering a climate “tipping point” (the concept is far more controversial even within the halls of Science than you have been led to believe), limpwristed Paris Agreements would be the least of it. Major powers would be imposing industrial limits on their rivals via sanctions and threats, to reserve the remaining CO2 capacity of the atmosphere for themselves. But, we see nothing like this at all, which suggests that the cluster of prognostications, beliefs and prescriptions around climate change are themselves the exogenously oriented moral response to a totally separate issue, which I will leave my readers to ponder. 4

Finally, because many objected that I overestimate Gates’s sincerity, I’d like to emphasise that I’m not making any claims about the subjective, inner life of anybody. I’m merely trying to articulate the moral system that explains the actions and professed beliefs of philanthropists, policymakers and many ordinary people in the West. By encouraging elites to ally themselves with immigrants or other more endogenously oriented outsiders against their native populations, the EMO definitely has malicious effects. The depressing truth is that people will be inclined to buy into moral systems which benefit them in other ways, and it is very hard to know where sincerity ends and cynicism begins, or to what degree sincerity can ever be an excuse.

Footnotes:

1. The growth rate – which has been in long-term decline – decreased by a barely-perceptible 0.1% since 2020 . 1

2. Third-worlders are typically favoured only when this redounds to the disadvantage of westerners; they are generally disfavoured on environmental and human-impact questions. Pragmatic environmentalists who subscribe to the theory of demographic transition ought to support any means of improving third-world conditions, as even relatively modest environmental impacts here promise to lower the birth rate. Instead, they favour hugely increasing the environmental impact of millions of third-worlders via mass immigration to the developed West, while they perpetuate third-world poverty via things like unworkable energy leapfrogging schemes, thus (at least in their framework) ensuring that birth rates and mortality remain elevated.
   Note that that the moral dynamic surrounding Covid – rooted particularly in a kind of hygiene purity mania – prevented pragmatic solutions to the pandemic in much the same way. The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration tried to sell their alternative to mass containment under the rubric of “focused protection,” but in fact it is better to say that their plan hinged on building natural immunity in the youngest and least vulnerable demographics via “focused exposure.” The moral instincts governing pandemic policy made accepting any infections impossible, even at the cost of higher mortality. 2

3. These are of course only two of various possible constellations. More endogenously oriented Americans, who want to expand American influence in the world or who hold specific anti-Russian animosities, may well find themselves on the Ukrainian side. The same goes some endogenously oriented Eastern Europeans, who perceive the war as a national threat. 3

4. This is true whatever you think about the empirical reality of claims that atmospheric CO2 from human industrial activity is responsible for some portion of industrial-age warming – a proposition I tend to accept in broad terms. 4

One of the things that the plague chronicle aims to do, is draw back the curtain on the institutional or cultural roots of particular malignancies, which seem at first to be contingent on specific bad actors. While I understand that some of you find this irritating, it’s not my purpose to let anybody off the hook. It’s rather to point out that the very real villains we’re all concerned about are mere expressions of much deeper forces, and that fixing things will involve a lot more than rounding up all the Anthony Faucis of the world and trying them for crimes against humanity.

One vein of Corona analysis sees the entire pandemic as the plot of globalist conspirators who are interested in reducing the world population. There are many variations on this theory, but the most basic would hold that lockdowns and the rest were a means of driving us to accept harmful vaccination, which will cause a massive die-off among the vaccinated in the coming years and prepare the way for whatever netzero sustainable future Klaus Schwab has planned for the survivors.

My readers often send me links to podcasts, videos and other media providing proofs of this Global Depopulation Agenda. Clip compilations like this one constitute an important genre in this area. They generally feature globalist goons – in this case, Bill Gates – saying ominous things about the overabundance of humans at different interviews and panel discussions.

I have a look at almost everything you send me, and by now I’ve seen enough to note that the internet case against Gates rests heavily on the same dozen or so video statements. Some of these items, for example the third one in that link (where Gates is talking about reducing childhood mortality), are deliberately deceptive, and it’s an important question, why this area is so awash in clearly manipulated media . The rest of the clips are more or less accurate representations of Gates’s arguments, the only problem being that they’re presented too narrowly.

The fourth at that link, for example, is from a TED talk, where Gates opines that

The world today … is headed up to about nine billion [people]. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, healthcare, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps ten or fifteen percent.

The fifth is very similar. Here, Gates pleads:

The problem is that the population is growing the fastest where the people are the least able to deal with it, so it’s in the very poorest places that you’re going to have a tripling in population by 2050. And so their ability to feed, educate, provide jobs, stability, protect the environment, in those locations means they’re facing an almost impossible problem.

If you read these statements carefully, you’ll see they don’t actually support the idea that Gates wants to reduce the world population by vaccinating people to death. First, he could hardly be expected to air such plots in a public forum; and second, Gates almost always pairs his remarks about population with other concerns about healthcare, food and education. These are strange scruples for a homicidal maniac bent on killing billions.

These statements only begin to make sense, when you realise that they’re rooted in the sociological theory of demographic transition . This theory observes that, as societies advance technologically and economically, they shift from an order of high birth rates and high death rates, to an order of low birth rates and low death rates. Gates, who like all globalist elites is worried about environmental impacts from there being too many humans, believes that he can reduce the total peak population in places like Africa by introducing medical interventions to lower mortality and thereby guide populations to a low-birthrate, post-transition demographic pattern. Whether this theory is right, or whether this makes Gates’s interventions morally defensible, are separate questions. What is beyond dispute, is that this is what Gates is arguing and what everybody in his audience understands him to be arguing.

The banal truth is that Gates is an unoriginal flabby Western liberal. He’s worried about the environment, about population and about disadvantaged brown people, and he thinks he can solve all these problems by improving healthcare. This isn’t a defence of him. I happen to think he’s a malign influence and that if we can’t rein in the Gates’s of the world we’re finished, but that’s not because he’s bent on using mRNA vaccines to decimate humanity.

Those concerned about the Global Depopulation Agenda will not be appeased by these clarifications, of course. They’ll point to anti-natalist messaging and policy in Western nations, and also to organisations like the Club of Rome and establishment intellectuals like Paul Ehrlich , who have openly railed against the spectre of overpopulation. They’ll argue – rightly – that our entire political culture is in thrall to a green movement which opposes any technology that might further human flourishing via reliable energy, regardless of its carbon impact. They’ll say I myself have frequently complained that countries like Germany are doing permanent damage to their economies by pursuing an energy transition which will make no difference in the longer term, because future carbon emissions are almost entirely a function of increasing prosperity and population growth in the developing South and East.

If there isn’t a Global Depopulation Agenda, what’s going on, and how are all these ominous developments to be explained?

The answer is very important, and it lies in the peculiarities of postwar political ideology and the moral instincts which this ideology expresses.

There are many ways to illustrate this, but the most efficient is probably this classic Nature paper on Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle .

Among other things, the authors asked study participants identifying as “conservatives” and “liberals” (in the American sense) to indicate their spheres of primary moral concern. “Conservatives” tended to emphasise those spheres nearest to themselves – their immediate family, their more extended relatives, their friends – as bearing the greatest moral weight. “Liberals,” meanwhile, expressed the greatest moral interest in those spheres furthest from themselves – “all people on all continents,” for example, or “all mammals.”

Plotted as heat-maps on 16 concentric circles, where the first circle is “immediate family” and the sixteenth is “all things in existence”, the comparative results look like this:

Because the future survival of humanity is at stake here, we should drop the dumb “conservative” and “liberal” labels.

The heatmap on the left is not “conservative.” It reflects the ordinary, unremarkable moral orientation of almost all human beings who have ever lived, and almost all currently living humans across the entire world. Without a moral orientation that somehow prioritises your progeny and your relatives (however widely understood), your genes will get nowhere.

The heatmap on the right, meanwhile, represents the anomalous exogenous moral orientation (EMO) of politicial and cultural elites in the developed West, which “liberal” cannot even begin to describe, and which applies primary moral emphasis to circles 13 and 14. These are “all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms” and “all living things in the universe including plants and trees.” Substantial moral value is also attached to things in the twelfth circle, “all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae,” and in the fifteenth circle, “all natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks.” These are people who, strictly speaking, claim to feel morally bound to family, friends and relatives primarily to the extent that these fall within the “living things” or “things in existence” categories.

While we aren’t exactly governed by shape-shifting lizards , we are governed by completely insane ideologues who would do the bidding of shape-shifting lizards – if necessary at our dire expense – were these ever to be discovered.

Now, it’s not quite as bad as it seems. Remember above all that these are moral aspirations and ideals; they are how study respondents claim to feel. Revealed preferences show that most of these people, in their personal lives, still attach substantial moral weight to their immediate friends, family and community. They probably feel qualms about this, however, and when the context is not so immediate – when, for example, they’re making policy decisions for millions of citizens – they’ll compensate by caving to their idealised EMO wherever possible. Put another way: Bill Gates likes the convenience of his private jet , even as he hopes to discourage people from flying.

Remember also that it is the dose which makes the poison. Some degree of EMO isn’t bad. It’s one reason that we look down on littering, for example. An important expression of growing Western EMO would be the European interest in other peoples and cultures, including much-maligned colonialism and the less-maligned British campaign to abolish the slave trade after the later eighteenth century. Particularly since 1900, however, the EMO of Western governing elites has grown ever more extreme, to the point that it has begun to constitute an existential threat for human civilisation.

How this radical and historically unprecedented EMO came to be so ingrained is a complex question. Putting it down to the media or to propaganda is not fully satisfying, because we’d have to ask where the media and the propagandists got these ideas in the first place.

A prerequisite is technology and our growing alienation from nature. Anyone who has spent a rough week or two on the face of a mountain will come away from the experience personally enriched, but perhaps also doubtful that unmanaged unmitigated nature is every bit as friendly, good and deserving of moral concern as his immediate family. Tropes which locate wisdom in distant indigenous peoples and on foreign continents likewise betray a naivete about the realities of hunter-gatherer existence and a lack of experience with life beyond the prosperous West.

A more important, immediate causal factor, is the upset in established social orders since the Industrial Revolution, which has coincided with the rise of liberal democracy, and the replacement of the traditional aristocracy with new managerial elites. The latter have frequently pursued tactical alliances with outsiders or the lower classes to displace prior establishments – including, as the quiet revolution continues, prior managerial establishments. This is the primary function of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity initiatives in America today, and it obviously encourages and depends upon both orchestraters and beneficiaries to engage in radical EMO rituals.

As the problem seems to be growing worse over time, self-reinforcing selection effects probably also play an important part. The more pronounced EMO is favoured by the governing elite, the more all politicians and persons of prominence in the West are specifically selected for this trait, or at least for their willingness to pantomime it. While people with these moral tendencies have always existed, they’ve never been so heavily concentrated in positions of influence before, and the more concentrated they become, the more aggressively they filter for like-minded radicals like themselves, even in the absence (and in excess) of any specific objective.

Once you have seen this simple dynamic at work, you cannot unsee it.

It explains the increasing prominence of animal (and even alien) protagonists in entertainment media, the overt preference for fringe sexual minorities, the predilection for supranational global political bodies and non-governmental organisations which transcend borders and national institutions.

It explains, in particular, why governing elites are so open to insane unprecedented policies like mass immigration. They no longer have particular national moral categories at all, and so they reluctantly embrace all of humanity, and preferentially all living things everywhere. Similarly, it explains why mainstream liberal policies happily enlarge the carbon footprints of millions of third-world immigrants by welcoming them into the industrialised West, while simultaneously waging war on all aspects industrial society for their supposed negative impacts on nature.

Less obviously, the radical EMO of our leaders and their supporters explains the increasing willingness of elites to tolerate suboptimal and actively harmful policies at home. The moral world of the people who run our countries has grown enormously in size, leaving the spheres of their direct jurisdiction almost microscopic in comparison. Why not shut down all of society in an effort to kill (a likely man-made) virus? Why not inject poorly tested mRNA novelty vaccines in billions and suppress all evidence of negative population-wide effects? That elites increasingly treat their populations like cattle is a direct expression of their expanded moral universe. They have so many other things to care about.

It took a while for these moral sentiments to find their proper ideological articulation. In the early 1970s, people with radical EMO signalled, for a brief time, about the dangers of human overpopulation, and there ensued a moment of moral hysteria in which people like Paul Ehrlich wrote books like The Population Bomb . The years since have seen the emergence of a more differentiated ideological system, which extends lesser but still privileged consideration to third-world populations. Thus antinatalist systems are confined mostly to the West, where the most zealous environmental policies are also implemented. That Europe could disappear tomorrow with minimal effects on long-term global population projections or the future composition of the atmosphere is irrelevant. It is the fact that this is the circle of least moral concern, which is determinative.

In the nineteenth century, somebody like Bill Gates would be far more likely to run domestic charities, but in our present hyper-EMO world, he spends every waking moment thinking about Africa, and how he can help Africans, and in the process also save nature by hastening the African transition towards lower birthrates and bringing the netzero ideal closer to reality. All the policy documents and aspirational statements produced by the World Economic Forum, the United Nations and other bodies are animated by a similar spirit.

A globalist cabal plotting the depopulation of the world would be a grave problem, but one with a clear enough solution. We’re facing, instead, an entire moral and ideological system, with very deep roots in prosperous Western culture. This isn’t a universe where everybody wakes up tomorrow, elects to put Bill Gates on trial for his crimes against humanity, and returns thereafter to sensible public health policy. It’s a world where millions of people share the ideological anxieties of eccentric children like Greta Thunberg, manifest escalating indifference to adverse policy outcomes in their own countries, and dream of a future earth devoid of humans like themselves. Because the driving forces operate at the level of moral instinct and emotion, no amount of evidence or appeals to reason that can stop this. Probably the best hope lies in its naivete and idealism. Worsening conditions will ultimately deprive these ideologies of their cultural appeal; how bad things have to get before this happens, is the terrifying question.

UPDATE: A lot of comments are querying Gates’s sincerity, suggesting ulterior motives, and so forth. I have no direct insight into the man, but I suggest that his interior state is a peripheral matter here. The problem is to understand under what moral orientation he is claiming to operate, and why that moral orientation resonates so broadly with elite Western culture.

We need to understand not only that the vaccinators are wrong, and how they are wrong, but also why they are wrong. If we misdiagnose the source of their error, we’ll go looking for evidence against them in the wrong places, and oppose them in the wrong ways.

Consider a story I’ve been following since last week, about an epidemiologist at Berlin Charité named Harald Matthes. It’s nothing special, merely the most recent occurrence of an obnoxious media dynamic:

Last year, Matthes set up a simple online survey for vaccine side-effects. Volunteers could sign up to fill out questionnaires at regular intervals about their post-vaccination experience. About 0.8% of those surveyed reported what Matthes classified as serious adverse reactions, a number 40 times higher than the official Paul-Ehrlich-Institut rate of 0.02%. Matthes has yet to release his data, but last week he appeared in the German media to announce his preliminary results and demand outpatient clinics for victims of vaccination.

Then the fact-checkers descended. One of the most influential attacks appeared in [Die Zeit](http://Much claimed, nothing proven The doctor Harald Matthes says that severe side effects after the Corona vaccination are much more frequent than known. Research shows that his figures are untenable.), under the headline “Much claimed, nothing proven.” The article dismantles Matthes’s study piece-by-piece: He’s wrong because he defines “severe reaction” differently from the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut; he’s wrong because his survey data comes from volunteers rather than a representative sample; and, above all, he’s wrong because he failed to establish a background rate of severe events in the unvaccinated:

It’s completely normal for people to fall ill, sometimes seriously, during the observation period of a study. Every day, almost 1,000 people in Germany suffer a heart attack … It’s important to take this background noise into account, especially when looking for rare vaccine side effects.

There’s a reason I haven’t written about Matthes’s study: These are serious criticisms.

The point, though, is that when it comes to Long Covid, Die Zeit forgets all of this methodological rigour.

In article after article after histrionic article, their journalists demonstrate a total lack of regard for definitions. Everything and anything is Long Covid, so long as it’s preceded by at least the suspicion of SARS-2 infection. All kinds of methodologically dubious Long Covid studies receive the breathless endorsement of Die Zeit, a paper that has never really bothered about the background rate of brain fog or sleep disturbances or joint pain in the population of Germany. Throw it all into the Long Covid bucket, says Die Zeit; after all, SARS-2 is extremely dangerous. Any scary thing anybody says about it must be true.

If you want to know how millions of people can so relentlessly defend the vaccines as “safe and effective,” regardless of what harm they inflict, while simultaneously fearing SARS-2 as a killer virus even after the emergence of Omicron, wonder no more: It is precisely this tendency to uncritically accept every scary poorly-sourced study about SARS-2 risk, while subjecting every last finding to the disadvantage of the vaccines to exacting, isolated demands for rigour. Masks benefit from a similar dynamic, as did lockdowns before them, and mass testing, and contact tracing and other things besides.

If vaccine injuries and deaths were counted in the same way as Long Covid cases and Corona deaths, the vaccines would all be pulled from shelves tomorrow. Alternatively, if we minimised SARS-2 risk in the same way we whitewash the vaccines, nobody would care about mass vaccination at all.

There is very little overt, deliberate deception driving this mass delusion. This is why, as Alex Berenson points out, there’s just not very much in the Pfizer documents that we didn’t already know, and why there’s never going to be very much in them.

The present insanity arises not from the plans of genocidal masterminds in the WHO, but from two years of mass media panic propaganda bordering on psychological abuse, in response to which a great many people find themselves confined in their own self-fashioned moral prisons, having decided that they are not good people unless they mask and self-isolate until SARS-2 vanishes from the earth. They want the vaccines to work, and they find it uncomfortable to contemplate the risks and imperfections of these pharmaceutical products.

Scientists aren’t immune to these emotions. The vaccine developers at Moderna and Pfizer, together with their government regulators, designed trials that would help the vaccines succeed, because they’d spent months awash in Corona panic porn like the rest of us. They made the trials shorter, lest waning efficacy grab too many headlines; they did their best to recruit as few old and vulnerable participants as possible, to keep the efficacy numbers up. This is not to say that there are no liars and malicious actors in the halls of public health, merely that the influence of the insane, panicking hordes is greater.

Orchestrated lying by specific parties very clearly did play an important role in establishing lockdowns and other mass containment policies. The vaccines are a different matter. Hundreds of thousands of scientists and journalists across the world have been wrong about them, in the very same simple and predictable ways, from the very beginning.

A few liars and grifters would be easier – you could expose them and end all of this tomorrow. We’re instead facing the much more intractable problem of pervasive self-deception and motivated reasoning. We need to stop looking for the reveal, and start thinking about how we can ease people out of their madness.

That’s not going to be easy.

In commenting on the many absurdities of the Corona regime, and asking what their purpose could possibly be, I’m often told that “it’s about power” or “it’s about control.”

I confess that I don’t find these explanations convincing. I think they’re grounded in a mistaken view of how western states exercise power and the constraints they face in this. The idea seems to be, that states accumulate the potential to act, which potential is however constrained by the law or popular opinion; and that they are forever striving to escape these artificial constraints through subterfuge and deception, in order to transmute more of their accumulated potential into real-world prerogatives.

I see it otherwise. As far as I can tell, neither laws nor popular opinion limit the action of modern states in any serious way. There are constraints, but these lie elsewhere, mostly in the area of coordination. As I’ve written several times now, our governments have become profoundly demobilised. Political power has accumulated at ever lower levels, with the press, academia and in the bureaucratic institutions. This process represents a kind of political decay, and yet it has distinct advantages for the senescent elite: It ensures broad consensus across all major corporate, government and media factions, shielding them precisely from things like popular opinion and judicial review.

The monstrous institutional apparatus can only act effectively if enough of its widely distributed nodes are activated and aligned behind the same agenda. This requires some kind of (in most cases external) stimulus. Corona has revealed how powerful modern states can be, if only they can get enough of their decentralised distributed substance to back a given programme. Laws become totally meaningless in the face of such coordination; the ensuing propaganda campaign overcomes popular resistance easily.

(The problem of coordination is also why I think the lockdowners and the vaccinators had a much harder time in the United States than in Europe. American [unlike German] federalism is a real force, which fragments the various parties to power still further. Coordination for the American government is thus much harder than it is in Europe, or New Zealand.)

Even in a condition of high coordination, though, the exercise of power or control by the state represents exertion. It’s like running, or lifting a weight. Modern states, with their multitude of international adventures and national initiatives, are fully committed here. The more the various arms of the state have been stirred to action, the more power it has to act in the moment; for a time, the stimulation of SARS-2 provided enough surplus energy to bring vaccine mandates within the realm of possibility. With Omicron, though, the enthusiasm and with it the coordination faded, and the exertion was no longer worth it. They could have still done it, but it would have meant redirecting resources from someplace else and not doing some other thing.

Anyway, that’s my basic model of how state power functions. It’s like the Eye of Sauron: It can’t look everywhere at once, it can’t do everything. And when it’s looking at you, the purpose isn’t just to control your life for the thrill of it. If that’s all the state wanted, it could look anywhere.

States act with purpose, towards specific goals. Their constituent pieces function like a distributed intelligence, which is always striving for something, and – especially when policies become bizarre, clearly unattainable, or circular – it’s worth trying to figure out what that something might be. It might not always be obvious; we shouldn’t assume that states will have goals or aims that make all that much sense to humans.

In fact, while they’re made up of people, western states often behave towards bizarre and alien ends, like an extraterrestrial or a sentient machine: They insist on human uniformity, they’re indifferent to children, they’re hostile to traditional cultures, they hate pathogens, they’re wary of real-life social interaction, they’re mildly wary of the natural world, they like buildings made of glass, steel and concrete, they abhor death, they like to count things, they dislike the rural environment, they prefer the highest possible degree of networking and interconnection.

Eugyppius is the pseudonymous author of Eugyppius: A Plague Chronicle, the foremost publication on all things Covid and beyond where he masterfully details what not one single well-funded, well-staffed, well-networked mainstream outlet was able to get right about the last 2 years of unprecedented change. This has probably been my favorite interview so far and it’s made me much more interested in interviewing other pseudonymous writers in the future, and as you read along you’ll see why. There’s maybe something about pseudonymity that frees individuals from the everyday incentives we face to conform and seek status, things you’re bound to do or at least consider when you’re visible since, if you do conform publicly, you’ll get good-boy points from the internet in the form of likes and retweets and followers, and, if you don’t conform, you’ll present a legible attack surface for other status-hungry conformists—nothing signals obedience and ostensible decency like bashing deviations from popular opinion! At any rate, pseudonymity allows the open-airing of truth and that’s exactly what we get here, and if you’re truly concerned with the truth and it’s expression as much as I am, Over the last 6 years or so I’ve seen a kind of (as of yet) unidentified sclerosis creep into widely used online infrastructure; the internet as I knew it became less responsive to my questions and interests, more prone to elevating mainstream sources to satisfy query inputs, less likely to guide me to the individuals actually concerned with whatever problems I was facing. The usual channels for learning more about niche experiences like Google and YouTube became virtually useless, and I began to spend more of my time looking to people on Twitter or rustic web forums for answers, most of whom were anonymous like yourself. But this phenomenon seemed intuitively backward—random internet denizens were somehow producing more insightful commentary on pretty much every matter than highly credentialed experts and capital-heavy institutions. My question to you is: how is this possible? You’ve basically been more right about covid than any mainstream news source I’ve seen, and there is a significant trend online of part-time sleuths predicting world events or describing complex subjects with higher-fidelity than “persons of authority.” But what makes anons and everyday people so much better here than our ostensible betters?

Thanks for your kind words about my work. It's an interesting question, and one I've written about now and then. One of the main things, is that these curated, establishment discourses promoted by the algorithms and sustained by mainstream media organs, are always trying to do something in addition to being right. They're trying to sell advertisements at the very least, but most of them are also running interference for progressive political programs, and striving to manage public opinion. This is also broadly true of academics and most of the experts who are brought to your attention on news programs.

Twitter anons aren't trying to do any of that, so we can speak a lot more freely and grasp problems much more directly than they can. This isn't to say that we're not political, but for me (and I suspect for most others in this sphere), the political commitments are secondary to the empirical project, and arise from it. To that comes the fact that the barriers to entry are a lot lower for us, and competition is much more ruthless. So we cast a wider net for ideas and promote the good ones much more relentlessly.

In addition to just being right, I'm often impressed with how much more agile and sophisticated all of the anons I interact with are, than the participants in expert, establishment discourses. The Twitter blue checks come across as very slack-jawed and narrow-minded by comparison. All the signs of a confident, dynamic discourse are with us – the sly, ironic humour; the openness to critique; resilience in the face of censorship and algorithmic deboosting; the inordinate interest we attract from adversaries.

I want to focus for a second on the progressive political program you’ve mentioned: there’s a trend of revolutionary posturing sweeping through authority and status-minting institutions in the West that’s come with a deeply polarizing affect; shifting, ultimatum-laden demands for (leftwing) ideological commitment have torn apart families, friendships, workplaces, universities, and entire cities in the US have even suffered millions in damage from those demands being taken to their extreme. Social trust has eroded and centers of power have become addled. A number of theories have been advanced to explain what we’re seeing, a few being that unprecedented consensus-generation (virality) from the rise of social media has an over-socializing quality that inspires shock, incredulity, and disgust at dissent; that the rise of secularism has left a God-sized hole that needed filling; that the decline of hobbies has seen the means for deriving positive approval change from doing something and signaling what we’ve done to believing something and signaling our beliefs; and that progressivism is a form of memetic warfare seeded by non-western state actors, which I’m more inclined to believe these days considering that Covid hysteria seems like part of the same thing, with China producing videos of collapsing bystanders at the start of the pandemic to seemingly bait western powers into overreaction. What do you attribute to the rise of the ideology we’re seeing?

All these are very good explanations for the rise of wokery, and they clearly all play a part. Not just social media, but the expansion of the technological apparatus in general, has had a destabilising effect on western culture. We are all of us increasingly withdrawn from natural conditions, we spend most of our time in artificial environments. Our experience of the world is mediated by technology, and so we see corresponding cultural and social tendencies to deny our biological essence. This is important, because most of leftist wokery is about overcoming our animal and physical natures – whether it is denying sex differences, the influence of genes on behaviour, unequally distributed cognitive capacity, and so on.

Beyond that, I think there's another component of social media that we understand only imperfectly, and that is the degree to which it is used deliberately to influence our ideas and behaviour. Social media platforms want universal participation and an advertiser-friendly experience, and they have coincided with the rise of a woke ideology that is pathologically inclusive and that seeks to suppress certain human emotions (hate, anger) which are not conducive to consumption. You propose that "progressivism" might be "a form of memetic warfare seeded by non-western state actors," and I think theories in this direction should be taken very seriously, especially if we expand the idea a little, to include also western actors in the major technological enterprises like Google. These people are notoriously pozzed, they have amassed a wealth of data on all of our habits and how we respond to content on their platforms. The result is a massive and increasingly sophisticated effort to manipulate the opinions and beliefs of billions of people across the globe. There is a good chance that the trangender craze arises from algorithmic manipulation, and I really, really want someone to explore the extent to which big tech was involved in pushing lockdowns and containment policies. A lot of these ideas seem to have first emerged in Bay Area tech circles.

It looks pretty bleak, but one reason for hope is that progressive wokery is at root a disease of affluence. It is not a normal, self-sustaining cultural tradition, and sooner or later it will end, whenever the money runs out, if not before.

Has wokery affected your personal life living in Germany? Various political polls here in the US have seen self-censorship and cancellation become the new norm where unorthodox thinking was once the rule and where personal views simply didn’t matter, and just anecdotally a startling number of people I know have experienced both a compulsion to lie publicly about personal views to maintain social-standing and livelihoods, and the loss of relationships and opportunities when non-mainstream views have been discovered or aired. What has your experience been so far here and what differences do you see between European and US manifestations of wokeness?

This is an interesting question, because the answer is that wokery has affected my life here in Germany far, far less than it did when I was living in the United States. This is not to say that there is no wokery in Germany, but it's far more limited, particularly in the south. One theory would be that we're just behind America, perhaps by 20 years or so, and in some ways this seems plausible. For example, the primary woke-adjacent political concerns are classic feminist issues of the kind that would strike an American as quaint, such as equal career opportunities for women, and (huge in Germany right now) gender-neutral language. But it's more than that too, I think. There is the fact that Germany has its own quite separate original historical sin, namely the Holocaust, and so aggressive woke doctrines about white oppressor classes are superfluous here. To some unknown degree, and in a way I can't even articulate all that well, I would also posit that wokery and the English language are closely related, and that as a political religion, wokery has trouble operating outside the Anglophone world. Thus wokery is more current in Scandinavia than Germany, and actually quite crazy in Scandinavian schools (where the language of instruction is generally English); it's worse in the north than in the south, it's worse in cities than in the countryside, it's promoted primarily by our very Anglo-centric mass media. Finally, Germany (and Europe in general) is much more racially homogeneous than the United States, so wokery beyond feminist topics lacks an organic constituency; and I don't teach students anymore, and students and the student-focussed administration were, in my prior life as a professor in the US, the main way that wokery made itself felt in my everyday routine.

When it comes to feminism and equality among the sexes, I don't really obfuscate my views. This irritates some people, but surprisingly fewer than you'd think. There just isn't any of the toxic hysteria here, that there is in America, the UK and Canada. On some topics (including Corona) I do obfuscate my views, because I'm not in a position to change anything.

Can you go a bit further into the English language being conducive to wokeism? This is probably one of the most interesting perspectives where meme-development and propagation is concerned but I’ve only had cursory exposure to ideas related, like for example I’ve heard that German with all its precision and granularity is the language most hospitable to philosophy, so I’m wondering if there’s more there: Do certain languages act as hedges against certain ideas or as fecund ground for their development and spread?

Well, these are just half-formed intuitions, but I’m happy to expand. Just observationally, wokery in German is almost always accompanied by a deluge of English vocabulary, and again is associated with those regions and social sectors closest to the Anglophone world. Why might that be?

There is in the strictest sense what you’re alluding to, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - the idea that languages or linguistic categories determine or guide thought. While I’m sceptical of the work I’ve read in this area, a few small points do come to mind. One is that the gender deconstructionists will probably have a harder time in languages with grammatical gender. When everything, from inanimate objects to animals to abstract ideas, has gendered articles and pronouns, special pronoun tricks become more challenging and less plausible. And staying with pronouns for a moment, I think the deeper goal of leftist word games like this is to introduce grammatical awkwardness, and to make plain speech difficult. Different languages offer different paths to achieving this. Thus, parallel to pronoun insanity in English, German leftists have engaged in a long-running (and equally absurd) attempt to introduce gender-neutral speaking habits, which is substantially more difficult and awkward in German than English. Wokery isn’t all about word games, of course, so this can’t be a full explanation, but it’s maybe a start, and perhaps there are deeper and less obvious ways in which language works here too.

But I also think wokery is native to and embedded in a tradition of critical theory, which has its deepest roots in postmodern critical theory. The earliest layers here (Frankfurt School) were obviously German, but the more direct foundations are French writers like Foucault and Baudrillard, and then English-language theorists like Judith Butler and the lamentable Kimberlé Crenshaw and so on. It’s hard to disentangle all the cause and effect going on here. On the one hand, these are arguments embedded in what you might call a broader intellectual operating system that, despite pervasive translation, exists only incompletely and without much cultural resonance outside the English language. On the other hand, these woke theorists are appealing to the interests of certain constituencies or political factions that, for historical and demographic reasons, don’t really exist outside of America and perhaps the UK. Intersectionality, for example, has something to do with the fact that affirmative action in the United States brought a lot of black women into white-collar jobs and universities, but very few black men. Black women thus needed a theoretical construct to maintain their position atop the victim hierarchy. These are social constellations that don’t exist outside the post-colonial Anglophone world. Which raises another point, the fact that wokery has a clear post-colonial political role, which will resonate far less in countries outside the Anglosphere that don’t have a very significant colonising past.

A final point would probably be that the Anglosphere has this tradition of often private residential universities, which I think are crucial for fostering a certain kind of leftist activism. Here my thoughts are even less well-formed than about English as the native language of wokeness, but in continental Europe, the university system is overwhelmingly public, with comparatively much smaller administrations, less well-defined campuses, relatively few student services, and so on. It’s much harder for schools to incubate these extremist left-wing cultures of permanent racial offence and protest. This isn’t to say there’s no leftist activism at European Unis - there is no end of it - but it’s generally much more integrated with the world beyond the university and the broader political environment, which mitigates certain kinds of extremism (but not others).

This is all reminding me of something I’ve wondered in the past 24 hours: One facet of the language angle of wokeism is that it maybe signals the acme of what Fukuyama considered a core feature of liberal democracies: the sort of simulation of war, the impulse for conquest acted out as upward advancement in academic, governmental, or private sector bureaucracies, now expressed as conquest over the language governing the procedures of our bureaucracies. Now new procedures with a new language are used by individuals unwilling or unable to play competence games to seize new territory in the academic landscape, by governments to seize new powers over the will of their people, by corporations to seize new standards for themselves beyond those of safety and quality or, for platforms, new standards beyond adherence to laws that may have constrained them to protection of privacy and the guarantee of freedom of expression. A new form of soft-power has been realized in the West which can bludgeon seemingly anyone into submission or achieve previously inaccessible goals. Countries like the United States and Canada seem smug in its deployment, confident that nothing can overcome its ability to guilt, shame, dehumanize, or transform the order of the world. But the incident happening now between Russia and Ukraine has maybe shown another way, an old way which may have defied Pax Americana, a way that shouts loudly that strength and ambition don’t need to be bound by procedural norms or obfuscated by compassionate misdirection! For the first time perhaps since the end of the Cold War the genteel cornerstone of liberalism—the idea that governance by procedure (and now by changes to procedural language) can exist without challenge—has proven itself assailable. How do you view US hegemony in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and what are your predictions for the state of the world order if liberal democracy loses face?

(Eugyppius here takes a brief break before answering. I harassed him a lot, the interview was too 🔥🔥🔥 to stop now)

In a way, I‘m almost grateful my answer comes at such delay, after the West imposed its unprecedented sanctions regime on Russia. This extends even to the withdrawal of American television news operations; the western propaganda of CNN will no longer be broadcast to Russians, and this is supposed to punish them somehow. If this continues for very long, it will lead to the development of a Russo-Chinese financial, industrial, perhaps even metacultural sphere, a multipolar world and an alternative to the West. On the one hand, I think this is the result of a lot of undirected, systemic processes premised on corporate virtue signalling and pandering to blue check outrage mob on Twitter. It helps to remember that a lot of the people making these decisions are incredibly parochial; they live in bubbles where everybody has the same views, and this leads to strange extremism, like these Munich doctors refusing to treat Russian patients. On the other hand, though, in a broader metaphorical or even spiritual sense, perhaps it means the abandonment of western universalist claims. A world in which the West has to develop a particularist conception of itself as something other than these abstract platitudes about democracy and freedom and so on, could only be an improvement on what we have right now.

In the near term, of course, I think the humiliation of the West is very dangerous. Not only the political leadership, but also many of the urban upper middle-class sub-elites, live in a state of profound isolation from reality, including geopolitical reality. While I think the nature of the post-political West is to prefer cultural and economic assimilation to military solutions, they also have a lot of munitions and they command substantial armies, and it‘s conceivable they misjudge the situation and do something really stupid, like escalate to direct military confrontation with Russia.

Despite all that we’re seeing happen in the world now, are we gonna make it?

Yes, I think we will make it. I’m not sure any of us will live long enough to see the end of this period of decline, and I’m even more pessimistic that anything can be done to reverse it. But beyond that, there are are reasons for optimism: Firstly, as things unravel, and the globalist vampire squid loses its monolithic hold, there will be more opportunities for some of us, here and there, to create alternative communities or even small-scale political orders that provide some relief from the decline and allow us to realise some of our vision. Secondly, it is the broader globalist machine that is artificial and requires enormous effort and resources to stay running. We represent nothing but older, more traditional, much more stable ways of living and conceiving of the world, which are rooted in our nature and biology and can‘t really be abolished. We can‘t ever be defeated, just sidelined for a time, and the corollary to this is that our enemies can never win, they can just dominate for a time.

To find more from Eugyppius follow him on Twitter and subscribe to his Substack today!

What follows is a long essay I wrote almost a year ago, in October 2020, on another platform. I had almost no audience at the time, but many people told me they enjoyed it, and I am happy to provide this edited, shortened and slightly updated version for many new readers.

In reading it now, I find that it is more heavily focused on lockdowns and mass containment than it would be if I wrote it today, but I think even these passages are still important. Lockdowns will be kept around, initially as selective “lock-outs” to repress and punish the unvaccinated; from there it will be trivial to impose closures on whole populations once again, as case statistics deteriorate in the winter.

Beyond all of the politics and hysteria and right-thinking, there is a real virus beneath it all. Its name is Sars-Cov-2. This virus is not to be confused with Covid-19, which is the illness that the virus causes. The distinction, like that between HIV and AIDS, is medically useful, and it invites us to make other, analogous distinctions, in service of cleaning up our thought.

Illness is as much a social matter as a biological one, and for most of us, the vastly more significant distinction is not that between virus and disease, but between the biological reality of the virus-disease, and the political and social perceptions of this virus-disease. Words help us think, and so here I propose to call the former biological virus-disease Sars2; and the latter, socio-political virus-disease, Covid.

Sars2 is only one of the players responsible for the social construction of Covid, and not even the most important one. It is best to think of Covid as a committee project, with a lot of creative talent. Politicians, epidemiologists, virologists, public health experts, computer models, public health institutes, journalists, Chinese bureaucrats, and yes, among them all, Sars2—they all get some say in constructing Covid. Sometimes Sars2 disagrees with their construct, and sometimes his fellow committee members listen to him. But sometimes he disagrees and gets overruled. He’s only one voice at the table, after all. When a Twitter blue-check or a scientist or your professor lectures you about the substance of scientific consensus, they are just delivering articles of faith about the social construct of Covid, as the committee has defined it.

When we say that something is a social construct, we don’t mean that it isn’t real. We just mean that it could be conceived of in a much different way; and that a big part of what we take for granted about the constructed thing is malleable. Clearly political and scientific authorities could have constructed a massively different version of Covid if they wanted to. If you doubt this, look at China. They have basically eradicated Covid by constructing it out of existence.

In the West, Covid has acquired a variety of features that demand constant and heavy-handed technocratic intervention. This is not the case everywhere, but in the West, where technocratic bureaucracies dominate, this is what Covid has become. The technocrats have had a huge hand in building Covid, and they have constructed the perfect nail for their hammer.

Above all, they have constructed Covid to be an intractable problem, because our bureaucracies derive much of their authority and legitimacy from permanent, intractable problems. This was not the only path. We very nearly embarked upon a quite different one. Before the permanent bureaucracy recognised that Sars2 provided fodder for another eternal project, they had taken substantial steps towards building a very different disease out of Sars2—a disease that nobody needed to worry about very much, that was not very different from other respiratory illnesses, and that would probably go away in the end, or that we could at least overlook if we didn’t think about it too carefully or test for it all that widely.

That changed very quickly. By March, western Covid committees had begun building a very different disease. One of its most important features, is its omnipresence and invisibility.

Covid Is A Hidden, Lurking Menace

Central to our image of Covid is its appearance out of nowhere. A wet market deep in China, or some bio-lab—official discourse is agnostic. The earliest images to reach the West depicted apparently healthy Chinese people suddenly collapsing in convulsions, as if struck by God. Efforts to quarantine the earliest Covid patients in Europe totally failed, as the disease turned out to be circulating broadly among the population first in Lombardy, then in northern Europe, and finally in the United States. This early impression of Covid as omnipresent and invisible remains with us to this day. It is not enough to stay home if you are sick. Healthy people, who never develop symptoms of Covid, nevertheless spread the disease. Aerosolised transmission is the subject of much discussion; Covid menaces through the air. Interestingly, the aerosol aspect only took off after establishment scientists decided that transmission via surfaces was at best infrequent. Yet the menace of contaminated surfaces has persisted in our consciousness, alongside the contaminated air, and the contaminated healthy people, and the visibly contaminated sick.

In the ancient world, it was held that certain life-forms, such as fish, were generated spontaneously by the environment. If you kept a barrel of water around long enough, theory held you’d soon find little minnows swimming around in it. This is, functionally, how we behave with Covid. Two healthy people conversing in an unventilated room will probably yield Covid in one of them. In fact Covid can arise from any instance of social proximity. People fear objects that many others have touched. People fear friends or relatives who are perceived to socialise or travel too much.

Now, Covid does not lurk absolutely everywhere. It favours above all those spaces subject to the direct control of government bureaucracies. Schools, therefore, are especially feared. Public transit is considered another terrifying locus of infection. Covid is especially pervasive in hospitals; a lot of people avoid them now at all costs. In the first wave, it was common to close parks and playgrounds, even though we know the risk of transmission outdoors is minimal. Bureaucrats control public parks.

As you move away from bureaucratic oversight, the threat of Covid recedes. Bars and clubs, in most countries subject to substantial regulation but essentially private enterprises, are a kind of middle ground: Dangerous certainly, and the subject of much moral expostulation, but not quite the unmitigated danger of schools. Things like restaurants and chamber music concerts at private venues take a further step away from bureaucratic oversight, and Covid recedes accordingly. Private offices are managed by bureaucrats hardly at all, so we don't read that much about infection at work. The exception is government bureaucrats themselves, who hear a lot about how dangerous it is for them to go to the office. That space furthest removed from bureaucratic supervision, the home, is a safe haven from Covid, although it is the one place you’re most likely to contract Sars2.

The presence of Covid, which is invisible and potentially everywhere, can only be ascertained via special tests. While you can give yourself an antigen test at home, the results are far less authoritative than antigen tests administered by authorised agents of the bureaucracy, and these in turn are still less significant than PCR tests, administered by medical professions and processed in a lab.

Mere symptoms do not mean you are infected; you could have something else. On the other hand, perfect health does not mean you are Covid-free. I don’t think enough people have recognised how bizarre this situation is. Consider all those people these past months who have recovered from a respiratory illness, with fever and cough, without ever being tested. When they suggest that perhaps they had Covid, it is routine to doubt them. Certainly nobody would exempt them from vaccines on that basis. Compare them to all the people who have no symptoms at all, but test positive, and are widely considered to have a disease. The voluminous and eager literature on the asymptomatics is extremely telling. They are 20% of all cases, or 80%; they are responsible for 2% of infections, or 40%. They are tallied in the statistics, undifferentiated from the truly ill.

Central to the definition of Covid, is that mass testing programs be the only means of defining the extent of the disease, assessing the success of the technocratic response, and the virtue of the compliant population. Covid is not like other communicable diseases, which are diagnosed mostly in private, according to likely symptoms.

Covid as a hidden, lurking menace has had by far the worst consequences for children. Sars2, everybody knows, is not a danger to them. The virus himself has been very clear about this and it has not been possible for the disease bureaucrats to overrule him. It is easy to imagine a parallel universe, one where we are relieved at the near-total safety of our children in the face of this disease, one where we spare them the effects of public health interventions, because they are not at risk.

That is not our world. Government bureaucracies are heavily involved in the lives of children, particularly through schools. Thus public health authorities and, most unnaturally, many women, have come to fear children as a vector of infection. Some people even believe children are the main drivers of the pandemic. Covid lurks, a deadly silent threat, inside them, wherever they gather to play, wherever they gather in school. Classrooms and childcare centres have become places of intense microbial hysteria, silly simulacra of hospitals, with odd Plexiglas barriers, hand sanitiser around every corner, and constant, constant testing. In this world Covid creates its own reality vortex. You find infections where you swab the most. Every time schools are opened, intense surveillance uncovers a new flood of cases, which cements the image of children as dangerous and contaminated, a mortal threat to their grandparents.

If you say to a person of orthodox political alignments that this is a bizarre approach to any disease, to surround precisely those people at least risk with so many precautions, harmful in themselves; and at the same time to leave those most at-risk to their own devices with vague advice to self-isolate, they will say a great many things to you. One of the first things they say will be this: Covid is a totally new virus. It poses an unknown and wholly unprecedented threat to our society. There are no low-risk populations, and there is no way way to protect the vulnerable from this pervasive invisible pathogen. All we can do is disrupt hidden transmission among the invulnerable carriers.

Covid Is A Novel, Extra-Natural Disease

As with the hidden menace, the foundations for this aspect of Covid were laid early on. In the beginning Covid was held to be a zoonotic virus, brought upon humans by exotic Chinese dietary practices. Now many admit that it is likely a laboratory invention, unleashed with some sinister purpose or by accident. However that may be, Covid is totally new to humans; it is unlike any disease we have ever faced before. It is beyond nature and we have no natural defences against it. In the discourse surrounding Covid there has always been the tendency to push this extra-natural facet to the extremes, nearly to the supernatural. The early paranoia about surfaces comes to mind yet again, with those old stories of mail-room employees picking up Covid from packages sent from far-off, plague-ridden lands. Covid can perfuse the air for hours after a fateful cough. There is no general unified Covid with a limited set of properties. Attempts to fix its characteristics dissolve in a pool of contradictory evidence. Note the widely differing characteristics of Covid in neighbouring, broadly similar countries. The better part of this variation arises from different national medical bureaucracies, which have lent Covid different properties according to their capacities and proclivities. But of course the variation is not understood in that way; it is rather put down to some magical aspect of the virus itself. Extranatural virions do one thing in Sweden, and another thing in Germany, and another thing in Italy.

Because Covid is an extra-natural disease, our natural immune systems are not up to fighting it. This is why the prospect of Covid reinfection has been a matter of obsession from the very beginning. The first rumours of reinfection arose in China, where reinfected were said to suffer devastating symptoms, such as heart attacks. Similar cases were never observed in the West and so everyone stopped talking about that. Later on, South Korean health officials began reporting various cases of reinfection, but then it emerged that this was an artefact of the manic Korean testing regime. Recovering Covid patients issued multiple tests may come up negative one day and positive the next, as their body sheds the virus. Though they had been proven wrong twice, reinfection theories persisted. Minor victory came when some serological studies failed to find antibodies in some confirmed Covid patients. Later they had the holy grail, namely several confirmed genuine reinfections.

You could say, perhaps, that the reinfectionists on the Covid committee forced a compromise with Sars2 on this point. Reinfection aligns neatly with established doctrine about the inadequacy of our natural defences. Only broad-scale social and political countermeasures have any chance of success against Covid. Think of it as a substitute, artificial, social immune system: Lockdowns, curfews, quarantines, travel bans, mass testing, masks, school closures, personal distance, interior ventilation, hand sanitiser, contact tracing apps, home office, and more. This is what a society of immune-compromised people looks like. Just as our bodily immune response is responsible for many of the symptoms we associate with illness, so too is the social immune response responsible for the majority of negative effects from Covid. We have made our whole society sick, in a vain effort to keep some people healthy.

The body’s immune system can overreact to the point that it poses a greater danger than the infection itself. In a related way, our social response to Sars2 has entered an inflammatory phase, a spiral of disease hysteria demanding mass testing and contact tracing leading to the discovery of more cases causing more stringent anti-Covid social measures that just make our nations and our societies vastly sicker and more dysfunctional than we were before. Remember that this all started with "two weeks to crush the curve," and consider how far we have come, and how far we might go still. It goes without saying that all these negative effects are taken as further proof of the unusual threat that Covid poses.

Beyond the extra-natural social defences, we have placed all of our hopes in an extra-natural vaccine. Here the discourse devolves into awkward contradiction. To begin with, vaccines, while indeed extra-natural, merely stimulate natural immunity. If we may hope for a vaccine, it is unclear why we cannot let some of our natural immune systems join the fight. What is more, despite unprecedented mass testing programs and enormous scientific interest and the bias of our perspective, Covid reinfection is not yet a pervasive phenomenon. Those with natural immunity are well protected indeed. From the very beginning, the developers of extra-natural vaccines have been warning for a long time that their products will provide only partial protection against Sars2. Yet their products were marketed, until recently, as more protective than infection, and to this moment, even as the vaccines fail, politicians everywhere insist that mass vaccination is the only answer.

Fundamental to this paradox, is the axiom that extra-natural Covid poses an unknowable yet grave risk to everyone. Reinfection is only the beginning of it. All those people who have recovered without lingering effects may well develop brain lesions next year. The health of their internal organs has yet to be confirmed and there are dark suppositions that no few harbour hidden heart or liver or kidney damage. A lot of people might never smell again. Many recover only to relapse several weeks later, and perhaps again several weeks after that. There is now an enormous body of literature about Long Covid, a chronic syndrome marked by every symptom you could imagine: Ongoing fatigue, shortness of breath, brain fog, joint pain, cartilage degeneration, insomnia, depression—on and on.

Before you get into the weeds of the journal literature on Long Covid or permanent organ damage from Sars2, consider this: Officially, the virus has infected over 220 million people across the world. That is a great river, wide and deep, for our Covid committee to trawl for stories of unusual complications, debilitating symptoms and incomplete convalescences, from now until forever. The question is not, what odd horrible things lurk in that river; but how many of them there are, relative to the ordinary pedestrian things. What are you most likely to find? Long Covid and relapsed Covid and heart attack Covid? Or low-grade grade fever Covid, mild-cough Covid, over-in-five-days-without-a-second-thought Covid? I think we can all answer that question for ourselves. That we let the rare and the unusual dominate our construction of Covid, rather than the mild and the pedestrian, is partly down to publication bias. The banal almost never makes it into print; the strange and unusual invariably find an audience.

But that is not the only reason we must constantly hear about the grave unknown risks of this extra-natural disease. There are others too, and the biggest is simply this: The bureaucracies responsible for constructing Covid have decided that infections must be minimised above all else. That is the Sisyphean task they have set themselves. As the costs of their containment measures increase and society gets sicker, they must tell ever grimmer stories about why it is unacceptable for anyone, ever, to contract Sars2.

Covid Is Universal

Covid is the great sin of globalism, and globalism has brought it everywhere. Not even Antarctica remains Covid-free. Covid can infect animals as well as humans, and the prospect of reinfection has been leveraged to dispel the idea that anyone might become immune from Covid. In this way, the disease applies always and everywhere to everyone. (The opposite and far better-documented phenomenon, that a lot of people who have never had Sars2 have some partial immunity—presumably from prior non-Sars2 coronavirus infections—is contrary to Universal Covid and so it is excluded from official Covid doctrine.)

Because Covid is everywhere, and everybody is subject to it, containment policies must also be general, and vaccination policies must be too. For the disease bureaucrats, Universal Covid is a central doctrine, eagerly defended. The myth of Universal Covid is reinforced by the infection statistics we hear about every day. The only thing that ever makes headlines is how many positive tests there were today, as opposed to yesterday or last week; and which regions have the most infections right now. Since the Lombardy outbreak, everybody grasps that Sars2 infections have a regional particularism about them, but this is never presented as a challenge to Covid’s universality. Regional “hot-spots” are universally applicable examples of what will happen to your region, too, if Covid is not suppressed there and everywhere. Positive swabs might also be broken down into age cohorts, and these function much the same way. If your region has many new cases, but nobody really seems to be sick or dying, this is because the pandemic is currently concentrated among young people. Old people are next, if everybody does not comply with suppression measures. The effect is to make grim statistics a problem, even in the total absence of anybody actually suffering or dying.

Beyond these crude numbers, you don’t know anything about all those positive tests or the processes that generated them at all. It is very hard to figure out, for example, how many of them represent people who tested positive last week, and now have submitted a second test to see if they’ve cleared the virus and can leave their apartment again. Crucial for the interpretation of any such statistics, is to know how many of them emerge from contact-tracing operations, from the kinds of routine tests administered to people like doctors, teachers, and school children; and how many of them reflect actual patients seeking medical treatment. Equally central, if you want to make sense of these numbers, is how many of these people are actually sick, which is another question that many testing regimes leave wholly or mostly unanswered.

Western nations instituted mass testing programs, a universal solution to Universal Covid, after the example of South Korea. In the early days, it was thought that the Koreans had avoided a serious outbreak, without locking down, by testing and tracing everybody. So now we’re doing that too. The theory was that the technocrats would find the positives, shut them away, and allow the rest of us to go about our lives. In practice, it has been pretty much the opposite. Mass testing and tracing, far from replacing mass containment, merely provide the data to justify its enforcement. It is the same with vaccines, now that many regimes are struggling to vaccinate their way out of lockdowns. All that testing and tracing ought to make vaccines less important. Are they not identifying and quarantining the sick? Alas, you can never test and trace your way out of the Universal Covid we have constructed. That would only work for a Local Covid or an Endemic Covid, which we have not built—a Covid that afflicts certain people and not others. So the contact tracers do their thing, but the statistics that their activities generate are used to assess the state of the Covid outbreak for absolutely everybody and general, universal solutions are deployed in response to them. More lockdowns, more vaccines.

The German government is highly federalised, even more so than the United States. Much of the governing actually happens at the level of individual federal states, or Bundesländer. Each of the states could, in theory, manage its own response, according to local circumstances and sensibilities. You’d think this would be an advantage, because the instance of Sars2 infections varies vastly across Germany, and people in different states have different opinions about how to deal with it. If different states had gone their different ways, we would now have very direct insight into the effectiveness of competing containment policies. Of course, nobody in government sees it that way. Instead, Angela Merkel has spent every minute fighting against a federal approach and demanding a unified response. Newspapers have deplored our traditional federalism.

A final expression of Universal Covid lies in the universal mathematical formulae that were once widely held to predict its future progress. In March 2020, the population of the entire world received instruction in the basics of exponential functions. It was thought, as the first wave advanced, that Covid could be plotted on a graph, with time as the x axis and new cases as the y axis. Wherever Covid was spreading, this exercise yielded a curve sloping upwards to the right. Predicting the future course of Covid became a simple matter of plotting that same exponential function into future x-axis time. A lot of commentators, including many scientists, portrayed the resulting projections as mathematical certainties. This was important because raw infection numbers differed everywhere: Lombardy had the worst statistics, and so it was in the lead. Behind it were France and Spain, where Lombardy had been the previous week. Further back was Germany, which needed still three or four more weeks to reach a catastrophe of Lombardic scale. But the math assured all of us that the same thing would happen everywhere, eventually. I will confess that I found all of this powerfully convincing at the time. The flat edifice of Universal Covid seemed to brook no contradictions. But typing it all out now, it is easy to see how foolish it was. Covid did not work the same everywhere, and the curves themselves were never forever and always exponential. Germany never caught up to Lombardy. It never even came close.

Those graphs have receded from our conceptions of Covid. That is not only because they were wrong, but because they ended up drawing attention to how much all of the national outbreaks differed from each other. They were a direct shot across the bow of Universal Covid, and in April and May you could read very long essays by deeply mystified people, pondering how this was possible and what was going on. Many of the authors behind these think pieces were presumably familiar with things like seasonal flu epidemics, which in Europe often differ drastically across regions, even though a similar mixture of flu viruses are typically implicated every season. Influenza, however, isn’t constructed to be a universal affliction, so its various impacts have never bothered anybody.

Covid is a Vice of the Young and the Healthy Against the Old and the Sick

We come to the fourth obtrusive feature of our socially-constructed Covid. By nautical miles, it is the most egregious and appalling one of all, and so I regret that I have the least to say about it. Stupid cruelty does not admit of much analysis.

Sars2 is no threat to the young, we said that already. What is more, disease bureaucracies have not been able to convince the young that they, personally, should worry about Sars2. The only way to enforce the one-size-fits-all measures that Universal Covid demands, is via an ugly moral blackmail.

What began as an appeal in early days to the conscience of the youth, to consider the health of their grandparents, has become an all-out war on everything that young, healthy and fit people do. Here is insight into the withered souls of many scientists and bureaucrats, who see in the casual joy, effortless strength and unthinking beauty of our youth a great indictment of themselves. Many of them have long disliked young people and what they get up to, and now they have been given the power to vent their spleens about it.

The social life of young people irks them most of all. Parties are scorned. Contact tracers routinely identify private celebrations as outbreak epicentres, and from the press reports, you’d think whole districts are rising up in rage against the kids who dared to gather in somebody’s friend’s garage. German police spent a lot of time the past few springs citing teenagers who, after weeks of isolation, dared to get a few beers with friends in the park. It was truly strange to behold: Patrol cars sporting loudspeakers driving slowly along footpaths, between the trees, past benches, reciting the corona distancing rules.

It’s safe to complain about parties, because some people stupidly assume they aren’t essential, or that they’re irresponsible or excessive. But behind the scenes, these ageing meddlers were busy attacking everything else. They have closed gyms for months. When they allowed them to reopen, the conditions were so onerous and counterproductive that it was hard to doubt malicious intent. A whole cloud of official opprobrium descended upon every sort of recreational travel, and remains there. Early disease clusters were traced to skiers, and a batch of young people who’d had the misfortune to visit Ischgl at the wrong time were handed responsibility for several national outbreaks. (Chinese travellers, responsible for the entire European pandemic, remained beyond criticism, even as Italy and Germany had a brief spat over who introduced the virus to whom.) In Bavaria, open-air playgrounds were closed for weeks and weeks, longer than hair salons, in case you thought any of this was about the risk of infection.

When anonymous bureaucrats of this sort are given their way, secure in the knowledge that nobody will hold them accountable for their egregious decisions, and that every mild critique of their policies will be suppressed, they spiral into extremism. In the midst of the lockdown, they began to complain that people were shopping for groceries too frequently and spending too much time in supermarkets. After mask requirements were issued for public transit and indoor spaces, newspapers ran very strange articles lecturing their readers about proper mask procedures. Readers were told never to put on a mask until they’d thoroughly washed and sanitised their hands. Then they were told never to touch the mask again at all. Should they touch it the mask would become hopelessly contaminated, and their hands too, so they'd need to sterilise them all over again and start over with a new mask. Runners and walkers were still allowed outside, for purposes of exercise, and this made the disease bureaucrats very nervous indeed. Pundits complained that parks were too full. Schoolmarms posing as experts began telling runners that their heavy breathing was a danger to everyone within three or four metres of them.

Covid the socially constructed virus-disease exploits the health and beauty of youth to reach the old, but this is not how Sars2 actually works. Sars2 prefers to do most of its killing in institutional settings. It is at base a disease of healthcare institutions, like MERS and SARS; it thrives in nursing homes and in hospital wings. This in Spring 2020 it was ironically the most alarmist regions, those that had imposed the strictest lockdowns nominally for the safety of the elderly, which ended up killing more elderly than anybody else, due to over-hospitalisation, criminal mistreatment of many Sars2 patients and poor, paranoid management of elderly cases.

Undeniably, Sars2—like many other viruses—exploits the social activity of humans. Until now, the Covid bureaucrats have responded with rolling seasonal embargoes on all human social activity that is not mediated by electronics. People who violate these restrictions are behaving irresponsibly and endangering all of society. Consider how much this stance differs from their approach to other viruses. Were gay men, at any point, ever exhorted to abstain from anal sex in the interests of defeating HIV? Was the gay community ever blamed for the AIDS epidemic and scolded by public health bureaucrats for worsening statistics? Were gay bars and bath houses ever targeted for closure or curfews or—imagine!—contact tracing, to flatten the curve? No, they weren’t; and if any of that had happened, we’d be reading to this day what a grave injustice all of it was. HIV is undeniably much harder on those it infects than Sars2, and I submit that, in the hierarchy of human needs, quotidian social interaction ranks well above anal sex.

Some Deconstruction

The question of how we ended up with this miserable social construction of Covid, and not with some other more manageable social construction of Covid, is well worth pondering. The most obvious answer is simply this: Our disease bureaucrats, a bunch of socially promoted charlatans and degree connoisseurs who play scientists on television, got spooked by Sars2. They had a lot of credentials but no real ideas, and so they borrowed their public health response from China.

Before January 2020, lockdowns were totally foreign to the public health establishment. None of our governments or epidemiologists or disease-control agencies had ever before contemplated containing a pandemic by placing everybody under house arrest and freezing the better part of economic and social life. Lockdowns as a measure against Covid are, top to bottom, an invention not of a fabled “scientific consensus,” but of anonymous authoritarian Chinese bureaucrats whose motives and intent are largely opaque to us. Italian disease bureaucrats copied this measure from the Chinese bureaucrats, the rest of our disease bureaucrats copied from the Italians, and since then they have all continued the senseless copying of containment policies among themselves down to this very moment. If you are an incompetent pseudo-intellectual devoid of ideas, following others is your only option; and if you can get everyone else to follow in the same way, you might even escape blame.

Covid, the socially constructed virus-disease, was fashioned in the midst of the lockdowns, to justify them. This scary construct also works well as a justification for coercive, universal vaccination programs, and so it continues to be propagated. It is a monument to the cognitive dissonance of our intelligentsia, who lobbied hard for a catastrophic policy on the strength of dire predictions that, save in a few much publicised cases, were never realised. Almost everything that has become “scientific consensus” about Covid is a retroactive justification of our failed and plainly foolish containment measures: Covid lurks everywhere, and it is invisible, so we must hide from it in our homes. Covid is a totally novel disease, full of indeterminate properties and unknowable risks, so nobody can be exposed. Covid endangers everyone, and so everyone must stay inside. Even if young people are all but invulnerable to Covid, they too must lock down, to save the old. And of course, for all of these reasons, absolutely everyone must be vaccinated—however dangerous the vaccines, however low-risk the person.

That is the simplest, most straightforward answer to the question of how we got this Covid, and not some other Covid. It is equivalent to the wet-market theory of the origins of Sars2. We got Covid from the stupidity and incompetence of our elites, desperate to justify the economic destruction they wrought via their plagiarised containment measures. Relatedly, in the wet-market theory of Sars2, the virus found its way to humans via the unhygienic dietary practices of the Chinese, and was spread everywhere by the unrelenting globalism of our short-sighted elites.

But just as the vastly more plausible theory of Sars2 is that it represents the product of gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, so too there is another, much more compelling way of thinking about the deepest origins of our Covid construct. Cast your mind back to January, as the Chinese implemented their own lockdown of Hubei. Consider those bizarre videos that appeared on social media, showing Covid patients convulsing in streets, collapsing on stairs—succumbing, or so it seemed, to instant viral death. Some of this footage recalled scenes from Hollywood films, particularly Contagion. At the time, the framing was this: The Chinese were keeping a tight lid on the Wuhan outbreak, but here and there the magic of social media could defeat the evil communist censors and provide some glimpse of what was really going on. Clips of Chinese news coverage circulated, where the screen briefly flashed mortality figures orders of magnitude higher than the official numbers. This was the journalists trying to alert the rest of the world, or it was grim reality crying out from the ground, or something. All kinds of strange news items, about mass mobile account cancellations in China and industrial-scale cremation in Wuhan, were put about to show that the Chinese were dying in the millions. Everyone in the world watched blurry video of some Chinese guys welding a door shut. Online news outfits declared that the Chinese were literally sealing people in their apartments. That’s how bad Covid was. In the weeks before conditions deteriorated in Lombardy, a whole host of social media accounts began advocating lockdowns as a western containment measure. It has now emerged that many of these were operated by people in China.

Sophisticated propaganda and disinformation campaigns involve more than Russians buying Facebook ads. One tactic, is to take the idea you want to plant, cut it up into a bunch of different pieces, and release these to the world via various proxies and intermediaries. These little bits and piece might take the form of accidental leaks or hacked data or surreptitious photos or whatever. People gather these pieces and put them together, find that they all contribute to the same, ominous picture, and believe that they have discovered a hidden truth. This gives the lie an organic, authentic feel. It becomes a personal thesis and nobody realises that they have been led down the garden path. All of that early nonsense from China has entirely this feel about it. None of it was true, nobody really knows where it came from, but it all supported the same false hysteria.

So a deeper, more conspiratorial but also more plausible answer to the origins of our socially constructed disease, might be this: Covid is the ideological construct our disease bureaucrats used to justify their failed lockdowns; but at root, this construct was probably not of their making. They merely recycled the selfsame propaganda by which shadowy actors had sold them on lockdowns in the first place. It looks like some people very much wanted western governments to implement lockdowns. This led to a remarkable realignment of opinion, whereby the elite leftist establishment, which had sought to minimise the virus as much as possible, totally reversed their position by early March 2020 and began advocating a maximal approach. The Covid that we have now is all downstream from that, and there is no changing it.

*

How things started, of course, is no indication of how they will end. The optimistic scenario was that the vaccine roll-out in Spring 2021 would defeat Sars2 and that all of this would go away. That was never very plausible, and as it now becomes clear to everyone that the vaccines do not work very well, optimism is no longer on the menu. Perhaps it never was. Covid has given a lot of terrible, petty, mediocre people a great deal of power, and they won’t be willing to give that up, ever, however often they fail.

The most likely scenario, the one which is already playing out, is that Covid devolves into an eternal nuisance after the pattern of climate change, but more intrusive. The vaccines have come, but mass testing and various containment policies remain in place. There will be some attempt to maintain regular boosters, first for the elderly, then for everyone. But this path is one of diminishing returns. Each new round of injections will inspire less compliance, and will also prove less effective.

Over the next several years, most countries will probably fight their disease bureaucrats towards some minimally acceptable long-term compromise. Home office will be normalised. The media hysteria will never totally fade. Full lockdowns, contrary to the interests of many industries, will probably be phased out in the coming years, but in the meantime we will see increasingly inhumane restrictions on the unvaccinated. Other obnoxious interventions will likely return every year in time for Christmas, a holiday that will be increasingly celebrated with a few close relatives, in private. The campaigns against shaking hands, standing too close, or having too many people over for dinner will probably not end for a long time. Contact tracers will come to be loathed as much as city parking enforcers. In the longer run, Covid policy will probably be redirected towards pharmaceutical boondoggles and hygiene legislation that creates markets for a new world of garbage consumer products. The vaccines are probably an early preview of all of the false hope, graft and absurdity the coming world of market solutions will bring. Should Sars2 become especially rare, then other seasonal respiratory illnesses, like the flu, will likely be pressed into service. In many countries, it is likely that a whole generation of kids will grow up wearing crayola-branded dinosaur masks in school.

Still more pessimistic scenarios are possible, but they would probably resolve themselves sooner or later. It is hard to see how any western democracy could endure the economic destruction of biannual lockdowns, or other similarly drastic interventions, for many more years, without destabilising itself politically.

Campaigns to impose regular boosters on entire populations will stir up more and more opposition to mandatory vaccination regimes and, if the gods are merciful, make repression of the unvaccinated increasingly unworkable. We must also remember that the disease bureaucrats are not omnipotent. They have seized power, at first on temporary terms, from other political players, who will sooner or later try to get it back. Intemperate Covid policies have also inspired a wide array of opposition throughout academia and government, even if you don’t always see it. Now that the vaccines have failed and there is no obvious end, it is likely these people will begin to form opposition movements from within bureaucratic ranks. In some countries they might even win, and in the breakdown of international consensus there will be some small hope.

Everybody is vaccinated in Gibraltar; since October, increasingly large numbers of people are triple vaccinated there.

Here’s what their booster campaign looks like:

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As if on cue, infections in Gibraltar skyrocketed directly afterwards:

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This isn’t a seasonal or a regional effect. Neighbouring countries, where the booster campaign has yet to begin (Morocco) or kick into high gear (Portugal, Spain), see a slight upward, seasonal trend—nothing like the Gibraltar spike.

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When Israel rolled out boosters in August, they also saw spikes in infections and deaths. It is the same phenomenon we observed after dose 1. Only the second dose does not enhance infections, presumably because it is administered in the protective shadow of the first one. As with everything involving this virus and our vaccines, there are probably multiple causes at work here. For about ten days following vaccination, the vaccinated are more susceptible to infection, and a subset of them probably become minimally symptomatic super-spreaders.

Millions of people across Europe and North America will become eligible for Dose 3 at the very height of coronavirus season, in December and January. Uptake will be highest among medical professionals and nursing home personnel. There is the potential for real catastrophe here. While the vaccines don’t work as advertised, they are powerful pharmaceutical products and they have strange, unexpected effects — not only on the bodies of people who take them, but also on the dynamics of transmission and infection. Deranged medical bureaucrats, who refuse to abandon their dreams of controlling a highly contagious seasonal respiratory virus, have whole populations popping these things like aspirin. They could very well succeed in making Corona into the unprecedented public health disaster that the virus itself never quite was.

UPDATE: Always-sharp commenter someothercat points to this further proof: Infection peaks in Gibraltar are cascading from the oldest age groups to the youngest, following the order in which they were boosted.

[

Simon @stevin2021

@orwell2022 @MConceptions What are the chances that the dates of the day with highest daily cases for each boosted age group in Gibraltar follow a perfect chronological order? Those vaccinated first peaked first and so on. Isn't that proof that the booster are causing the current 🌊?

](https://twitter.com/stevin2021/status/1459987142231404552?s=20)[

November 14th 2021

11 Retweets18 Likes

](https://twitter.com/stevin2021/status/1459987142231404552?s=20)

Similarly close correlations plagued Dose 1. As @kingotnik discovered in May, infections in Germany were always around 2–7% of vaccine doses administered 17 days prior. The effect disappeared only with improving spring weather.

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Vaccinated vs. unvaccinated case rates in the United Kingdom, from the latest UK Health Security Agency vaccine surveillance report:

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Yet again I had to draw this graph myself, and yet again, the UK Health Security Agency wants you to know that these rates are extremely, totally, absolutely unadjusted. They just don’t know precisely why or how.

As I noted on Twitter, it’s emerged that UKHSA inserted all of their ill-advised disclaimers after coming under fire from the Office of Statistics Regulation, a regulatory body which periodically complains about statistics published by the British government.

OSR director Ed Humpherson met with UKHSA hours before they published their Week 43 report, demanding they do something about these awkward graphs. They responded by ditching the graphs altogether and calling every last number unadjusted. This failed to satisfy him, so in the days afterwards he issued this unbelievable open letter.

Dear Jenny,

COVID-19 vaccine surveillance statistics

Thank you for the constructive meeting on Thursday 28 October to discuss the UK Health Security Agency’s (UKHSA) COVID-19 vaccine surveillance statistics. We focused on the risk that the data presented on rates of positive cases for those who are vaccinated and those who are unvaccinated have the potential to mislead – and indeed we noted that these data have been used to argue that vaccines are ineffective.

We welcome the changes you have made to the Week 43 surveillance report, published on 28 October. It is also very good that you are working closely with my team and with the relevant teams in the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The UK has backed itself into publishing some less-than-useful numbers. Now the office responsible for this publishing will have to work closely with a gaggle of political commissars, responsible for cleansing official discourse of anything that might be “used to argue that vaccines are ineffective.”

Because he appears to be a genuinely stupid man, Humpherson spells this point out explicitly:

It remains the case that the surveillance report includes rates per 100,000 which can be used to argue that vaccines are not effective. I know that this is not the intention of the surveillance report, but the potential for misuse remains. In publishing these data, you need to address more comprehensively the risk that it misleads people into thinking that it says something about vaccine effectiveness.

Emphasis mine. The next time somebody tells you that UKHSA reports show substantial protection against severe outcomes, draw their attention to Ed Humpherson’s letter. He thinks these numbers don’t tell you anything about anything. This is the first step towards not publishing them at all.

This is not just about the choice of denominator. It is about recognising that the comparison of case rates for vaccinated and unvaccinated groups is comparing datasets with known differences – including, potentially, the greater propensity of people who are vaccinated to come forward for tests. So the data reflect a behavioural phenomenon, not just a feature of how well vaccines work. I do not think your surveillance report goes far enough in explaining this crucial point.

Emphasis mine again. Humpherson has no idea what behavioural factors might be at issue. He is just throwing random ideas at the wall, here. And notice how he slithers from what is “potentially” true to totally unqualified and unsupported assertions about is true (“the data reflect a behavioural phenomenon”). Maybe the higher unvaccinated death rates also “reflect a behavioural phenomenon“ and are “not just a feature of how well vaccines work.” As long as we are allowed to speculate baselessly, let’s do it in both directions.

He goes on to voice the old and tired complaint about the NIMS data. He wants UKHSA to use ONS population estimates instead. While the former might well understate the case rate among the unvaccinated, the latter is sure to overstate it, but Humpherson doesn’t care.

One possibility would be to only publish rates in the vaccinated population, which are known accurately, but I recognise your concern that you are already publishing rates for both groups.

Confirmation yet again of the obvious: They are only publishing these numbers because they locked themselves into doing so early on, when they looked good.

The alternative would be to use the ONS population estimates, which are used in the main coronavirus dashboard but which may be flawed for some age groups, as you have pointed out. … In the meantime, you should consider setting out these uncertainties more clearly, including by publishing the rates per 100,000 using both denominators, and making clear in the table, perhaps through formatting, that the column showing case rates in unvaccinated people is of particular concern.

That column is of particular concern because Humpherson doesn’t like the numbers in that column. He doesn’t care about the other columns because those numbers are neutral or pleasing to him.

And he closes with this:

I recognise that you want to maintain transparency and consistency, but these qualities should not be at the expense of informing the public appropriately.

Remember, always, that all Corona statistics are propaganda.

The UKHSA have issued a separate set of disclaimers on their website. Every line is fairly hilarious. And the Office of Statistical Regulation provides their own wall of text, where they show that if you understate the unvaccinated population with ONS numbers, indeed you can get the unvaccinated case rate to go up. Humpherson and his crack team of statistics regulators just love the ONS numbers, but UKHSA don’t like them so much. This is because UKHSA actually have to compile minimally plausible tables and for this they are unworkable. From p. 15 of the Week 44 report:

When using ONS, vaccine coverage exceeds 100% of the population in some age groups, which would in turn lead to a negative denominator when calculating the size of the unvaccinated population.