The Psychology of a culture is revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat their children and in how they relate to and treat the most vulnerable people within their society. Heal that and we can heal everything.
Freedom from democratic regulation of externalising costs - the driver of anti-masking ideology.
Observing what has been happening, I have made an assessment that the use of the language of 'restrictions,' if it is deliberate, is most probably designed to trigger the 'my personal freedom from tyranny' emotional hook. Nobody likes to feel restricted. It's a way to nudge an opinion set that dismisses evidence.
In this blog piece I want to explore how that trigger works, why I think it is being exploited for political reasons, what the effects are of such intentional triggering and why I think it is lethal to all our futures. I want to show how it relates to a constellation of problems as a key, as a critically important distraction, deflection, obscurant strategic weapon.
The ability and willingness of certain agencies to exploit this trigger more or less guarantees that this pandemic will run on and on and on causing incrementally more harm, with no end in sight.
I say incrementally causing more harm because the assumptions about the nature of the virus and it's impacts are incorrectly assessed and thus measures to limit those harms - measures to uphold the populations right to health - are conflated with undermining personal liberty, even as this government outlines very real legislation that undermines civil liberties and diminishes Government accountability.
"who will we not save?" as they sought to 'protect the Hoard'..
The effect of saying "We are imposing restrictions" is quite different the effect of "We are implementing preventative public health measures to protect the populations Right to Health."
If the strategy is to allow spread to achieve herd immunity, then it would be useful for the Government to create a scapegoat and exploit that vector to insulate the Government from the costs such a strategy will incur. The Government must not pay the price, and so others will be made to carry the cost. This is an externalised cost exercise.
Non-Essential Travel is Tinder for the Virus.
In the most simplistic terms, if SARSCOV2 cannot meet a new host, it will die out. Suppression of transmission of the virus in the community is the most effective strategy in dealing with an epidemic of an infectious pathogen.
Stopping the spread is spreading the love.
However, in global terms this strategy is only as strong as the weakest or least effective implementation of it. Any country that allows spread of the virus will generate variants, and successful variants will select for more efficient replication, transmission. Where we have huge unknowns is the virulence of new variants - we cannot predict future virulence and this means allowing spread is taking a terrible gamble. England has been a significant weak link in terms of global transmission suppression, as has the US and EU.
This takes on another dimension when it is a question of travel between countries or within countries, in the midst of a pandemic of new highly infectious air borne virus, when we cannot predict long term outcomes, even as we observe short and medium term harms. International Travel, because it always involves enclosed spaces and a mix of people who are exposed to each other for significant periods, operates as a dating app for this virus. This kind of travel is inherently risky for spread of SARSCOV2.
Right to Health.
When powerful lobbies with immense economic interests advocate for their interests at the expense of the whole population, at the expense of the populations Right to Health, we see a conflict of interest, and an externalising of costs occurs. The people pay the price.
What is one years economic activity in the great scheme of things, compared to many, many years of life lost to death and long term disease? This kind of question arises in other areas. What is the value of high processed foods industrial economic activity and profit taking that leads directly to dietary disease, compared to the costs of dietary disease?
If we had regulation that limited high processed foods, that removed them from our food shelves, would that be a 'restriction' or a 'public health measure'? New Zealand is going to ban sale of tobacco.
Is that a restriction? Is it a rational public health measure? Do the 'rights' of Tobacco Company shareholders trump the rights of people vulnerable to addiction who are being exploited?
Here we see the choice of the word 'restrictions' clearly has a political and economic meaning.
Economic liability, externalised costs.
In the case of a loss of business imposed by a Government 'restriction' - an order to cease flights - the Government is liable to some degree for compensation to those adversely affected.
The affected Business lobby will have a reasonable claim that since the Government is restricting it's ability to function it deserves adequate support for the duration of that limitation. That was not the case with the travel lobby - they lobbied for continuation of their business, they lobbied for spreading the virus as one outcome of that stance. It was not their intention, yet that is precisely what happened.
I know of someone who flew to Thailand this week, for a holiday. Upon arrival he was tested, and found to be infected, and infectious. It is likely that he picked up the virus just before he flew out, in public transit or at the airport, and was incubating during the flight, totally unaware of his condition.
That person had to quarantine for 12 days and do regular tests. He was without symptoms. He was bored. He tried to bend the rules. He was more concerned with his personal freedom, the irritation he felt because he had to quarantine than he was with protecting the Thai population. His reaction is quite typical among wealthy westerners who think international travel is their right. The sovereign individual. Me, me, me.
It's not his fault, it is the culture that has acculturated him so that he behaves as he did. He could easily have taken a holiday anywhere in the UK. He felt an entitlement to undertake international travel, travel that is spreading the virus, in the middle of a global pandemic. He is one of millions.
Throughout this pandemic there has been no travel lobby seeking to protect the population's Right to Health. The travel lobby is happy to externalise the costs of spreading the virus - the travel lobby was unwilling to share those costs.
Tourist travel spreads the virus
Since February 2020, I have had a sense that something was off about the insistence upon maintaining tourist and holiday travel - non-essential travel - because I could not help but notice how much of a vector of spread of the virus such non-essential travel was, precisely because effective quarantine arrangements were resisted and were not put in place.
The first two waves of SARSCOV2 spread within the UK are entirely down to the Government's deliberate choice to reject quarantine, to reject precise tracking of where the virus was, to reject mass testing to chase down the virus, to reject support for isolation and to allow open, unchecked borders.
It was that choice more than any other that seeded SARSCOV2 into the UK. The media were full of the narrative 'the China Virus' when by February 2020 it was the Spanish, Italian and Austrian Ski Holiday Virus, even as the East Asian countries were proving that suppression of community transmission is the most effective way to avoid the avoidable harms which the USUK Governments did not avoid - by choice.
Where there were proven suppression of community transmission strategies put in place, community transmission was much more reduced. That's the basic scientific truth here.
Measures designed to reduce harm in an epidemic of infectious disease are more correctly described as preventative public health measures. They are not necessarily restrictions. When viewed in this context they are not sensed as restrictions - even as they do require temporary limitations on behaviour - it is understood that the measures are protective and that they are temporary, and that once the threat has subsided, the measures can be withdrawn, and the limitations thus evaporate as they are no longer necessary.
That protection that could have been organised, and funded if Governments and travel lobbies had put populations right to health at the top of their priorities. The protection evaporated.
Freedom to trade trumped the Right to Health.
How selfish, and to be honest, how cruelly reckless.
The Oligarchy are waging a war against democratic legislative regulation of Wealth Extraction grounded in toxic industrial practices which incur costs when they are not cleaned up or prevented. Those costs are kept at a distance. Those costs are externalised from the economic activity of the operations from raw material sourcing through processing, manufacture, distribution, sale, consumption and end of life of product.
The Free Market Fundamentalists and Industry leaders choose to see such regulation as might be required to prevent those costs from being incurred in the first instance, let alone dealt with when they are incurred, as a form of tyranny. "We will not let you restrict our Wealth Extraction by reducing our profitability by demanding we pay all those costs."
They understand that the demand by a growing and significant cohort of reliable scientists, concerned citizenry, NGOs and some government officials for corrective and adaptive action on climate change, on environmental degradation, pollution of air, land and sea, on species loss and other related matters, including mass poverty, low wages and corrupt influence of legislators represents a threat to their 'liberty' to carry on extracting wealth even as it causes harm and to externalise the costs of that harm.
Democratic legislative regulation is deemed to be an enemy of their ability to extract wealth and their capability to and willingness influence legislatures to protect that wealth extraction. Democratic regulation is a threat to their political power, power which stems from their Wealth Extraction.
However they cannot stand in the town hall and make that plain. They must find other ways to protect their interests and this puts them into conflict with our collective interests.
Political Grooming Gangsters.
By deploying emotional hooks that conflate emotive notions of individual freedom within existing democratic systems with a vaguely defined Libertarianism, the Oligarchy have been able to enroll the 'Mask is a Muzzle Freedomeers' in a process that is undermining democratic regulation to protect the populations right to health, and this is inextricably linked to the protection of their Wealth Extraction Systems and their toxic industrial practice of Externalised Costs.
Trump, Brexit and anti-masking, anti-vax, anti border quarantine, open up the economy, let the vulnerable take it on the chin - these are all views that are underpinned with funding and logistical support from the Oligarchy of the Wealth Extracting Industrial giants. They are not emergent concepts, that have popped up from the grass roots of society, as an organic awareness and movement. These ideas have been developed and promoted by the Oligarchy, and seeded into vulnerable parts of the population through a process of political and ideological grooming.
Percentages or persons?
There is a pattern where people opposed to public health measures cite that only a small percentage of people die from Covid - they ignore the reality that a small percentage of a massive population is a lot of people dying avoidable deaths. The Covid Freedomeers dismissal of the lives of so many vulnerable people is a good example of externalising costs
The vulnerable must pay the price incurred in the strategy of allowing spread of the virus beyond control in order to keep the economy open. The cost is externalised.
The people who will gain from keeping the economy open in ways that place the vulnerable at greater risk that they ever needed to be placed at, will not pay the price.
The vulnerable pay the price.
The Covid Freedomeers do not draw attention to how many of any given population have pre-existing conditions, which elevates their risk of death and disease and harm, exponentially. That is why they cite percentages. To evade the human realities.
The vulnerable will pay the price of the Freedomeers ill-advised reckless endangerment.
Then there's the matter of post infection chronic disease, which is rarely discussed in honest detail - as I write close to 2% of the total population of adults across the UK are suffering with varying degrees of Long Covid. 1.3 million people, who did not have this chronic disease burden prior to January 2020. 1.3 million people whose condition could have been avoided.
Not avoiding avoidable harms - externalising costs.
The Freedomeers claim that protecting the vulnerable undermines their Freedom, even though the evidence is that where States and populations have adopted best practice public health measures, and have pursued strategies to suppress transmission of the virus within the territories of the State whilst protecting borders with effective quarantine and screening, both economy and civil liberties fare much, much better - not to mention the right to health of the population is upheld and preserved.
d) https://graphika.com/reports/ants-in-a-web/ - just one example of many, where wealthy billionaires and states operate psychological manipulation campaigns that undermine healthy democracy, and attempt to drive behaviour that can be exploited.
"Exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui, who fled China to evade trial for Corruption, is at the center of a vast network of interrelated media entities which have disseminated online disinformation and promoted real-world harassment campaigns. The network acts as a prolific producer and amplifier of mis- and disinformation, including claims of voter fraud in the U.S., false information about Covid-19, and QAnon narratives."
"Election hacking is perhaps the most topical example of what the combination of hostile information-technological and information-psychological activities can mean in the modern information environment. It has government officials asking whether malicious information activities targeting elections could be the new normal."
There are a number of internalised conflicts inherent in the Anti-mask Freedom lobby, not least that they are being exploited by the very people they most often claim are engaged in a conspiracy of tyranny - the Oligarchy.
By triggering emotional hooks related to vague notions of personal freedom, they blind the Covid Freedomeers to the Freedom the Oligarchy desires - freedom from rational democratic regulation of Wealth Extraction and Toxic Industrial practices - and enrol the Covid Freedomeers in demolishing rational democratic governance.
Now, to be honest, as much as I find the position of the Covid Freedomeer an irritant, I was myself fully hooked into Conspiracy Theory, New Age Woo and other belief systems that ignored evidence, and that exploited my vulnerability.
I do have deep reservations about the nature of State power as it operates within the current historical context, understanding as I do, as many of us do, that the origins of The State System are steeped in blood letting, that the evolution of the Rulers localised institutionalised 'right' to exercise violence, to 'defend' their realms from external and internal enemies and to engage in war fare runs counter to egalitarian principles and usually causes great harm to workers, and rarely do the Ruling Class bear such harms.
Of course, I and many, many people see the potential for healthy democratic development of a truly equitable social power system as it has played out in the past, and is playing out in the present.
We are all aware of the potential trajectories of a more democratic system of Governance focused on Justice, Equity and Humanity, into the future (Power Inquiry 2006, UBI, Blockchain Policy Fora, People's Assemblies, Egalitarian Democracy).
We live within an historical context that is the struggle to end oppression.
Trade unions were an expression of that struggle, as were The Suffragettes, Martin Luther King, the struggle against Apartheid and the struggle of workers to attain decent working conditions, education for their children, health care systems for their communities and much else besides.
In the 21st Century, the Unions of the grass roots will need to expand well beyond the work place and working conditions...
Schools, Hospitals, Care Homes, even our own homes are the new political battle fields, fora for dissent and laying the ground work for collective change, countering oppressive corruption, building healthier democratic systems that serve all our futures, that nurture our world instead of exploiting and damaging our world.
The Grooming Operations are a very important element of the way oppressor class maintains it's hegemonic stance, a very potent weapon and we must understand why so many are vulnerable to that kind of persuasion, because we need to help them and us to break free of that persuasion, in order to build social grass roots solidarity that we need to confront the problems of Power.
"The Industrial System is inherently adversarial: it treats those who are harmed by the Industrial System, those who bring attention to the harm, in order to stop the harm, as adversaries.
Insulate Britain
The custodial sentences imposed on Insulate Britain activists for contempt of court are clearly a contempt of our collective welfare. In the same way that Shell's move from Holland to England is. In both cases, those who drew attention to harm and suggested ways to prevent the harm are being treated as adversaries.
Another way to put it is like this: political power struggles undermine healthy governance - adversarial dynamics inhibit co-operative dynamics. Any relationship that has a power struggle within it is likely going to be toxic.
Industrial political Power is inherently adversarial in that it is profitable only because its foundation for wealth extraction is created by externalising costs.
Those who bear the pain of the costs and bring attention to that pain, and those costs, are considered as adversaries.
When those who are harmed find a voice and become advocates to confront the harm causation, with an eye to stopping the harms, the industrial cult treats them as enemies to be crushed.
This is a reactionary stance - the cult wishes to preserve the extraction of wealth above all else, and will attack anyone who questions the morality or wisdom of extracting wealth at such a cost.
It will take every measure available co-opt anyone who proposes solutions in order to control any proposed change.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
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