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The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

― H.L. Mencken

WHAT IF THEY DECLARED a crisis and no one came?

Have you ever noticed that crises seem to be a regular part of our lives?  Does it sometimes feel as if we’re living in a political thriller or perhaps a science fiction novel?  Fiction, in order to avoid being dull, must introduce obstacles and problems for the characters to overcome.  Sometimes, fiction writers resort to absurd artifices to make their desired story come true.

Whoever’s writing the story of the Great Pandemic seems to know that very well.

If it feels as though we’re living in a constant state of crisis now, we might ask what or who is responsible for that feeling?  Do the crises that oppress us originate mostly from nature – pestilence, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, tornadoes, infectious disease – or from human actions?  Are we more afraid of natural disasters or of war, terrorists, social breakdown, government oppression, anthropic climate change, or the local zoning board?

Perhaps if we asked the question differently: What are the transformative crises?  That is, what are the crises that changed our society in major ways?  Do earthquakes, floods, infectious disease, or any other natural threat alter the fabric of human society?  Occasionally natural threats do – for example, our struggle with pathogenic microorganisms spurred the universal adoption of sanitary and related medical measures – but in modern times people have caused the most common transformative crises.  Neither the polio outbreak nor the 1918 pandemic changed the fabric of society (aside from making vaccination more routine).  The European colonization of the Americas, the War of Independence, the Civil War, the creation of the Federal Reserve, the 1929 Panic and Great Depression, World Wars One and Two – these crises/events arguably did alter the social fabric in the United States.

Sticking with U.S. for the sake of simplicity (which I’ll do for most of this book), what crises have altered us most recently?  Perhaps the housing crash of 2008 or, further back, the Vietnam War.  Yet nothing in recent decades comes close in terms of transforming our society than one chilling event: 9/11.

9/11 was caused by people.  Which people is a topic of argument, but that it was a people-crisis is indisputable.  9/11 ushered in an era of endless war, mass surveillance, police militarization, the creation of a monstrous security agency, and the partial government takeover of our airports.  Since 9/11, we take it as a matter of course that our most private communications – our lives themselves – are subject to constant surveillance by faceless government agents.  We accept having our daughters patted down and our grandmothers dusted for bomb residue by TSA agents.  We endure border checks by zealous customs agents who have declared unilaterally – without a vote or any oversight – that Constitutional rights are suspended one hundred miles from any border.  Most of us are required to produce “Real ID” when we travel by plane.  These things are all part of the “new normal.”

Yet the events of 9/11 did not cause any of these things.  Those events killed roughly 3000 people and destroyed some buildings and airliners.  The response of the United States Government and American citizens caused all the major enduring changes in American society.  The authorities told us a terrorist crisis existed and that extreme measures – war, mass surveillance, loss of freedoms – were necessary, and we accepted that narrative.  The authorities told us over and over that “everything has changed forever” and that “normal life will never be the same.”  Does that sound familiar?  It should, because we’re hearing echoes of those same indoctrination phrases today: “C-19 has changed out society forever!”  “We must adjust to living in a New Normal!” We may never even shake hands again!

Those post-9/ll phrases insisted that our world had changed helped usher in the Patriot Act, universal surveillance, the DHS and TSA, and police-militarization.  Accepting the propaganda slogan “the world has forever changed” was necessary for accepting all the authoritarian measures and endless military interventions that followed.

Despite token objections at the time, the Patriot Act is regularly renewed and all the other losses of liberty continue unchallenged.  The terrorist crisis is permanent.  Or perhaps we don’t even need that rationale any longer?  The authors of our current crisis are hoping for the same result today.

Yet even 9/11, America’s most transformative event in recent times, may end up taking a distant second place to the coronavirus crisis.  For one thing, C-19’s dire effects are worldwide.  Closer to home, it has crushed the finances and livelihoods of millions of Americans, disrupted higher and lower education, and dampened our joi de vivre in dozens of ways large and small – everything from shortages of toilet paper and food to canceled sports events and travel.

As with 9/11, the response of the U.S. government and American citizens caused all the major enduring changes in American society – not the virus, which of this writing allegedly has killed over two hundred thousand people here (more than the 1957–1958 influenza pandemic; I will defend allegedly in later chapters).   The authorities – government and the media – told us a crisis existed and extreme measures – loss of freedoms, mass surveillance (contact tracing) – were necessary, and once again, most people accepted that narrative.  Will the Coronavirus Crisis (or virus crises in general) become permanent?  That’s what the U.S. Government and the media is telling us when they declare “things will never go back to the same” and we must be content to live in a “new normal.”

Still, if we could just get back to normal – free to hang out with friends or crowds on the beach and not follow lines or wear masks in a supermarket – we could put that awful virus behind us and resume living life with gusto!

Tsk, tsk.  You childish, unscientific, human!  Everyone knows the virus has altered our lives irredeemably forever!  Why, we may never shake hands again, according to Dr. Fauci!  The last thing we should do is go back to normal – we must build back better! After all, other viruses that were even more deadly, such as the 1918 influenza or the Asian and Hong Kong Flues that killed far more people worldwide, led to a “new normal” and eternally changed our lives, right?  The Asian Flu had a significantly higher estimated Case Fatality Rate of .67% than the current C-19 estimates of around .2%. 

Surely, you remember how we shut down  the economy for months and afterward maintained a two-meter distance and washed our hands constantly, wore face masks everywhere, and bumped elbows instead of shaking hands, long after those viruses had subsided?  Surely, you recall how we destroyed much of the world’s working class and small businesses?  What a terrible time it was indeed.

What – you don’t remember that?  Could this be a case of the Mandela Effect?