Did you hear the latest about monkey pox? Apparently people are pronouncing “monkey” incorrectly. The “k” is silent.
- comment overheard in a public park
Jokes about illness are not usually funny, but after more than two years of Covid-19, we might forgive people for their cynicism. And whether you think the pandemic is over, or only lurking until next winter, or whether some other crisis will take its place—whatever you may think, the events of the past do not die. They ripple into the future like the wings of a butterfly, and occasionally give birth to monstrosities.
This essay isn’t really about Covid, though it’s where we’ll start. One rarely encounters serious and sustained criticism of the Covid-19 mandates in the mainstream media, which is why I’m sharing a recent analysis from BMJ Global Health—a highly respected medical-science journal—on the unintended consequences of the mandates. Although at times tentative, the overall conclusions are damning:
Our analysis strongly suggests that mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policies have had damaging effects on public trust, vaccine confidence, political polarization, human rights, inequities and social wellbeing. We question the effectiveness and consequences of coercive vaccination policy in pandemic response and urge the research community and policymakers to return to non-discriminatory, trust-based public health approaches.
The table below shows the potential damage to human behavior and politics.
And here is the suggested damage to socio-economics and institutional integrity:
Of all the “unintended” consequences of the mandates, the most troubling is perhaps the stigmatization of the unvaccinated—which, it seems, was not actually unintended. It was deliberate:
Political leaders singled out the unvaccinated, blaming them for: the continuation of the pandemic; stress on hospital capacity; the emergence of new variants; driving transmission to vaccinated individuals; and the necessity of ongoing lockdowns, masks, school closures and other restrictive measures…Political rhetoric descended into moralising, scapegoating, and blaming using pejorative terms and actively promoting stigma and discrimination as tools to increase vaccination.
And to drive the point home, the article cites public remarks by current and past political leaders:
[It is] only a very small minority who are resisting [vaccination]. How do we reduce that minority? We reduce it by pissing them off even more… - Emmanuel Macron, PM of France
This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. - Joe Biden, President of the USA
We need to target the unvaccinated. Frankly if you are unvaccinated at the moment and you’re eligible and have no health reason for being unvaccinated, you’re not only irresponsible but you’re an idiot. - Tony Blair, former UK PM
They [the unvaccinated] are extremists who don’t believe in science, they’re often misogynists, also often racists…It’s a small group that muscles in, and we have to make a choice, as a leader and as a country: Do we tolerate these people? - Justin Trudeau, PM of Canada
Idiots. Piss them off. It’s their pandemic. Do we tolerate these people?
I know a lot of unvaccinated folks who felt the psychological whip of these attitudes in their everyday lives—and some who lost their jobs for their non-compliance. Even as the pandemic winds down, the resentment lingers, and has provoked compensatory extremism, as in the case of a ranch in Canada that is refusing to accept vaccinated visitors.
We shouldn’t be surprised, or outraged. This is what you get after two years of divisive policies.
There are counter-arguments, of course, like Hey, it was a pandemic, and the most important thing was to save lives. But such objections overlook the fact we could have saved lives without deliberately provoking division and eroding public trust; without pouring political bleach over our liberties and turning the mainstream media into a 24-hour trauma-story machine; and without being so passively trusting of the evidence that was used to justify so many high-stakes decisions.
For instance, you might remember being told, repeatedly and urgently told, that getting vaccinated protects you from long-haul Covid. However, research just published, based on over 13 million people who got vaccinated, suggests that vaccination lowers the risk of long-haul Covid only “slightly” (about 15%), with no difference in the severity of brain fog and fatigue in vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals at six months post-illness.
Obviously more research will be needed to help us understand long-haul Covid as well as the impact of the mandates, but it’s becoming clear there are massive, damaging disconnects between the narrative we were given and the reality.
Edicts to Save Us
Now, at the end of it all, we’re stuck with a precedent. Elected officials have gotten away with a pandemic management strategy that was often coercive, stigmatizing, polarizing, punitive, and simplistic, and implemented through political and public health edicts rather than through open scientific discussion and debate. It will be easier to deploy the same approach again to ensure compliance with new vaccines, or with other new technologies that not everybody wants.
That might seem a bit paranoid, but even the authors of the BMJ paper recognize the feeling is real and widespread:
Social perceptions and logics about science, technology and corporate and government power have been grafted onto the public discussion about COVID-19 vaccines, specifically related to authoritarian biosurveillance capabilities. These include concerns about the adoption of implantable tracking devices (including microchips), digital IDs, the rise of social credit systems and the censorship of online information by technology companies and state security agencies. The COVID-19 pandemic happens to coincide with far-reaching technological advances that do provide the capability for new forms of mass state surveillance.
In the not-too-distant future, overreaching political edicts and snap-quick tech solutions may be used to “save” us from a resurgence of the current pandemic, or a new pandemic; or else the goal might be to “save” the economy, or the environment, or democracy, or justice. It will not matter. The necessary fear and urgency will be supplied, if not already available. The necessary technological interventions will be designed and rolled out, surely at “warp speed”. But with the goal of saving us will come something else, following like a shadow. Covid had that shadow. A wish not only to save us, but to control us. A wish to rescue us from freedom.
We mustn’t be too fanatic about freedom, of course. We need freedom, but we also need order; the first to explore and grow, the second to stabilize and harmonize. We enjoy more individual freedom than ever in the West, though it’s come at a cost of dismantling old traditions and beliefs, old political and social structures. Whether you like it or not, the rivets have been knocked out, the support beams have fallen out of joint, and the historical skeleton inside the old colossus is caving inward.
And yet, as the body threatens to collapse into a soft heap, we naturally grow unsettled and yearn for structure. We yearn for it so much we’re willing to give up some of our freedom. Nothing captures this temptation better than the words of Eric Hoffer: “When freedom destroys order, the yearning for order will destroy freedom.”
Many of us have sensed the destruction of that order; and some of us have felt the yearning for its restoration.
The New Social Exoskeleton
The yearning for order can be dangerous. We may grab on to anything that seems secure. We may try to repair, or replace, the old skeleton too hastily in a bid to establish a new order—although if anything, it feels to me that what’s been emerging isn’t really a new skeleton inside the body. It’s more like a scaffold erected outside of the body; a support to keep it standing, much as the scaffold can also feel at times like a cage: secure but limiting, forcing us into strange and uncomfortable postures.
We’ve all felt that strangeness, that discomfort, not only in the Covid mandates, but in other mandate-like demands that have built up around the social body of the West: the demand for certain words, certain concepts, certain performative gestures and signals, with the threat of stigmatization for those who don’t comply.
What Covid has added to this society-wide scaffold was the often-coercive imposition of new medical technology. That—an intrusion not only on our behavior, but on our physical bodies—is a radically new development. It sets the stage not only for continued compliance with perpetual vaccination (even where reasonable objections might be raised, as noted in the BMJ analysis), but an increased willingness to let authorities decide what technology goes into, onto, or close to, our bodies.
Imposed values, imposed technologies; a pressure on the mind, a pressure on the body. A full wrap-around scaffold…and yet not entirely inflexible. It’s not like we can’t move at all. Maybe the support structure isn’t best described as a scaffold, but as an exoskeleton?
Certain insects have exoskeletons, like cicadas and ironclad beetles. The problem is, a social exoskeleton tends to make everybody the same, creating a paradoxical uniformity where none was intended. Some people actually like the surface armor, because it makes them feel strong—more like an Iron Man than an insect—though the strength is mostly on the surface, which is another, perhaps bigger problem.
If the outer armor is worn too long, the inner body deteriorates because the wearer’s values, ethics, and morality are coercively imposed from the outside rather than internally cultivated. The result is an externalized conscience based on fear and shame. We may end up bending down on our knee, not because we are pledging loyalty from the heart, but because exoskeletons can be oppressively heavy. Is that the kind of morality we want?
Every society needs order and stability, and the emerging social exoskeleton of the West, for all its faults, is still far from the monstrosity of a full-on social credit system. But it’s been growing in recent years, firmly touching and pressing on aspects of our lives that had never been its business to touch. Maybe the people designing the new exoskeleton are hoping that, in time, the structure will meld itself into our flesh? That we’ll internalize the slender bars, accept them, even baptize them, amen?
At the heart of it is a spiritual problem, and perhaps the main source of the conflict. Old Man West may have lost his inner skeleton, but there are many of us who still have one, and we’re not willing to give it up, or to allow it to be dislodged by a soul-cage designed in Davos or Silicon Valley.
So, the next time mandates are proposed in reaction to a new crisis or as part of a new “cause” or “agenda”, it’s worth examining the bars rising up around us and asking:
Are fear and coercion being used to drive the mandates?
Is the autonomy of the human body or mind being compromised?
Who is being stigmatized or punished for non-compliance?
Are elected leaders showing any awareness of how the mandates might distort or dehumanize us?
Here’s the link to the BMJ Global Health article again. Read it, post it, and stimulate some healthy conversation. And maybe nurture your inner skeleton.