Essays in Idleness

A trillion here, a trillion there, it all adds up. Penny-wise and trillion-pound foolish. Time to float. I give gentle reader a choice of clichés this morning. He may already have caught my drift.

Like most making poor use of their time, I have been reading more Wu-Flu-related meejah through the last few weeks than I could possibly justify — and at a time when the churches are closed, so that I cannot confess it. Approximately none of it has done me any good, except in one instance, by checking if they were open first, I spared myself a long walk to a store that sells curtains.

All I (or anyone) needed to know was to wash my hands, and keep my distance, from crowds especially. But I already did that, from creative misanthropy; and had already learnt how to wash my hands in the philosophical manner. For, even without computer modelling, I already knew that the secret of modern longevity is soap. Everything else is incidental, by comparison; and in the case of the modelling, counter-productive.

The secret of defeating a pandemic is the immunity, which spreads among survivors. That is one of those incidentals, and it helps explain why Buddhist monks drank snake venom, back in the day. (Found through Google.) The concept of a vaccine is older than modern science, but like the rest of it, steeped in the arcane. This includes the (shockingly effective) placebo principle, which, long before the invention of sugar pills, relied on the feathers of the witch doctors. In order to impress the patient, you must make a show and dress the part. This explains the lab coats of practitioners, today. At some point the stethoscope replaced the wand.

I am not denying empirical science. I am merely noting that no one takes it seriously. It is scientism that wins the accolades, and collects the big budgets. A truer understanding of this than we have, would view it as part of the entertainment industry — and of our modern superstitious faith in matter over mind. We think, or are actually browbeaten and brainwashed from early childhood, that this is “the age of science,” unlike all the ages preceding. There has never been such an age, by the way, and never will be.

Ours is rather the age of electronic toys. Our ancestors had better things to play with.

Moreover, electronic toys confound us. The incredible piffle that supports “climate change” is entirely based on computer modelling. So are the projections of infections and deaths from the coronavirus. At the Imperial College in London, the number of dead pending in Britain went down overnight from half a million, to twenty thousand. That, to my mind, was an unconscionable number of resurrections.

While I try never to disagree with God, I have sometimes wondered if He was wise to let the worldlings learn about exponentials. Didn’t He know it would go to our heads?

It is by the use of their electronic toys that the Americans are about to spend two trillion dollars that they don’t have, then try unsuccessfully to tax it back later; each of our other Western countries in proportion. The politicians ask, What is the alternative?

That would be to tell everyone to fend for themselves, and be charitable with their neighbours. This is the “fiscal policy” compatible with civic freedom. All the others are incompatible.

They might add that, when this is over, people should try to recover from their losses, but they may think of that without being told. In the meantime, they should beat their electronic toys into ploughshares.