Essays in Idleness

Veritas liberabit vos, as it says in the Bible, or if gentle reader prefers, ἡ ἀλήθεια ἐλευθερώσει ὑμᾶς. In our casual English rendering, “The truth will set you free.” My own habit is to put a “shall” in that instead, but forgive me, I can be a hothead sometimes.

The truth leads to Jesus; verily, it is Jesus, as Western men were among the first to discover. But we have also gratuitously applied this saying to a wide range of things, including many with no obvious religious significance. Being backward and reactionary, as well as a hothead, I am often inclined to use it for our general inheritance of common sense: things learnt from experience through the centuries, and not to be abandoned without cause. Most such “truths” are now being abandoned, however, at least in our universities and other asylums, because few of them are politically correct.

The ancestral experience of mankind is that epidemics are not defeated by the human will. Rather, they are endured. True, they can be more or less intelligently endured; we may take elementary precautions. But if we think we might defeat them with these, we are, as it were, batty. That a vaccine, or equivalent, may eventually drive a virus into extinction, has been part of that olden experience. It did not occur to our ancestors, however, to shut down the economy after polio was first identified, about thirty-six centuries ago, until Jonathan Salk invented his vaccine in 1955.

And this was because they were not drooling morons. A man cannot live on bread alone, but he does need some form of nutrition. That this hasn’t been proved by epidemiologists in double blind tests does not phase me in the least.

That we must love our enemies, including the drooling morons, I accept as Christian Truth. Loving them, I think, involves trying to understand them — an effort for which patience may be required. In an emergency, such as a threat to our freedom, we must confront them, sometimes in a truly decisive, badass way. But this is finally for their own good, too.

I have decided to demote the Red Chinese Batflu, from a pandemic to an epidemic — this in the cause of injecting cool reason into it. All mass media please copy. And should you hesitate, remember that by following my instructions, you are not following Donald Trump’s.

That this Batflu has spread internationally, I have been informed. That it originated in Wuhan, China, and almost certainly by an accident at the Communist Party’s big virology lab in that town, I take for known. That the totalitarian authorities deny this, I accept. For as Bismarck said of other arbitrary statesmen, “Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.”

But a plague is a plague is a plague, and always has been. It is something that happens, and once it is happening, except for mostly ineffectual precautions, the human race is defenceless against it. The first wave of the Batflu followed the same pattern in sensible Sweden, as it did in hysterical Italy. We are gradually realizing, as we could have from ancient experience, that spectacular theatrics do no good. Specifically, we can already know that our lockdowns have been a waste of time and spirit. So are all of our proposed theatrics, going forward.

For instance, the present explosion of virtue signalling, from behind facemasks. Many, many previous studies of influenza virus transmission showed them to be useless, except in places like surgical theatres. They could catch viral sneezes, but so could your elbow. Conversely, there is plenty of evidence (summarized here) that healthy people wearing facemasks are sickening themselves, and reducing their immunities. That might seem counter-intuitive to some, but the truth is often counter-intuitive, and therefore requires reason.

Once again, hard-earned, “tried and true” medical knowledge is too easily replaced, among the panicking, by the untried and false. Soon it is imposed by ignorant politicians.

Those who have faith in statistics (I don’t, because my faith is in God) should note that more than two-thirds of hospital cases in such a place as New York came from lockdown locations, where the infected had been diligently following the public health orders. Moreover, 97 percent of cases were generated indoors where, thanks to political idiocy — real, manslaughtering idiocy like Governor Cuomo’s — most of the population has been trapped. “The peeple” are discouraged, or actually prevented, from seeking safety outdoors, where it was instinctively sought by plague-threatened people since time out of mind.

That the sun and fresh air are cleansing, should be known to every child, approximately from birth. They should also be taught that the truth will make them free.