Essays in Idleness

My own thought, while being wheeled into an operating theatre of the Toronto General Hospital last year, was mildly political. It was, “There is about one vaguely conservative writer left in Canada, who hasn’t been completely cancelled yet; and this doesn’t look good for him.” In the time since I emerged, however, I have been cheered to see a few of the reactionary tendency, taking fairly prominent positions in public (“Internet”) debate, and not yet arrested. It appears that my survival was not as crucial as I had supposed. Jordan Peterson could even take the luxury of quitting his job at the University of Toronto — a nuisance he no longer needs to endure. (He is mostly liberal, but uncharacteristically thoughtful.) Between “true north” and south, which is to say, Canada and Australia, there must now be as many as five frightening writers, though I wouldn’t take the risk of naming them. If we add Britain and the United States, we quite possibly climb to twelve or thirteen dissidents, maybe more. I am not counting the blatherers on Fox News, and similar hacks, whose premisses are consistently liberal, but who deviate in superficialities, as Republican to Democrat. I am only counting the genuine reactionaries, who know all the prevailing assumptions are false, and do not waste their time picking and choosing. They are not dominated by the desire to concede.

In this time of the Batflu, the falsity of the prevailing view becomes increasingly obvious. The liberal knows that public safety is so important, that even our health must be sacrificed to preserve it. The most recent estimate, delivered under a response to a “freedom of information” request in the United Kingdom, tells us that only one-eighth of those reported dead with the Batflu have only the Batflu on their death certificates, and that the average age of these deaths is greater than the national average for life expectancy. I had already seen similar revised numbers for Italy, and expect more from every other country. The fearmongering to sustain the (fading) universal panic requires systematic manipulation of numbers — in a “scientific spirit.” That means that direct lies are avoided; the message is simply massaged until it conveys the opposite of the truth.

Now that the “omicron” variety of the virus is universal, the number of deaths drops towards zero, but hospital admissions are still buoyant. In a country like Canada, where the number of hospital beds has been reduced by bureaucratic enterprise since the health system was nationalized, there is, and always will be, a crisis of overcrowding. The press, and other media, capitalize on this, for another pandemic of nonsense. Our politicians will gradually remove some Batflu restrictions, but hope to have us wearing useless masks, and observing pointless social distancing rules, until the planet freezes over. Given the popularity of their sensational “global warming” predictions, and their propensity to be ludicrously wrong, we should expect an ice age to descend upon us shortly.

A genuinely liberal order, such as our political constitutions used to guarantee, would have ruled all Batflu restrictions illegal from long before the spread of the current virus, allowing, at most, only voluntary suggestions. But as a genuine reactionary, I don’t believe in this. Even talk of voluntary restrictions is twisted. It was never the government’s job, but only that of legitimate medical authorities, outside politics. Governments should categorically step out of their arbitrary rôle of “advising.” It will always be a play for power.