THEORY OF THE END - Part 3: That Thing People Don't Want to Talk About
The third part of a series exploring various theories on the end of human civilization.
[Note: This is the third entry in an ongoing essay series. If you have not yet read the first two parts, you can do so here and here.]
Although many will deny it, the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 was a breaking point for the legitimacy of Liberal Democracy in the minds of the public. As much as people try to leave the events of that accursed year in the past, it’s difficult to deny that something had shifted in the way Americans and residents of other Liberal Democracies viewed their governments.
But let’s start at the beginning. While the virus that would eventually become known as “COVID-19” made its way across the globe from the point of its conception in Wuhan, China, several United States lawmakers attempted to dissuade the people from panicking, dismissing concerns about potentially infected Chinese visitors as mere bigotry. “... We want people to come to Chinatown,” said California representative Nancy Pelosi in February of that year. “Don't be afraid. Enjoy it all. It's beautiful and there are some good bargains here now, so it's a good time to come.”
The tone, of course, would change when the US government declared a national state of emergency the following month. The public was thrown into a total panic, with many questioning what kind of precautions to take: should we wear facemasks? If so, what kind of mask? Should we go outside at all? If we do go outside, should we take off all of our clothes afterwards and set them on fire? What should we do if we get infected?
Despite the clear need for answers, the government found itself at a loss, going back and forth on the issue of facemasks (and it’s still in question exactly how effective the government’s eventual facemask policies were in preventing viral transmission) and imposing seemingly arbitrary “social distancing” guidelines which instructed members of society to maintain a distance of at least six feet between each other. Most devastating of all were the state-wide shutdowns, which forced businesses to close and workers to stay home… Unless, however, you were deemed an “essential worker.” I was one of these individuals and was thus obligated to work my way through the pandemic as if nothing whatsoever had changed.
All of this did irreparable damage to public trust in the so-called “experts” who staffed our government bureaucracies. It seemed that no consensus could be achieved regarding the rules, and the rules which did make their way into public policy were often nonsensical. If the virus really was as terrifyingly deadly as was originally claimed (and it seems to be a nearly unanimous conclusion at this point that it was not), did this mean the lives of the “essential workers” mattered less? Why did they have to sacrifice their bodies while everyone else was able to hide away at home? Moreover, did it even make sense to force people to stay home while they were still leaving for trips to the grocery store? Surely there would be people who were unknowingly infected wandering the breakfast cereal aisles.
But outside of the nonsensical nature of these measures, the sudden authoritarian nature of the government registered to many as a disturbing development. Why, in the so-called “land of the free,” had the government suddenly become powerful enough to force people indoors? Skateparks were infamously filled up with sand and business owners who refused to shut down their operations were arrested. Out of other ostensibly Liberal Democratic countries came videos of people being apprehended by police simply for walking around alone outside, something previously only thought possible under the most totalitarian regimes.
On top of all of this was government surveillance and censorship, using police and drones to monitor everyone’s movements and even applying pressure to social media companies to squash discussion which may be disadvantageous to their project. Speculation on the origin of the virus was highly discouraged. Even though there was a viral research lab (which notably had been receiving grants from the United States federal government) very close to the first recorded area of infection in Wuhan, the “experts” all seemed unanimous in decrying any accusation of foul play or mismanagement on the part of the scientists as “harmful conspiracy theories.”
The dogpile on these theories began almost instantly, with The Lancet publishing a letter signed by 27 different scientists denouncing them in no unclear terms. “The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins,” the letter stated. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
The Biden Whitehouse, which took over the next year, was notoriously keen on maintaining social media censorship around the Coronavirus, including what was eventually known as the “lab leak theory,” with a May 2024 House of Representatives report recounting the efforts as follows:
In Facebook’s February 8, 2021, public statement announcing a change to its content moderation policies, the company noted that it would “remove” several new claims on its platforms, including claims that “COVID-19 is man-made.” That same day, Facebook emailed the Biden White House to alert it that Facebook would be “expanding [its] efforts to remove false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19…”
In July 2021, when Facebook executive Nick Clegg asked a Facebook employee why the company censored the man-made theory of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the employee responded: “Because we were under pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more… We shouldn’t have done it.”
The US federal government, by the end of 2024, was finally ready to admit that “a lab-related incident involving gain-of-function research is the most likely origin of COVID-19,” and that “current government mechanisms for overseeing this dangerous gain-of-function research are incomplete, severely convoluted, and lack global applicability,” however neither of these statements would come as a surprise to anyone who had been paying attention, and as a result the announcement was greeted with little fanfare.
Keep in mind that no one voted for any of the authoritarian measures outlined above, meaning it was neither Liberal or Democratic in any sense of those words. Considering the facts at hand, how do these events square with Francis Fukuyama’s assessment of Liberal Democracy? Is this something he accounted for? Indeed, Fukuyama notes the concern for health over other moral obligations as a distinctive character of the Liberal Democratic man, stating:
It becomes particularly difficult for people in democratic societies to take questions with real moral content seriously in public life. Morality involves a distinction between better and worse, good and bad, which seems to violate the democratic principle of tolerance. It is for this reason that the last man becomes concerned above all for his own personal health and safety, because it is uncontroversial. In America today, we feel entitled to criticize another person's smoking habits, but not his or her religious beliefs or moral behavior.
If the story of 2020 ended here, then we could potentially chalk everything up to a temporary lapse in sanity and liberty due to modern man’s over-preoccupation with his own health and safety. I personally would not come to such a conclusion, but some might. However, the story becomes far more complicated from here.
As if to follow up the proverbial wrench in the gears with a grenade, Summer of 2020 saw a racial fervor over the alleged police killing of a black man named George Floyd in Minneapolis, which in turn sparked both marches and riots in the streets of all major American cities. All at once, the narrow consensus that the government’s supposed “experts” had reached was also turned on its head, and both lawmakers and unelected bureaucrats alike kneeled in submission to this new righteous cause. But what of the Coronavirus restrictions? Surely hundreds, or occasionally even thousands, of people marching closely in solidarity through the streets had to violate at least a few pandemic precautions.
Keep in mind that protests were not a new phenomenon that year. There was quite a lot of public resistance to the lockdowns, leading to numerous protests across the country (although, in stark contrast to the George Floyd protests, these resulted in no riots that I’m aware of). However, the same government actors and mainstream journalists who would go on to show fervent support for the racial protests (and even the related riots in some cases) disavowed the comparatively peaceful lockdown protestors.
Needless to say, this was no longer about “health and safety.” In fact, it’s been reported that well over a dozen people (at least) perished in the chaos of the George Floyd riots, and countless more were injured. Several miles of American cityscape was also destroyed due to widespread arson and vandalism. Instead, media outlets described the protests with a much more “moral” character, promoting an ideology known as “Antiracism” and decrying a force of civilizational evil called “Whiteness.”
It is necessary here to note that “Antiracism” is not the “colorblind” absence of racism conventionally ascribed to Liberal Democracies, rather it is essentially the opposite: a philosophy of supposedly benevolent discrimination in favor of those who are labeled members of “marginalized” demographics. Ibram X Kendi’s book “How to Be an Antiracist,” which saw a massive surge in popularity at the time, describes it like this:
The only remedy to negative racist discrimination that produces inequity is positive antiracist discrimination that produces equity. The only remedy to past negative racist discrimination that has produced inequity is present positive antiracist discrimination that produces equity. The only remedy to present negative racist discrimination toward inequity is future positive antiracist discrimination toward equity.
This became a dominant moral lens not only in school and business, but in government as well, doing away with old notions of “equality of opportunity” and replacing them with a more explicitly Leftist understanding of “equality.” Under the previous mindset, one may look at the riots as a hideous orgy of violence that must be stopped at all costs. Under Antiracism, however, it was an expression of righteous fury against an inherently “racist” and “oppressive” system which must be razed to the ground.
But, in that case, what of the pandemic restrictions? Would they be counted under the “oppressive” aspects of the system and accordingly done away with? Well, no. The restrictions stayed, at least on paper. In practice, on the other hand, it was clear that there were unspoken carve-outs in favor of the Leftist protests and riots which were not extended to other situations. It’s clear that the establishment had no logical justification for this, and they did not exert themselves to provide one.
“I certainly condemned the anti-lockdown protests at the time, and I’m not condemning the protests now, and I struggle with that,” Catherine Troisi, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center said in a July 2020 New York Times article. “I have a hard time articulating why that is OK.”
Mark Lurie, a professor of epidemiology at Brown University, also weighed in. “Instinctively, many of us in public health feel a strong desire to act against accumulated generations of racial injustice,” he said. “But we have to be honest: A few weeks before, we were criticizing protesters for arguing to open up the economy and saying that was dangerous behavior. I am still grappling with that.”
This shifted once again by the end of the year as the COVID vaccines became available. These vaccines, although having been tested with relatively little rigor, were heavily pushed by the press, government, and corporations. People were threatened with job loss or abandonment by their family for rejecting the shots, international travel was restricted for the unvaccinated, and the government once again applied pressure to social media companies to silence anyone who criticized the new medical treatment or questioned its effectiveness.
Gradually a new wave of sadism against those who resisted spread through much of mainstream culture, with a infamous front-page article from Canada’s Toronto Star reading:
If an unvaccinated person catches it from someone who is vaccinated, boohoo, too bad. I have no empathy left for the wilfully unvaccinated. Let them die. I honestly don’t care if they die from COVID. Not even a little bit. Unvaccinated patients do not deserve ICU beds.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that explaining all of the reasons for this baffling series of events would take, at the very least, several volumes dedicated strictly to the task, thus it is outside the scope of this series to do so. Like most supposed grand conspiracies, the culprit is a rat king with many heads, all with different motivations. To point the finger at any singular philosophy as the sole driving force would be utterly foolish.
Rather I wanted to provide at least a brief outline in order to introduce my first “problem” with Francis Fukuyama’s theory of Liberal Democracy as the “end of history,” namely the contradiction between Democracy and the need for expertise, and to illustrate the tension this contradiction is able to cause in a supposedly advanced society like America’s.
I believe this contradiction to be the very root of our post-2020 heightened political turbulence, and the primary driver behind the recent rise in skepticism around Liberal Democracy, even if most people simply do not want to talk about it (the same way they would rather leave 2020 in the past).
A full exploration of this topic will be included in Part 4. Until then, thank you all very much for reading.
To be continued…