It gets a bit boring to many of my friend. Before launching into an article or a tweet, I often remind people where I come from. I share my birthplace with one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Franz Kafka and another phenomenal Prague writer, Jaroslav Hasek, who deserves to be equally well-known. Hasek is the author of the seminal satirical war novel, The Good Soldier Schweik. But the main reason I precede my pieces with details about my birth location is to warn readers not to lecture me about the glories of collectivism. I have lived it. My parents had lived through the ultimate horrors of the two main collectivist regimes - Communism and National Socialism. And I turn red when I’m forced to listen to the inane bleatings of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez which she believes - to the extent she believes anything - to be a solid base for forming American policy.
The glory of the United States is its historically powerful emphasis on individualism. The moment we fall pray to collectivist hallucinations, we get lost. Our current dire situation, the tyrannical hygiene fascism we’ve been experiencing, is a perfect example.
There is a cadre of doctors, computer geeks and social workers who form an army of “public health” experts. Of course “public health” is only as good as the health of individuals in a society but that’s a separate topic. Invariably, these public health officials are enamored of collectivist ideas by the very nature of their gig. “Public” is the obverse of “private”. It’s in their name. As good college educated collectivists, PH people look to countries and systems that like to solve problems communally. They soak up the Chinese method of dealing with a health threat because China is “efficient” (Let’s not forget Mussolini made the trains run on time and Hitler built the autobahns) They look to these countries and want to emulate them. They long for the kind of power that comes from running a one party state. The problem truly begins when our leaders get sold on their line of thinking.
When Covid first reared its head in early 2020, we never heard much about beefing up our system. All we heard was that if we don’t all submit to the PH authorities dictat, our medical system will be overrun. But that premise was never tested anywhere, as far as I can tell. We went straight for “we’re all in this together” I wanted to scream: “NO! I’m not in anything with anybody”. In other words, the government in the United States and elsewhere never once bothered to test the hypothesis that our healthcare system would, in fact, collapse. We were instructed that we must COLLECTIVELY do something right now to forestall a catastrophe of unimagined proportions.
This is all straight out of Marxist manuals. The Five Year Plan means that no individual can step out of line. All must focus their energies on fulfilling an elaborate - and completely unrealistic - economic plan, no matter what the social and financial and moral cost. “It’s for the good of all of us” The individual loses his/her agency completely. Not only is he/she an irrelevant cog in the system, the system itself quickly becomes sclerotic and irrelevant too because individual effort and energy have been sacrificed on the collectivist altar.
The next stage is for the system to demand total fealty. Criticism is dangerous and gets punished or at least censored. But the good boys and girls with the red pin in their lapel get rewarded. Signaling virtue is important of course, because without agency, men and women are children who rely on Daddy and Mommy government for sustenance and for praise and encouragement.
All our mistakes throughout this pandemic stem from our surrender to collectivist thinking. From “flatten the curve” to “prove you’re unsoiled”, from “we’re in it together” to “my mask protects you”. Do not worry. The ever vigilant Daddy Government is on the lookout for the next danger (an exotic variant) and will make sure you won’t come to any harm. As if! More harm has already been done than free individuals could ever do.
Now imagine we had approached the crisis with good old Anglo-Saxon “sang-froid” (nothing to do with Sigmund’s vocalizing). If our government had sat down and executed a proper risk assessment, a risk/benefit analysis based on INDIVIDUAL, not COLLECTIVE needs. Concurrently, the government could have injected cash into our health-care infrastructure and make sure that if there is undue stress on the system, relief valves could be opened. That’s what the government should ideally do: provide a light framework for individuals to solve their problems - for themselves and their families. We saw this approach would have worked: at least a week before any “shelter in place” orders were issued, restaurants and bars were empty. Individuals and businesses had assessed their risks and modified their behavior accordingly.
The world had lost its mind and gone Marxist. We adopted formulas based on the WHO recommendations, whose architects were mainly CCP apparatchiks. And the government swallowed it holus-bolus…and here we are.
And that’s why I tell people: “Hey, I have lived it. It does not work. It’s a prison. Under Communist systems people are not nicer - they are meaner. Because they have lost their agency, they’re angry and mean and childish. Oh, and while I tell them about Prague, I’ll say: “Read Kafka, read Hasek and for God’s sake, don’t call Bud Light a beer”