The Great Demoralization

Can It Be Reversed? [The Daily Reckoning] October 06, 2023 [WEBSITE]( | [UNSUBSCRIBE]( The Great Demoralization - The first lockdown… - The hierarchy of infection… - It really can happen here… [URGENT: Unclaimed Giveaway Offer]( We have an item of considerable value on hold for you in our warehouse. Valued at nearly $300, this special item is an opportunity you wanted to miss. [See How To Claim Yours Now]( West Hartford, Connecticut Editor’s note: Three years on, the nation is still suffering from the effects of lockdowns. Jeffrey Tucker calls it “the Great Demoralization.” Today Jeffrey tracks it to its origins and shows you the effect it’s had on American life. [Jeffrey Tucker] JEFFREY TUCKER Dear Reader, On March 6, 2020, the mayor of Austin, Texas, canceled the biggest tech and arts trade show in the world, South by Southwest, only a week before hundreds of thousands were to gather in the city. In an instant, with the stroke of a pen, it was all gone: hotel reservations, flight plans, performances, exhibitors and all the hopes and dreams of thousands of merchants in the town. Economic impact: a loss of $335 million in revenue at least. And that was just to the city alone, to say nothing of the broader impact. It was the beginning of U.S. lockdowns. It wasn’t entirely clear at the time — my own sense was that this was a calamity that would lead to decades of successful lawsuits against the Austin mayor — but it turned out that Austin was the test case and template for the entire nation and then the world. The reason was of course COVID but the pathogen wasn’t even there. The idea was to keep it out of the city, an incredible and sudden fallback to a medieval practice that has nothing to do with modern public health understanding of how a respiratory virus should be handled. “In six months,” I wrote at the time, “if we are in a recession, unemployment is up, financial markets are wrecked and people are locked in their homes, we’ll wonder why the heck governments chose disease ‘containment’ over disease mitigation. Then the conspiracy theorists get to work.” I was right about the conspiracy theorists but I had not anticipated that they would turn out to be right about nearly everything. We were being groomed for extended national and global lockdowns. Ew, It’s the Dirty People At this point in the trajectory, we already knew the gradient of risk. It was not medically significant for healthy working-age adults (which still to this day the CDCs does not admit). So the shutdown likely protected very few if anyone. The extraordinary edict — worthy of a tin-pot dictator of a dark age — completely overrode the wishes of millions, all on the decision of one man, whose name is Steven Adler. “Was the consideration between maintaining that money, effectively rolling the dice, and doing what you did?” asked Texas Monthly of the mayor. His answer: “No.” Clarifying: “We made a decision based on what was in the best health interest for the city. And that is not an easy choice.” After the shocking cancellation, which overrode property rights and free will, the mayor urged all residents to go out and eat at restaurants and gather and spend money to support the local economy. In this later interview, he explained that he had no problem keeping the city open. He just didn’t want people from hither and yon — the dirty people, so to speak — to bring a virus with them. 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I don’t think that closing down South Bay was intended to stop the disease from getting here because it is coming. “The assessment of our public health professionals was that we were risking it coming here more quickly, or in a greater way with a greater impact. And the longer we could put that off, the better this city is.” The Hierarchy of Infection And there we have the “flatten the curve” thinking at work. Kick the can down the road. Postpone. Delay herd immunity as long as possible. Yes, everyone will get the bug but it is always better that it happens later rather than sooner. But why? We were never told. Flatten the curve was really just prolong the pain, keep our overlords in charge as long as possible, put normal life on hold and stay safe as long as you can. Prolonging the pain might also have served another surreptitious agenda: Let the working classes — the dirty people — get the bug and bear the burden of herd immunity so that the elites can stay clean and hopefully it will die out before it gets to the highest echelons. There was indeed a hierarchy of infection. In all these months, no one ever explained to the American public why prolonging the period of non-exposure was always better than meeting the virus sooner, gaining immunity and getting over it. The hospitals around the country were not strained. Indeed, with the inexplicable shutdown of medical services for diagnostics and elective surgeries, hospitals in Texas were empty for months. Health care spending collapsed. This was the onset of the Great Demoralization. The message was: Your property is not your own. Your events are not yours. Your decisions are subject to our will. We know better than you. You cannot take risks with your own free will. Our judgment is always better than yours. We will override anything about your bodily autonomy and choices that is inconsistent with our perceptions of the common good. There is no restraint on us and every restraint on you. The Turn to Barbarism This messaging and this practice is inconsistent with a flourishing human life, which requires the freedom of choice above all else. It also requires the security of property and contracts. It presumes that if we make plans, those plans cannot be arbitrarily canceled by force by a power outside of our control. Those are bare minimum presumptions of a civilized society. Anything else leads to barbarism and that is exactly where the Austin decision took us. We still don’t know precisely who was involved in this rash judgment or on what basis they made it. There was a growing sense in the country at the time that something was going to happen. There had been sporadic use of lockdown powers in the past. Think of the closure of Boston after the bombing in 2013. A year later, the state of Connecticut quarantined two travelers who might have been exposed to Ebola in Africa. These were the precedents. “The coronavirus is driving Americans into unexplored territory, in this case understanding and accepting the loss of freedom associated with a quarantine,” wrote The New York Times on March 19, 2020, three days after the Trump press conference that announced two weeks to flatten the curve. [New “WiFi Crypto” Token is Going NUTS!]( Only a handful of crypto investors know about this… But there’s a tiny, affordable device… That’s paid investors real crypto – every day, with zero work… Just for having a working WiFi connection! It sounds crazy, but it’s true… And this 3:28 video explains everything. [Click Here To Watch Now]( The experience on a nationwide basis fundamentally undermined the civil liberties and rights that Americans had long taken for granted. It was a shock to everyone, but to young people still in school, it was utter trauma and a moment of mental reprogramming. They learned all the wrong lessons: They are not in charge of their lives; someone else is. The only way to be is to figure out the system and play along. We now see epic learning loss, psychological shock, population-wide obesity and substance abuse, a fall in investor confidence, a shrinkage of savings reflecting less interest in the future and a dramatic decline in public participation in what used to be normal life events: church, theater, museums, libraries, fairs, symphonies, ballets, theme parks and so on. Attendance in general is down by half and this is starving these venues of money. Most of the big institutions in large cities like New York, such as Broadway and the Met, are on life support. The symphony halls have a third empty seats despite lowering prices. It Really Can Happen Here It seems remarkable that this 3½-year-long war against basic liberty for nearly everyone has come to this. And yet it should not be a surprise. All ideology aside, you simply cannot maintain much less cultivate a civilized life when governments, in combination with the commanding heights of media and large corporations, treat their citizens like lab rats in a science experiment. You only end in sucking away the essence and vibrancy of the human spirit, as well as the will to build a good life. In the name of public health, they sapped the will to health. And if you objected, they shut you up. This is still going on daily. The ruling class that did this to the country has yet to speak honestly about what transpired. It was their actions that created the current cultural, economic and social crisis. Their experiment left the country and our lives in shambles. We’ve yet to hear apologies or even basic honesty about any of it. Instead, all we get is more misleading propaganda about how we need yet another shot that doesn’t work. History provides many cases of a beaten-down, demoralized and increasingly poor and censored majority population being ruled over by an imperious, inhumane, sadistic, privileged and yet tiny ruling class. We just never believed we would become one of those cases. The truth of this is so grim and glaring, and the likely explanation of what happened so shocking, that the entire subject is regarded as something of a taboo in public life. There will be no fixing this, no crawling out from under the rubble, until we get something from our rulers other than public preening about a job well done, in ads sponsored by Pfizer and Moderna. Regards, Jeffrey Tucker for The Daily Reckoning [feedback@dailyreckoning.com.](mailto:feedback@dailyreckoning.com) Editor’s note: On occasion we feel compelled to forward you information from one of our affiliates. Today is one such day. 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Please send all feedback to [feedback@dailyreckoning.com.](mailto:feedback@dailyreckoning.com) [Jeffrey Tucker] [Jeffrey Tucker]( is an independent editorial consultant who served as Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. [Paradigm]( ☰ ⊗ [ARCHIVE]( [ABOUT]( [Contact Us]( © 2023 Paradigm Press, LLC. 808 Saint Paul Street, Baltimore MD 21202. By submitting your email address, you consent to Paradigm Press, LLC. delivering daily email issues and advertisements. To end your The Daily Reckoning e-mail subscription and associated external offers sent from The Daily Reckoning, feel free to [click here.]( Please note: the mailbox associated with this email address is not monitored, so do not reply to this message. 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