September 2020 – Simon Sheridan

I thought I should do a quick post for those who have been following along.

I have mentioned that I was considering turning this series of posts into a book. That is what I have now decided to do and I am working on that book as we speak. Readers might have noticed that the posts have been all over the place thematically. With the book I will be presenting the argument in a more orderly and rational fashion. I am also filling out the argumentation where it was lacking and just generally cleaning things up. The general gist of the posts won’t change much but there will be substantial revisions in particular to the chapters on the epidemic of testing and the panic principle.

Where I have ended up as far as my explanation for the corona event, and the direction that the book will take, is as follows:-

High modernist ideology is a faith that uses the prestige of science to advance utopian social programs. Such programs purport to be for the good of everybody, that’s why they are utopian. The problem is that they are predicated on simplified and naïve science that doesn’t work in the real world. Under normal circumstances they simply don’t get off the ground. However, when they are combined with authoritarian government and prostrate civil society, they can be made to ‘work’ because what happens is that government, through bureaucracy, re-structures society to make them seem plausible.

Such programs have never been tried in western countries before because we have neither authoritarian government nor prostrate civil society. However, there are a couple of ways in which you can get a western society to change into an authoritarian state. One is war. Another is plague (pandemic).

The early warning system set up by the WHO is designed to trigger a plague story. It’s a warning for plague. It has false alarmed several times in the past two decades but those false alarms didn’t cause much real trouble because the criteria for establishing a ‘case’ were too cumbersome. They required both a doctor to diagnose clinical symptoms and a bureaucrat to do the contact tracing on a suspected case. In addition, suspected cases were mostly limited to those who made it to hospital thereby excluding all asymptomatic and mild cases. Also, as David Crowe pointed out, the criterion that required contact with an existing case ensured the number of cases was self-limiting. Once quarantining of the sick began, the numbers dried up immediately because no more contacts could be generated.

This all changed with the corona event because of the PCR test. The test gave bureaucrats the perfect, simplified criteria needed for a high modernist intervention. Clinical symptoms and contact tracing were thrown aside and a ‘case’ was now defined purely by a single test result. All that was needed was to carry out the test. The infrastructure to do that was already in place due to the WHO’s influenza surveillance programs and thus the testing machine was able to ramp up very quickly.

In addition, suspected cases were no longer confined to hospital patients but expanded to include anybody with flu symptoms and even people with no symptoms. The test allowed such people to now be included as ‘cases’ and this massively expanded the available pool of suspected cases relative to previous pandemics alerts. By defintion, the actual medical status of ‘cases’ became irrelevant. All bureaucrats now cared about was the test result. This new case definition also ensures that the pandemic can never end because there will never be a shortage of people with flu-like symptoms to put through the testing process.

Once governments opted for lockdown, politicians became married to the plague story interpretation and will now defend that narrative at all costs. Smart politicians would have to know that the only way out of this is a vaccine and that is why we have a ridiculous situation of governments buying millions of doses of vaccines that don’t even exist yet. Many politicians have now staked their political careers on a vaccine.

High modernist ideology is tied to what Mary Midgley called reductionist megalomania. This is what was behind the public’s desire to see heroism during the corona event. It is also the driver for Nassim Taleb and his ilk who have reduced the whole thing down to a so-called risk analysis and thereby promulgated the idea of ‘smashing the curve’. Other obvious examples of megalomania can be seen in Bill Gates and his billionaire mates. All of this is simple hubris. But hubris goeth before a fall.

The fall-out from this event is going to define the years ahead and politicians can be expected to do everything they can to avoid taking responsibility for the collateral damage. One of the ways to do that is to continue to try and repress civil society so that competing narratives do not arise. They have the exact means to do that with the testing and the continued threats of ‘second waves’ and the like. It seems the plan at the moment is to play that card and hope to hell that a vaccine arrives as that is the only thing that lets everybody save face.

The longer the vaccine takes the more the pressure will build and this pressure itself is now a danger. On the other hand, it seems very likely that the official narrative won’t be able to hold and this does offer a glimmer of hope that the neo-liberal/globalist consensus, of which the WHO’s early warning system is a part, might be genuinely challenged in the years ahead. The globalists, meanwhile, seeing their opportunity have already started pushing for a high modernist reform of society through such catchphrases as the ‘new normal’.

In the background of all this is the actual science of microbiology where it has become the norm not to attempt to reproduce or challenge published studies about new viral disease. This is part of the larger replication crisis in the sciences in general but particularly in the biomedical sciences where enormous sums of money are up for grab. The inherent analytical problems with viral disease have not been resolved and, in fact, new research is calling the germ theory of disease into question. The fact that more scientists have not spoken out during the corona event speaks to the fact that their incomes and career are largely dependent on government money and/or private investment money some of which has blatantly obvious political motives. In short, the sciences are in very bad shape and have failed the public during the corona event barring the few lone voices such as Professor Bhakdi.

That will be the main thrust of the book which will also include the chapters on germ theory, the economics of pandemic, the denial of death which, while less relevant as causes, are nevertheless part of the broader social and cultural trend that got us to where we are.

The book, tentatively titled “Viral Narrative: The Story about the Story about Coronavirus”, will be about the start of the corona event and will trace out the elements that led us into it as described above. How it’s going to end is anybody’s guess at this point.

I hope to have the book finished in the next week or two and released very shortly after that. I’ll be sure to post here when it’s available.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 2: An Epidemic of Testing

The Coronapocalypse Part 3: The Panic Principle

The Coronapocalypse Part 4: The Denial of Death

The Coronapocalypse Part 5: Cargo Cult Science

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona