Author: Simon Sheridan

Way back in the very first post in this series I stated that my position right from the start of the corona event has been that it is a mass hysteria on a global scale facilitated by the internet. I was not the only one to make this analysis. Several psychologists also came out with the same conclusion. They noted, and this is something to bear in mind for those wondering when all this is going to come to an end, that a mass hysteria would take years to sort itself out. Certainly 2021 looks like a write-off. Whether corona will extend beyond that is anybody’s guess.

This week I came across a very interesting scholarly article which examines the notion that corona is a mass hysteria but with a focus on how the actions of governments contributed to it. It’s one of the best articles I’ve read on corona and backs up a number of my guesses about what’s going on with scholarly references. It also ties in with an idea I’ve been thinking about recently which is that, politically and psychologically, the corona event is a lot more like war than pandemic in the sense that most western governments (with the exception of Sweden) have been egging the population on rather than trying to calm them. It seems to me that the closest event in recent western history to the corona event is not previous pandemics like Asian Flu or Hong Kong Flu (both comparable as public health problems) but rather World War One. The correspondences are there. Remember “two weeks to flatten the curve”? Those kind of promises happened at the start of World War One too. Kaiser Wilhelm told his troops they would be home by the end of autumn. In Britain, it was assumed victory would be had by Christmas at the latest. Of course, it was four years and millions of deaths later before it all finally came to an end.

The bill for the corona event is going to be similar to that for the wars. Australia already has $1.5 trillion of national debt baked into the cake but that’s only the start. I would guess it will be many trillions by the time all gets counted. Like with war debt this will create massive inflation and we have already started to see that in soaring property prices and ridiculous stock market valuations.

Then there is the mass hysteria part. In a mass hysteria, people do things that look crazy in normal times. In WW1 this involved telling young men to jump out of trenches and run into machine guns. The corona event can’t compare to that for sheer madness but things have happened in the last year in western societies that nobody would have believed possible prior. This week here in Melbourne we saw Australian citizens wearing garbage bags being hauled out of quarantine hotels. We have seen pregnant women handcuffed in front of their children over social media posts. We have seen grandmothers pushed down the aisles of the Queen Victoria Market by baton-wielding stormtroopers (errr, police). State borders have been closed at days or even hours notice while governments welcomed in Hollywood movie stars and sports players. In the middle of all that, the Prime Minister decided to change a line in the national anthem to read “we are one and free”. Really? We have never been less ‘one’ or ‘free’ since the Federation of the country. Probably not the most appropriate time for that change, mate.

In many states in the US, it looks like children and teenagers will go two years and maybe more without in-person schooling while many elderly people in nursing homes may also go years without being allowed to see their loved ones in person. The list could go on and the whole thing is not over yet. Who knows what else will come especially the biggest unknown which is the long term effects of a mass vaccination program.

Like the events of WW1, our response has been radically disproportionate to the initial problem. Also like war, there is a big geopolitical element to corona. Once governments went with the plague story interpretation they needed a vaccine to end the story. But that has big implications for international travel and commerce. Any country which decided to break ranks and deny the importance of corona would set its citizens up to be excluded from other countries on the basis of vaccination status. How exactly all that gets sorted out is going to be something to watch carefully. Presumably countries will have to recognise each other’s vaccines as valid so that, for example, Chinese citizens can take a Chinese vaccine to travel elsewhere and vice versa. Will that actually happen or will countries make foreign citizens take ‘their vaccine’ to enter?

The idea among some that we can take the crisis and use it renew our society also harks back to the post WW2 era. A nice little Marshall Plan (Great Reset) to rebuild shattered economies this time with a green energy agenda. Sounds nice in theory (actually, it sounds horrible in theory as anybody who has read about the Great Reset would know). But the future that awaits us is almost certainly much more like the post-WW1 era: political instability (already there in the USA and Europe), inflation (already here), massive debts that can’t be repaid perhaps leading to currency collapse (Germany had a hyperinflation and reset its currency in the 1920s/1930s). Oh yeah, and the great depression.

Most importantly, if both government action and the internet have contributed to this mass hysteria, there is no reason why other hysterias will not break out. We have the WHO there to identify ‘new’ viruses. The technology is there to create PCR tests and distribute them instantly. Big Pharma is there waiting to make billions from vaccines and testing. In short, there is nothing stopping this whole thing from happening again unless governments put some safeguards in place. Safeguards like defunding the WHO. But we know what happened with that idea. If, as the authors of the paper cited above note, bigger government makes mass hysterias more likely and mass hysterias create big government (by shrinking and curtailing civil society) then we have a positive feedback loop. Just like WW1 made WW2 more likely (some might say inevitable). Another reason to bunker down and buckle up.

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

The Coronapocalypse Part 10: The Story of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 13: The Book

The Coronapocalypse Part 14: Automation Ideology

The Coronapocalypse Part 15: The True Believers

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 20: The Neverending Story

The Coronapocalypse Part 21: Kafkaesque Much?

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 23: Acts of Nature

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 26: The Devouring Mother

The Coronapocalypse Part 27: Munchausen by Proxy

The Coronapocalypse Part 28: The Archetypal Mask

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 31: How Dare You!

The Coronapocalypse Part 32: Book Announcement

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 37: Finale

I’ve referred several times in this series of posts to the cybernetics/systems thinking movement of the 20^th century. The other day I came across this interview with the daughter of two of the greats that movement – Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. In the article, Mary Catherine Bateson laments how systems thinking got hijacked by the technology industry. This struck a chord with me because it’s through my work in the IT that I was introduced to those ideas. I think she probably overestimates the degree to which the concepts of systems thinking are actually used in IT but she’s right on the whole that this is where the attention has gone towards while moving away from systems thinking as a way to think about the world. What gets called systems thinking in the academic world these days seems to be driven by the idea that it’s a way to do better science which is ironic because systems thinking was, among other things, a sharp critique of the naïve scientific thinking of the late 19^th and early 20^th century. It set out to define clearly the limitations of science so that hubris did not take over. The corona event represents the reappearance of that hubris in our culture. For that reason, our response to corona can be sharply critiqued from the perspective of systems thinking. Let’s just have a look at one important concept from systems thinking to get an idea of what that critique might look like. It’s one raised by Mary Catherine Bateson in the article above: side effects.

From the point of view of the universe (does the universe have a point of view?), there is no such thing as a side effect. Effects are just effects. The phrase side effect is about intention. I act with an intended effect and that is the thing that I care about. Side effects are the other effects which follow from my action; the ones I didn’t intend. But we can be more specific because side effects are normally the effects I didn’t intend but which also come to my attention usually because they are negative effects. There are a whole host of other effects that never come to my attention. They exist but I don’t give them the name side effects because I am unaware of them.

Effects and side effects are information. Gregory Bateson defined information as “a difference that makes a difference”. In the case of an effect, it must make a difference that we notice. Otherwise, we don’t call it an effect. This is a very important point because it makes explicit the role of the observer. An action may have all kinds of effects that an observer does not notice because they do not get above the threshold of awareness of the observer. For example, there are sound waves floating around all the time that we do not perceive because they do not get above the noise floor that is partly hard wired in our hearing apparatus and partly a function of our attention. There was a ‘difference’ but it did not make a ‘difference’ to us. We must be attuned to perceive the effect.

So, there are effects which we are looking for and are able to notice, side effects which we were not looking for but which came to our attention anyway and then all the effects we were not looking for and didn’t come to our attention. There is one other kind of effect worth mention which is a perceived effect which is not related to the action or cause. An example of this is optical illusions which relate to edge cases around our perceptual apparatus. In more complex domains, we can fool ourselves into perceiving effects which were not really there. Let me give my favourite personal example of this.

Just over ten years ago I started to get into audio engineering in a big way. I have always been an enthusiastic amateur musician and, with the advent of cheap home recording technology, it seemed like a good thing to get into recording music if for no other reason than as a practice tool. Learning how to mix and master recorded music is fiendishly difficult. To do it well requires you not so much to master the tools (although you must eventually do that) but how to rewire your aural perception. You must learn to hear when a difference makes a difference. Newbie audio engineers will fiddle around with the various settings on reverbs and compressors but they aren’t really hearing the difference. They haven’t learned how to listen properly. It’s not until you have learned how to listen that you can make real progress. In the meantime, you’re swimming around in a world where nothing seems to make any difference.

I was swimming in that world on the morning in question. I was working on a song that was sounding like shit. I was frustrated. Nothing I did seemed to make any difference. I added reverb, it still sounded shit. I took the reverb away. Still shit. Then I made a big but very tempting mistake: I went to the internet and typed “why does my mix sound like shit.” There are five bazillion answers to this question but the one that came up first was compression. That’s the thing that makes the difference between pro recordings and amateurs. So said the internet. I followed a thread where there was a link to a new compressor that somebody said would fix all my problems. I eagerly downloaded it. This was gonna be great. I would install this thing and be on a way one ticket to recording superstardom. I inserted the plugin into the mix, took a deep breath and then switched it on.

The effect was instantaneous. The track burst to life. The guitars were clearer, the drums bigger, the vocals cut through with the clarity of a spring morning and the mellifluousness of a choir of angels. I sat back and took it all in marvelling at how wonderful this new compressor was. Once the euphoria had died down, I opened my eyes and decided to check the settings that I was using so I wouldn’t forget them. I looked down at the compressor plugin on the computer screen and to my horror, to my sheer disbelief, realised the compressor was not even turned on. I had clicked the wrong button. To be sure of my mistake, I turned it on for real. The mix of my song changed but not in any significant way. It still sounded like shit. My mixes continued to sound like shit for about another year till I finally learned that it didn’t really matter what compressor you used so much as how you used it.

In this case I had convinced myself that I heard an effect that wasn’t really there. Why? Because I really wanted it to work. If intention and will are required to perceive an effect it’s also true that emotions and imagination can create an effect where one does not exist. Then you have fooled yourself. Most of the time it’s hard to know whether you are fooling yourself or not. There’s usually no on/off button which can give definitive feedback. A big part of science is learning how to test things in a way that gives definitive feedback. That’s why not fooling yourself was one of the main rules of science outlined by the great Richard Feynman but it holds in life in general. Learning to be objective is largely learning to be able to put aside emotions and see something for what it is even when you really, really, don’t want it to be the case. It’s also about knowing when you haven’t set up your testing in such a way as to give a clear answer about what is happening. That is why blind testing and randomised control trials are so important in science. They exclude the researcher’s emotions from the equation. Even scientists allow their emotions to get in the way and to see and effect where there isn’t one.

The point to be made here is that just perceiving an effect is often very difficult. In complex domains like sound engineering and science, it takes a lot of practice and it’s easy to fool yourself. What about side effects? These are normally not so hard to ascertain as they usually force their way into our attention whether we like it or not. The challenge is not to see them but to simply admit their existence and deal with the inevitable frustration or disappointment they cause. Let me give an example of such a side effect from my personal experience.

I decided to set up some raised wicking beds in my backyard. The summers in Melbourne are typically hot and dry. There is definitely not enough rain to grow vegetables without extra watering. Wicking beds are an excellent way to irrigate vegetables as there is almost no evaporative loss of moisture and you can fill them up about once a week and then forget about them for the rest of the week which makes maintenance very easy. The effect I was looking for out my wicking beds was to grow vegetables with the least amount of work and watering possible. That was the happy path. Of course, any gardener knows gardens rarely deliver the happy path, at least not straight away. Gardens are complex systems and side effects pop up regularly.

In constructing my wicking beds, I decided to make them look nice by re-using some weatherboards I had lying around as cladding. It worked and the beds looked attractive enough. In the process, however, I had inadvertently created the perfect habitat for snails. In between the weatherboards and the container that was holding the soil was a nice dark, damp place that was about an inch wide and protected from the outside world. It was also right next door to a food supply: the seedlings for my vegetables. My wicking beds were like a five star snail hotel with an all-you-can eat breakfast buffet thrown in. One day I went outside to check on my seedlings and they were gone with the tell-tale trail of slime indicating clearly who the culprits were.

Systems theory says that any system you build will produce effects that you did not foresee. This includes side effects that will barge their way into your consciousness whether you like it or not and a whole host of other effects that you will never know about because you are not looking for them. Sometimes those affects are small and localised like my snail problem. But with large systems you can get very big negative effects such as major environmental damage or loss of life. Side effects are information and, used correctly, that information will allow you build a better system. I could have removed the weatherboards from my wicking beds to solve the snail problem. However, once I learned where the snails were, it was a trivial matter to pick them off the boards and feed them to my chickens. In so doing, I was able to turn a negative side effect into a positive one. This is known as adaptation, which is another important concept in systems thinking.

We’ve seen that effects can be hard to determine and that side effects are always present. Knowing all this we can make some general statements about systems. The newer a system, the more side effects there will be and most of these will be negative. (I can state the truth of this as my job is to test newly built IT systems. There are always more bugs at the start than at the end). When building a system you should be sure to set up information channels for side effects to be dealt with so you can learn and correct. It is never a good idea to roll out a big new system at scale without first prototyping and testing at a smaller scale. To do so invites collateral damage from negative side effects on a large scale.

Which brings us to the corona event and I’m sure the reader can see where I’m going with this. Never before attempted lockdowns on a global scale, all kinds of governments measures that have never been tried or tested and now as the fitting finale to the whole show a never before tried vaccine rolled out on mass after being rushed through testing. From a systems point of view, all this is guaranteed to cause large scale side effects. We have already begun to see these in the mass unemployment, closure of small businesses, massive new government debt and all the rest. But with corona it’s not even clear any more what main effect we are aiming towards. Originally, it was ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’ but that has changed to, well, who knows? The newly elected President Biden admitted as much a week or so ago when he said there was nothing much that could be done about corona (after promising during the election campaign that he had a plan, of course). We have no idea what we are doing. It all reminds me of my early days of audio engineering, desperately flailing away trying anything to find something that works. That’s not a good look for politicians who are supposed to be leading our society.

In relation to the vaccine, the media, as the modern propaganda machine that it is, is reassuring the public that side effects are ‘normal’ for vaccines. That may be true, but what about the side effects of the new vaccine that we don’t know about yet. Those are the ones that are going to be game changers if they do happen. I’m thinking of autoimmune disease and antibody dependent enhancement. Then there are the social and political side effects. One of these, at least in the US, looks certain to be a growing loss of faith in the government, although that has been building for decades. We have seen in the past few weeks quite ridiculous things like Biden admitting he has no plan for corona, Fauci recommending two masks or even three, Cuomo and Newsom suddenly realising the economy matters. We have the same ridiculousness here in Australia with WA recently mandating masks for people exercising outdoors in the middle of summer in one of the least densely populated cities in the world (Perth).

For now, the public here seems to support it. Will they continue to support it if the vaccines don’t make corona ‘go away’ and once the budget deficit hits several trillion? Who knows? Budget deficits don’t seem to matter anymore. Does anything matter anymore? We live at a time where it’s quite impossible to know what is going to happen next. That outcome was already baked into the cake as soon as we went into lockdown. The main reason not to lockdown was because it would lead us into a situation just like this. The corona event demonstrates that we still haven’t learned the lessons from cybernetics and systems thinking. Rather, we have reverted back to that old hubris and over confidence in ‘science’.

Will we still believe in ‘science’ when all this is over or will one of the side effects of our new system be a cynicism not just of science but our whole society? Time will tell. For now, buckle up and keep your eye out for any side effects that come flying in your direction.

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

The Coronapocalypse Part 10: The Story of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 13: The Book

The Coronapocalypse Part 14: Automation Ideology

The Coronapocalypse Part 15: The True Believers

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 20: The Neverending Story

The Coronapocalypse Part 21: Kafkaesque Much?

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 23: Acts of Nature

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 26: The Devouring Mother

The Coronapocalypse Part 27: Munchausen by Proxy

The Coronapocalypse Part 28: The Archetypal Mask

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 31: How Dare You!

The Coronapocalypse Part 32: Book Announcement

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 37: Finale

This week a fun piece of news came to light that links the last post of my propaganda school series, which was about statistics, with my coronavirus series. For those who have read some or all of my coronavirus series, you’ll know that the core of my analysis is that the corona narrative is an example of what I call the plague story and that this is how the public discourse around the corona event has been framed. According to that analysis, the vaccine was the thing that would end the story because that is how the plague story gets told in the modern world. When I wrote that analysis, it still wasn’t clear that a vaccine was even possible and therefore it was unclear how the story would end. It has subsequently transpired that several vaccines were given emergency approval and the rollout had already begun.

Nevertheless, the story still seemed politically dangerous to me for the reason that the PCR test, which has driven the whole shebang, would almost certainly continue to return positives. This is because the virus is now endemic and also because nobody knows whether the vaccine would stop transmission. It’s also the case, as has been pointed out by critics from the start, that many of the PCR tests are very likely to be false positives (we still don’t know the exact false positive rate as there is still no gold standard test for corona and, unless I missed the news, the virus has still not been isolated). In short, if governments kept testing, they would keep getting positives and this would lead the public to believe that the vaccines had not ‘worked’. That would be a violation of the plague story. Politicians know they need to deliver the correct ending to the story and Big Pharma would also have to know they will have a public relations crisis on their hands if the vaccine is seen to be a failure. So, all parties have a vested interest in the seeing the plague story ended properly.

How would the powers-that-be solve this problem? I had assumed they would simply stop testing. The vaccine gives them the perfect excuse for that. But the article I linked to above reveals another way to achieve the same result. The WHO just issued new advice part of which involves dropping the number of cycles that the PCR test runs for. This news had a special resonance for me because my whole pathway into being a ‘covid denier’ started with the PCR test. Way back in February last year I started reading about it and instantly realised that there were 99 problems with it and one of the big ones was the cycle times. This was also a fact pointed out in some detail by the late David Crowe in his infectious myth website and subsequently by a number of dissenting experts among them Professor Bhakdi, Wolfgang Wodarg, Denis Rancourt and Dr Yeardon. Yet apparently the WHO has only just realised these problems almost exactly a year after they gave the green light to Christian Drosten’s PCR test and, more importantly, right after the vaccine roll out has begun and Biden has been inaugurated. An extraordinary coincidence isn’t it that they should change the guidelines in just the way that will cause the ‘case’ numbers to drop right when they need to. This will solve the problem of not having test numbers remain high after the vaccine is administered. It is a way to properly end the corona story and ensure that the vaccines appear to have ‘worked’.

This move is a paradigm example of something I covered in part 10 of my propaganda school series: the use and misuse of statistics. Governments do this kind of thing all the time. You make a subtle and seemingly innocuous change to the definition of a statistic and – voila – the numbers go the way you want them to go. But it also raises the concept of a phrase that’s been so overused in the last year in particular that I hesitate to even mention it – the conspiracy theory. Isn’t it just a little too convenient that the WHO should make a change that will drop the numbers just at this time? Isn’t it also convenient that Democrat governors in the US have suddenly realised their economies matter right after Trump has left office (for those who didn’t see the news, New York’s Cuomo is now telling the public they need to open up for the good of the economy). It’s all a little bit convenient isn’t it? Very tempting to think these people are in league. And, in a way, they are. But are they in a conspiracy? The answer is: sort of.

To eludicate the distinction, let’s first look at an example of an overt conspiracy. This is a funny story from the world of corporate IT where I make my living.

My job is to find bugs in software. It’s in the interests of most companies to have as few bugs in their software as possible and that’s why they hire people like me. I once read the story of an enterprising CEO who came up with an innovative new idea: he would offer a reward for each bug found by his software testing team. I think it was about $1 per bug. At first glance, this sounds like a good idea. You incentivise people to find more bugs and in that way you remove them from your software. What happened at this particular company, however, was that one of the testers came up with his own innovative new idea. He hooked up with a few of his programmer friends and they conspired to create and then to find bugs. The system was ingenious. The programmers would build the bugs into the software then tell the tester where to look. He would ‘find’ them and report them to collect the bug bounty which they would then split 50/50.

The CEO looked at the skyrocketing number of bugs being found in his company’s software and thought that his bug bounty program was a raging success. However, one of his subordinates smelled a rat and interrogated the numbers a little closer. They realised only one tester seemed to be finding all the bugs. Still further investigation revealed that the bugs were almost all coming from only three programmers. A review of the work email accounts for parties involved revealed extensive communication from programmers to tester about where to find the bugs this week. The racket was busted and the enterprising individuals were shown the door.

That’s an example of an overt conspiracy. The story is funny because the CEO accidentally created the shared interest that led to his employees conspiring against him. It’s also an example of a very common naivete that can be seen by corporate managers (and politicians and public bureaucrats) who try and govern their organisations by metrics alone. Metrics are easily manipulated to give whatever result management demands and lower level managers will find a way to tweak the numbers; little tricks like changing the number of cycle times on a PCR test.

Which brings us to the decision by the WHO. Now, there is almost certainly no explicit agreement between the WHO and the Biden administration or any of the Big Pharma companies or any of the public health bureaucracies in western nations. There is no explicit deal to make the ‘case’ numbers go down but there is a strong shared interest in that outcome. So, it is technically not a conspiracy when the WHO decides to fiddle with the test parameters to make them go down. Rather, it’s the kind you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours event that happens very often in the world of politics. Don’t ask, don’t tell. In this case, the media is also in on the action. Is there a single journalist in the world looking into the PCR settings used in different countries and how the authorities change them to achieve an outcome? Certainly not in the mainstream media, there isn’t. The media is also in the business of telling stories and knows how this story is supposed to end.

What all this amounts to is: the narrative. Most of modern politics runs on such narratives and it’s notable that the phrase ‘conspiracy theorist’ is now applied to anybody who questions the narrative. Once upon a time, to be a conspiracy theorist meant you had to have a story about how the government was covering up the fact that aliens had landed in a certain spot and the CIA and the FBI were in league with the army to keep the whole thing a secret. Now, you just have to ask basic questions about the narrative. It’s almost as if the powers-that-be are admitting that they are, in fact, in league and that narratives really are a kind of conspiracy.

Here in Victoria, we had a great example of the use of narratives in politics during the corona event. The State government had botched the hotel quarantine program which led to an outbreak that ended up locking the citizens of the state in their homes for four months. The narrative from the government was the nobody made the decision which led to the outbreak. All parties were sticking to that narrative and it wasn’t until the former adviser to a former Prime Minister (Peta Credlin) started asking hard questions that the narrative started to fall apart. Several people ended up resigning including a minister and a couple of senior bureaucrats. The fact that in this case it took somebody who is not a ‘real’ journalist but a party insider to do a proper questioning of the narrative is also quite instructive. It takes somebody who has an interest in the narrative breaking down to ask the hard questions that lead to that outcome. That’s the way journalism used to work. What it meant to be a ‘hard nosed’ journalist was that you were trying to break down the narratives that were a kind of conspiracy against the public interest.

So, narratives are in a grey area. They are not really conspiracies and they are not really not conspiracies. They hold together people and organisations who have common interests and give everybody plausible deniability if things go belly up.

The corona event is one such narrative. Not really a conspiracy but certainly a lot of shared interests. When politicians in western nations opted to lockdown their countries it became in their interests to uphold the narrative at all costs and that is what has been done. What the news from the WHO portends is that the powers-that-be do actually want the corona event to come to an end (for a while there it wasn’t clear that they did). I’d say we are now into the endgame for corona. The narrative has been guided to its proper conclusion and the ‘case’ numbers will be managed away by fiddling with the test definition and/or process. Once all the vaccines have been sold, of course.

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

The Coronapocalypse Part 10: The Story of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 13: The Book

The Coronapocalypse Part 14: Automation Ideology

The Coronapocalypse Part 15: The True Believers

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 20: The Neverending Story

The Coronapocalypse Part 21: Kafkaesque Much?

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 23: Acts of Nature

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 26: The Devouring Mother

The Coronapocalypse Part 27: Munchausen by Proxy

The Coronapocalypse Part 28: The Archetypal Mask

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 31: How Dare You!

The Coronapocalypse Part 32: Book Announcement

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 37: Finale