Clinging To Reality And Letting The False Fall Away

First up is William Sullivan, over at the American Thinker today in a piece entitled Epidemic Mask Theater Past and Present. Sullivan makes the point that the mask mandates are a form of Kabuki theater, in which people perform rituals to ward of imaginary threats. Here is Sullivan:

You’re probably familiar with the “plague doctor” mask, most often associated with the infamous Black Death of the fourteenth century, and the later outbreaks of bubonic plague that recurred in Europe for centuries afterward. The mask, which included spectacles and a long, hollow beak, was certainly distinctive, but its unusual look was more than just aesthetic. The beak would be filled with herbs and spices that would produce pleasant smells, which were believed to protect the doctor from invisible “poisonous emanations” in the air, called “miasma,” which created harmful imbalances in a person’s “humors,” or bodily fluids. The presence of this poisonous air was signified by foul smells, often arising from rotting carcasses or vegetables, and the mask’s beak shape was meant to “give the air sufficient time to be suffused by the protective herbs before it hit the plague doctor’s nostrils and lungs.”

It would be easy, given our modern conceit in appraising the inhabitants of the past as ignorant bumpkins, to mock these practices as peculiar and ridiculous, knowing as we do how useless they were. But the plague doctors could be forgiven for all this ritualistic pageantry, and the false sense of security it provided, if only because they lived long before modern germ theory was even a thought.

The symbolic and useless mask-pageantry in which we Americans are now engaging, on the other hand, is less forgivable.

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At your local grocery store, you are standing in a line that is several customers long. Everyone’s wearing masks, but still standing several feet apart. When you finally get to the cashier, you observe that the mask she’s wearing couldn’t be looser, with large gaps between the cloth and her face that you could drive a Buick through. But, in the unlikely event she’s infected, somehow the mask might still prevent coronavirus-carrying, microscopic droplets of moisture from escaping her mouth to infect anyone else, we all suppose. There’s a clear acrylic barrier annoyingly placed between you and the cashier for some reason, so you move a foot or so to the right so you can comfortably communicate with her around it. It’s time to pay, so you look down at the card reader, and there’s a thin layer of translucent plastic covering it (which looks suspiciously like the plastic food wrap from aisle 13), though you notice it hasn’t been changed by anyone since the six customers before you used it, and you assume hasn’t been changed for hours before that. But you confidently insert your card and press the keys with your bare fingers, anyway, knowing that the barrier provided serves as some sort of protection from the invisible coronavirus that is potentially lurking on every surface that you touch.

You don’t have to be a scientist to recognize that what I’ve described above are nothing more than useless symbolic rituals, and it’s all practically ineffective at stopping coronavirus spread, just as a plague mask was practically ineffective is stopping the spread of plague. But, unlike the plague doctors of the past, we should certainly know better than to go through any of these silly motions believing otherwise.

I would suspect that at least 50% each day's local news broadcast is devoted to some form of alarm and scare tactic over Covid-19. Yet it has a death rate of less that 0.26% and those deaths are mostly among the elderly, especially those with multiple comorbidities. And it stands to reason that these people would be targeted. If you are already fighting various chronic diseases, your body has less reserves to take on yet another disease. Each day brings an ever expanding drum beat of new cases of the corona virus, but there is no discussion of the number of cases that have survived and now are offering some herd immunity.

Also note that the goal posts have constantly shifted from simply flattening the curve to now preventing the spread of the virus in order to keep the story alive, and allow the media to keep amplifying the scare factor.

One must ask though, what is the purpose?  For surely there is more to it than just scaring people.  One can imagine that perhaps a few people will find it amusing to falsely scare the folks, but the majority would not be amused.

Yet it is here that Fay Voshell seems to have the answer in another article on today's American Thinker entitled Burn Baby Burn: The futile Revolutionaries Of Today. Miss Voshell credits the current wave of revolutionaries with the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. And it fits for the Communist and Socialists have long spoken of this knowledge, possessed by the enlightened, the Vanguard if you will, that the rest of us are just to stupid to understand.  The revolutionaries see injustices as wide spread and systematic.  Such wide spread injustices in their eyes justifies the violence, destruction, and burning down of the very law, the economy, indeed everything, to be replaced by their enlightened rule.

Law acts as a restraint blocking distorted impulses. But for the incendiaries, their impulses are pure, stemming as they do from irreproachable and victimized hearts bleeding from inequities. Anger attached to the ideal of absolute equality transcends Law. It can and must be expressed without any restraint. The hysteria resulting from the systemic suppression of dreams and the continual deference of hope is the result of societal institutions committed to subjugation. They are so hardened into wooden absoluteness that they will yield only to protest by fire, the ultimate implement of the oppressed.

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But, as Voegelin notes, “…the strange, abnormal spiritual condition of gnostic thinkers” is that they ignore large chunks of reality (like the reality of human beings as male and female) in order to create a fantasy world, a society that is governed neither by God’s will nor its own, but one placed under the governance of the gnostic thinker.

The contemporary gnostic prophet is the secularist thinker who discerns the meaning of history and can predict the future direction of history. “All gnostic movements are involved in the project of abolishing the constitution of being with its origin in the divine transcendent being…this is a matter of so altering the structure of the world that a new, satisfying world emerges.”

If that new order emerges only by the fires of destruction, so be it.

The truth is, though, that such injustice is not widespread, nor systematic. It is, rather episodic, the result of man's sinful nature coupled with his own incapacity to change reality.  And it is here that the revolutionaries can not stand, for theirs is a flight from reality.  This is the fundamental thing tying BLM, Antifa, the Communists, Socialists, Fascists, and all others who deny the existence of the Christian God, the God of Creation, the God of Salvation: they can not change reality.  They can flail about, hold their breath till they are blue in the face, through gross tantrums, but in the end, they can not change reality.  Voshell concludes with this:

However, spiritual renewal and growth, individual and societal, is a slow burn process. It is full of painful and often seemingly unfulfilled effort. But it is also a process that has been shown to be utterly transformative of humanity and society; witness the elimination of chattel slavery from the West. At times and with heroic effort, men and women have brought societies into at least partial conformance to the great commands that are at the heart of all true reforms, beginning with the first two as summarized by Christ: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

In those commandments is found the spiritual fire that kindles righteousness and justice within society.

If we are to get through this, we must cling to reality and let the false fall away. Unfortunately, it will take some people with it.