I am using words carefully because I want to be precise. One can easily don their 2019 hat and say, “Well, why I should I care about a WHO document? It’s just some cryptic, pointless formal thing, a bureaucratic project that exists to justify their salaries,” etc. And if I could somehow erase the past two years from memory, I would agree! (In the past, many unbearably boring documents birthed by the United Nations agencies served primarily to justify their salaries.)
However, the past two years cannot be erased. Adhering to the WHO guidelines put countless innocent people on ventilators and killed them, and prevented many from receiving helpful medical attention—and that’s just the surface of the story! We are in the middle of what feels like a global color revolution, where submissiveness and not asking questions make you a good citizen, and “love of freedom” is suddenly an embarrassing and selfish ultra-right value. By the way, even the “reframing” of the previously highly marketable Western freedom didn’t happen overnight but instead, took some years and a very concerted effort! “Updates” to public perception are at the core of any major social change! Besides, “long-range plans made in secret” (borrowing Steven Newcomb’s term for “conspiracy”) do exist. They exist because human beings with extreme ambitions exist—and they usually like to lie and scam. In fact, we can easily describe the entire known history of the past few thousand years as a story of very successful scams: scams based on sincere illusions, scams based on blatant deceit—but scams none the less, in a sense that somebody had an arbitrary ambitious idea, made it into a cause, got some funding, whipped together a bunch of willing or unwilling men with arms—and here we are. A lot of things that many generations of people have believed in with religious fervor have never been true in the physical sense—but none the less, many choices by millions of people have been made based on those beliefs...<<<Read More>>>...