Note from Adam Fischer, Publisher
I wrote two weeks ago that I was recently asked about my personal thoughts on what this person perceived as an attack against our personal freedom. This person asked me as someone who is passionate about finding financial freedom and helping others find it as well to give my thoughts about the attack on personal freedoms. So, I decided to share a series of thoughts. I am going to share my thoughts in two separate blog posts and have my brother, Justin Fischer share his thoughts in a third post on the response people need to take. Here, are Justin's thoughts.
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From Justin Fischer, Editor
Starting in late March, early April of 2020 the political context through most of the world changed drastically. While the details and specifics varied, most political jurisdictions imposed some level of lockdowns on the people as a means of containing the spread of Covid 19. My goal in this piece is twofold; first, to argue that the response to government lockdowns by most political factions has been either insufficient if not outright vile. Second, in broad brush strokes, an attempt at defining what is needed politically in responding to the lockdowns.
When it comes to the American political scene, the normal line of demarcation is left versus right. While I think this is overly simplistic and overlooks a great degree of nuance, the concept of left and right have explanatory value. What has the left’s response been to the lockdown? Overwhelmingly, it has been defense and an attempt at justifying them. I believe there are two specific reasons for this. One is that across a large swath of the political left you can find a cult of scientism. Essentially, this is the position that the methods of natural science (physics, biology, chemistry, etc) are the correct means for understanding human life and interactions. The implication of this worldview is that people should be ruled by the scientific experts who have ascended to the status of philosopher or king. The second specific reason is that the left now is almost solely about behavioral control. While they still may pay lip service to their traditional concerns of economics, foreign policy, and civil liberties, all of that is subsumed to their cultural vision and their attempt at controlling the behavior of people to act in accordance with their vision. The lockdown - restricting normal human life while is a blunt instrument is still an instrument of behavioral control.
The response to the lockdowns by the left has been overwhelmingly vile, the response by the right has overwhelmingly been insufficient. While a sizable portion, if not the majority of the American right has been opposed to lockdowns, the root cause for their opposition has been that they see it as an attack on their way of life, while I believe a good argument can be made to justify this view, by not grounding their opposition to the lockdowns on the principle of human freedom they become prey to political drifting. As they grounded their opposition in the larger context of the culture wars, their attention became distracted by the rioting over the summer and through the presidential election and the aftermath.
As, in large part, the political response by the government to covid 19 lockdowns has either been offensive or inadequate. What should have been the correct political response? It is my belief that the correct response should have been one of radical opposition. In using the term radical - I mean radical in both senses, radical in the literal meaning and in the political meaning.
The literal definition of the word radical, by examining its origins in Latin means getting to the root. What is the root basis for the justification of lockdowns? The inordinate and unjustified hysteria surrounding Covid-19. What we have is a virus that isn’t the existential threat to the human race that it has been portrayed as. What we have is a virus that 99 plus percent of people who are afflicted with it recover from. What we find is that it is being used as a means to take our greatest freedoms away in our lifetime in the form of government lockdowns. To be radical in our opposition to the lockdowns means debunking the lies and half-truths surrounding Covid-19 that are being used to justify government lockdowns as a response.
The thing is that when most people consider the word radical it conjures up images as something that is outside the norm and antagonistic to the mainstream. It is my contention that political opposition to the lockdowns should also be radical in this sense. Since last spring, there has been much talk of “the new normal”. While lockdowns have been the impetus for this, it is clear that this is not where it will end. No one sees a push for mandatory vaccines, immunity passports, a ramping up of government surveillance, contact tracing, and a push for digital fiat currency. What we have here is an issue of the old parable of the boiling frog. The parable states that to boil a frog you first slowly increase the temperature. If you immediately scald the frog it reflexes react and it will jump out of the water. By battering humanity with lockdowns it is as if governments have scalded us first. Now there is such a desire for a return to something approaching normalcy, even a “new normal” it is much more likely that people will become complacent in government further imposing the things mentioned above.
This is why an anti-lockdown movement should be radical. It shouldn’t exist solely within the context of culture wars but transcend that paradigm. It needs to be educational in the sense of refusing falsehoods about Covid-19 and the effects of the lockdowns. But it also needs to be an activist movement that fights the political mainstream and is also ironically, counter-cultural in that it reminds people of the old normal.
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