Comparing Lockdowns to the Iraq War

Both seem to follow a seven-step pattern:

1. SCARY PROBLEM causes panic among the population (9/11, COVID-19 outbreak)

2. General feeling that politicians must do SOMETHING to stop SCARY PROBLEM

3. Politicians roll out a SOMETHING despite the fact that there is no evidence the SOMETHING will do anything to solve the SCARY PROBLEM (Iraq War, lockdowns)

4. Public (and media) supports politicians doing this SOMETHING, assuming they can trust the experts and that politicians wouldn’t be advocating for it if it wasn’t going to help solve the SCARY PROBLEM

5. The SOMETHING doesn’t do anything to stop SCARY PROBLEM and actually causes more harm than good, but the public doesn’t recognize it and still continues to support the SOMETHING as a matter of inertia

6. Public finally realizes that the SOMETHING is actually doing more harm than good, and that their politicians are more inept and less driven by evidence than they thought

7. Public loses trust in those in the government who advocated the SOMETHING (Rumsfeld, Fauci)

“If not A then B” Thinking

One of the scourges of our time is “if not A then B” thinking. It might also be named the “false binary” fallacy or, in some senses, the “law of the excluded middle.” The idea is that if you are against one thing, then you must necessarily be in favor of a specific something else. If, for instance, you are against wokeness, then you must be a Trump supporter. Getting past this fallacy is one of the key challenges of our time, but it requires more nuanced thinking. The political binary of “left vs. right,” makes it especially hard, since we are told there is a “spectrum” and if you don’t want to be on the “left,” then you must necessarily be on the “right.” The idea that there are more options than two doesn’t even occur to many people because their operating paradigm doesn’t allow for it. But, sadly, both A and B are wrong in our current time and the Book of Mormon warned of problems we are seeing in both. Stoking of racial grievance and judging people based on ancestral wrongs is a problem warned of in the Book of Mormon, as is the tendency towards supporting an immoral strong man in defiance of democratic norms (King Men). The correct approach to most realms of life, including politics, is “neither A nor B” and until we can collectively get to this point, we will see a lot of people supporting a lot of really bad stuff from A, and a lot of really bad stuff from B.

Passing Fad or Permanent Trend?

The spread of wokism to all corners of society, with a concomitant tendency to restrict speech, fire heretics, and establish orthodoxy, is clearly a reality, but the question is, will it burn out, or is it a more permanent trend? In my optimistic moments, I see the comparisons to previous witch hunts (such as the McCarthy era) where, in the short term, decent people were cowed into silence by the powers that be, but in the long term, public opinion turned and the leaders of the witch hunts went from enjoying unchallenged power to being historical villains (Sewell, McCarthy). The opinion cascade peaked and reversed with a well-placed “have you no decency, sir?” in a public forum. But the differences make me think we are watching not a fad that will burn out, but a general move into a new medievalism. First, wokism isn’t just a hysterical reaction to a perceived new threat (communism), but an entirely new worldview. McCarthyism operated within an overriding Judeo-Christian worldview while Wokism is itself a new overriding worldview. Second, the spread of wokism has been long in developing. Whereas the red scare emerged quickly after World War II, the wokist perception of “oppression embedded in systems” has been growing and expanding for at least a generation. It’s not a sudden overreaction to a perceived threat, but a longstanding, long building worldview that didn’t flame into existence suddenly and so probably won’t flame out of existence suddenly. Third, the elites, by and large, were never on board with McCarthyism. It had the support of the masses, many politicians, and some cultural elites (e.g., the Hollywood studio heads), but it had significant opposition—virtually all academics, novelists, and journalists were vocally anti-McCarthy from the beginning. There is no such opposition today. Wokism dominates media, Hollywood, and academia with almost no concerted cultural pushback. Where are the Arthur Millers writing Broadway plays denouncing the cowardice and conformism? The religious elements of wokism and its takeover of virtually the entire elite culture make me believe that it’s a new revolutionary force, establishing orthodoxy much as Catholicism did at the time of Constantine, or Protestantism did at the time of Luther. The historical metaphors to 500AD seem more apropos than the metaphors to 1950AD.