During the Covid response it has amazed me to witness otherwise ‘good’ people going along with – even relishing the lockdowns, masks, censorship, suppression of treatments, coerced injections, risking children to save adults, piling ludicrous debt onto future generations, creating a privileged and an ostracised class of citizen, human rights violations… and much more.
Intuitively, the harms from any one of the above are obvious to anyone thinking about it. Just one extra bit of imagination and the collateral damage from the whole becomes apparent. Our Covid cure is far, far worse than Covid itself would ever have been.
So why are ‘good people’ going along with such obvious harms being inflicted on both themselves and others? And why are some of them actively inflicting those harms?
A rare, ‘serious’ video from JP Sears sheds some light.
Kate Wand’s piece on this topic takes things deeper and makes it more personal to each of us. The Line Dividing Good and Evil passes through each of our hearts… and it is evil’s ordinary, banal nature that allows evil spread like a fungus.
Referencing the writings of Hannah Arendt and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn she suggests:
When people do not think, others can put thoughts in their heads. If the greatest acts of evil are committed and accomplished by ordinary people who have lost their ability to think, this leaves a wide gap easily filled with propaganda.
Kate Wand
So if someone has had their ability to think nullified by fear of say, an invisible, deadly virus potentially lurking in the breath of every person they encounter1… and that unthinking mind is then subjected to authoritative direction… then it won’t take much for them to go passively along with, or actively commit harm.
In fact it’ll probably seem to them that such behaviour is quite normal.
Even good.
If history lends prediction to the future, then our fate depends on the sum of our personal choices and moral conviction, and perhaps above all, our ability to think.
Kate Wand