COVID-19 was a test. It was only a test.
They wanted to know how many people would comply with a complete re-ordering of their lives based on no science at all, just random orders...
How did the "land of the free and home of the brave", so easily turn into the country of obedience and conformity?
Hannah Arendt Was Really a Prophet Against Conformity
There was, she believed, a totalitarian germ in the Western liberal political order. The instruments for the total control of opinion existed in every advanced technological society—and some of those instruments were already at work in America, even if selectively and half-buried under pretexts and euphemisms...
How could totalitarian methods ever draw the compliance of free citizens? A cause of the peril, Arendt believed, quite apart from propaganda and coercion, was the enchantment of success. A government that could exact apparent agreement with one radical change after another was given legitimacy by the mere fact that it was never stopped. What Germany witnessed in the mid-1930s, she wrote in “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” was not simply the corralling of a stupefied populace by the promises of a master demagogue. More remarkable was the apparently sincere
overnight change of opinion that befell a great majority of public figures in all walks of life and all ramifications of culture, accompanied as it was by the incredible ease with which lifelong friendships were broken and discarded. In brief, what disturbed us was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends who had done nothing to bring this situation about. They were not responsible for the Nazis; they were only impressed by the Nazi success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it.
This belief in a determined trajectory, an irresistible and progressive arc of History toward an assured goal, was the metaphysical fallacy against which Arendt’s political criticism was always directed. To the person who says “Put yourself on the right side of History,” the candid and self-respecting answer can only be “You are asking me to be irresponsible.” But appeals for proscription and censorship on behalf of “safety,” even in a tolerant democracy, always return us to a single temptation: the demand that we concede an ever-engrossing prerogative to the powers that be, in the cause of comity, or stability, or a less troubled consensus...
More Info:
- The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude
- Judging the Masses: Spectatorship, Action, and Politics in Arendt’s Critique of the Masses
- When the Whole World Goes Mad: Mattias Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism
- The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Mattias Desmet
- The dark side of obedience to authority
- The Psychology of Obedience: Are We in a Gigantic Milgram Experiment?
