So obvious it’s not obvious

We must not ever let lies get so ubiquitous again. We must stop swooning to the orchestra of those who benefit from our wholescale gullibility 

I’ve spent the better part of three years trying to figure out a central question. Why did so many individuals and institutions fail to protect our rights and liberties and thus set countries and the entire developed world on the path to decline, fact free hysteria, stamping down on civil liberties over a viral strain? The failure was grave and existential. The betrayals were for the ages. The blinkers were terrifying and virtually all encompassing.

And as 2023 gets underway, if we are truly to rebound, to recover, to move on, we had best make our peace with the cataclysm that we allowed and enabled. And Sri Lanka’s is even more acute, “pandemic” and “post pandemic” but the fault lines are the same.

One of the fastest routes to solvency for Sri Lanka is tourism income. I tried presenting to tourism authorities, with the backing of private sector commitments, a recommendation to get a proper PR company hired, and most crucially, briefed, so they could proactively address the confused, mistaken views, incessant media distortions of Sri Lanka’s earlier political convulsions have produced. 

I was told they would review the idea. We were then told such a PR company had already been hired and private sector support wouldn’t be needed. I asked if we might help brief them. No reply.

As I wrote in my last article, Cambodia with 16 million in population, and essentially three stunning sites, has had over 1.5 million tourists for 2022 with a far higher spend per tourist (we hit a creditable 720,000 roughly, but forward bookings are currently “promising but uncertain”). At our height when we were topping 2 million, Cambodia had 6 million per annum. These aren’t laurels to rest on, when our attractions, appeal and seductiveness are so overwhelming if properly packaged and presented.

I also mentioned British friends, annual visitors to Sri Lanka who love the island and its people, said their own friends cancelled visits saying, “You’re brave to go there.” Well now, this same sentiment from the UK has been reported recently by the Tourism Alliance which has spearheaded their own private campaign in lieu of a national one. 

And I reflected in this vein on something else I reported, Montenegrin friends, 20-year residents of Singapore, also were beguiled by Sri Lanka (so easy to be, when introduced properly). They said, Singaporeans told them, “This is not the time to visit there.” Surely then, it is “high time” to get our PR act together, if even our regional neighbourhood still has these misapprehensions. Again, this is so “obvious it’s not obvious” apparently.

During the “pandemic,” on other fronts, countries like Sri Lanka economically rent themselves asunder while seeking a badge of “good citizenship” from intellectually and morally bankrupt institutions that completely changed all their guidance and kept “switching” advice, guidelines, the very definitions of things from “cases” to “vaccines” to “immunity” to classifying deaths on death certificates and more. And then Sri Lanka’s leaders threw a tantrum at having to change habits and reflexes that were destroying the country. Surely more chest pounding would do the trick. Surely another donor/saviour will emerge from the international woodwork.

Globally, it wasn’t a pretty sight either. The courts were supposed to protect our liberties based on something akin to the US Bill of Rights. They did not. They pounded pulpits at times, but it never translated into any meaningful restraint. 

The scientists were supposed to rally around facts and known truth. They did not. They recited the talking points of their paymasters. And eminent specialists were censored, smeared, deplatformed and attacked with a virulence that belied genuine disagreement.

The economists were supposed to defend a functioning market. For the most part, they did not. Fantasy tales of money printing, and cities being “revitalised” by closures rather than having their vitality, their elan, their core, compromised and their ability to function, eviscerated by lockdowns, abounded.

The media was supposed to operate as a watchdog of the politicians. They acquiesced to propaganda. They blathered, they equivocated, they indulged in histrionics, they delivered as “conclusions” what were barely coherent hypotheses. For example, the conflation between “cases” and “deaths” and being unable to consult seroprevalence reports on actual fatality rates (equivalent to a median strain of influenza globally) and ignoring lack of verifiable hard evidence on outdoor transmission and asymptomatic illness, or not challenging the buffoonery of the “testing regimes” with untested tests which spewed out different results based on different cycle settings.

The digital platforms were supposed to guarantee free speech. They operated as censors instead. They shut down dissent. Intelligence agencies used them as platforms for their own aims and ends.

The academy was supposed to be a sanctuary for truth. They bought and enforced the lies, being part of the quarantining, covering students’ faces, and jabbing kids for no reason. No dissent or debate was allowed. Autonomy over your own body was a heretical concept, while the very concept of “education” must have curdled in the mouths of these cronies.

The think tanks funded by private monies were supposed to provide an advocacy buffer on behalf of citizens and research. Yet the same poisoned funding wells determined who got grants, and so these institutions competed by being feckless with nearly every sitting politician also cowering in fear.

Nations and states were supposed to be able to resist impositions of the central government bureaucracies or the dictates of unelected global institutions like WHO that became surrogates for national judgment.

Initially, in the US, 49 of 50 states sold out and went along with the demands of the hegemon. The red states came around gradually but months of damage were irreversible. 

Sweden was a marvellous, heroic contrarian, vilified, with extrapolations of ruin. Now, with among the lowest global excess mortality numbers and a relatively healthy economy without the shutdowns, their heroic public health leaders seem exemplars of courage and astute judgment. Unflappable, almost prescient. 

What is the reason for this meltdown? There isn’t only one but there is a central theme to them all. All of these individuals, managers, and institutions chose fear and self-enrichment over principle and truth. And with that choice, came state violence. 

When internment camps are considered, and on the other side children are wooed by ice cream to make a life decision of this magnitude (getting jabbed with essentially untested technology with real life implications when the law doesn’t let them drink, smoke or drive for good reason), you know up is down and straight ahead has gone sideways.

And it isn’t as if there was one moment in which the choice was made. When did Sri Lanka, with virtually no cases and no deaths, decide to implode? When did it decide at every flutter of a “case surge” (symptoms be damned) to open and close its economy as if it was a faucet, with ruinous business and economic consequences? And in the midst of all this, why was the eco-lunacy of no fertilisers, proven nowhere in the world, allowed to become policy? 

Too much derangement, locally and globally

Too much of the derangement, locally and globally, happened one day at a time or even one hour at a time. When the lockdowns were first announced, they were localised: mayors cancelling events for fear of COVID spread. Maybe they were under the impression that this truly was a plague that would wipe out the population, perhaps even believing the ridiculous propaganda videos coming out of China. 

Even then, there was never a chance that locking down would solve anything. The pathogen was airborne, it had been circulating since 2019, the floating cruise ships showed mild infection and fatality rates, and we knew it was primarily dangerous for the elderly and those with multiple comorbidities where COVID was either incidental or a member of the cast, rather than chief morbidity protagonist.

And these facts were easy enough to check. There really was no excuse since we had a good grip on the nature of the issue from mid-February 2020 or even much earlier. But people in a position to do something to protect freedoms primarily joined the “tyrant” bandwagon, and extolled fear rather than rallying around facts.

Perhaps in spasms of “magical thinking” unsure how to stop what had been started, they hoped that things would calm down a tad and the environment would cool down and then they would perhaps point out certain obvious realities and offer an off ramp and take their bows. 

But vanity and venality overtook prudence, and that day never arrived. March came and went, then April, then May, and the lockdowns, wild spending, and brutal business and school closures continued on and on, and the inexorable destruction of that which we claimed we were aiming to protect became ever more horrifying. And the detachment from reality had to become ever more feverish and immune to any rational challenge.

Why didn’t more people speak out? Why didn’t the courts work? Why didn’t all the people who today say that they knew something was wrong from the start speak out when it was most necessary to do so? 

It was risk avoidance, and it was herd infatuation, and yes it was a mass crowd induced “trance” that for those who had lost the habit of independent thought, supplanted real-time analysis and assessment. When “feelings” matter more than truth, the central plank of the Woke fiction, truly we are in dire straits.

Our fellows didn’t want to be wrong. Too many icons were on board surely. They didn’t want to lose their funding. They didn’t want to be screamed at on social media. They didn’t want to be “cancelled,” so they chose silence even in the face of grotesque outrages, or the wanton destruction of their children’s wellbeing and education, or the decimating of businesses or subcultures and ways of life. 

And if you think about it, once individuals and institutions started down this path of lies, there was really no point at which it became obvious that it was time to turn back. 

A commentator writes, “I know this from having been in very close contact with people at institutions that stayed silent. They were frustrated at their bosses, but their bosses had bosses and so on and no one wanted to be guilty of insubordination, lest they lose their secure income.” 

And not just “insubordination”, outright viability. US nurses to this day say that if not “vaccinated” they cannot get a job! They can only get exemptions where they are already employed, and they argue that this is why there is such a defection of providers in healthcare. People do not wish to be obligated to abdicate their physical autonomy or be forced to stifle themselves with useless face nappies all day, and inhale fibres and toxins from them and be unable to breathe, when clearly no positive results have been forthcoming from this carnival.

Back when everyone had a good excuse. So now, Sri Lankans who looked at national projects that still haven’t delivered and debts that still won’t budge, would do well to remember that “cost/benefit” is almost as implacable a reality as gravity. 

When months and then even a year or two years went by, and the silence became embarrassing, for the autocratic “democratic” leaders there was only one next step: just wait for the subject to change and pretend like nothing ever happened. Never admit wrongdoing, act as if the silence was intentional and strategically correct the whole time, and then as the world lurches into the crisis we caused, yell for another emergency somehow, somewhere. 

This is more or less where we are today. None of the major institutions in society today have much residual credibility. Not academia, not media, not science, not courts, not think tanks, not medical leaders, not corporations, not governors, and not politicians. 

There are some wonderful exceptions and most of them were shockingly brave and in a position to speak or otherwise paid a huge price for their words and analysis. And they are still paying and are still on the fringes. But that “fringe” is growing, and we have to hope that as the lies continue to be chipped away, the truth will increasingly come out. 

But for the most part, so many of the same people who utterly failed to stand up and denounce these outrages now are deeply interested in having the whole of society simply move on and forget.

Things began to change

At some point, little by little, things began to change. A crescendo of commentators finally started to break through via alternative websites and media and forums. The results became too embarrassing, including the utter failure of the “vaccines” with their mounting adverse effects. 

Courts began to side with our “rights” once more. States began to repeal restrictions. Governors started shaping up. Religious institutions opened their doors, some in defiance. 

Businesses stepped up, however haltingly, and however belatedly, and said no more. Universities dialled down the oppressing of their students. Doctors cautiously but increasingly started taking on their medical boards, and early treatments via real therapeutics continued to deliver results and had people flocking to them, medical establishment or not. 

And the mandates started falling one by one. Finally, even the mainstream media has started publishing some actual facts, though with more tap dancing than was needed, and with stoic grimaces plastered on their faces, but it has started.

Eventually, public opinion was swayed, people saw A-listers maskless cavorting in crowds with no outbreaks. The same in protests, and sporting events and concerts. 

They stopped “boosting” after finally realising they were being “boosted” for a now non-existent version of this “virus” and anyway neither “spread” nor “immunity” were fostered by these jabs even at the outset. And then they learned these “may” actually make you more susceptible. 

So all that started shifting, people were getting educated, getting the arguments right, people finally looking at the facts that were increasingly hard to ignore or avoid, and they were, in turn, informed by a small group of people who took the risk to speak out for truth when the whole world seemed to be going the other way.

This shift in public opinion is what gave cover to judges, corporate leaders, educational leaders, pastors, editors, and even managers finally to say that they would no longer live the lie and instead would stand up…too little, too late, but at least, at last. 

As a commentator has very aptly opined, “It took far too long—what should have taken days took years instead—and the carnage left in the wake of cowardice is truly unspeakable. So much has been broken. So much trust has been lost. So many leading institutions have been discredited. And so many intellectuals who advertised their services as brave warriors have proven themselves to be nothing more than regime sycophants. There continues to be far too much silence about this whole problem simply because so many people and institutions want to keep it that way.”

We must not ever let lies get so ubiquitous again. We must stop swooning to the orchestra of those who benefit from our wholescale gullibility. Seedlings of dissent should be honoured and irrigated, particularly in a crisis. And we need to protect those dissenters. We have to give particularly well-credentialed and experienced naysayers, megaphones and not muzzles.

The history of civilisation advancing, the recovery of Sri Lanka, the region, and world, will require a true Socratic interrogation of facts as they are and as they unfold. And it will require the moral courage to defend our right to live, love and express essential freedoms in a functioning society: a society that truly is for the people and by the people, not for and by puppet masters.

(The writer is the founder and CEO of EPL Global and founder of Sensei Lanka, a global consultant with over 30 years strategic leadership experience and now, since March 2020, a globally recognised COVID researcher and commentator.)