The morning after

Sadly, after people have been systematically terrorised, gaslighted, threatened, tormented, stripped of autonomy, fed pseudo-science (cases without symptoms, phantom asymptomatic patients, PCR tests which don’t reliably diagnose, given “jabs” that aren’t “vaccines” and don’t stop reinfection or spread), any corner to which they can retreat that seems “normal”, is gratefully accepted – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara

So, here we are, in the aftermath of aftermaths. A world ruptured. The UK in an economic tailspin. The US dealing with public health meltdowns as mRNA “vaccines” reveal their dangerous inefficacy. Europe grappling with energy crises, Sri Lanka teetering here at home, and the entire region still seeking to pilot a path forward while the Russia-Ukraine conflagration continues unabated.

And there is a parallel world, where CNN proclaims the “World’s Top 50 Bars” (Barcelona having displaced New York and London) and the glitterati continue to glide and rampage unfettered, hoping to out-run their demons ahead of more dubious pandemics.

The “regurgitant chorus” are all the Covidian Cultists, all the inflation deniers, all those who were blithe in the face of businesses destroyed and educations undermined, having to explain how this trifling pathogen with a global 99% recovery rate became the Alpha and Omega of everything.

The fear and hatred orgy is finally abating, and the “COVID illiteracy” is now confined primarily to insisting that an airborne pathogen be detained by a loose fitting face nappy in outdoor public places as I encountered in one lonely checkpoint in Anuradhapura (not one verified instance of outdoor transmission according to the US CDC). This was hard not to ignore, as an “official” hurriedly scampered by with no trace of the “masquerade.” 

Here in Lanka, everyone is still pontificating about Gota, fertilisers, currency float, deficits, ignoring that most of the people culpable are still in positions of relative influence and have yet to explain why they were so obtusely rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic for lo these many years? 

Like a penitent drunk, we are signed up for the IMF “financial sobriety” package, and we are congratulating ourselves for having at last, scampered out of the quicksand.

Psyop galore

So, it’s not a pretty reflection. Thousands killed, adverse effects, lockdown impacts, deferred medical care. Here, sheer surging poverty and the decimating of ways of life. Everywhere, too many disabled, victims of idiotic experimental “vaccines” they were coerced into taking.

And just this week, in a European court, a Pfizer senior executive “confesses” that Pfizer never tested to see if their product would have any impact on “transmissibility” and in fact any of us who could read knew no such claim was even filed in the original EUA (Emergency Use Authorization). 

Therefore, any “mandate” was illicit, any attempt to disenfranchise someone for not wishing to be a guinea pig for inadequately tested protocols, was outrageous. 

Societies were rent asunder, economies were crippled (and here with outrageous debt management, never-ending curfews and fertiliser insanity we added insult to injury), trust in institutions discredited, the rule of law and constitutional precepts became trinkets in a power bazaar.

The dust of this dudgeon has far from settled and will take years for the damage to be assessed, psychologically, emotionally, tangibly. Friends and families alienated and estranged, and those culpable, and the masses who demonstrated hysterical gullibility, are already hard at it to “recontextualise”, rationalise, outright deny and “memory-hole” the damage, while averting their gaze from the fascistic dystopia “surround sound” of it all.

The “COVID restrictions” are now largely ditched and only ceremonially or formulaically followed if at all. A “new normal” is being proclaimed again, and the pathetic “Monkeypox” attempted “pandemic” fell as flat as it deserved to. You can only pummel people with so much “BS” when they’ve seen behind the curtain one too many times.

Sadly, after people have been systematically terrorised, gaslighted, threatened, tormented, stripped of autonomy, fed pseudo-science (cases without symptoms, phantom asymptomatic patients, PCR tests which don’t reliably diagnose, given “jabs” that aren’t “vaccines” and don’t stop reinfection or spread), any corner to which they can retreat that seems “normal”, is gratefully accepted. And worse…it is embraced as a “breakthrough!”

So the brutal “morning after” is dawning, and now we are slowly facing how we took a wrecking ball to hard won progress and liberties almost everywhere. We did incalculable harm to small businesses, to children, to education at large, to mutual trust. This was never about a pandemic, it was about managing an overheated economy without enough credit, about conditioning masses to fear and about coercion via a Pavlovian behavioural dance

The vicissitudes of belief

So, now in Lanka, everyone is economically savvy, and to hear the tale, never was frenzied enough to go along with the “spending” fever or to have “swooned” over debt drenched infrastructure projects. 

And all over the world, people are persuading themselves they never believed the ridiculous tale of needing to shut down a planet over a garden variety pathogen that was highly infectious and so mildly lethal that there was globally an average age of death above normal life span and no risk for those below 65 and not awash in comorbidities. 

So, to placate “power” we are now accepting “the new spin” and desperately redirecting our beliefs so we can be taken into the new fold. 

We humans have an unholy capability of forcing ourselves to believe whatever is necessary for economic and social approval and thereby we think, survival. And this trumps pretence, this is akin to religious conversion. It is overt denial of anything that contradicts the flimsy, spurious, web of lies we are fed, as long as there is direct personal advantage.

This though is not a “breakdown” much less a “breakthrough.” It is axiomatic as a human coping system; it is how social cohesion is ratified and maintained. It is how we indoctrinate our children. It is how we “hypnotise” armies and educational departments, mass repetition of the prevailing evangel and vehement censure of that which contradicts or questions. And yes, some of this, is inevitable.

And while this is almost trite as we review human pathology, it is rare to be able to observe this up close like this, so visibly, unshrouded, in the context of everyday life, with such wild oscillations from one “reality” to another.

This has been a mass formation pageant. Impoverished emotional lives, frayed social bonds, free floating anxiety, and massive clique formation. 

And the masses inducted themselves into this fervour – not wishing to be demonised by governments, mocked by media, ostracised and excluded by friends, shunned by family, tossed out of jobs, censored, and in parts of the world beaten and arrested by police.

Has anyone seen a plausible “emergency” require so much cajoling? Finally, the Guardian newspaper has seen fit to publish an Op-Ed from an eminent UK Barrister decrying this lunacy.

Here’s Adam Wagner: “It’s just over two and a half years since Boris Johnson gave us a “very simple instruction,” that we “must” stay at home, followed – three days later – by a law that for the first time in our history would impose a 24-hour curfew on almost the entire population. The years, months, weeks and days since have been so relentless – and at times almost beyond belief – that it is difficult to begin to process them. Many of us have experienced personal bereavement, and everyone has been touched in some way.

But as tempting as it is to move on, to focus on other important issues vexing our society, there are some aspects of the past three years we must face up to.

There are a hundred lenses through which to view this important period in modern history, but as a barrister I have looked at the more than 100 laws that placed England in lockdown, imposed hotel quarantine, international travel restrictions, self-isolation, face coverings and business closures.

These were probably the strangest and most extraordinary laws in England’s history, imposing previously unimaginable restrictions on our social lives, bringing into the realm of the criminal law areas of life – where we could worship, when we could leave home, even who we could hug – that had previously been purely a matter of personal choice.”

By early 2020, the Johnson government already had form for seeing democracy as a gadfly to be swatted away, having tried, and failed – thanks to the Supreme Court – to shut down Parliament for weeks to ram through a Brexit deal. When the pandemic hit, it is no surprise that it took the same approach to involving parliament in the most consequential decisions and laws in living memory.

“The Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 allowed for ministers to enact the coronavirus regulations with almost no parliamentary scrutiny. Of 109 lockdown laws, only eight were considered by parliament before coming into force, usually only a day before. The rest became law (literally) as soon as Matt Hancock, the then Health Secretary, put his signature at the bottom of the page.

I am not suggesting that emergency law-making would ever be straightforward and neat, following all the processes of ordinary legislation. During public emergencies, events move swiftly and mercilessly. But it did not have to be like this.

Also troubling was the constant refrain that the Government was ‘following the science’, by which it meant its scientific advisory group, SAGE. But decisions were ultimately taken in the extremely powerful but opaque COVID-19 Cabinet committees, presided over by four ministers – Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Matt Hancock and Michael Gove. No minutes were released and no explanation offered of how decisions were made. This was the most powerful Government committee since the Second World War but received no scrutiny. Important political decisions need to be understood, scrutinised and tested. These hardly were.

Parliament relegated itself to a “1,400-person rubber stamp”, Wagner says; the police, “floundered between excessive and unjustified intrusions into our private lives” and “attempting to stay out of the fray altogether”; the courts ducked responsibility, repeatedly ruling that pandemic policy, “even when it interfered with fundamental rights” was “a matter for Government and Parliament, not judges”.

It should be a wake-up call, he says – “the ease with which ancient freedoms such as the right to protest, to worship, to see our families, were removed essentially by decisions of a tiny group of ministers” – as it is only a matter of time before a new crisis will arise.

And Lanka, we should be as chilled, and as outraged and as scandalised, and on guard as anyone. Asserting “pandemic” and shouting “curfew” should not be enough to take over a country, much less undermine its social and democratic fabric. There is a reason it was never done before.

Changing realities yet again

So now, mRNA jabbed countries show unbecoming “excess mortality” compared to those countries with minimal “vaccination” or those that didn’t use experimental methodologies for their “voodoo”. So “the science is evolving” we are told.

And here in Lanka, perhaps “the Economics is evolving” as long as we can no longer keep imbibing absurdities, the evolution might actually be taking place. Perhaps reducing military expenditure, government expenditure and not being so egregiously debt-led may finally come home to roost and revving up our economic engine and competitiveness and human capital might actually be truly accepted as grand projects worth undertaking. 

Otherwise, we just align behind political grievances here and overseas, fresh terrors are sought. The fanatical disdain for the “unvaccinated” in New York subways re the “masquerade” has now morphed into “You do you,” very convenient now when all the hissing vitriol has been revealed to have been based on no facts whatsoever.

Now fanatically we’re after “the Russians” and Ukranian “Neo-Nazis” are somehow acceptable as are felons in the US subjected to “racist” bail policies who emerge and repeat their behaviour as if to make a point. And we dare not say it. The Woke intellectual and moral thuggery continues its wanton march.

But as murder rates rise, and energy prices soar, and billions get “laundered” through the Ukraine, and the same cohorts that destroyed the economy here are back to political posturing, the surviving critical faculties of a critical few are plunging them into understandable cognitive dissonance or borderline psychosis.

Earlier if you mentioned the curfews were bankrupting us, credentialed hacks were trotted out who spoke about the economic “windfall” from eliminating COVID, though they must have known that with animal reservoirs involved “eliminating COVID” was pure fiction. And Australia and New Zealand unfettered after years of being sealed off, had a recurringly ugly exchange with reality in terms of both “cases” and “deaths” associated with COVID and otherwise. 

And with such low lethality, compared to poverty and hunger and killer illnesses not treated, the ice of sanity around these prognostications was thin indeed.

Of course, the imperious scientific high ground was demonstrated by threatening internment camps in Australia and Germany and wooing with ice cream cones in Canada, with armed police never far away, and in the UK, drones following people into country hikes when they might at most have been threatening a few shrubs and certainly for an airborne pathogen already widely circulated, this was otherwise sheer parody.

We can’t ever allow this again

We cannot blithely smile at economic ruin just so long as we get short term hand outs and unearned credit and get “bubble” wealth. And enough realities kept emerging to pop people out of their trance states, so they had to wilfully choose to re-enter them. We all did to some extent.

So the brutal “morning after” is dawning, and now we are slowly facing how we took a wrecking ball to hard won progress and liberties almost everywhere. We did incalculable harm to small businesses, to children, to education at large, to mutual trust. This was never about a pandemic, it was about managing an overheated economy without enough credit, about conditioning masses to fear and about coercion via a Pavlovian behavioural dance.

The terms “overreaction” or the statement “mistakes were made” cannot come close to the horror inflicted – essentially destabilising and restructuring the entire global economy while psychologically crippling and economically crippling countless children as well as families. A sedate piece of lamentation in mainstream media seems almost obscene.

And how many “dress rehearsals” have there been for reality avoidance? From the Vietnam War to Iraq, from economic meltdown in 2007 to Swine Flu fraud? 

Could 2023 be the pendulum swinging back to being in greater love with reality, with meeting crisis early, with engaging facts so we can transform them, with creating capabilities that respond to our real challenges? 

Could for Sri Lanka this be a time to re-ignite human capital and redefine value creation and value delivery? For the world at large, could this be an end to reflexive panic and a search for a purpose worth living into and living up to, personally, socially and civilisationally? 

(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.)