I've been thinking about one of the curious phenomena seen during the Covid craze. Disease scares have always inflamed germophobes and hypochondriacs, but this public frenzy had a unique potential to turn people 180 degrees from their professed worldviews. Many people who could be identified as hippie alternative health enthusiasts became devotees of Big Pharma. People who had spent their lives espousing individualist and even anarchist worldviews started snitching on their neighbors for hosting backyard parties. There were also some cases of people moving in the opposite direction: living their lives entirely within the boundaries of the "normal" until the pandemic drove them to completely drop out of mainstream thinking, never to get a shot or send their children to public school again.
What caused this? An idea I've been toying with is that many of the nonconformists enjoyed thumbing their noses at power but they never had it in them to truly question the integrity of the people running the show. Authority figures could be short-sighted and foolish and there were some genuinely bad apples among them but it couldn't be that the entire system was hostile to its subjects. To take an anti-authoritarian stance during Covid meant facing up to the idea that the leaders of many countries didn't desire only obedience, but suffering and even the deaths of their people. Like Cypher in The Matrix they began to realize the true nature of their world and decided "ignorance is bliss."
One thing I noticed was that some of the lowest levels of "defection" occurred among people who already believed in a fundamentally corrupt and hostile power structure. Not merely a health food hippie or Bernie Sanders voter, but someone like a survivalist in a cabin believing the United States ceased to be independent with the formation of the Federal Reserve. I can't think of anyone I know of in these ideological categories who crossed over to become a system supporter. The pandemic reassured them that every detail of their worldviews was true.
As for the "normies" who went the other way, I get the sense that many of them had gone through their lives with perspectives that they never bothered to examine in detail. When you just coast and think what the TV tells you to think you don't have to put much work into it. Then the madness of the lockdowns and vaccines tore at the edges of their reality, they pulled the loose threads and the whole thing came unraveled in a heap. There's nothing like a fox injury to erode your faith in the government.
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branchandroot
Defecting Nonconformists
Date: 2024-02-27 11:09 pm (UTC)What caused this? An idea I've been toying with is that many of the nonconformists enjoyed thumbing their noses at power but they never had it in them to truly question the integrity of the people running the show. Authority figures could be short-sighted and foolish and there were some genuinely bad apples among them but it couldn't be that the entire system was hostile to its subjects. To take an anti-authoritarian stance during Covid meant facing up to the idea that the leaders of many countries didn't desire only obedience, but suffering and even the deaths of their people. Like Cypher in The Matrix they began to realize the true nature of their world and decided "ignorance is bliss."
One thing I noticed was that some of the lowest levels of "defection" occurred among people who already believed in a fundamentally corrupt and hostile power structure. Not merely a health food hippie or Bernie Sanders voter, but someone like a survivalist in a cabin believing the United States ceased to be independent with the formation of the Federal Reserve. I can't think of anyone I know of in these ideological categories who crossed over to become a system supporter. The pandemic reassured them that every detail of their worldviews was true.
As for the "normies" who went the other way, I get the sense that many of them had gone through their lives with perspectives that they never bothered to examine in detail. When you just coast and think what the TV tells you to think you don't have to put much work into it. Then the madness of the lockdowns and vaccines tore at the edges of their reality, they pulled the loose threads and the whole thing came unraveled in a heap. There's nothing like a fox injury to erode your faith in the government.