I will never forget those early zoom meetings, when so many people seemed excited - like kids on Christmas morning kind of excited - about the whole thing. You nailed it with the phrase "their boring lives sparkled with purpose." They were superficially pretending that things were "scary" and "tragic" and "so much death" blah blah, but you could see that on some level, they were just thrilled to the gills to finally be living in "historic times" and to be able to participate in "the war on covid". They seemed to revel in staying home, or going out and performing cootie theater in their costumes (face masks), in silencing heretics, in lining up for salvation by injection and then announcing to everyone that they'd been injected, and in shunning the uninjected. Believe in Science! Trust the Experts (priests)!
The whole thing felt deeply religious in nature. There has been some critical social analysis of it, with people examining it as social contagion, mass formation, moral panic, Asch conformity experiment, Milgram experiment, etc., all of which certainly have some validity, but the one thing those analysis seems to miss is the way it all reeked of religion - belief, piety, rituals, shunning of heretics, and salvation through the savior of almighty Science.
On a related note, a phrase that just popped into my head is the title of a 2002 book by journalist Chris Hedges called "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning". It's been over 20 years since I read it, but the argument made in the book is reflected in the title. Covid was a fake war, but it sure did seem to give a lot of people meaning. Hedge's analysis may be yet another way of understanding covid. I may need to find my copy and re-read it and see how the argument holds up for a fake religious war.
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branchandroot
Re: Social engineering
Date: 2025-01-26 03:23 pm (UTC)I will never forget those early zoom meetings, when so many people seemed excited - like kids on Christmas morning kind of excited - about the whole thing. You nailed it with the phrase "their boring lives sparkled with purpose." They were superficially pretending that things were "scary" and "tragic" and "so much death" blah blah, but you could see that on some level, they were just thrilled to the gills to finally be living in "historic times" and to be able to participate in "the war on covid". They seemed to revel in staying home, or going out and performing cootie theater in their costumes (face masks), in silencing heretics, in lining up for salvation by injection and then announcing to everyone that they'd been injected, and in shunning the uninjected. Believe in Science! Trust the Experts (priests)!
The whole thing felt deeply religious in nature. There has been some critical social analysis of it, with people examining it as social contagion, mass formation, moral panic, Asch conformity experiment, Milgram experiment, etc., all of which certainly have some validity, but the one thing those analysis seems to miss is the way it all reeked of religion - belief, piety, rituals, shunning of heretics, and salvation through the savior of almighty Science.
On a related note, a phrase that just popped into my head is the title of a 2002 book by journalist Chris Hedges called "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning". It's been over 20 years since I read it, but the argument made in the book is reflected in the title. Covid was a fake war, but it sure did seem to give a lot of people meaning. Hedge's analysis may be yet another way of understanding covid. I may need to find my copy and re-read it and see how the argument holds up for a fake religious war.