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During the COVID era, physical things — like our businesses, our schools, our general social intercourse — have been sacrificed to the cult of Science (of ‘following the science’). The traditional human, biological, embodied means of responding to stress, which are inherently physical, inherently based on human contact and closeness, have been replaced with a ‘safe’ scientistic isolation (which also, not inconsequentially, means digitalization). Physical proximity has been made, in many places, illegal, or semi-illegal. In place of physical entities and interactions, there is a proliferation of dematerialized entities: Only Fans accounts, Tinder accounts, stock trading accounts, Amazon Prime accounts; digital theaters, Zoom colleges, telemedicine. This amounts to an intense existential castration — a neutering, a hamstringing — where the only kind of relationship you can have is the narcissistic relationship between you and your digital self: who you constantly monitor through a veil of your own choosing.
No particular statistic is needed to justify the observation that Americans are sick and depressed. COVID struck an already enfeebled society. In response, that society, has, in large part, demanded that the government further enfeeble it by protecting it from all risk. Subtly, covertly, the relationship between what I’ll call the digital left — the vaguely well-meaning herds of Karens and grad…
