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Lockdowns are dogma, a tenant of faith, a new religion.
It just seems like a lot of people who think of themselves as intelligent progressives imagine a mask-wearing soy-eating tech-humping bloodless future where we feel self-satisfied but alone…
We don’t have much compunction about preserving the human spirit — keeping it human — that’s far less important than keeping the abstraction of the human-machine humming.
What I’ve realized about masks — regardless of their marginal effectiveness — is that they’re easy and that’s why people like them. If you want to feel good about yourself, just take a stroll in your new max — show off for the neighborhood. Virtue signaling isn’t really even the right phrase — ‘virtue pandering’ is slightly better. It’s really a form of begging — a way of asking for social credit.
In a sense, irrational Coronaphobia represents a trend which pre-dates Coronavirus: the influence of the Internet on material, physical, social reality — the eery co-evolution of the Internet and the world in which the world begins to resembles the Internet… in which people disbelieve their senses and believe what the screen is telling them.
In Platonic terms: the en-cavement of the Mind.