The Covid pact

The best account of the process remains Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, written by the great Austrian economist and philosopher of freedom in the shadow of World War Two and the emerging Soviet Empire. The image that best captures Hayek's thesis is that of the slowly boiling frog. The tyranny most likely to succeed is that which promises utopian outcomes on earth, in our interests and with benign intent and methods. Give us a little more power, and we will look after you. From cradle to grave. Trust the State.

The most recent exemplar of this approach has been the fear campaign over climate change. This campaign of lies has convinced a sizable proportion of the West – governments, bureaucracies, corporates, innocent believers, fellow travellers, useful idiots – that we face catastrophe. Embedded narratives can be powerful, for the low information citizen. This has been the perfect dress rehearsal for the Covid panic. Convince the people that there is a threat, and we have the answer.

And we fell for it.

The one political philosopher I didn't mention earlier is Machiavelli. He explained how to do it. And his modern Branch Covidian followers have learned well. Adam and Eve fell for the snake's appeal to their "reason". They subsequently lost the lot. There is a lesson in the Genesis story.

What did Faust actually do? Here is one definition:

Faustian bargain, a pact whereby a person trades something of supreme moral or spiritual importance, such as personal values or the soul, for some worldly or material benefit, such as knowledge, power, or riches. The term refers to the legend of Faust (or Faustus, or Doctor Faustus), a character in German folklore and literature, who agrees to surrender his soul to an evil spirit (in some treatments, Mephistopheles, or Mephisto, a representative of Satan) after a certain period of time in exchange for otherwise unattainable knowledge and magical powers that give him access to all the world's pleasures. A Faustian bargain is made with a power that the bargainer recognizes as evil or amoral. Faustian bargains are by their nature tragic or self-defeating for the person who makes them, because what is surrendered is ultimately far more valuable than what is obtained, whether or not the bargainer appreciates that fact.

It sums up the last year rather prettily. Fits the Covid bill, n'est pas? It isn't pretty.