From the White-PillBox: Part 13 - Fauci edition 2

There's delicious irony that Fauci White Pills have their own mutations. One of his variants may well have infected the State’s ability to start new panics.

Recall that a key tactic of the State is to leverage public fear. When people are afraid, they lose objectivity and reason. Their sense of panic makes them more likely to blindly follow authority.

The history of the last 100 years confirms this; a continuous parade of crises of one sort or another dominating public attention. This has helped cement the idea that political authority is legitimate in the first place. In a condition of fear, questioning authority is the last thought that occurs to a person.

One would hope society might have learned the “fool me once” lesson at some point. After all, no crisis ever lives up to the hype…yet the public accepts the very next one as if history started 15 minutes ago.

I expect one reason for this is because most crises are not universal. That is, in any given fear campaign, typically only part of the population is panicked. Some might perceive population growth as critical, others not. Some might see environmental concerns as world threatening, others not. Some view a particular foreign country or political figure as a reason to panic, while others do not.

Therefore, since not every crisis is immediate to everyone, most do not sense the continuous attempt by the State to instill fear. The panics are spaced in time far enough to mask the pattern.

Once in a while, however, the State gets lucky and can foment almost universal fear. Recent examples of this were: World War II with Hitler and the Japanese; the Soviet scare; and the terror scare after 9/11. The State managed to do this most successfully with COVID.

And the support the State gave to Anthony Fauci permitted him to boost the panic mightily. He stoked fear time and again. He relentlessly used every piece of news about the virus to sustain the hysteria.

What he did not realize is that he was unintentionally (and again, ironically), helping inoculate the public. With each new scare announcement, more people reached the point of thinking, “Oh, really? What now?”. Many are now reaching the “okay, enough is enough” point.

This is not to say the inoculation was universal; simply that he compressed the time between each panic-announcement. He delivered so many scary predictions in such rapid succession, that more and more people easily saw the pattern: essentially, the “boy who cried wolf” lesson, globally, and in real time.

How this is a Fauci White Pill variant

Fauci was the face of COVID, endorsed by the State and every influential institution. This conferred upon him the same incentive for abuse that is characteristic of State power. So rather than navigating the virus as a classic health concern by encouraging level-headed reason and open dialogue, he used his power to cause COVID to become a global hysteria.

No doubt his position bought him a decent ego boost, at least in the short term. But he and the State created an extraordinary White Pill: they may have permanently undercut all future State scare attempts.

As trust in Fauci wanes and the COVID hysteria is unmasked, future panics will more likely be seen as overblown from the start. And that covers all scares: wars, terror, environment, health, racial, you name it.

To Statists it’s a true Black Pill for future propaganda: they will have a harder time creating, popularizing and maintaining public fear.

But for the rest of us it’s a solid White Pill - potent protection against future scare-mutations. Tomorrow’s fear campaigns will be diluted, as compared to those of the past.

Will some people nonetheless feel panic and urgency about perceived threats arising from Russia, China or the Middle East? From environmental news? From another terror scare? From another health concern?

Most certainly some will. But it is naive to think that there could ever again be a panic that grips the attention and sees the same level of blind compliance that the COVID hysteria saw. The State, and its assigned cult leader Fauci, were too wrong, too often, and too publicly.

As I’ve argued before, the COVID response has been a genuine and historic case of mass hysteria. But remember the panic and its aftermath are occurring in an age of instantaneous information flow. As the hysteria dissipates, it may only take months for the events of COVID to be seen from the perspective of time.

The public will realize it gave way to a mass panic far greater than, say, the Salem Witch hysteria. Movies, articles and dramatized documentaries will be created, hammering home the lesson. The ongoing collateral damages will be made explicitly clear. The social embarrassment of having permitted it will be compounded because so many voices that tried to warn the public during the hysteria were ignored or censored.

And Fauci will be among the most vilified. He helped shut down discussion of natural immunity as well as virus debate itself; he disregarded alternative treatments; he drew attention away from the collateral damage of government mandates.

It will be fitting justice if Fauci must suffer for his complicity. But history will be served even better if the State’s ability to panic the public suffers permanently.