From the White-PillBox: Part 65

Learning from history just got a shot in the arm.

Tom Woods’ Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania is an important historical contribution. The detailed accounts in this book help us recreate the experience of living through the madness.

But it does more than this.

It allows us to look back with cooler heads. To realize that society embarrassed itself. This book is a mirror that reflects what the majority of people permitted. They allowed themselves to abandon reason; to blindly defer to authority; to allow authority to instill fear; to become compliant and obedient sheep.

It represents a true benefit to the future history of this time period.

To truly learn from history requires taking the facts on the ground, showing how people reacted to those facts, then understanding the lessons we can learn from both the facts and the reactions.

Mass hysteria

Much has been said about the COVID experience, but very few have recognized it for exactly what it was: an historic case of mass hysteria.

While the causes and symptoms of mass hysterias can be varied and nuanced, they share a common attribute: suspension of critical thinking leading to a partial break with reality.

Tom Woods’ chronicle makes patently clear that this is exactly what occurred with COVID. But unlike previous hysterias, this one spread across all social strata, across scientific and social institutions, and encompassed the globe. COVID easily represents history’s most widespread mass hysteria, dwarfing previous cases such as the Salem Witch Trials, the 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast, the Day Care Sex Abuse Hysteria of the 1980's, the tulip mania of the 17th century, and the various medieval dancing and laughing manias.

A sobering fact emerges in Woods’ diary of the experience: the vast majority showed blind faith in the authority of the State, the medical establishment, corporate media, and academia. All these institutions pushed the narrative that COVID was a catastrophic threat to humanity. The public believed them, and complied with their various recommendations and mandates.

Critical thinking was the first psychological victim, and the COVID over-reaction resulted.

The book makes this harsh truth plain: most people stayed willfully blind to how poorly the mitigation measures worked.

This is even more incomprehensible, given our modern world of the Internet, where information moves near-instantaneously across the world. Neither the major institutions or general public showed any meaningful curiosity when predictions mismatched outcomes. For example, early on it was clear that regions with harsh mitigation measures had more or less the same (or worse) outcomes than regions with lenient measures. Few were curious enough to ask questions.

Tom Woods was not among them.

What we cannot get from history

The chronicles of past events, including previous mass hysterias, mainly describe events. What they cannot give us (except perhaps in bits and pieces) is a sense of what it was like “on the ground”. Our history books rarely convey the deep human sense of peoples’ lived experience of such events.

The best we had were spoken words and books. But oral narratives do not stand the test of distance and time. And written histories took time to write and disseminate.

It was inefficient, or even impossible, to chronicle the flavor of events while they were still fresh in peoples’ minds. The sense of importance of lived experience simply faded with time. That aspect of history was irrevocably lost.

We will never be able to recapture the feelings and experiences of the people who gave in to previous mass hysterias, or were victims of them.

This was the case for all histories, until only quite recently.

Today, the information age and the Internet are maturing. We can chronicle for future generations a better sense of lived experience, and publicize it while it is still fresh in our memories. Today’s historians have this ability. Tom Woods’ book gives them this tool.

The hysteria: start to finish

The book begins at the start of COVID. We can see how, even early on, hysteria had taken hold. We are reminded of events that were already slipping from our memories…events that would have been all but forgotten without a book like this. We see how the overreaction affected actual peoples’ lives. And not only were their stories ignored, they were often suppressed.

We see charts and graphs, readily available at the time, that made clear the mitigation measures should have been questioned.

Week by week, month by month, we relive the madness. Under the cover of “science”, an endless parade of the most unscientific of statements and pronouncements were made. And they came from the mouths of politicians, scientists, academics, and the media.

True, we look back from the perspective of time, and understand these authority’s statements and policies were illogical and unscientific. But if one lesson shines above all from this book, it is this:

Their actions were illogical and unscientific even then.

The book takes us to the end of the worst of the hysteria. By this time, most mandates were eliminated. Interestingly, they were ended quietly, without fanfare. Almost as if the State did not want the attention.

This was hardly the victory lap one would expect if they had genuinely felt they conquered COVID.

How and why an hysteria ends relates to how it forms. In my own essay, written at the height of it, I said:

To sustain a mass panic, the preconditions needed to trigger it must remain intact (unquestioned authority, and perceived catastrophic threat). The panic ends when one or both of these conditions lose their efficacy.

Today, neither condition stands where it did during the panic.

Deference to authority

Of course the public still defers to authority, in general. But as indicated above, the mitigation rules, lockdowns, travel and vaccine mandates, etc. seemed to disappear overnight. This rapid and unexpected turnaround was certainly not based on scientific evidence. Rather, the State had made a parade of bad predictions and false promises, which undermined public compliance (for example, the dwindling numbers choosing to receive each subsequent booster).

Enough people stopped regarding the State and the medical establishment as authorities on COVID.

Perception of threat

We can all recall the hysterical mindset in the first years of COVID: we were told it posed a catastrophic threat to humanity. With time and experience, this claim was plainly falsified.

The White Pill

The history of COVID will now include Tom Woods’ timely and important book. He has allowed the immeasurable pain and destruction of the COVID hysteria to stay fresh in our minds, even with the passage of time. We need this as a defensive weapon against the State’s relentless propaganda.

Moreover, the book helps arm us against the always-next crises, whether invented or overblown. It reinforces the lessons the public has been learning from the experience: to think as adults rather than blindly deferring to authority.

In making this chronicle available to history, Tom Woods imparts to the future a potent “lesson learned”.

Readers are encouraged to purchase this book and promote it.