Below is my speech delivered at the international round table on post-pandemic health issues. Sarajevo, Bosnia -Herzegovina, Oct. 11–13, 2024.
Contagious diseases are a fact of life, even in an era of advanced medicine and modern sanitation. Any one of these diseases is susceptible to receive the label of pandemic should a political strongman or a supranational institution decide to label it as such. Just as we have by now become accustomed to academic self-censorship and the covert thought police scrutinizing our online language or our offline lectures, we are also observing the surge of health squads policing our daily life, lecturing us on what to eat, how to have safe sex, how to stay eternally young and how to beat old age. Failing to conform to such therapeutic rules and hygienic regulations means to be labeled as a heretic unworthy of participating in what is pompously called civil society.
Purveyors of the recent covid pandemic and its fear-mongering WHO commissars, including their political acolytes in the US and EU, seem to have retreated temporarily from the radar screen. The new brand of their world-improving progeny, however, along with multiple self-proclaimed health benefactors, let alone social justice warriors, may pop up on the horizon any time soon, should political circumstances so require.
Who encouraged the lockdowns in 2020 instead of sticking to the moderate confinement measures during the spread of the Covid disease? Who was the person in the WHO tasked to explain in simple language the etiology of this viral illness? Leak from a Chinese gain-of-function research facility? We still know little of the main movers and shakers who ordered the massive Covid clampdown, causing irreparable physical and psychological damage for the life of millions of people, especially schoolchildren and small businesses. Once the pandemic lockdown was lifted in 2021, Covid fear-mongers wisely made sure to not go viral.
Surely, medical doctors, biomedical scientists, biologists and geneticists can proudly claim that their fields of research, unlike the field of social science, are empirical in nature, and can often be scientifically fact-checked with ease. Well, how is it that there was a significant number of their dissenting colleagues who rejected the apocalyptic narrative about the putative world’s deadliest disease? Many behavioral geneticists and sociobiologists in academia face a far worse predicament. When questioning the inborn hereditary or racial traits that determine behavior of our politicians and opinion makers, they almost certainly run the risk of facing not just demonizing lawfare, but even a prison term. Based on their widely ignored empirical evidence about our hereditary defects or strengths, we may take an educated guess as to how “criminal chromosomes” are thriving among many of our elected politicians and opinion makers.
Basically, the Covid scare, when it started several years back, paved the way in the EU and US for the reenactment of the Soviet era when Stalin’s scientist Trofim Lysenko laid out his theory of how to grow oranges in the Arctic circle and how to turn a low IQ Homo sovieticus into a rocket scientist. The same surreal communist ukases are alive and kicking today in the US affirmative action regulated higher education and political arena where DEI mandated decision-making is mostly carried out by half-wits who hate the idea of a meritocracy.
We don’t need to enter into the dangerous woke field of Freudo-Marxism or CRT scholasticism which has for decades rejected the study of racial differences; we may quote instead the 17th-century. dissident French satirist Molière, whose plays satirize itinerant quacks posturing as medical supermen able to cure all physiological and political ailments. Given the divergences among top scientists on the usefulness of the past Covid pandemic lockdown, one may justifiably wonder whether we should now turn again to medieval homeopaths or snake oil merchants for more effective curative powers. Trust in the medical establishment is gone.
It is always the dominant political dogma, the political myth and the prevailing zeitgeist that determines the approach to natural science, never the other way around. Social science scholars and lawyers are even in a worse position; if they want to stay in the educational or legal business, they must obey the current dogma of that environmental influences are the whole ballgame and reject the role of genes in the study of political behavior of their clients or defendants. Should they focus too much on the role of criminal chromosomes in political behavior, they won’t get tenured and might be smeared as incorrigible racists or proverbial White supremacists.
The war of looks and outlooks
Back to the body. Or rather, back to the body language which has become a new religion in our enlarged “therapeutic and maternal state”. This expression was used by the late American author Christopher Lasch and a few other dissident philosophers such as the late French author Jean Baudrillard and Alain de Benoist. In place of the Orwellian Big Brother, the Big Mother is emerging with her transgender ordinances postulating the dogma that biological identities are fleeting social constructs that can be changed or replaced at will. Moreover, we have witnessed over recent decades the growth of a dangerous new pandemic, a cultural pandemic of the “war of looks” among politicians and celebrities, each claiming that their own color, height, motoric skills and phenotypic traits make them clearly superior to their adversaries. Once upon a time, a Black obese person was considered sick and in need of hospital treatment or a radical weight loss regimen. According to voguish-woke social construct dogma, however, obesity is now viewed as a matter of lifestyle that can tentatively help a person gain the overweight of celebrity status in a motion picture audition. Moreover, an aspiring white politician in the US or EU, if he was to enter favorably into the political lime light must endorse victimhood stories of his targeted non-White constituencies while adorning his cheering staff with individuals of diverse sexual, racial and physical looks and outlooks.
The same viral mimicry can be observed during a TV duel between presidential candidates with spectators being forced to focus more on the proper dentures of their preferred candidates and less on their respective policies. Under the guise of scientism, a new totalitarianism is in the making, resorting to far more elegant and fatal methods of political surveillance than the bygone communist system. In the description of the “covidification” process in the modern therapeutic state, self-censorship and self-abnegation among scientists and political leaders becomes the unwritten rule. Alain de Benoist sees it this way:
The dominant human type of today is the immature narcissist ignoring all realities other than his own, and who, above all, wishes to satisfy all his cravings. This infantile type of human being, predictably of liberal-libertarian orientation, is perfectly in line with the System. … What follows is a therapeutic civilization centered on the “Me” only. … A statesman makes decisions, gives orders and requisitions. Macron, however, relies on the advice of “experts” who, as a rule, never agree with each other.
The doomsday predictions about tens of millions of Covid deaths have not come true. Official Covid body counts are still a tale of obscurity, a tale more reminiscent of the Book of Revelation than the exact tally from coroner findings. It is a general truism that social scientists hardly ever agree on their respective grandstanding world-improvement theories. One would expect that natural scientists are better positioned. This is not true. Multiple much-acclaimed Covid experts, or would-be experts have not agreed on the origin, let alone on the cure of the Coronavirus, while upstaging each other on TV with their egos the size of the Zagreb Cathedral. This brings again to mind Molière and his description of the imaginary physician talking to his imaginary patient, both projecting their false Double and both assuming that their mendacity will not be detected by the other party.
A character from Moliere’s play describes the physician Purgon (whose name could well be posted today on the internet as a poster child meme for Pfizer Inc. in purgatory) with these words: “He (Purgon) must have killed off an awful lot of patients to have made all that money.” Or another character from the same play who retorts: “Most people die of the cure, not the disease.” One wonders whether thousands of Covid experts have taken the Hypocritical Oath instead of the Hippocratic Oath.
Cases of self-deception abound, not just in the social sciences but also in the fields of natural science. The study of behavioral genetics, when combined with social sciences, could help us better grasp the human drama, especially when observing the psyche of decision makers in a state of emergency. This approach, however, is strictly avoided in the social science departments, both in the US and EU, where the prevailing idea runs rampant that all people are equal — and hence expendable at will. Not long ago the communist multiethnic, multicultural, and egalitarian obsession had this fictitious Lalaland on display every day in Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia — with catastrophic results.
When transposed into the political arena, the master plan of covidification, while invoking surreal and fictitious pandemics, or the now popular myth of the alleged rising pandemic of right-wing fascism, can always be tempting for a politician. It can come in handy in order to clamp down on any form of political heresy. With the Age of Covid we are no longer in the purview of science, but in the department of demonology.
