The covid-19 pandemic had an extreme impact on the global order, from how nation-states interact, to governments and governance, down to how individuals interact with each other, this virtually nobody disagrees with. And I believe that the overall end result of the pandemic has been one of the absolute worst catastrophes of the 21st century. In terms of Liberty, Responsibility, and Ethics in general, the reaction and solutions to the pandemic have solidified a totalitarian path that human society has trudged ever further down since the beginning of the modern interation of the State that began with the end of the American Revolution. There is no hyperbole in this assessment. It is clear that the Liberal ideals that thinkers who basically created the idea of what America was founded on, were almost stomped to death in reaction to the spread of covid-19.
For the majority of the world, there are broadly two systems of governance that exist: Systems such as America, which are founded on and exist with the consent of the governed, or totalitarian systems that rule over a populace with violence or the threat of violence. An extreme case of the latter is the North Korean regime, and most nation-states today exist as a hybrid on a spectrum of these two distinct systems. America by and large was the closest nation-state to exist on the “consent” end of the spectrum, and while no nation-state cannot exist without some level of threat of violence, as laws need to be enforced through violence, America did far better than any other state at respecting the consent of the governed. This is not to say that America perfectly respected consent, but rather to point out that virtually every other state did a far worse job at respecting the consent of the governed.
This is also not to say that America, or any other state for that matter, has improved in respecting the consent of the governed. In fact, it’s arguable that while the franchise has grown over time, the overall size and scope of government has increased, and with the rise of the modern bureaucratic state, those enjoying the franchise have had diminishing use of their political power versus the bureaucratic state. This is the basis of the idea that the covid-19 pandemic’s impact has been a catastrophe for the liberal project. The response to the covid-19 pandemic, by resorting to specialists and bureaucrats taking the reigns of government force and violence in order to enact a response to the virus, rather than the voting public coming to a decision at any level, has forever damaged the value of the vote, and Liberty overall.
This is not to say that the pandemic was the first time that this has occurred. As stated in the beginning, the pandemic is merely another step towards the ever approaching totalitarian state that the American founding fathers, and 18th and 19th century liberal thinkers abhorred against. Since the very founding of the American Republic, the size and scope of the State, specifically the federal government, and specifically the executive branch of the federal government, has not once ever shrunk in power. It seems that the gravity of politics will forever pull towards a king or a group of oligarchs ruling over a largely ignorant and docile flock. The fall was slow at first, but major events such as the Civil War, the world wars, the foundation of the American Empire in the late 19th century and its ever expansion in the 20th century, the War on Terror and beginnings of the Orwellian Police State with the passage of the Patriot Act, all are demonstrative that the State has grown.
The bureacratic response to the pandemic, specifically turning to specialists, and allowing whatever the specialists thought or spoke about to be the overall policy response to covid-19, was the culmination of the ever encroaching tyranny. Dissidents were silenced on private platfroms at the order of government intelligence agencies. Dissidents, or anyone in general who disagreed, had their financial assets frozen, livelihoods ended, and terrorized by agents of the state. People were tracked, traced, and databased by their cellphone/data providers, who forwarded on any location or personal data to governments around the world, who used that data to imprison, fine, or just plain harrass people attempting to live any sembelence of a normal life during the pandemic.
The most disconcerting thing about the whole ordeal is that the vast majority of people are at the minimum ambivalent, or at worst, highly supportive of the totalitarian regime. Many an former elementary school hall monitors took it upon themselves to remind people to “wear a mask because of the Governors orders”, or calling police on grocery store shoppers not wearing a mask. In a particularly egregious event, a pregnant woman in Australia was arrested for organizing an anti-lockdown protest. The state had a response to the pandemic, and that response was to violently enforce lockdown, masking, and evnetually coerced vaccinations.
The fact that the majority of people have already either forgotten that this occurred, or worst yet, believe that it was the correct decision, leaves very little faith that the ideals of the men who founded the nation will eve rreturn. Worst yet, many create false equivelences with other historical events. The number of people who have created a strawman by equivocating the response to the covid-19 pandemic to other historical atrocities such as the holocaust, Soviet or Chinese communism, or any other major genocide, have completely lost the plot. The fact that those horrors occurred at all should ring alarm bells to anyone who understands the magnitude of those atrocities, and why the response to the pandemic is just as bad. The fact that 12 million people weren’t murdered in an industrial model of mass murder is not demonstrative that the response undertaken was the correct one. Both instances can be equally evil for different reasons.
The liberal ideals that America was founded on are hanging together by a thread. People in general need to understand that yes, the pandemic was scary, and it was dangerous. Only a fool would argue that a new disease would not have a devestating effect on the world. However, Americans, or people around the world, cannot continue to flee to the arms of an ever growing tyrannical state, and not expect that state to use the maxmimum amount of violence and force in order to enforce its power over people. People in general just need to understand that personal responsibility is the only ethical way to livewith other people, and that not infringing on personal liberty is the only ethic that matters.
Otherwise, we’re all just animals in a cage electing another animal as king, and expecting them to be benevolent when they have no reason to be.