Bon Jovi’s ballad “Livin’ on a Prayer” (see below) is a story of a working-class couple struggling to make ends meet. The dream – synonymous with prayer in this usage – of them rising above their current circumstance keeps them going. Prayers, or dreams, come in many shapes and sizes. Some are unattainable fantasies and eventually lead to ruin. This darker side of illusory end-states riddles much of today’s political debates.
Dreams seek to become premises when cloaked in the jargon of “science” as in the cliché “follow the science”. To be clear, a premise is “a proposition antecedently supposed or proved as a basis of argument or inference” according to Webster. Emphasis is on “supposed” since many are unproven and unprovable, and therefore unscientific by definition, and more a statement of feeling than objective reality. A classic example is the trite qualifier “if it saves one life”. It’s a ticket to the straitjacket of complete risk-aversion if not balanced against the very real costs.
One such “dream” is the fallacy of interventions nearly eliminating risk, as in another clamp down against COVID. The dream of risk-aversion is king. The flat-lining of social and economic life is commonly the result. The toxicity in this latest drive to utopia is found in the rejection of life being a long series of trade-offs. The economist Thomas Sowell, an accomplished amateur photographer, would explain the concept to be like the contest between aperture and shutter speed. The taking of pictures is analogous to the balancing of risk of infection and prosperity. The elevation of concern for one depresses the other. That kind of mature thinking is jettisoned in the headlong rush to prevent anyone from getting the sniffles.
“If it saves one life” is the hidden mantra, and underlying premise. If that is the standard, why get up in the morning? We’ve known for quite some time that the virus, like all infections, carries greater dangers for the slender segments of the population with prior medical difficulties. The “saves one life” supposition is weaponized to eliminate any thought of the costs and off we go to eight-year-olds stuck as six-year-olds in academic maturity, lifetimes of personal fortunes destroyed in business closures, an evisceration of social life behind creepy masks and social distancing, and grandma’s hug being reduced to digibytes on a computer screen. It’s monstrous.
The delta variant is the excuse du jour for a return to a form of authoritarianism that’s beginning to awfully look like totalitarianism. It’s used to force people into taking the jabs (vaccine passports, threats of job loss, an end to travel and schooling). Any concerns about the vaccines or applicability to individual circumstances are officially suppressed as “bad thoughts”. The rallying of businesses to the cause carries the stink of fascism of early and mid-20th-century Germany or Italy.
It doesn’t stop there. The science of epidemiology is taking on the appearance of the “science” of race in National Socialist ideology. Totally disreputable, both are the gilding for a power grab and raw utopianism. Lost in the furor are some simple questions. Like, what is the difference between natural and man-made immunity? Is one more efficacious than the other? Pardon me, but isn’t a vaccine an attempt to replicate an infection in order to stimulate the body’s immune system, the one that God gave us? As such, the 99% COVID survival rate has produced a huge number of people with natural immunity. Is this swath of the population better protected than those with the jabs? Crickets by Jen Psaki.
The relative newness in historical terms of the current pandemic prevents many hard and fast answers. I wish that the folks at MSNBC would be more cautious about their bloviating. As for the natural vs. artificial immunity debate, a recent Cleveland Clinic study must be thrown into the hopper for consideration because it raises the scepter of equivalent if not better protection for the survival class. So, why the crisis-mongering for proof of vaccination if a good chunk of the population has equal if not better immunity without it?
More damage is incurred by the risk-averse obsessives in our public health bureaucracies when they resort to agitprop and end up soiling the very real advantages of the vaccines. The recent spike in hospitalizations is routinely characterized as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”? The phrase is parroted with some glittery number like 97% of cases. I’m sorry but I’m skeptical, and they’ve earned it. On what numbers did they derive their percentage? Some have suggested that they are based on January to June figures, a period when few had the vaccine and thus skewing the result toward the unvaccinated. Conversely, other spot data might confirm the oft-repeated claim. However, the CDC’s Walensky recently let slip that they don’t have up-to-date numbers. Boasts of certainty under conditions of real uncertainty only besmirches the reputations of authority figures and their vaunted “experts”.
Anyway, much of this is an angel-waltz on the head of a pin. The discussion misses the critical issue: Is risk to be avoided at all costs? What are the limits to risk-aversion? Our public gurus act like the 1% – the flip side of the 99% survival rate – is grounds to suffocate civilization. It ignores the fact that some periods carry more dangers than others since nothing in nature is evenly distributed, including hazards. The manic attempt to make all of life for perpetuity equally safe will end in a cataclysm. The premise, or supposition – “if it saves one life” – isn’t a moral imperative. It’s a formula for disaster.
Another calamity awaits in the headlong rush to expunge the phantom threat of systemic racism. Like the fit over COVID, this one is founded on a supposition that, in good ol’ boy fashion, is a dog that won’t hunt. It can’t hunt because it has no legs. The allegory works because the idea has no proof to prop it up. The racism is assumed to exist and it’s off to the drive for wholesale indoctrination.
Under the guise of critical race theory (CRT) and other anti-racism programs, minds are shaped around an unfounded assertion, or premise, in ubiquitous shaming sessions. It’s a simple mental equation for the hustlers: unequal outcomes mean . . . RACISM! To avoid having to identify individual racist actors, it’s loudest barkers point to a shadowy, evil presence. It’s “systemic”, because in their minds unequal stats MUST derive from RACSISM. Not logical but it works politically. Making the malefactor spectral, clears them of having to identify individual racists, which would be hard to find in the upper echelons, or too few anywhere else. It’s a familiar tactic in administrative conflict avoidance: send out a mass memo to address the misbehavior of one or two.
By making the problem the society, or “system”, the way is paved for revolution. That’s what they’re really after. Their soul mate, Karl Marx, wasn’t satisfied with waiting for another round of elections to impose socialism, something pushed by the Fabians and Mensheviks. He wanted to tear the whole thing down right now. So do they, the hucksters who provide the theoretical framework for the munchkins to tear down Portland. In their minds, after they’ve mangled logic, a corrupt system requires the overturning of an entire way of life root and branch. Imagine it, an entire way of life relegated to the historical ash heap for an empty premise.
The premise of inequality-equals-racism is a scandal to logic, but it doesn’t stop there. We are in the midst of a wrecking campaign for the American economy. Why are we trying to mass devastate livelihoods? This time, the culprit is “climate change”. The charge is that man has wrecked the climate with our grid, cars, and suburbs. It’s said to be crisis, but is it? Now that’s hard to tell, but “crisis” is certainly useful if you want to stampeded the public into draconian self-flagellation.
Faulty, jump-to-conclusions premises abound in this latest round of modern hysteria. What constitutes a “crisis”? Does the available evidence support a “crisis”? Who are the major purveyors of CO₂? Mind you, it isn’t the total amount of CO₂ but an accurate formulation relies on the number per unit of GDP. Would a single country, or state within that country (California for instance), make a dent? Would any of the suggested measures make much of a difference? And, going back to Sowell’s photography metaphor, what are the trade-offs? And costs there will be in a tunnel vision focus on warming.
Our giddy, 31-year-old sophomore class president now serving as the representative of NY’s 14th congressional district (the firebrand known by the moniker AOC) would have you believe that we have 12 more years – oops, 11 more years – before the Sahara covers the globe, Arizona becomes beachfront property, and the islands of the South Pacific have to be removed from maps like the old Soviet Union. John Kerry is tasked with the mission to recruit international converts to the self-mutilation as Biden executes a go-it-alone strategy. All for what, a degree Celsius in a century?
The goal is breathtaking with nothing much behind it but the premise of a crisis. For the true believers, all-too-often with as much scientific understanding as my border collies, it’s an absolute certainty that requires you to surrender your liberty to them. Never mind that the “crisis” lacks any observable clarity, that China and India with 36% of the total world population aren’t about to sign onto a return to life in the dirt, and that Americans won’t long tolerate a grid designed by the greenie wizards of California with California results.
Amazingly, the governing elites in rich countries, mostly the Anglospehere and western Europe, are stupid enough to go along, which says volumes about the state of education in the birthplace of Horace Mann and the modern university. We are flooded by advanced degrees but can’t master simple logic. Has education evolved into a grandiose system of befuddlement? Is education actually de-education?
Something must account for the ignorance of the scientific method and abandonment of sound reasoning. Today, the substitute for a sound education is a computer model. Computer algorithms, i.e. models, are the go-to approach to make certain what is uncertain. Data goes in and predictions pop out, trend lines and whatnot. But the models didn’t suddenly materialize from a burning bush. Humans construct them and play with them and their results. In other words, they are product of us, with all our biases. So, data is entered and weighed, more numbers pop out, and Al Gore jets off to Davos and more $50,000 speaking gigs.
Loose premises are the stuff of many of our most influential political movements. Our schools haven’t inoculated us from the mental plague. Ironically, they function as super-spreader events. As a result, we lurch from the suffocation of our kids behind masks in our schools, businesses forced to operate on a knife’s edge, colossal public debt, to the psychological scarring of ritual shaming sessions under the guise of anti-racism commissars, to a wholesale bulldozing of an entire way of life in a sinister crusade to eliminate something that the rest of the world won’t forego to satisfy the greenie fixations of Santa Clara County.
These aren’t premises in the proper sense of the word. They are leaps of faith, leaps of a materialistic faith, like Marx’s dialectical materialism, and have nothing to do with the spiritual kind. In fact, this new faith appears to be the only kind increasingly congenial among a people who have abandoned the pew or prayer rug. But far from being enlightened, we’ve laid ourselves open to a new kind of sky god: the sky god of ourselves with all our hysterias, stunted cognitive development, and flights of pure fancy. Welcome to livin’ on a premise, and many a faulty one at that.
RogerG