How COVID became a religion (and why it’s hard to sway them) [my title]

Twitter (via thread reader) ^ | John Hayward

[ReaganGeneration2]

Every crisis becomes a religion if it lasts long enough.

One factor in that transformation is the Beautiful Theory phenomenon: the power elite insists its remedies are logical and politically correct so they MUST work, even if the actual evidence shows they obviously don't.

When Beautiful Theories crash into hard, cold reality and shatter, faith is the glue used by the elites to put their precious ideas back together. They need MILITANT faith to get the job done: true believers eager to crush doubt and compel obedience by making war on the infidels.

Some are swept into the faith because they desperately crave a sense of control over the crisis. They need to believe Something Can Be Done, and they'd rather invest their faith in debunked Beautiful Theories than have no faith at all. Faith is a coin that demands to be spent.

Some crave social approval, and the purveyors of Beautiful Theories have immense political, economic, and cultural power to make their faith seem fashionable. Virtue signaling is such a plague in modern society because the signals are pre-packaged and made very easy to send.

Some aren't even hoping they can assert control over a crisis by converting to its religion. They'll settle for just having some MEANING, some simplicity, a sense that the righteous will fare better than the unbelievers, that virtue will be rewarded while sin is punished.

That's a very common impulse with the Church of Covid, since the Beautiful Theories were so very obviously wrong. There isn't much left of the faith except the visceral communal satisfaction of hoping unbelievers will be punished for their blasphemies with sickness and death.

That sort of thing happens with all of the crisis religions, although not usually as quickly and obviously as with the Church of Covid. Look at the endless stream of movies about how the world became an apocalyptic hellscape because people didn't believe in global warming.

The last resort of every crisis religion, the last thing that puts asses in the pews, is that addiction to misery porn, the collective hope that unbelievers will suffer someday, and everyone will admit the True Faith was right all along as Judgment Day crashes down upon them.

The elite will never have the humility to admit they were wrong, and they'll never give up on politically or financially profitable "solutions" even when they obviously don't solve the problem. Founding a crisis religion means they never have to say they're sorry.

That applies to some very longstanding crises, like the War on Poverty, whose nostrums long ago transformed into fantastically expensive articles of religious faith even as mountains of data accumulated that proved they were utter failures, and often made the problems WORSE.

You can look for some telltale signs of a crisis transforming into a religion. The most obvious one is when the high priests tell you the "war" you've been drafted into will never end. They become very angry when asked to define success or failure, or lay out exit strategies.

Watch for the moment when you're told "science" means not asking questions, defying dogma, or challenging "consensus." That is the literal definition of faith, not science.

Always keep an eye out for Moving Goalposts, which are the signature miracle of crisis religions, their version of parting the waters or loaves and fishes. Crisis religions work very hard to make their faith unfalsifiable by constantly changing the standards of evidence.

Check to see if certain people are accumulating huge amounts of money and power from a crisis. That's a pretty good sign it's turning into a religion. A crisis should be solved as quickly and efficiently as possible. Don't let it fester long enough to become a special interest.

Above all, look for the whiff of ARROGANCE to develop around a crisis. Wise religions and effective crisis managers have something in common: a sense of humility. Crisis religions are militant faiths that quickly become arrogant, smug, and totalitarian.

Dedicated people who truly want to solve a problem will look for evidence their analysis is wrong, or their policies aren't working, and make adjustments as quickly as possible, no matter the cost or embarrassment to themselves. This is humility.

Crisis religions are arrogant. They reject criticism, insist their Beautiful Theories MUST be right because they're ideologically pure - they fit snugly into a worldview that must not be challenged. Their plans only fail because their commands were disobeyed or sabotaged.

The high priests of a crisis religion see devils everywhere, leering at them from the rubble of every failure. Only sin can explain why their Beautiful Theories are tarnished. Failure never THEIR fault, so it must be YOURS. They find your lack of faith disturbing.

And you know what? A LOT of people want to see the world that way, including a great many self-described atheists. They hunger for the comfort of faith and the vibrant energy of militancy. They want to be right, and they want the wrong to suffer for their folly.

Conservatives think religious faith in the State is terrifying and wonder why so many embrace it. It's because uncertainty is much more frightening. A simple false story is better than a complex true one, and with enough faith, maybe we can force the simple story to be true. /end

[Keyhopper]

The newest religious cult.......
The Branch Covidians

[Senormechanico]

Then there’s this:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/08/more-masks-than-jellyfish-coronavirus-waste-ends-up-in-ocean

[Grampa Dave]

“I’m surprised they did not realize how many people would object. Good at science but out of touch with the populations they were trying to serve.”

The few scientists we know, really don’t know very many people in the rest of the world. They don’t want to.

[Keyhopper]

The newest cult.....
The Branch Covidians

[RC one]

The mRNA vaccines are absolutely vaccines. They do the same thing that the J&J vaccines do-stimulate the body to develop antibodies and immune memory. They just have different ways of getting the spike protein code into a human cell. The J&J vaccine is actually just using viral DNA instead of a strand of mRNA to tell the host cell what protein to make and it’s actually quite experimental too.

[RC one]

I live in a large violent city. I prefer the 21 foot rule.

[Grampa Dave]

“Happy to hear that. There’s a nonzero chance a mask might help. I’m even happier to hear you instilled some common sense into that jogger.”

We used to have a few masked Karens patrolling our street. They got so much flak from the homeowners and regular walkers without masks. They just don’t show up.

[RC one]

The J&J injection is a vaccine in the traditional sense.

No it isn't.

While adenoviral vectors have been tested in far more people than mRNA vaccines, the technology is used in only one commercial vaccine today: a rabies vaccine used to immunize wild animals. So far, no adenoviral vector vaccines have demonstrated they can prevent disease in humans.

What's more, adenovirus vaccines may preclude the use of booster shots any time soon.

There’s another potential problem. Just as human bodies develop immune responses to most real viral infections, our bodies also develop immunity to adenoviral vectors. That makes booster shots of adenoviral vector vaccines problematic. Upon a second injection, our bodies will unleash an antibody attack on the vaccine itself. And since adenoviral vectors are based on natural viruses that some of us might already have been exposed to, the vaccines might not work for everyone.

[lepton]

(And doesn’t mean all that excess death was covid - how many from alcohol and drug abuse, increased heart attack and stroke, etc and also likely pulled forward some deaths from this year.

---

So, if the number is really only 425k, and not 475k, the point still stands. That people are dying from it at a substantial rate is clear-cut.

The issue here, is whether the mask-mandate and the lockdowns, for example, make an appreciable change compared to the - as you mentioned - increases in suicides and drug overdoses, as well as the effects a crippled economy, depression, and a variety of other ills.

One can still oppose the lockdowns and mask-mandates as each relatively ineffectual - even more so when compared to their costs - and meanwhile be able to do basic math and see that the disease is a substantial killer, as well as leaving several percent with additional longer-term health issues.

And it was a reasonable thing to try the lockdowns and masking last spring in some areas - but that they were ineffectual seems pretty clear since last May and there is no real excuse for them now.

[lepton]

So all Americans should continue to breathlessly await and do what Fauci and Biden and CNN experts say?

---

One thing does not follow from the other.

That something in excess of at least 350k excess deaths occurred last year is clear. We won’t be able to give an exact estimate for another few months as the data is reviewed.

That those solutions are helpful is not clear. The real solutions were keeping the economy going - which they largely failed at by state mandates - and to get a safe-enough vaccine.

[reasonisfaith]

“People are afraid of death and seek immortality, so they are primed to believe almost any BS that is fed to them.”

This doesn’t make sense. Within the structure of what I presume to be your attempt at logic, if people seek immortality then they’re “primed to believe”
covid isn’t deadly.

[lepton]

Using government numbers to disprove that this is a government religion shows that you missed the entire point.

---

There has to be some basis or anchor point. And we have lists of dead, and not a lot of examples of people that don’t exist being recorded as dying or the living reported dead, so the total numbers are essentially correct.

If not, your argument reduces to there being no point in having a discussion since everyone is free to make up their own numbers with no possibility of dispute, as there is no basis for any numbers.

[reasonisfaith]

But your argument reduces to the claim that an erroneous number is better than no number.

[lepton]

It’s more like a talisman — no, the mask is exactly like a talisman. The completely ineffective mask against a virus — any virus — is nothing more than a good luck charm or face-mounted amulet to ward off a Chinese evil spirit, Covid.

---

I’m not going to say that the masks cannot, if worn properly, be at least somewhat effective in certain situations and conditions - but for the most part and for most people it is exactly that: a talisman.

[Bonemaker]

Excellent!

[reasonisfaith]

How about just admitting the masks were stupid.

[Bonemaker]

Excellent!

[lepton]

Yes, all states are manipulating Covid death numbers. They get money and power for doing so.

---

Surely that is so. There are, however, bounds for doing so.

As example, in a typical April in NYC, there are about 4500 deaths. In April 2020, there were approximately 19,000 deaths.

You can say that many of the deaths not actually attributable to COVID were misclassified, but that only means several hundred - while there are about 15,000 extra deaths which you have to account for some other way.

Maybe half that are still COVID deaths, but attributable to the direct malfeasance of Cuomo, but that still leaves nearly two and a half times the normal number of deaths which your argument doesn’t touch and just attempts to hand-wave past.

[reasonisfaith]

First you need to establish the reliability of CDC numbers.

Would you stake your credibility on a belief that the CDC is trustworthy?

Would you stake your intelligence on it?

[Stentor]

Naturally, mine was just a classical, basic rhetorical question...HA HA

I know. I was in a crap throwing mood.