Posted on 05/08/2022 12:05:20 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
For the last two days I’ve felt an uneasy sense of grief, or of a heavy pressure on my heart. At first I could not figure out the cause of it.
Nothing unusual was wrong in my personal life. My loved ones were safe and well, thank God. The battle for liberty was ongoing, as it has been for over two years, but I was used to the rigors and stresses of that. What was the matter?
I was just driving with Brian over Taconic foothills, and through the vast early-Spring expanses of the beautiful Hudson Valley. The sun was shining. Daffodils, creamy-white and bright yellow, displayed their trumpets shyly in shadowy recesses under old ash trees with wide-spreading boughs. The lighter-yellow forsythia dotted the roadsides in a riot of buzzy color.
We’d just been talking to a realtor acquaintance who described how the area had changed when the city people fled their Brooklyn apartments at the start of the pandemic, to sit out the crisis in the gracious, creaky old farmhouses that they could purchase for a relative song.
We’d driven through reopened businesses flush with newly transplanted money. An old railroad car diner had been revamped and now offered curated organic-beef hash, and tasty, if ironic, egg creams.
We drove past little 1960s ranch houses with some land around them, now being redone with costly cedar shingles and white trim, for the farmhouse look that the ex-Brooklynites liked. Sotheby’s signs were out on the lawns already, in preparation for the lucrative flipping.
On driveway after driveway of the ex-Brooklynites, of the former weekend people — (and I confess that I too was once a weekend person, but something has happened to me in the last two years that has changed me even more than my change of home address).../p>
(Excerpt) Read more at brownstone.org ...
I’m sorry, but when I saw the headline, it reminded me of “The Carpenters” song, “It’s just only begun”.
We’ve got a long way to go.
I love Trump, but America’s future, like its past, dispends on the life, liberty, and free pursuits of the American People, not a despotic “welfare” totalitarian government.
Right now, Trump is using government in emergency measures to counteract the Left. But at some point, for America to be truly great again, our FREE CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC MUST be restored which means the federal government takes a back seat and the America People through their sovereign states run the show.
This will not happen in one or two elections. We were founded as a nation under the inspired Supreme law of the Land, the Constitution, which is pointed DIRECTLY at the federal government and SEVERELY LIMITS its powers. To return as a nation under the Law of the Land means the federal government will again be severely limited and the people will be free from government coercion.
Right now, too much hope is focused on man and not enough hope focused on the Lord. “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” May we once again trust in the Lord and put man and his government back into its constitutional cage where it belongs.
“ Right now, Trump is using government in emergency measures…”
That’s a crazy statement.
Take time to read the article. It’s worthy of your attention. I wish I had written it, because it’s how i view today’s American dream.
Good read. She’s welcome in New Hampshire with the same quaint farmhouses and freedom loving people. It’s just an hour farther north.
I am becoming a Naomi Wolfe fan.........and I never, in all my days, thought I would say that!
Good mercy she is purely spot on!
Like the Nazi war criminals, I want a LOT of folks to see justice.......NOT escape to some exotic island or country.....
....and NOT be forgiven ( because of their future usefulness) when the war is over
Now I understand why Tucker invites her to speak on his show.
There MUST be justice!
p
How so?
I have a feeling that the “awkward period” Naomi Wolfe talks about is nearly over.
CC
Powerful article. Very sad.
Back when she was tutoring Al Gore on how to be an Alpha Male, I never thought I’d give her the time of day. Now, she’s the main reason I watch War Room every day.
Thanks for posting this article. It led me to another excellent and timely article at the web site:
Selfish: The King of Covid Epithets
BY GABRIELLE BAUER MAY 6, 2022 PHILOSOPHY 7 MINUTE READ
Enter “Covid” plus “selfish” in a Google search box and you’ll get over 28 million hits. Here’s the type of headline that pops up:
“Don’t be one of the selfish idiots putting us all at risk” (Edinburgh News, Sept. 24, 2020)
“Too many Americans are selfish, and it’s killing people” (Los Angeles Times, Jan. 1, 2021)
“As long as selfishness wins, the pandemic is here to stay (Orlando Weekly, Jan. 12, 2022)
“Selfish, stupid COVID protesters get short shrift in Wellington” (Aljazeera, Feb. 14, 2022)
Since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, people have slapped the “selfish” label on those who didn’t share their zeal for lockdowns and restrictions. Remember the “disgusting display of selfish behavior” in Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks on May 24, 2020? The “selfish and dangerous” people who flocked to Trinity Bellwoods park in Toronto that same day? The “selfish and irresponsible” beach goers in the UK town of Bournemouth two months later?
The word “selfish” rose to new heights as the global vaccination campaign ramped up throughout 2021. In July, UK Cabinet Minister Michael Gove threatened to bar the “selfish vaccine refusers” from events, and five months later a Canadian radio personality exhorted the unvaxxed to “stop being a scientifically ignorant, selfish drag on society.” In April 2022, the word gathered fresh steam when a judge struck down the transportation mask mandate in the US. A Washington Post article described plane travelers’ reaction to the mid-air announcement as “whoops of selfish delight,” while the Boston Globe decried the jubilation as the “unmasking of a selfish nation.”
Even those who do wear masks may face a charge of selfishness—if the mask is the wrong kind. When advising the public against the use of valve masks, Yuen Kwok-yung, a microbiologist and professor at the University of Hong Kong, described them as “a bit selfish. In other words, they filter what a person breathes in, but when you breathe out through this valve, it doesn’t filter well.”
All in it together?
Caught in the froth of their moral indignation, the finger pointers never doubt that they hold the correct, “unselfish” world view. They don’t consider that the pandemic strategy they endorse, which requires everyone to dance in lockstep around a single threat, may cause downstream suffering to a large swath of the human family—like the estimated 50 million extra people plunged into extreme poverty by 2030. They dismiss the mental-health impact of social isolation and business closures as a “necessary sacrifice,” pooh-pooh the ethical arguments for bodily autonomy, and reduce the profound ramifications of canceling the human face to “just a piece of cloth.”
This is not to say that people can’t or shouldn’t band together to solve a problem. But collective action only works when it springs from the ground up. People can’t really “band together” when forced to do it.
It’s like telling someone to surprise you on your birthday: the very request negates its fulfillment. Andreas Kluth, author of Hannibal and Me, a book about how political figures respond to disaster, nailed the conundrum in a 2021 Bloomberg article: “Collectivist ‘solidarity’ is thus neither totally voluntary nor inclusive, and ‘harmony’ tends to be coerced and parochial.”
Here’s a dirty little secret: individualistic cultures turn out more unselfish people than their collectivist counterparts, as discovered in a 2021 psychocultural study of the world. “We found that in more individualist countries like the Netherlands, Bhutan and the United States, people were more altruistic across our seven indicators than were people in more collectivist cultures,” says Georgetown University psychology professor Abigail Marsh, one of four researchers who conducted the study.
On a more fundamental level, collectivism suffers from the fallacy of misplaced concreteness—treating abstractions like “society” or the “common good” as concrete entities that exist in the real world. As Carl Jung points out, “Society is nothing more than a term, a concept for the symbiosis of a group of human beings. A concept is not a carrier of life.”
The only way to achieve a grounded and democratic “common good” is to give flesh-and-blood individuals the freedom to define it and pursue it. John Stuart Mill says it best: “The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily or mental and spiritual.”
Selfishness reconsidered:
No doubt some people would brand Mill’s position as a selfish one—the same people who view a planet-wide commitment to stamping out Covid as the obviously unselfish choice. To Vinay Prasad, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco, it was never that simple. The Covid Zero champions—the group that believes that any restriction is a good restriction—“routinely and falsely claim that their policies protect minorities and low income people, when those policies do the precise opposite: protect the rich and transfer wealth upward,” he writes. “Never content with merely sheltering themselves, they wish to use brute force to compel others to do things that they think helps them, even if there is no data supporting those things.”
Which is more selfish, demanding that everyone follow the same rules in perpetuity—rules that feel comfortable to the most risk-averse among us—or giving people the freedom to assess and manage risk as they see fit?
Which is more selfish, dictating the minutiae of people’s lives in a chaotic effort to “slow the spread” or treating them like adults who can make adult decisions?
I stand with Oscar Wilde here: “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live,” he famously stated. “And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone.”
Aaron Schorr, a Yale University student on immune-suppressing medication, would likely agree. “I didn’t expect the government to structure its entire [Covid-19] response around my personal well-being,” he wrote in the January 2022 issue of Yale News.
“Feeling unsafe? By all means take extra precautions, but 4,664 undergraduates should not be forced to adhere to the same standard.” If anyone merits the “unselfish” prize, it’s Schorr—not the campus activists calling for mandates until the end of time.
Reality-based policies
More than two years into the pandemic, public health experts, politicians and ordinary citizens continue to blame policy failures on human selfishness, rather than on the policies themselves. It’s like blaming a failed math-education method on the students’ stupidity. The students are what they are. Should we rage at them for their lack of aptitude or revisit the method?
As the saying goes, we fight a war with the army we have, not with the army we wish we had. If humans are indeed selfish (however we define the word)—well, that’s our army.
America’s Founders, to their credit, understood this from the get-go. As noted by Christopher Beem, Managing Director of the McCourtney Institute of Democracy, “they accepted the reality of human selfishness and developed institutions—especially the checks and balances among the three branches of government—whereby people’s natural selfishness could be directed toward socially useful ends.”
Pandemic policymakers would do well to remember this. Policies that ignore people’s natures and self-interest will backfire sooner or later. Kids need to run around, teens to connect, young adults to explore. Older people need these things, too. For a limited time, people can set their basic needs aside. But asking humans to stop acting like humans until some ill-defined and ever-receding endpoint? Not everyone will sign up for that, and you can’t blame those who opt out.
My Zoom shrink understood this. (I talked to him every few weeks during the first year of Covid, almost exclusively to dissect the societal response to the virus.) “These were young urbanites who lacked green spaces,” he said of the revelers at Trinity Bellwoods park. “After two months of lockdown, they did what young people are programmed to do on a gorgeous spring day: get together.”
We need pandemic policies rooted in human nature—policies that meet people where they are, not where some sanctimonious Twitter warriors decide they should be. Throwing the S-word around doesn’t earn respect or cooperation from the accused.
Au contraire: when pelted with character-assassinating epithets, people double down.
For the remainder of this pandemic and for the next one, I’ll leave public health experts and policymakers with these considerations: Stop calling people selfish for wanting some agency and quality in their lives. Stop bullying them into “caring” about a vulnerable stranger who lives three states or continents away.
Instead, tap into their natural motivation to protect themselves and their loved ones. Communicate risks transparently, provide strategies to reduce them, and treat humans as humans—the way you used to manage pandemics before Covid.
Author
Great piece. Thanks for posting.
Wow! Naomi brings the fire down!
She’s been amazing and prescient on War Room. Even before the vax was invented she predicted “vaccine passports” and it sounded like futuristic dystopia to me. And then sure enough it happened. Every horrible prediction she had came true…
That was Claire Wolfe
That’s a crazy statement
It is a great thing that the comment you responded to is from a person of great faith. That person needs our prayers for sanity and clarity, because that person has heart in the right place, but has lost rational thoughts.
This needs to be read and shared.
Uncommonly, i read the article twice, excerpted and again entire. I am surprised and amazed that Naomi Wolf wrote that heartfelt piece, and thankful for both her candor and apparent conversion.
Yes, there is a long way to go before any normal, but i think that there are fewer quislings than we counted.
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