2021: How it started, how it's going
It’s been quite a ride, and this may be the understatment of the year. The proximity with the new year’s eve is the time to take a step back and observe what was going on during this year. This is especially important when things are moving into weird territories. The drift is a slow process, it is hard to measure correctly while it is happening. You need to widen the focus, get out of the 24h cycle news to have a sense of how far things have gone. 2021 was a weird year. Maybe the Capitol events of January the 6 were a good warning. It was going to be crazy beyond imagination. A picture tells more than a thousand words:
Yes this was as crazy as it can get. Whatever your angle is on this event, the lost of touch with anything resembling rationality is total. Everyone is mad. For some it is easier to spot than for others. But everyone, me included, has completely lost it at some point in time during this year. And this was just january 6, the rest of the year got even weirder. Yes. Really.
Social Contract as an Operating System
the 2021’s most striking evolution is not about virus variants but about the instillation of a new kind of society. The Authorization Based Citizenship officially started in the middle of last summer (in France). The idea was in the air (eg the tracing apps set up at the start of the pandemics in mid 2020) but the concrete implementation came under the form of the “sanitary pass”. In the past everyone was the equal of everyone. This is no longer true at the end of 2021. Depending on your medical status you may have access or not to basic aspects of civil life as it was understood. Going to theatre,. restaurants, using public transportation or visiting a museum are examples of things you can't do anymore in France unless… Well the list of conditions change on a weekly basis. Social contract has been turned into a “Terms of Service and conditions applies” kind of thing. You have as much say about it as you have regarding TOS of Facebook or Windows. You just have to click “yes” on an incomprehensible and ridiculously long list of terms. Of course the definition of words used in the list is also changing with or without the list changing. In France there were dozens of different protocols regarding schools. It is impossible to follow. Has someone made a list?
I could multiply the examples at will. Every country and little administration has introduced its own mark. Like a dog peeing to mark its territory: small things, everywhere, anytime, stinky. The new normal is that you don't have permission to live your life unless… You comply to a set of abritrarily ever changing rules, like the neverending updates of your operating system. Of course, as in every operating system there are super users operating with a different set of rules. The new update of the operating didn’t include freedom of speech nor presumption of innocence. But presumption of contamination was delivered.
The french term for operating system is “système d’exploitation”. There is a double meaning in french to the word “exploitation”. One is the marxist way of thinking about it, the other is the productive way to understand the term (like a farm can be called “une exploitation”). This double sense works wonderfully well here.
The 90+% Church
Wherever you turn your eyes you will notice that the 90+% Church is making new adepts at an unprecedented rate. The 90+% church is the new religion in town. Forget about wokeism and global warming. Those are outdated cults today. Moreover the 90+% Church rules over them anyway. The central precept of the 90+% Church is that you can conflate certainty with a claimed 90% efficiency/level. The vaccines were supposed to be 90% efficient when released. When 90% of the population would be vaccinated the pandemics would disappear. Masks are not perfect but they filter 90% of the virus particles, etc. Everytime that you read a statement starting with a pretty high percentage and ending with a definitive conclusion you are most probably contemplating a gospel of the 90+% Church.
I am not going to delve into the intricacies of the theological foundations of the 90+% Church. They are going deep into the epistemic understructure of our enlightened civilization. It will be the subject of future work. I am just going to state the most visible roots of this religion. Maybe one of its deepest root is the refusal of will (free or not). Facts, brought to you via statistics, cannot be discussed. The future will strictly be a function of the past. In this, it clearly emulates the pysical description of the world (but it conveniently forget about the other part: experimental validation). Knowing initial conditions you can compute how inanimate systems evolve. For living systems, it doesn’t work that well. You can precisely forecast where a shell is going to fall with arbitrary accuracy, much less so with a bird that you throw in the air. But for the 90+% Church there is no such distinction. Facts don’t care about your will.
Why 90+% and not 100% ? Because what needs to be protected is not the truth but the narrative. Therefore the 10% margin is the insurance policy for “things haven’t gone as I had expected” or this famous sentence by E. Macron: “Je ne prendrais pas ce chiffre pour dire que c’est un échec, ça n’a pas marché” (I would not use this number to say that it has failed, it didn’t work). No matter that you always fail, you always have the : “but you know it is not 100%” explanation at hand. Just another way to spell unfalsifiabilty/unaccountability… The evolution of the discussion around covid vaccines efficiency is a perfect poster child: just read the declarations about it across time during last year. Officials at the end of december of 2021 have gone farthest in the satire than early 2021 4chan trolls.
The Austr(i)a(n)lian touch
Some are more equal than others. Some countries have singled out themselves on the race to the bottom. We have two clear winners Australia and Austria. Is it because their name are so close? Can we find back explanations in history ? It is true that Australia descends from a bunch of convicted and Austria is the eagle nest of nazism, but concluding that things would go southwways in both of those countries from that would have appeared a bit crazy at the beginning of last year. Yet those countries have really lost it, gradually then suddenly. They act as beacons of what can be feared by this neverending downward spirals. The list of insannities is almost unbelievable to a 2018 Spear of Lugh. Few examples:
Manhunt In Australia After Three Covid-Negative Teens Briefly Escape A Quarantine Camp. You know the camps in which there are only voluntary people.
In Austria it went from bad, the proposal to lockdown unvaccinated, to worse: finally the lockdown was for everyone few days after, to legit totalitarian stuff: you will be fined forever if you don’t vaccinate in a matter of weeks.
The slippery slope would be a relief at this point. I don’t have words to describe it correctly because it appears that unlike on a slope, the acceleration itself accelerates. I am proposing to rename the “Stockholm Syndrome” by the “Canberra Syndrome” or the “Vienna Dilemma”, because there are large parts of the population that seems to find it ok. I don’t know in what universe they are living, and even if 90+% of the population is ok with that I won’t comply. These are the hills over which I am going to die.
The Mogwaï/Gremlin Era
As remarked By N. Oliveras and others, there are more than one similarity between what we are living now and the Gremlins movies. Governmental mandates before and after midnight may come to mind. The (psycho)path is known: the temporary becomes eternal, the initial motivations are forgotten and the very idea of diminishing returns vanish from our consciousness. What started as an almost little thing that arouse curiousity, two weeks to flatten the curve, may mutate into a self multiplying nightmare. Nothing evolves as it was planned and Gremlins have taken control of the situation: things that should have worked didn’t, and like in a nightmare every move towards the horizon is made difficult, everything that can go wrong actually do go wrong etc.
This is where we will start 2022. This is the new normal. I will be back here in a year to check out how much things have unravelled during this year.