There are few books that have changed my mind a lot. “Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected, Ethically, Emotionally, Physically, (... And Without Going to Prison)” by Rory Miller is one of them. This is not your usual book of self-defense in which you are supposed to learn some secret move that will save your life in a dark alley (while at best it only gives you false confidence in non existing skills). Most of the book consists in the exploration of violence from different angles: psychology, anthropology, legally, etc. I really recommend you to read it along with “Violence: Terrorism, War, Genocide” by Wolfgang Sofsky which is an essay on the sociology of violence. Both are really complementary books. But my aim here is to talk of the former and its relevance to the situation that we are facing in 2022.
Secondary Crime Scene
The place where you really don’t want to find yourself is a secondary crime scene. If someone threatens you at gunpoint to climb into a car or to move in a certain direction just don’t. You are just making it easier for the villain to commit a crime. The golden rule of self-defense is to run and shout as loud as you can. You are not going to have a better shot (pun intended) to escape. Certainly not if you renounce to your liberty and rely on the mercy of a psychopath. Ceeding your options to a criminal doesn’t sound great, and it is not. Yet it appears that it is what we are allowing in this never ending covid crisis.
I couldn’t have imagine, two years ago, that I would have to display a QR-Code to go to the restaurant. Yet this is the reality I am experiencing. I had to show a permit to eat a Kebab last week. Like in those old dystopian books. Liberty has been taken from us. You are allowed to go allong with your life if you comply. Liberty is no longer seen as being a right of each citizen. It is delivered by the government following arbitray rules and lip service justifications (you could contaminate and kill grandpa). The freedom of movement is gradually reduced. Just like when you are taken hostage by a criminal at gun point.
Keeping it Polite
The number of crimes that are facilitated because criminals leverage on social reflexes like politeness can’t be over stressed. Just to not appear rude you can make people do a lot of things. A similar mechanism is at play in our media. There should be discussions about those increasingly more coercitive measures. The fact that the official strategy to address the covid situation in France is still about vaccination defies any reasonable explanation. More than 90% of the population is vaccinated. It is a success from this point of view - you can hardly do better. Yet we are breaking record after record in terms of contamination. Clearly, experimentally, the vaccines haven’t stopped the epidemic. Yet the government continue as if nothing happened and puts in place its “passe vaccinal”. No journalist has put a microphone in the face of a minister to question that. Journalists only talk about peripheral issues like : “how long will this measure be in place”, or ponder on the various subtle differences in the infinite list of exceptions “can we eat in trains between region ?” - “What is the capacity for restaurant: 25% or 33%...”
The king is naked. Everyone sees it. Yet no one talks about it. Even professionals like journalists only remain at the surface. Are they afraid? Of what? Afraid to lose their jobs? Afraid to appear rude? Afraid to appear to be “not following the science”?
Not the right alley of the library
Maybe you find that I do to much. But to borrow from a Bret Weinstein expression in one of his podcast: we are not finding ourselves in the right alley of the library if all the comparisons we can make with the current situation are so gloomy. Maybe it is not as dark as I see it but I am failing to find better analogies. In covid conversations you always have someone to point out that “it is not a real tyranny you know. Just go to North Korea blabla”. Just the choice of the examples show you that you are not in a place you would like to go if you had a choice. Since when have we started to measure our western democracies to ancient totalitarian regimes ? It didn’t even come to mind when I was young during the 80s. Nowadays… not so clear. You can argue on the details of the Nuremberg Code about the fact of knowing if m-RNA vaccines are approved or still experimental, and about the varions recent evolutions of the definitions of these words in institutions like the CDC (are they justified? wise or not?). But simply by having to argue about that reveals where we stand: not in the right alley of library.
The covid crisis is not the end of it. It is the primary crime scene. Prepare for the secondary crime scene. Prepare to the unexpected.
Good brain food...Amazing I went 78 years without a traumatic crisis, how lucky to be American...how lucky to be me....Felix