(Brownstone Institute)—Under the cover of disease control, most nations in the world have lived through the equivalent of war – never officially declared as such and never officially ended with a peace treaty – and this has swept into place vast changes in our lives, politics, culture, and economy.
Consider the big-picture thinking. Nearly every nation in the world attempted the eradication of a respiratory pathogen that is spread through aerosols and has an animal reservoir – an ambition that any competent medical professional could have told you was insane. And they sought to achieve this great goal through maximum control of the human population. And toward this end, they exercised total control for several years.
A devastating feature of total wars in history is the loss of cultural continuity from prewar to postwar. What came before fades into memory, replaced by trauma, and then the desperate desire to forget that it ever happened and then create something new.
The development of society and its growth – technological, informational, political, cultural – is supposed to be organic. War changes that, deprecating some features and elevating others, usually to the detriment of human flourishing.
We saw this after the Great War. The difference between 1910 and 1920 was more than a decade. It was a different age. The fashions, music, literature, painting, and architecture all changed and dramatically so. The Belle Epoque and its manners, customs, and ideals receded far into the past, and were replaced by something else entirely.
Monarchies and old multinational states were blown away completely, and nationality came to mean any and every external sign of group solidarity, each struggling for recognition. Most cultural signs were suddenly darker, embedding a new awareness of the grim realities of life and death on earth. The old writers were forgotten, as were old habits, professions, and ways of being. The old idealism was gone too.
This was especially obvious in high-end art culture, which turned against all forms of the past. It was precisely in this period when what we call “modern” art took hold. In the lower rungs of society, the trauma was palpable in broken homes, displaced workers, permanent consciousness of mass death, public distrust, and a turn toward substance abuse and ill-health. The only fortunes were depleted and divested and a cultural anomie gained ascendence throughout the West.
Only a few decades later, the same upheaval took place during and after the Second World War. Following that war, once again, the music shifted as did the architecture, painting, literature, demographics, and the ideas we held about the future. Optimism in general experienced its second massive blow in a century, replaced by an advancing nihilism that could not be contained until it exploded two decades later.
One again, the distance between 1940 and 1950 was far more than a decade. There was a multinational reset with the formation of “neo-liberal” world political institutions like the IMF and World Bank, plus GATT, which were supposed to guarantee global peace. And only a few years later, the Cold War wrecked those plans with the creation of walled trading blocs.
The writers of the interwar period seemed to vanish, dismissed as old-fashioned and out of touch. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Nock, Mencken, Wharton, Garrett, Flynn – these were all household names in the 20s and 30s but gradually evaporated from the 1950s and onward. Magazines changed and industry too, with the old wiped away and the new granted a subsidized prominence.
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This is a consequence of the perception of new times and the irrelevance of everything that came before. This was coupled with a Freudian-style unwillingness to speak about the horrors of the war.
Though never announced and rarely acknowledged by corporate media, we’ve lived through our own form of trauma with the policy response to Covid. It took a form without precedent. Without a shooting war and without a declared peace, all the signs of war surrounded us from March 2020 onward.
It was characterized by an explosive shattering of how life was supposed to work. Holidays were canceled. We faced global and domestic travel restrictions. We obeyed sudden and untested protocols from anti-social distancing to masking to closures of everything, together with the turn-key socialism of multiple trillions in stimulus spending (and money printing).
The conscription came later, as millions were pumped full of an experimental medicine called mRNA delivered through a novel system with an injection. Most had no choice. Whole cities were closed down to the refuseniks. Even the students and kids were drafted into the great push for what was called vaccination – a moniker playing off past successes – but had no sterilizing effects and made no serious contribution to ending the pandemic.
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The more we learn about what provoked this horrifying experiment in virus control, the more we are discovering the central role of the military in shaping the policy response, dictating rules to public health, and shepherding the vaccine into being. From long before the American people had a clue what was coming, the military was already treating the virus as a bioweapon leak in need of countermeasures.
It was more like war than is usually admitted. Certainly most countries imposed a form of what felt like martial law. It felt that way because it was that way.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s book The Wuhan Coverup explains the larger context. The military had long worked with labs around the world in undertaking gain-of-function research in its bioweapons program of anticipating both the pathogen and the antidote – mad scientist stuff from the movies.
When the lab leak from China became obvious – sometime in the fall of 2019 – the preparations began, without consultation of elected leaders or even career civilian bureaucrats. By the time the response was implemented, it must have seemed like the only viable path, which is probably why Trump agreed to the preposterous plan of shutting down society.
The US Constitution nowhere authorizes such emergency-based abolition of liberties and rights. Justice Neil Gorsuch was correct in calling this “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” And notice the qualification: in peacetime. But can anyone think of any wartime measures that included canceling holidays, mass quarantines of the healthy, closed business and schools, and universal censorship of dissidents?
Both the Great War and the Second World War authorized universal censorship and surveillance but the targeting was specific to high-profile objectors and hardly touched the average person. And no time during these wars did government dare to issue countrywide edicts that everyone had to stand 6 feet apart from each other at all times or cover their faces just to shop. This did not happen in wartime.
We can safely edit Gorsuch’s comment to simply say the greatest intrusions on civil liberties, period.
And so what cultural trends can we track as marking the difference in pre-lockdown and post-lockdown times? We can note five terrible trends in particular.
- The entrenchment of new trading blocs that began to form with renewed protectionism but now foreshadow the end of dollar supremacy and close ties between Russia and China. Events of this past week – in which the whole world was invited to compare the relative erudition of the Russian and US presidents – suggest the end of the American empire.
- Dramatic declines in fertility. We are seeing this in every country but especially those countries that locked down the hardest like Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Italy, and Spain. Counties in Africa that did the least to enforce lockdowns have the highest rates of fertility. As part of this, gender dysphoria has taken hold. Yes the trans trend pre-exists Covid but the isolation, the digital addiction, the loss of purpose of the young, and the pause button on relationships cultivated a strange movement toward confusing men and women, and creating the illusion that biological sex is infinitely malleable.
- The ruination of literacy. Surveys are showing the lowest rates of book reading on record in addition to the lowest rates of even the ability of young people to read anywhere close to grade level. Those trends might be related, as is the rise of digital addiction.
- The deprecation of work. You can no doubt confirm this trend: work and the work ethic are deeply unfashionable, as an entire generation experienced what it was like to lounge all day in PJs and still get flooded with income courtesy of government. Labor dropouts in the UK, US, and EU remain very high.
- Up with dependency. The US and other nations show a greater number of people than ever living off government welfare, including disability benefits but more besides. The bureaucracy has taken full charge.
Add it all together and you get less individualism, initiative, and even desire to grow in prosperity. In other words, no surprise, the dramatic collectivized response has led to a greater degree of collectivism than we have heretofore experienced. With that comes inevitable spiritual despair.
As for changes in art and music, it is too early to say but here we can detect something unusual as wartime goes, not a forward-thinking effort to create the new but a clawing back of the old forms, probably because there is nowhere else to go.
And this introduces the other side of the coin, which is that the dramatic loss of trust in media, government, academia, corporate power, and science has led to:
- A new search for what is true, using every tool. This pertains not only to science and health but also to religion and a general philosophy of life. When the elites fail, it falls to everyone else to figure things out.
- A new emphasis on homeschooling. This practice lived under a legal cloud for decades until suddenly it became mandatory and the schools closed for as much as a year or two. Still education has to go on, so millions of parents have taken it upon themselves.
- A turn against college is part of this. They demand all the students get jabbed up, again and again, despite firm evidence that the shot was necessary, safe, or effective. Is this why people are paying six figures in tuition?
- Millions have realized that government can be trusted to take care of people and so there is a dramatic turn toward financial independence and new forms of independent living.
- New institutions are being founded. So many nonprofits, foundations, media outlets, and houses of worship utterly failed to show courage throughout the lockdown and mandate period. Hence new institutions are being founded by the day that have paid close attention and are preparing a culture for new times.
Brownstone Institute is certainly part of this but there are many more besides, in addition to alternative media which is growing so fast that it is swamping the legacy media.
This is only a sketch and it is too early to see precisely what kinds of changes have been initiated in our country and world due to the wartime tactics of the Covid response. The closest analogy we can name is the Great War more than a century ago, which closed one chapter in history and opened a new one.
To make sure that what comes next is better than the corruption we left behind will take all our efforts. It is precisely for this reason that there is so much mandatory forgetting that is being urged upon us. You can see daily in the corporate news, which wants to forget about the whole ugly chapter for fear that the peasants will get too restless. Anthony Fauci in his depositions and Congressional testimony sums up the theme of all official institutions today: “I cannot recall.”
We dare not comply with this mandatory forgetting. We must remember, and take full account of the deception and destruction the ruling class has caused for no other reason than profits and power. Only then we can learn the right lessons and rebuild on a better foundation for the future.
About the Author
Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
Five Things New “Preppers” Forget When Getting Ready for Bad Times Ahead
The preparedness community is growing faster than it has in decades. Even during peak times such as Y2K, the economic downturn of 2008, and Covid, the vast majority of Americans made sure they had plenty of toilet paper but didn’t really stockpile anything else.
Things have changed. There’s a growing anxiety in this presidential election year that has prompted more Americans to get prepared for crazy events in the future. Some of it is being driven by fearmongers, but there are valid concerns with the economy, food supply, pharmaceuticals, the energy grid, and mass rioting that have pushed average Americans into “prepper” mode.
There are degrees of preparedness. One does not have to be a full-blown “doomsday prepper” living off-grid in a secure Montana bunker in order to be ahead of the curve. In many ways, preparedness isn’t about being able to perfectly handle every conceivable situation. It’s about being less dependent on government for as long as possible. Those who have proper “preps” will not be waiting for FEMA to distribute emergency supplies to the desperate masses.
Below are five things people new to preparedness (and sometimes even those with experience) often forget as they get ready. All five are common sense notions that do not rely on doomsday in order to be useful. It may be nice to own a tank during the apocalypse but there’s not much you can do with it until things get really crazy. The recommendations below can have places in the lives of average Americans whether doomsday comes or not.
Note: The information provided by this publication or any related communications is for informational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. We do not provide personalized investment, financial, or legal advice.
Secured Wealth
Whether in the bank or held in a retirement account, most Americans feel that their life’s savings is relatively secure. At least they did until the last couple of years when de-banking, geopolitical turmoil, and the threat of Central Bank Digital Currencies reared their ugly heads.
It behooves Americans to diversify their holdings. If there’s a triggering event or series of events that cripple the financial systems or devalue the U.S. Dollar, wealth can evaporate quickly. To hedge against potential turmoil, many Americans are looking in two directions: Crypto and physical precious metals.
There are huge advantages to cryptocurrencies, but there are also inherent risks because “virtual” money can become challenging to spend. Add in the push by central banks and governments to regulate or even replace cryptocurrencies with their own versions they control and the risks amplify. There’s nothing wrong with cryptocurrencies today but things can change rapidly.
As for physical precious metals, many Americans pay cash to keep plenty on hand in their safe. Rolling over or transferring retirement accounts into self-directed IRAs is also a popular option, but there are caveats. It can often take weeks or even months to get the gold and silver shipped if the owner chooses to close their account. This is why Genesis Gold Group stands out. Their relationship with the depositories allows for rapid closure and shipping, often in less than 10 days from the time the account holder makes their move. This can come in handy if things appear to be heading south.
Lots of Potable Water
One of the biggest shocks that hit new preppers is understanding how much potable water they need in order to survive. Experts claim one gallon of water per person per day is necessary. Even the most conservative estimates put it at over half-a-gallon. That means that for a family of four, they’ll need around 120 gallons of water to survive for a month if the taps turn off and the stores empty out.
Being near a fresh water source, whether it’s a river, lake, or well, is a best practice among experienced preppers. It’s necessary to have a water filter as well, even if the taps are still working. Many refuse to drink tap water even when there is no emergency. Berkey was our previous favorite but they’re under attack from regulators so the Alexapure systems are solid replacements.
For those in the city or away from fresh water sources, storage is the best option. This can be challenging because proper water storage containers take up a lot of room and are difficult to move if the need arises. For “bug in” situations, having a larger container that stores hundreds or even thousands of gallons is better than stacking 1-5 gallon containers. Unfortunately, they won’t be easily transportable and they can cost a lot to install.
Water is critical. If chaos erupts and water infrastructure is compromised, having a large backup supply can be lifesaving.
Pharmaceuticals and Medical Supplies
There are multiple threats specific to the medical supply chain. With Chinese and Indian imports accounting for over 90% of pharmaceutical ingredients in the United States, deteriorating relations could make it impossible to get the medicines and antibiotics many of us need.
Stocking up many prescription medications can be hard. Doctors generally do not like to prescribe large batches of drugs even if they are shelf-stable for extended periods of time. It is a best practice to ask your doctor if they can prescribe a larger amount. Today, some are sympathetic to concerns about pharmacies running out or becoming inaccessible. Tell them your concerns. It’s worth a shot. The worst they can do is say no.
If your doctor is unwilling to help you stock up on medicines, then Jase Medical is a good alternative. Through telehealth, they can prescribe daily meds or antibiotics that are shipped to your door. As proponents of medical freedom, they empathize with those who want to have enough medical supplies on hand in case things go wrong.
Energy Sources
The vast majority of Americans are locked into the grid. This has proven to be a massive liability when the grid goes down. Unfortunately, there are no inexpensive remedies.
Those living off-grid had to either spend a lot of money or effort (or both) to get their alternative energy sources like solar set up. For those who do not want to go so far, it’s still a best practice to have backup power sources. Diesel generators and portable solar panels are the two most popular, and while they’re not inexpensive they are not out of reach of most Americans who are concerned about being without power for extended periods of time.
Natural gas is another necessity for many, but that’s far more challenging to replace. Having alternatives for heating and cooking that can be powered if gas and electric grids go down is important. Have a backup for items that require power such as manual can openers. If you’re stuck eating canned foods for a while and all you have is an electric opener, you’ll have problems.
Don’t Forget the Protein
When most think about “prepping,” they think about their food supply. More Americans are turning to gardening and homesteading as ways to produce their own food. Others are working with local farmers and ranchers to purchase directly from the sources. This is a good idea whether doomsday comes or not, but it’s particularly important if the food supply chain is broken.
Most grocery stores have about one to two weeks worth of food, as do most American households. Grocers rely heavily on truckers to receive their ongoing shipments. In a crisis, the current process can fail. It behooves Americans for multiple reasons to localize their food purchases as much as possible.
Long-term storage is another popular option. Canned foods, MREs, and freeze dried meals are selling out quickly even as prices rise. But one component that is conspicuously absent in shelf-stable food is high-quality protein. Most survival food companies offer low quality “protein buckets” or cans of meat, but they are often barely edible.
Prepper All-Naturals offers premium cuts of steak that have been cooked sous vide and freeze dried to give them a 25-year shelf life. They offer Ribeye, NY Strip, and Tenderloin among others.
Having buckets of beans and rice is a good start, but keeping a solid supply of high-quality protein isn’t just healthier. It can help a family maintain normalcy through crises.
Prepare Without Fear
With all the challenges we face as Americans today, it can be emotionally draining. Citizens are scared and there’s nothing irrational about their concerns. Being prepared and making lifestyle changes to secure necessities can go a long way toward overcoming the fears that plague us. We should hope and pray for the best but prepare for the worst. And if the worst does come, then knowing we did what we could to be ready for it will help us face those challenges with confidence.