Compassion for Maskers? - Rethinking Mass Compliance After Decades of Cold Atheism
Learning to see the crippling fear and loneliness behind the covid mask
I’ll admit it… I got really angry during covid hysteria times.
Particularly during the constant global gaslighting misinformation campaign waged by governments, media, big pharma, and a million other organizations and entities who worked in lock-step across the entire world to basically break down the minds of previously reasonable people into little sheep willing to do anything the government said without any critical thinking.
I think one of the reasons that I was so suspicious and sensitive to gaslighting was because in the previous decade I had come out of a relationship where there had been a lot of it, and part of the healing was recognizing the extent to which it affected me in my own life.
You see, I had been through a ‘dark night of the soul” years before covid, and so when the gaslighting seemed to descend on me from the whole world, I resisted it on all levels.
That the virus was not a big deal (unless you were over 80 with major comorbidities) eventually became entirely obvious.
That distancing was useless for stopping a virus also eventually became obvious.
That wearing a mask to stop a virus was like using a chain-link fence to keep out mosquitoes, also became obvious.
And that no one cared to look into any of the real data also became entirely obvious.
And then I got angry.
And at one point, in a more silent protest of mockery, I actually purchased a BANE mask (“Bane” from the movie, Batman the Dark Knight), and wore it as a substitute for the absurd medical masks that were given out freely everywhere.
In an effort to keep my sanity, and in a way to assert myself by silently mocking everyone (for I was very familiar with the Bane character and all his quotes from the Dark Knight), this was my way of fighting back, and turning a negative into a positive.
But even though I was intending to actually resist all the maskers, I ended up doing the opposite… namely, endearing myself to them.
Most of them loved it. I got tons of compliments.
Lol.
And I eventually found it hard to be angry with the very people that I had originally set out to resist. Lots of conversations were started, and many laughs were had.
And so on one hand, I was resisting all the obvious BS being spewed everywhere across the western world at every corner, but I was also having a hard time maintaining my anger, and was finding that I really didn’t want to live in that space of anger continually, and so I started digging much deeper, and really trying to get to the bottom of things.
One author I eventually came across really helped me put things in perspective, and remind me of things that I think knew, but managed to forget to some degree. His name is Mattias Desmet, a psychologist, who wrote a book called “The Psychology of Totalitarianism”.
And one of the things he talks about in this book is the problem of what he calls “scientism”. Having been someone who has studied a lot of philosophy, religion, psychology, and the philosophy of science, I was very familiar with scientism, or what people call the “mechanistic” view of life.
In contrast with the word “scientific”, scientism is used often as a pejorative to describe the process of elevating “science” to a total worldview, when of course, in reality, science is a method, and not a worldview.
People who are “scientistic” (as opposed to scientific) tend to forget that science is a constantly evolving process/method that requires constant skepticism and questioning, and that, in reality, “the science” is never really settled.
Desmet discusses how there has been a very worrisome trend for quite sometime towards abandonment of religion and towards a mechanistic “cause and effect” view of life where essentially a sort of darwinistic determinism holds sway and where there is subsequently no meaning in anything.
And then people (in silent despair) eventually decide that the “point” of life is to be “happy”, which is very reminiscent of the Bible passage that says if there is nothing after death,
“Let us eat and drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”
And I definitely agreed with Desmet.
Because for the previous two decades, I have seen a steady flow of people (online and in real life) rejecting their former (usually Christian) faith, and often embrace a “secular” “godless” view of life that entailed this “mechanistic” view of evolution, and was very “reductionist” in it’s view of the universe (and, in my opinion, quite wrong).
Many years ago, I had seen the popular ascension of “the four horsemen” atheists (Dawkins, Dennet, Harris, Hitchens), and was witness to countless people abandoning their faith and taking on the (in my opinion, quite vacuous) viewpoints of so-called “rationalism” and popular secularists who boldly claimed “I Fucking Love Science” (the name of popular science groups online that regularly mocked religion and religious claims).
I actually had many friends who ended up abandoning the faith (whether many of them had real “faith” to begin with… I’m not so sure now), and many joined a chorus of voices in mockery and opposition to “religion”.
One of the more popular books was by Christopher Hitchens called “god is Not Great. How Religion Poisons Everything”.
I was always skeptical and distrustful of such sweeping titles and accusations, and as it turns out, I was entirely justified in my mistrust.
But not because of a rebuttal or argument made against his thesis, but something much more simple… the obvious and historic reality that the word “religion” is probably the most poorly defined and most poorly understood word in the world. And when people assume they know what they are talking about when they use that word, you would probably eventually find out otherwise.
You see, when you look up the etymology of the word (instead of the absurd reductionist meaning found in any given dictionary), things start getting extremely complicated.
And then one starts to realize that the “anti-religion” movement is just as obtuse as a lot of the more crude religious movements that the world sees regularly. Indeed, the “anti-religion” movement always eventually ends up becoming it’s own “religion”.
In the same way that the word “cult” has lost it’s historic meaning (and usually has a very negative connotation), so also “religion” has unfortunately been divorced from it’s very complicated and nuanced past.
You see, whatever you think about “organized religion” or the “truth claims” of religions and religious people, is, in many ways, really besides the point.
Because whether you’re a hardcore evolutionist anti-theist, or a died-in-the-wool creationist who thinks the world was made 6,000 years ago ex-nihilo, what both sides are missing is that they never take the time to even think about the very practical reality of what “religion” has historically meant, and what it does for people and cultures (and I don’t mean that in a purely utilitarian way either, as it may seem).
And subsequently, in our rush to “find the truth” and “be right” about the “evidence”, we don’t consider the original meaning of the word, which was…
“to bind people together”.
For the Romans, they were all about “religio” (pronounced “ree-lig-eeh-oh”), the bond between gods and men, and the bonds that strengthened society, the thing that “binds people together”. They would offer “cult” (ie, “devotion”) to the gods (often through the priests), and thus affirm themselves, their community, their values, and their people.
Modern people’s minds have been so polluted by our bastardized word “religion” (which both secularists and religious people have abused), which basically has come to mean “what you believe”, we can’t see that, for thousands of years, the word had very different implications.
Can you believe that there was a time when the word “religion” didn’t even necessarily imply any “belief” in a particular god? Or, for that matter, belief in anything in particular?
But there were cultural situations where that was indeed the case!
Most people have a hard time wrapping their minds around this, and largely because of so-called “truth seekers” (who can’t see the historical forest for the trees).
But there indeed was a time when “religion” or “religio” was all about (among other things of course) preventing the one thing that is so common in our day now, namely:
alienation.
From the Romans to the Persians to the Greeks to the Pagans to the Jews to the ancient Christians, and so much more, “religion” was a much broader thing that encompassed devotion to your gods, your rituals, your values, your priorities, your culture, and your people.
For the ancients, worship of any particular god wasn’t so much about “belief” in that god per se, but rather devotion to the ideals and values which that particular god represented, and subsequently an alignment and connection to the values of your people, and to the people themselves. Any particular god’s “existence” was simply taken for granted, like the existence of the trees or the wind, and even questioning it would have been considered indecent.
And within this context where giving “religio” to the gods was respected and honored, where a common people shared a common vision of who they were, what their values were, what they stood for and valorized… it was here that community and togetherness flourished.
Now this doesn’t necessarily imply that all relationships were loving and peaceful ones… but whether it was the “religion” of the early Christians with their loving community which focused on “love your neighbor as you love yourself”, or the comradery that naturally flows from “brothers in war” engaged in a common struggle (or even against each other but with a common vision of valor) that was common in the Roman and Persian ethos (and which seems to find it’s modern equivalent or emulation in MMA cage fighting like UFC), the common vision of values and culture and ritual was the thing that (among other things) kept the people and the community together.
This is of course not to say that “religio” made everything better (of course, how you even define “better” would be very much influenced by your own personal “religio”).
But among other things, it did create a strong sense of identity of where you come from and what mattered to you and your people.
But what a different time that we live in now…
For the last 20 years, I have been witness to a steady decline in “religio”, and the community that had typically pervaded it. And regardless of whether you had a good reason to stop going to church or whatever religious get-together you had (maybe it was a corrupt leader or priest or something like that), it still doesn’t change the fact that when you lost that group of people and the regular expression of common values and vision you regularly connected with… you still lost A LOT.
For what happens when the community you grew up in (regardless of it’s faults or corruptions) goes away?
You are left alone.
Isolated.
Alienated.
Some people, when they discard their faith, initially feel a strong sense of exhilaration, especially if there was a strong guilt component associated with it. No doubt there would have been many people who discovered Darwin’s idea of natural selection, and were already eager to throw off the shackles of “superstitious” and guilt-tripping religion.
And however inevitable this process might have been, historically speaking, those rushing to this “rationalism” were indeed massively short-sighted in their enthusiasm (and lack of trepidation).
Because what’s the hard historical truth?
THAT WE ARE IN UNCHARTED WATERS.
Whatever you think about “religion”, if you have honesty in your historical perspective, you would have to admit that there was never a time when “secularism” and “atheism” were so dominant and widespread.
Over the last two decades, I have been witness to ever increasing confusion, loneliness, and aimlessness. The ever-increasing break-down of families and communities and religious communities has been relentless and ongoing.
And the category of “spiritual, but not religious” has done little to blunt this decline. In fact, it is likely accelerating it.
More than ever before, people have lost the historical sense of who they were… and thus subsequently, who they are.
Now people like Nietzsche saw this as an inevitability which would come about as a result of the “will to truth” so highly valorized in religions like Christianity (indeed, many other religions didn’t valorize truth nearly as much as Christianity did), and so he thought that we should expect this time, and that it is not coming “out of the blue”. And that, although it would be a calamity, there was reason to have hope on the other side.
But in the meantime, we have been witness to this amazing charade and spectacle of half-truths and outright deception in the covid era.
Never before have so many forces converged throughout the world in lock-step on a narrative that seems to fall apart upon the slightest inspection.
Why don’t most people want to look into things? Why do they do silly things like wear masks and distancing and take experimental injections that were rushed to market without proper safety protocols and transparency?
Because they lost their faith a long time.
They don’t believe in their community, or in their religion(s). And they have no cult (devotion) towards a higher ideal or value, and thus most importantly, they don’t believe in themselves.
For so many, all they had left was the (capitalistic) global order around them, and the potential for more comfort and more material goods.
So what did they naturally put their faith in? The only thing they had left:
Government.
And so when these people are confronted with obvious evidence that the government is extremely corrupt and inept, they simply find it too uncomfortable to accept. Too scary, too destabilizing.
And no, this article isn’t me lamenting the decline of Christianity and how we just need to go back to the basics and live like we’re in the 1950s again.
No. I don’t think that’s possible.
We’ve come too far.
And even though this whole process has indeed been a trainwreck leading to here, I still have hope for the future. That even this whole process into apparent chaos and decline, itself has meaning, and even hope for the future.
For there is always a silver lining. And for us, there may be the biggest silver lining right around the corner.
In the meantime, I want to change my view of the maskers and the covidians. I don’t want to hate anyone or be enraged with the global gaslighting campaigns, no matter how aggressive it gets (although I may have to resist it in whatever forms). I want to have compassion for them and see the fear and despair behind the mask, driving it all… the fear that has been building for decades.
I want to understand this phenomenon within it’s context.
And “keep the faith”, looking to the horizon.
As Nietzsche said,
“Amor Fati”
Truly excellent article.
I too was angry: https://christophercook.substack.com/p/will-you-comply-masking-lockdowns
So angry.
And I too want to leave behind the anger and better understand the fear, the loneliness, and the psychology (of totalitarianism) at work.
I can forgive those maskers who wore one and minded their own business. But those who decided to demand everyone around them wear these useless “virtue” pieces can pound sand, no compassion, no forgiveness. Sorry you didn’t practice skepticism and perhaps ask yourself why, if masks worked so well, they hadn’t been recommended from 1918 (Spanish flu) until 2020. I guess 100 years of annual flu deaths didn’t matter to public health authorities when the answer could literally be on their faces.