It has affected politics, economics, culture, media and technology. It’s not just about the spreading of economic, cultural and demographic decay. Millions and billions of lives have been wrecked, to be sure, but there is also a big impact on the way we see the world around us.
What we once trusted, we now doubt and even disbelieve as a matter of new habit. The simple categories of understanding that we once deployed to make sense of the world have been tested, challenged and even overthrown. Old forms of ideological commitments have opened their way to new.
This particularly pertains to intellectuals. Or should in any case.
If you have not shifted your thinking in some respect over these years, you are either a prophet, asleep or in denial.
The way social media works today, influencers are reluctant to admit it lest risk their followings built out of a prior cultural landscape. This is really too bad.
There is nothing wrong with changing, adapting, migrating and calling out truth even if that contradicts what you once said or how you used to believe.
There is no need to change your principles or ideals. What should change in light of evidence is your evaluation of the problems and threats, your outlook on the relative priorities of focus, your perceptions of the functionality of institutional structures, your awareness of issues and concerns about which you had limited prior knowledge, your political and cultural allegiances and so on.
These days, this intellectual migration seems mainly to have affected the left. Nearly daily I find myself having the same conversations with people in person, on the phone or online. It is from an Obama voter and someone with traditionally “liberal” allegiances.
The COVID era utterly shocked them in what they discovered about their own tribe. They aren’t liberal at all.
They supported universal quarantine, forced face coverings and then mandatory jabs pushed by a tax-funded corporate monopoly. Concerns about human rights, civil liberties and the common good suddenly evaporated. Then of course they turned to the most blunt instrument of all: censorship.
The trauma felt by principled people who imagined themselves to be “on the left” is palpable.
But the same is true of people “on the right” who were aghast to observe that it was Trump and his administration that greenlighted lockdowns, spent many trillions forcing COVID compliance and then threw public monies at Big Pharma to rush a shot by bypassing all standards of necessity, safety and effectiveness.
The promise to “make America great again” ended in wreckage coast-to-coast. For Trump partisans, this realization that it all happened under their hero is hard to take, a triangulating rope-a-dope.
Even more strangely, it was the “never Trumpers” on the right who most strongly supported lockdowns, masking and shot mandates.
The libertarians are another story entirely, one that nearly surpasses understanding. Among the higher echelons of this faction in academia and think tanks, the silence from the start and even years later was truly deafening.
Instead of standing up to totalitarianism, as the whole of the intellectual tradition had prepared them to do, they deployed their clever heuristics to justify outrages against core freedoms, even the freedom to associate.
So yes, observing one’s own tribe collapse into craven careerism and coercion is disorienting. But the problem goes even deeper. The most striking alliance of our time has been to observe the lockstep of the elites in government, media, tech and academia.
The reality blows apart the traditional binary of public vs. private that has dominated ideological discussion for centuries.
Hellbound and Down 