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Notes -
I've just started to read an historical book, which was written in 2014 and updated in 2021. And the book, understandably, starts with a preface by the author. In which the author chose to give an insufferable sermon about how much we should worry about the climate change (of course, nobody is going to print a book without a
quote from Leninsermon on climate change) and, since it was 2021, about profound and civilization-changing consequences of COVID (the topic of the book itself has absolutely nothing to with either, btw).Now it is 2026, so I find myself compelled to ask - were there any civilization-changing consequences to COVID? If so, which ones? To kick it off, I can give a list of what it changed for me personally:
I have lost significant dose of respect and hope for institutional knowledge. It's not that I doubt The Science (C) (TM) (R) knows a lot of things - I do not doubt that. What I doubt is a) that all those things are true, and b) that the institution as such really cares about as many of them being true as possible. I am now certain that institutionally there are no mechanisms that would preclude institutionally inconvenient truth from being hidden and institutionally inconvenient falsity from being accepted (and enforced) as true - at least on the timeframes comparable with my lifetime. I also am convinced the role of the press in the equation is significantly negative.
I no longer think that the US - as a society, as a culture and as people - have immunity to tyranny of any sort. It has somewhat better resistance than some other cultures, maybe, but the barrier after which all the lofty ideals of freedom are going to be gleefully trashed is awfully low and very easy to overcome, and can be overcome on literally days' notice by the government, with no significant resistance. We are all walking on a very thin ice, freedom-wise.
Personally, COVID events also gave me the necessary kick in the butt to finally get out of California. While it felt uncomfortable for a while before COVID, I could be succumbing to inertia for a long time yet, but COVID overthrew all my routines anyway, so the change came much easier.
On the personal level, I also realized I may not have as much time as I thought I have, with regard not only to my personal health and well-being, but also for all the framework that I enjoy as a member of Western civilization. Any part of it could disappear for reasons I can't predict, so if I want to do things, I better start doing things I want and not delay them to some vague future when I have more time and energy.
Job market drastically opened to remote work (in my area, of course) - what used to be a weird ask, became a standard offering. While there's RTO pushback now, remote work is a standard option and asking for it is no longer a niche request but a solid, respectable preference, that has its own ample market to work with. If anything, in-office work now begins to be seen as an add-on instead of the default.
None of that is civilization-changing though. Maybe the last one is a little economy-changing but it existed very much pre-COVID too. Any civilization-changing consequences I did miss?
Remote work and mistrust in institutions are civilization-changing in the long run, but it's not as if they wouldn't have happened without The Experts just openly lying to back up their narrative on Covid.
Look, I've talked to continentals who relocated over the virus restrictions. The USA is far and away more resistant to tyranny than other countries with functioning sewage systems. Yes it got bad here but not as bad as in Holland or France. I put way more importance on gun rights and accept much higher casualty rates for their sake than I would have prior to the 'pandemic'.
I think the USA didn’t so as well as we like to tell ourselves on resisting tyranny. It was months before there was any serious pushback on restrictions. And even then, it was pretty minor. We still allowed the government to impose vaccination as the cost of leaving the house and having a non-remote job. We still allowed the government to — without even a hint of an end-date — to shut down public venues, close schools, close businesses (that the government itself got to decide were not essential enough to be allowed to do business at all). There were no protests for weeks or months. There were no cases of people going to those places and opening them in defiance of the government fiat. Obeying and then changing your mind later isn’t resistance. Obeying and then changing your mind when the costs affected you personally is buyers remorse. There were no members of any government in the USA that objected to shutting down until … whenever the government defined the country “safe enough.” They never thought that they were laying the foundations for the next crisis and creating the precedent that it would be allowed to interfere with people’s lives indefinitely.
This worldview is incomprehensible to me. Do you believe the government should never enact any restrictions as a response to an emergency? If you’re a principled libertarian, I suppose it’s self-consistent, but the majority of people aren’t. Temporarily closing non essential businesses, social distancing and vaccination orders are all standard, reasonable responses to a pandemic and aren’t some new form of tyranny, there were similar responses during the Spanish flu (minus vaccines which weren’t as developed).
There were curfews in London during WW2 to protect civilians from bombings, do you view those as tyranny as well?
I’m not totally anti-restrictions, but those restrictions, should be either voted on by publicly elected representatives in open sessions, or be done only in extreme emergencies, and even then must have a date or publicly acknowledged end condition at which point the restrictions lift. The Covid restrictions were not voted in open sessions of the legislature, nor did they have an officially declared ending condition or date. The public was locked down and restricted by the fiat of the health departments and had no public end. The end of those restrictions would come when an unelected government official accountable to no one outside the department decreed that the “free” public would thus be allowed to resume their lives.
Not sure how it worked where you lived, but in most EU countries the parliament had to pass a law to give the executive branch emergency powers to respond to the crisis.
Yes, isn’t that what happened? At least where I lived, all emergency powers had a built-in expiration date and a vote had to be passed every few months throughout the pandemic in order to extend them.
If you live in an authoritarian country where the executive branch can enact a state of emergency with 0 accountability and have it persist without requiring any votes, that’s another problem entirely. In functional democracies, suspension of civil liberties was not done without significant scrutiny and legislation.
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Yes. But certain limitations of freedoms is expected in the middle of a war, with the understanding that as soon as the war ends, those will be gone, and everybody tries to make it shorter. Something that is clearly driven by enemy action - if there are bombings, there is curfew, if there's no bombing, no curfew anymore. And yes, the war can very much be a roadway for tyranny - just look at Russia, for example. With the war though, sometimes you have no choice - if a person is outside and a bomb falls, that person has a very high chance to die, and it's not a very controversial statement. But if the government says we must jail everybody who says anything critical about the Generalissimo because there are bombings - that's clearly tyrannical.
Oh, it's definitely not new - there's little tyranny-wise that can be really new, people tried to take power over other people for millennia, there's not a lot of new you can invent there. Well, maybe making people wear aquariums on their heads wasn't tried much before, but otherwise a lot of stuff is not new at all. "Reasonable" though is quite different beast - is it reasonable to arrest people for walking alone on the beach, while encouraging mass riots? Is it reasonable to impose night curfew to fight a viral infection? Is it reasonable to impose random restrictions not based on any empirical data because they look like the government is doing something? Is it reasonable to lie in order to get the citizens to behave in the way the government thinks they need to behave? Is it reasonable to suppress criticism of government policies because the government thinks allowing criticism will lead to less compliance? Ultimately, that's the essence of the problem - the freedom encroachments become bigger and bigger, and it's very standard and natural - if the government wants to do something, it's clearly easier if nobody would disagree and everybody would shut up and do exactly what they are told to do, but we also know where this road is leading, and it's not a good place. There must be a stop somewhere, and the recent events showed that we can go quite far on this road, much farther than we thought before, with little resistance on the way. That makes one question - is there a stop at all? How far is it?
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Re: WW2 there was full male conscription and rationing of every foodstuff except bread, heavy propaganda, the works.
“Tyranny” has a moral valence one can agree or disagree with but it was extremely authoritarian. And as with COVID it was very dangerous long term because certain segments of society loved it - Labour tried hard to make rationing a permanent feature of British life long after food shortages had been resolved.
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I imagine what it would all look like if the Black Death struck again, in 2026. The workable solutions to any of this would be tyrannical in nature. “Free and open” is a recipe under trying circumstances to give natural selection free reign to determine the course and outcome. Maybe some people want to live under that paradigm. Normal human beings do not.
I remember reading a history book on the effects it had on Britain in the 13th century. One natural consequence that fell out of the havoc it wrought across the country was that the whole society became younger. It was a horrific time to live through, but the social transformations that co-evolved in the wake of the pandemic were amazing to read about. It made me reflect on history in a way I’d never considered before.
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