FOR those of us whose antennae were vibrating with suspicion in 2020 – seemingly a lifetime ago – the wait for a shift in public consciousness has been long.
In March 2020 Channel 4 hosted a debate with a panel including a geneticist, Sir Paul Nurse, an epidemiologist, Professor Sunetra Gupta, and the fairground fortune-teller, Professor Neil Ferguson. For a history of the latter’s fantastical and damaging forecasts, see here.
The lone voice of good sense was quickly identifiable as Sunetra Gupta, and I knew instinctively it would be quickly silenced.
As the vaccine fervour rose towards the final part of the year, my stomach tightened wondering how few people would see the second lockdown as a political manoeuvre to keep the fear-engine running long enough to ensure mass uptake of the injections.
By the spring I was saying to myself that if the adverse effects of blood clots and bleeding disorders that Doctors for Covid Ethics including Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, Dr Mike Yeadon and many others, had alerted the European Medicines Agency to as early as February 2021 materialised, the programme would be halted.
But the slogans of the jungle drums drowned out the voices of common sense and caution. I was sure, however, that if people were personally harmed by the injections, the news would spread via their families and contacts, causing the tide to turn. It did not occur to me and those who think like me that medical professionals would twist themselves into knots to deny any correlation between inexplicable and spontaneous cardiac damage and the experimental injections, and actually accuse people with serious neurological injuries of imagining their ailments. Nor did we anticipate the crude censorship by social media platforms.
As the reports of multiple types of injuries mounted, coming from all over the ‘vaccinated’ world, along with explanations from manifestly ethical scientists that these experimental biotech interventions were unnecessary, lacked efficacy and were dangerous, we managed to hang on to the belief that there would be a sudden realisation at population level that the ‘vaccines’ had been forced on people entirely to satisfy the interests of corporate profit.
What we witnessed instead, however, was a cult formation which psychotherapist Sue Parker Hall described in her article ‘The Undue Psychological Influence of Covid-19’. She references Lifton’s theory of ‘Thought Reform’ (1989) whereby a process of individual political indoctrination gains a psychological momentum of its own, and once installed ‘there is no further need of an indoctrinating guru, teacher or other authority figure, because the subjects who have been indoctrinated reflexively take on that role, policing their own and others’ adherence to the ideology’.
A source within the NHS tells me that staff are off sick in unprecedented numbers; many have received four, and in some cases even five injections. Non-subscribers to the ‘cult’ are treated with increasing ridicule.
On the positive side, however, many minds are turning to formulating ideas as to how we might begin to re-imagine and build new societal structures and methods of governance ‘post war’, including an interesting article in these pages by James MacRae last week.
As regards education, the teaching of ethics needs to be a central plank, as it has great value as a method of developing critical thinking.
The Aristotelian school of virtue ethics, unlike other theories of ethics, cautions against relying on any precise, fixed set of rules as a guide to ascertain what is right and wrong in all circumstances. Instead, his teachings encourage a daily practice of self-questioning to develop an inner commitment to honesty, building over time into a natural habit of rigorous examination of one’s motives before making any judgment. Of all the virtues, he ranks courage as the most important, without which none of the other virtues can be successfully exercised. He also prizes balance, and warns us not to confuse courage with rashness. He believes that the pursuit of these qualities brings self-reliance and contentment because the individual possesses free will and as such supreme moral responsibility for himself and his actions.
Margaret Mead (1901-1978) said: ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.’ Every effort counts.
