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I remember warning at the outset that on a long enough timeline, every crisis becomes a religion. The Church of Covid is fully up and running, complete with heaven-and-hell mythology, devotional practices, and papal indulgences for elites and events with the correct politics. https://twitter.com/SteveDeaceShow/status/1326879246468476935
Beneath all the politics and myth-making lies the simple idea that masks probably help a little, and if they help a little - plus giving people a little psychological comfort in a time of great crisis - they're worth using. If it ended there, we'd be having a rational discussion.
But masks were politicized in the worst possible way, and reason went out the window as a political-religious movement formed around the Wuhan coronavirus. It's easy to see why people fell for it. They desperately wanted to believe they could do SOMETHING to gain control.
It's not easy to accept that little can be done after a highly contagious disease spreads through a vast population. People desperately want to believe there is a "smart policy" that will bring it all under control. Politicians desperately want to be seen as smart policymakers.
And as President Trump learned to his cost, people desperately want to displace their feelings of anger and helplessness onto an approved target, someone they're allowed or encouraged to hate. They have a primal hunger to blame SOMEONE for a massive crisis.
American political and media culture pressured people into thinking they cannot blame the people who actually unleashed the coronavirus pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party, so their feelings of anger and helplessness became a river that could be diverted elsewhere.
Americans were lectured that the only truly effective defense against a virulent disease, quarantine - which includes banning travel from high-risk areas - was unthinkable and inhumane. From that moment on, the only question was how quickly the Wuhan coronavirus would spread.
Having convinced people not to do the only things that would have made a difference at the crucial moment (while the Chinese laughed and merrily implemented their own travel bans) politicians needed to contrive an illusory "smart policy," a religion for all the smart people.
One of the key attributes of arrogance is refusing to admit you have a deep need for faith in your life. Arrogant people are thus susceptible to pseudo-religions gussied up to resemble SCIENCE! and flatter their image of themselves as creatures of supreme reason and logic.
That's one of the reasons the NXIVM cult flourished. Watch the documentaries about them and look at the "self-help" seminars they used to lure in converts and make money. They preyed on the eternal longing of arrogant people to fill their lives with a "scientific" faith.
Mask Mania and the quickly-developed Church of Covid depend on similar appetites. People want something they can believe with all their hearts, but they want it styled as something they can embrace with their minds. They want to demonstrate their faith by denouncing unbelievers.
Mask Mania is perfect for the current moment. It's obvious and physical, thus the Rise of the Karens. Masks are a constant, uncomfortable reminder of dread, but they're not TOO uncomfortable. They let people feel like they're Doing Something Important.
The latter isn't necessarily an unhealthy impulse - psychological comfort IS comfort, and much needed in times like these - but it was ruthlessly exploited by political operators. Masks were inflated in effectiveness beyond all reason, with potentially dangerous consequences.
The enduring problem is that masks became one of those Beautiful Theories our pretend-scientist elite is obsessed with. Beautiful Theories make sense to them and fit neatly into their ideology, so they MUST be true - and all evidence to the contrary must be suppressed.
Beautiful Theories are to real science like a predator that learns to mimic its surroundings to trap prey. They superficially resemble science and are marketed as such, but they invert the scientific method: invincible conclusion established first, ignore facts that challenge it.
We're well into that "invincible hypothesis" territory with masks, which became objects of pseudo-scientific religious devotion so strong that it was arguably a decisive factor in the presidential election... despite a mountain of evidence that they only help a little. /end
