Flu Games

Atlanta, GA

February 16, 2022

Like a magnate who’s never happy if another mogul has more, LeBron James always looks as if he doesn’t get the respect he thinks he deserves. Perhaps it’s petulance. Maybe it’s pride. Or potentially it’s true.

But I’ve always thought, regardless his accomplishments, that LeBron desperately wants his own “flu game”. 

In 1997, Michael Jordan enhanced his legacy by scoring 38 points…while suffering severe “flu-like symptoms” (later revealed to be food poisowning)…to lead the Chicago Bulls to victory in Game 5 of the NBA Finals. 

Jordan was already considered by many to be the best basketball player who ever lived. But as when Tom Brady won his fifth Super Bowl, this performance…and the eventual championship to which it led…removed whatever doubt the remaining skeptics might’ve had.

LeBron James has won multiple titles with several teams, compiled records that may never be matched, and is now considered by some to be Jordan’s equal. But to look at him, he seems to think it isn’t enough. Great as he is, he looks insecure, and appears unable to acknowledge how good he has it. 

It’s like he needs some unprecedented peril, a unique calamity only he can surmount…and for which he can be appreciated and applauded by generations to come.

He needs his flu game.

He’s not alone. With an unparalleled abundance of food, shelter, leisure, material prosperity, racial acceptance, and time-wasting technology, a lot of people seem to suffer this affliction. 

They have what Jeff Deist referred to as a “romantic sense of their own lives”.  They crave a “great cause”, and will concoct one if needed to appease the urge. 

They can’t appreciate their blessings, or acknowledge historical achievements that made them possible. No social ills can be cured unless they get the credit. 

It’s a variation on the self-centered martyr complex. Those it afflicts lament not the challenges they endured, but those they missed.

Not that our modern world-improvers are actually willing to be martyrs to whatever causes they insist we care about (that’s what they want to rest of us to do). But they desperately want everyone to think they are. 

For two centuries…thru industry, enterprise, sacrifice, and saving…our ancestors built the most prosperous society the world’s ever seen. They conquered so many foes that their descendants had no choice but to become their own worst enemy.

And they did.

These self-entitled heirs enjoy such bounty that many of them think there should be no misfortune. When suffering beckons, as it always will, our self-appointed saviors interject with “policies” to eradicate the misery. But by doing so, they inevitably multiply it. 

We used to reserve universal public anxiety for real problems: British bayonets in Boston…Sherman scorching Georgia…the Japanese bombing Hawaii…the planes hitting the towers…the Falcons blowing a 28-3 lead. 

Such calamities didn’t happen often. But when they did they were extremely serious, with grave consequences for great numbers of people. These days, “crises” are conjured with the regularity of morning Metamucil. And the world-improvers are always ready to add more fiber. 

These meddlers crave problems as much as they cause them. It’s not enough to let people confront the normal challenges of their private lives. The do-gooders must create new ones, blowing them up into big public fiascos that they can then “solve” on our behalf, spawning real calamities they can use as justification for additional interference.

To these self-aggrandizers, every two-bit skirmish is Munich 1938, any perceived slight is Selma 1965, each sickness a portent of Venice in 1348. Every molehill is a potential mountain…and they’re just the ones to make the rest of us climb it.

The “crises” they create are conveniently abstract, conspicuously elusive, and impossible to “solve”. To validate themselves, our self-righteous intruders urge “us” to conquer the intractable challenges they insist we confront.

“We” must eradicate “racism”, eliminate illness, extinguish “inequity”, micromanage “the climate”, pretend January 6 was the storming of the Bastille, and rattle sabers at a nuclear power with a GDP less than New York City, and with no intention of harming us. If anything, “Russian aggression” is merely a handy scapegoat for higher gas prices caused by Federal Reserve money printing and crazy global “green” policy.

Most of the concerns over which we’re ordered to obsess are politically contrived. Many are largely ameliorated, can’t be fixed, don’t exist, or were never problems at all. But the moronic “solutions”, like forcibly replacing fossil fuels on which civilization depends with fickle energy from erratic wind and fickle sun, will cause millions to freeze if they don’t starve first. 

But whatever cockamamie fix our overlords inflict, all of these “challenges” are contrived ways to accrue power…crony projects to stuff elite pillows with the plucked feathers of gullible geese.

Like a religious heresy, the issues prompting these persistent panics aren’t completely false. The busybody bakes his bread with enough grains of truth to present a palatable loaf, then slices it so his side can easily be buttered.

But the urgency of our manufactured “crises” is greatly over-hyped. They can usually be safely managed or easily ignored…except by the charlatans, cronies, and scoundrels who profit by the grift.

And these insufferable busybodies aren’t known for their subtle nuance or delicate touch. Their preferred “solutions” typically involve firing up a blowtorch to light a birthday candle. 

When confronted with the genuine problem of a deadly virus, they followed “the science”…which naturally led them where they wanted to go. With no votes taken or questions asked, it benefited big business by closing small ones, quelled the people by masking their faces and confining them to their quarters, and counterfeited trillions of dollars for distribution to Wall Street banks and K Street clients.

The virus, of course, did what it was going to do no matter what we did. But the “experts” took a cleaver to a case that warranted a scalpel. By treating a serious problem as the only problem, they made it immeasurably worse…while creating a slew of new ones that quickly incubated in the consequent chaos.

This is typical of the pattern Ludwig con Mises described a century ago, whereby government identifies a “problem”, then concocts a “solution” that makes things worse, which prompts demands for additional “action” and new “programs” to mitigate the damage from the original intervention. Like scratching a skin rash, every attempt to “fix” these problems only makes them worse. 

Most people have enough to worry about with the private struggles of their daily lives. The last thing they need is to get worked up about whatever mess the rest of the world has gotten itself into. And there usually isn’t anything they can do about it even if they did. 

But minding our own business and leaving each other alone have no place in the meddlesome mind of the moral busybody. These days, anyone’s problem is everyone’s concern. Yet the worst consequences of these farcical “emergencies” and hyperbolic cataclysms usually come not from the “threat” itself, but from the public reaction to it. 

Those most eager to involve themselves in other people’s affairs aren’t just annoying. They’re dangerous.

These are the types most desperate for a righteous cause or a “fight for justice”. Since so many of those have already been won, they’ll eagerly invent new ones. They’re not above waging worthless wars, fighting phony oppression, circumscribing speech, or inventing new “genders” to give them something to “save” that satiates their sanctimony. 

They regret not having their own “civil rights” battles to fight, or no World Wars to win. So they try to fabricate new ones, and conscript the rest of us as soldiers in the assault.

This century alone they’ve fertilized several weeds that now cover society like kudzu over Georgia.

First, the “War on Terror” sprouted. Then the bank bail-outs bloomed. These venomous vines spread unabated, choking liberties, strangling the economy…and enriching the insiders. Tangled among them are the insidious “Woke” weeds, and their thorny branches that reach relentlessly for universal “equality”.

Inequality isn’t a problem per se. But if it were, it’d be impossible to eradicate, and destructive to try. Not that wealth transfers based on crony political deals and Fed money rigging shouldn’t be stopped. Those, not inequality in and of itself, are the problem. Yet like modern medicine, our incessant meddlers attack the symptoms while exacerbating the disease.

Our equalizers regularly wonder how there can be so much poverty (altho’, historically, poverty is as low as it’s ever been). But that’s not a very interesting question. Poverty, after all is the natural condition. It’s what everyone would endure if all of us were “equal”. That explanation is easy.

The real question, as Tom Woods put it, is why there’s so much wealth, and how did it happen so quickly, particularly in the place and time it did? Wealth comes not from “equality”, but freedom, competition, and the consequent capital accumulation that enables saving, investment, and compounding.

Even if “equality” could somehow be compelled, the balance would be broken when the next exchange is made. Besides, who says “equality” is a desirable goal? Do we want every man to have the same skills, or for every woman to look alike?

There are 100,000 adjectives in the English language, all of which denote a distinction, many of which are compliments. Only disciples of “diversity” are hell-bent on everyone being the same.

Inequality, like so many “problems” with which we are beset, isn’t itself a problem at all. And if it were, there’s a nothing we can do about it. But it is a distraction, which benefits those who prefer we not focus on what they’re really up to.

As Noam Chomsky put it, “the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

The phony crises of the last decade are great distractions to divert attention from the chiselers, crooks, and cretins creating the real calamities.

There are (more than) enough people with a “romantic sense of their own lives” to conjure these convenient “crises”. These are the buttinskies who are determined to have their “flu game”…and who are more than willing to sneeze on the rest of us if that’s what it takes to get it.

JD