The Fallacy of the “Greater Good”
Atlanta, GA
January 10, 2022
Chesterton observed that the modern world is insane. Not so much because it admits the abnormal, but because it cannot recover the normal.
We’re now at a point where normality not only appears incapable of being recovered; most people don’t even seem to remember what it was. We think we’re rebellious when we defend the Founding Fathers, insist men can’t get pregnant, or refuse to wear a mask. But that such innocuous acts now seem brazen shows the extent to which normalcy has been lost.
As CS Lewis said, when the whole world is running toward a cliff, he who is running the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind. I’m sure many people feel that way about the person writing this essay.
FDR wasn’t right about much, but he was right about fear. Fear, as the saying has it, is often a liar. And, in the public realm, it’s frequently fabricated by master craftsmen in high places and of low repute.
Over the last couple years, reasonable, rational, and pragmatic people have been shorn of their senses and scared out of their wits. We know many of them, and love some. They are generally smart, considerate, compassionate, and well-educated (perhaps too well).
Yet people of good sense and sound mind will often yield both in the face of fear. And they have. They’ve allowed themselves to be scammed by colossal mediocrities in corporate media, elected office, or appointed position. They’ve been hoodwinked by hot air in empty suits, and swindled by oatmeal in thin skin.
But too many of them blame not the grifters who pulled a fast one, but the wise marks who dodged the con, and didn’t fall for the ruse. Rather than rise up against the oppressive warden, they turn on the more perceptive inmates.
That makes a degree of sense. No one likes to admit he’s been had, or to feel like he was less perceptive than those who weren’t. The incessant virus debacle and vaccine fiasco are emblematic of this natural tendency.
Jefferson said famously that not every difference of opinion is a difference in principle. Yet these days, for more and more people, it is. Increasingly, Americans seem to be living in different worlds, and separate realities.
Bridges seem incapable of being built, much less crossed. On one side are people who wish to be left alone. On the other are those who refuse to let them be.
And, like the war on “terror” before and that on “climate” to come, “the virus” is an ideal foe for our irrepressible meddlers to instill fear, provoke panic, and accrue power. It’s a deadly, invisible adversary that’s not going anywhere.
It’s a perfect excuse to wage an endless war that must ever be fought, but can never be won. And the purported “enemy”…as with terrorism, poverty, “the climate”, or drugs…couldn’t care less. It’ll be here regardless, and will do what it does no matter what we do.
As with the ostensible fight against those nebulous adversaries, the real “Covid war” is being waged on those it was ostensibly launched to protect. Many victims remain unaware that they are the target. They keep joining the ranks and following their orders, oblivious that they’re on a kamikaze mission.
No matter how many mindless government directives, idiotic corporate mandates, or incomprehensible bureaucratic pronouncements come whisking across their radar, they stay locked on auto-pilot, maintaining full-speed as they spin toward impact. Even after two years of this lunacy, they refuse to pull up.
For the hysterics of the Covid cult, injecting “the vaccine” is like receiving a sacrament, or taking an oath. Declining, for whatever reason, is akin to sedition. To the high priests, those who refuse are considered anathema. And any traitor, infected or not, will be treated like vile vermin, to be excluded from society in ways that have harrowing historical precedent.
Around the world, people have lost their perspective, and their minds.
Remember when people knew infectious diseases were a fact of life and not a moral failing? That the world was full of threats, and that we risked encountering them whenever we walked out the door (or even if we refused to open it)? That germs were among these threats, and that being infected by them was no one’s “fault”? That mitigating these bugs was an individual or family responsibility, to be managed in ways best suited to each person’s medical situation, value scales, risk profile, and philosophic outlook?
But as with the Communists last century and the Revolutionaries a century before, our “public health” commissars invoke an abstract “common good” as a way to extol “collective benefits” to suppress individual rights. And, now as then, ersatz “science” is the pillow pressed to freedom’s face.
“The Greater Good” is this year’s “We’re All In This Together.” It’s an anesthetizing euphemism that makes people think their rightful liberty is a threat to everybody else’s freedom. Everyone must be “safe” before anyone can be free.
But a genuine greater good can only be revealed thru an aggregation of voluntary individual action. To the extent personal preferences are forcibly thwarted, the greater good is by definition diminished. Our rights are inherent. They’re not subject to democratic debate, to the whims of popular vote, or the vicissitudes of political weather.
In Rousseau, the Greater Good was part of the “Social Contract” to which everyone was bound, but that no one ever signed. The Soviets referred to a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, that inevitably subjugated the workers. The Nazis proclaimed that “public benefit comes before self-interest”.
And they taught us that when it does, both are destroyed.
JD
