In American culture, there is an admirable tendency on the part of young children to playact a kind of righteous heroism over the horrors of the past. Spend a little time around a group of school kids who have just learned about U.S. slavery, and you'll probably hear something like, "I would've helped free the slaves and punched those stupid slaveowners in the face!" As their historical education goes on, you hear the same thing about the Holocaust: "The Nazis were evil idiots! I would have helped Jewish people escape!"
It's a commendable kind of moral flexing. I also think it has, at this point, been proven more or less completely false. Whatever young children believe about their own capacity for heroic acts of virtue, we can pretty definitively say at this point that when children grow into adults, nearly all of them become submissive, compliant, obedient proxies of authority, essentially doing almost everything they are told without question.
We know this because we have seen it play out over the past two years of the COVID pandemic. Two years ago, virtually every civic leader in the United States – from the president on down to your local alderman – unilaterally made himself a dictator, ordering us to close up our businesses, pull our kids out of school, cut ourselves off from nearly everything and everybody we love, and stay home indefinitely. All of this was over a virus that we knew (even then) is survivable by virtually every single person who contracts it.
Nearly everyone complied with almost no questions asked whatsoever. And they continued to comply with all of it, every word of it, for two years: The stay-at-home orders, the shutdowns, the endless masking, the hysterical hygiene theater, the school closures, the ruination of countless childhoods, the industrial-scale hypochondria, and the new, miserable way of moving through public life.
But the awfulness of the past two years went beyond meek and docile acquiescence to authority. Nearly overnight, many tens of millions of people were transformed into snarling, wrathful enforcers of the new rules. If you weren't wearing your mask properly, or if you went to an outdoor picnic and didn't stand 72 inches away from everyone else, or if you opened your cafe for indoor dining because you needed to make money so your kid could get braces—if you did any of those things, you became an instant public enemy, and our newly minted Saal-Schutz was there to bite your face off because of it.
Ultimately, the hollowness of this hateful new regime was exposed just a few short months after it was implemented. After many weeks of viciously shaming and targeting anyone who dared defy the new health mandates, all of our experts and commentators suddenly couldn't endorse the 2020 George Floyd protests fast enough.
Whereas before, you would be considered a mass murderer if you shopped at a nearly empty grocery store without a piece of cotton on your face, suddenly mega-protests with thousands of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder was not only perfectly acceptable, but even necessary.
We saw what the true purpose of these new dictates were—above all else, control—and we also saw how passively everyone to conceded them and indeed how eagerly they became enforcers of it all.
It might seem overkill to hold such societal compliance up to the atrocities of the Holocaust or U.S. chattel slavery. But that's actually kind of the point. Standing up to the Sturmabteilung and the Einsatzgruppen were genuinely life-risking endeavors; standing up to the Southern slave power may have, in some ways, been even more so.
In contrast, it took relatively nothing to push back against the new COVID order. All you had to have was a willingness to actually read the data and a small modicum of bravery to speak out on social media or with family and friends.
There was virtually no legal risk associated with standing up to these awful mandates, and it was very easy to do so from a factual, science-based perspective. And yet so few people actually did.
That is the world we live in now. Indeed, it was the world we lived in before; we just did not know it yet. As the pandemic turns two years old, do not forget how eagerly and happily people allowed themselves to be deceived, and how quickly they allowed themselves to be turned into shock-troopers of enforcement.
And as you reflect on that, remember too that it can and will happen again. It is simply a matter of time. Do not be surprised when it does. Rather, be prepared.
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