You Will Be Unfree, But You'll Be Happy

Is That The Real Message Of The New 'Normal'?

Commenter Old Frank provided a link to an item at Rebel News regarding the mind boggling situation in Australia—specifically in the state of South Australia. Quoting the original piece at The Atlantic, we learn:

People in South Australia will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”

I read the piece at The Atlantic, and despite some flaws it was—in a way—encouraging to some extent:

Australia Traded Away Too Much Liberty

How long can a democracy maintain emergency restrictions and still call itself a free country?

The author, Conor Friedersdorf, doesn’t really address the core issue: Is being a free country at all what the Great Reset—and who can any longer doubt that that’s what’s behind the Covid Regime?—is about? Recall Klaus Schwab’s now well known claim: Under the Great Reset—in the New Normal—”You will have no property, but you’ll be happy.” Yes, I know there are a lot of people who are happy enough to receive their government checks and not work, but color me skeptical when it comes to the majority of people being happy in that regime.

To his credit, liberal Friedersdorf, writing at the liberal The Atlantic, finds the situation in Australia extremely disquieting. The article has its flaws. For example he acknowledges—perhaps too readily—Australia’s far better record on the surface when it comes' to stats like deaths per 100K from Covid, as compared to the US and Israel. But he does so without addressing issues such as who are these people who died and where did they die, how was cause of death determined and recorded, and how is Covid reflected in all cause mortality stats? It’s now well known, or should be, that in most US states with high death tolls 50% of deaths occurred in long term care facilities, and that sick persons were placed among these vulnerable people often as direct government policy. It’s also well known that cause of death figures were knowingly padded—again, as government policy—to increase the number of Covid deaths. How would all this be reflected in all cause mortality figures if a searching reassessment were done? Who knows, we might even discover that the flu never did actually disappear.

Still, Friedersdorf is quietly freaked out by what’s going on in Australia, as well he should be:

Up to now one of Earth’s freest societies, Australia has become a hermit continent. How long can a country maintain emergency restrictions on its citizens’ lives while still calling itself a liberal democracy?

Australia has been testing the limits.

Before 2020, the idea of Australia all but forbidding its citizens from leaving the country, a restriction associated with Communist regimes, was unthinkable. Today, it is a widely accepted policy. “Australia’s borders are currently closed and international travel from Australia remains strictly controlled to help prevent the spread of COVID-19,” a government website declares. “International travel from Australia is only available if you are exempt or you have been granted an individual exemption.” The rule is enforced despite assurances on another government website, dedicated to setting forth Australia’s human-rights-treaty obligations, that the freedom to leave a country “cannot be made dependent on establishing a purpose or reason for leaving.”

…

Other states also curtailed their citizens’ liberty in the name of safety. The state of Victoria announced a curfew and suspended its Parliament for key parts of the pandemic. “To put this in context, federal and state parliaments sat during both world wars and the Spanish Flu, and curfews have never been imposed,” the scholar John Lee observed in an article for the Brookings Institution.

Uh, isn’t that, like, a suspension of representative government? That was easy! What comes next?

The reason given illustrates a bizarre disconnect from human realities:

“In responding to a question about whether he had gone too far with respect to imposing a curfew (avoiding the question of why a curfew was needed when no other state had one), Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews replied: ‘it is not about human rights. It is about human life.’”

Is bare biological life—devoid of most elements that we in the West consider to be at the core of actual human life—a truly human life? People died to secure those rights that are so flippantly suppressed in the name of … bare biological existence?

And so Friedersdorf asks—and his case might be even stronger were he to question some of the surface stats and assumptions re vaccines:

Enduring rules of that sort would certainly render a country a police state. In year two of the pandemic, with COVID-19 now thought to be endemic, rather than a temporary emergency the nation could avoid, how much time must pass before we must regard Australia as illiberal and unfree?

…

In return for trading away their liberty, Australians gained a huge safety dividend. ... What remains to be seen is whether Australia can maintain that performance without permanently ending core attributes of life in a liberal democracy, including freedom of movement, peaceable assembly, and basic privacy.

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Because of its geography, Australia is a neighbor and an observer of authoritarian countries as varied as China and Singapore. But its own fate, too, may turn on whether its people crave the feeling of safety and security that orders from the top confer, or whether they want to be free.

Have Australians traded away their liberty for a safe but barely human life—in a humanly meaningful sense? At what point can a line be drawn? What if the rulers decide that they like this regime as is, this New Normal?

Are we, too, in danger of ‘building back’ into a ‘New Normal’ that is anything but normal in terms of the deepest needs of human nature? The comparison that Friedersdorf makes to Communist societies of the note too distant past are not really over wrought. The differences lie in this: In Australia and other parts of the West this neurotic concentration on personal safety at the expense of all other human considerations has been embraced by a significant portion of the population. It expresses their worldview. Thus, the draconian measures of full on totalitarianism have, to a great extent, not been necessary. The subjects have largely shackled themselves.

It remains to be seen whether they have also thrown away the key to their shackles. That liberals like Friedersdorf, writing at a liberal outlet, are beginning to question what’s going on is at least one hopeful sign—among others—that a broader anti-regime consensus could emerge.