Social distancing, to my mind, is even more distasteful than the term "social media," in which no one has physical proximity, and thus cannot be "social" in any normal sense of the word.
While I find the term "herd immunity" disgustingly distasteful when referring to human beings, I nevertheless can't help but see the inherent contradiction of promoting group shared immunity while forcing people to avoid groups. More of that wonderful Doublethink.
For those dwindling few who still have not read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Google oracle defines Doublethink as "the acceptance of or mental capacity to accept contrary opinions or beliefs at the same time, especially as a result of political indoctrination." If the current Fauci Flu Plandemic isn't a glaring example of this phenomenon, then none can be found.
Even as recently as when I was parenting, the practice of putting all the kids in a room with one who had chicken pox or mumps was a common practice. The children would thus exchange the viruses and develop life-long immunity to those relatively common childhood maladies. This was also done with influenza and other seasonal discomforts.
Many people are under the mistaken belief that the practice of immunology began with the creation of the polio vaccine by Jonas Salk, in the 1950s. The concept of inoculation has a long and storied history using some distasteful methods to our modern minds, but effective nevertheless.
The practice of inoculation, or variolation as it is referred to now, came to the attention of the Anglosphere in the 1800s, when British doctors brought the practice back from India, and added it to Edward Jenner's own work in this area.
Inoculation involved rubbing the pus from smallpox sores into pin pricks in the skin of healthy people to generate antibodies to the disease. Louis Pasteur had the bright idea of using a relatively harmless virus called cowpox to achieve the same result. To Westerners, the concept is just 200 years old, but in India, the practice had been used for at least a millennium, and not just for smallpox.
The idea of "herd immunity," or what I prefer to call "community immunity," is an ancient idea. One imagines the practice evolving out of animal husbandry and inoculating one's farm animals by placing them all in the same barn and letting Darwinism run its course.
What was new to the 19th century was the idea of microbes being the cause of disease. Humans intuitively understood that proximity spread disease, but thanks to Aristotle, could not conceive of an unseen creature jumping person to person. It wasn't until Zacharias Janssen developed the microscope in the 16th century that humans could conceive of anything smaller than the width of a hair.
Janssen's fellow Dutchman Antonie van Leeuwenhoek ran with the microscope's new revelations and created the entire science of microbiology. He was the first to posit that these tiny creatures were the culprits in spreading disease, and not the mythical unbalanced humours that required bleeding out patients. It seemed logical, he thought, that inoculating healthy people with the pus of sick people was in fact using these tiny creatures against themselves.
The idea of quarantining sick people is far older. The use of leper colonies dates back thousands of years, and was also used for a number of diseases in both farm animals and humans. Isolating the sick is probaably one of the oldest forms of medical practices and seems almost intuitive or instinctual.
All this being said, the idea of isolating the entire population of the planet to fight what amounts to a severe cold or flu was developed in AD2020. Never in the history of humanity has anyone thought to quarantine every single human being on Earth in order to fight a disease. In fact, the very idea flies in the face of common sense - though certainly no one ever accused the political classes of possessing such innate reasoning capabilities.
First off, someone needs to produce the necessities that maintain both the sick and the well in society - an idea that seems to have escaped the Powers That Were.
Furthermore, having those individuals who aren't sick roaming around would seem to spread whatever immunity they naturally possess, even if that immunity is little more than good fortune. After all, they are apparently doing something right and should be emulated, insofar as they don't later become ill themselves. Either way, it's a learning experience for all of us.
The very idea of global social and economic shutdown as a means to fight an illness is itself the most vile example of Doublethink ever devised. The whole concept places the entire human race at risk of starvation and economic ruin in order to prevent some small fraction of humanity from getting sick.
Even more absurd is the notion that isolating those who have survived the virus, thus depriving the rest of us from sharing their immunity.
Immune systems develop and harden through contact with the outer world. We pick up viruses and bacteria by the millions in just an average day, rubbing them into our eyes, sinuses and mouths with completely automatic motions. It's almost as if our deeper minds are trying to ingest as many pathogens as possible for target practice.
Those of us who still consume the Geezer Media are literally being conditioned to deny our common sense and thousands of years of human experience. We are being told that vaccines are cures, which they most definitely are not. We are being told that we must wait in isolation for community immunity to kick in, which defies logic. We are being flooded with insane ideas that we know are wrong, but that we must believe at the point of a gun.
Classic Doublethink.
When what we instinctively know to be true is contradicted by the politically motivated messaging of our supposed authorities, it is our sacred duty - both to ourselves and our species - to ignore those edicts en masse and get back to the business of living.
We are each given a finite time in this life and we are literally being robbed of it by actors who are self-serving liars. We know that in our hearts, but we must elevate that knowledge to our conscious minds and take action based on it.
If one prefers to live in fear and huddle in one's cave until madness or starvation takes the only real possession we have, then so be it. But to inflict fear on others in order to rob them of their lives is a crime so heinous, so despicable, so egregious that to not fight back is itself a crime - one of acquiescence to evil.
Doublethink is a cognitive virus that has infected us all at some level. Like any other virus, we must isolate it and mobilize antibodies against it.
The real threat to our health is in our minds, not our bodies.
Bernard, thank you for your informative, educative, and inspiring posts, during days of "Q" and since. This latest post launching from Orwell's 1984 is a KEEPER! I have shared widely.
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