Omicron and the big lie

Frontrunning the collapse pt. O

The fear porn machine is in high gear once again. Flights from South Africa cancelled. Japan and Israel close borders. G7 in an emergency meeting today to discuss countermeasures. Hundreds of news articles pumped out by the hour, and financial markets of all sorts are getting shafted. Ten dollars off the oil price.

This is the strategy of tension directed at a population terrorized to its wit’s end for the last twenty months. It’s just another chapter in the unfolding global class war. The narrative now basically puts us back at square one of early 2020, and we’re threatened with having to do everything all over again.

Omicron, this horrendous “three-headed monster” even carries more mutations than any other variant so far! That’s a lot of mutations! Never mind the fact that any distinct strain of any species by definition will exhibit more mutations in comparison to those from which it evolved, i.e. this says exactly nothing.

But it’s good press. One envisions bulging, veinous, gnarly eyes popping out of the naked flesh of horrifying Resident Evil-style aberrations, ready to devour your defenseless body.

And it’s of course remarkably easy to manufacture and market a “new variant” with a whole set of potential ominous attributes tacked onto it. Just pick one of the literally thousands of genetically distinguishable strains of SARS-CoV-2, push some technically but trivially true hype on how it’s possibly quite infectious and may possess immunity escape properties, and the media machine will eat it up and perform its little function.

So expect this little twist to sell more vaccines. It’s entirely irrelevant that many of us have been arguing for months that the emergence of immunity-escape variants is precisely what you should expect from universal vaccination against this sort of pathogen. Expect this development to be used as pretext for more lockdowns, and to further reinforce the incipient vaccine mandates and the digital certificates. Oh, and “vaccine equity”. Look what’s happening in all of those third world countries because we didn’t get the sacred juice out there in time! No one’s safe until everyone’s safe!

It doesn’t matter that the selling point of the current story is precisely that the legacy jabs still on the market might be useless - you still need to get them for everyone’s protection. Better safe than sorry. And yes, the dirty unvaccinated will of course be scapegoated.

All of this naturally doesn’t discount the possibility that we’re actually dealing with a “hotter” variant driven by the selection pressures of mass vaccinations. Nor the serious risks pertaining to ADE. The problem is that we’re seemingly going to take the… Let’s say “questionable” measures, for another spin. And how all of this keeps the spectacle afloat.

And as you read this, about one million Afghani children risk dying from starvation. But I’m sure they can take another global supply chain disruption. At least if it helps me feel a bit safer.

So why do people buy this, once again, for the nth time? I get asked this question a lot. One would think that rebranding and repeating the same narrative is not a viable strategy, that almost everyone would catch up to it and start pointing out the glaring inconsistencies and hard contradictions upon which it is erected. Under normal circumstances, this could plausibly be the case, but these circumstances are… Quite abnormal. The media apparatus, for one, operates in lockstep, flooding all information spaces with the desired perspectives, with the captured social media discourse functioning as a force multiplier. Try a google news search from different locations and you’ll see the pattern more clearly.

Moreover, we’re a people burdened with a severe induced attention-deficit disorder, trained to consume and internalize simplistic and sensational narratives, so to actually connect the dots and critically assess the propaganda as it has unfolded over time is going to be a stretch for most people. Also, most digital media communications are ephemeral in practice, such as your daily facebook feed, so even if it’s possible in principle to do meaningful research, almost everything gets memory-holed from the point of view of the average smartphone-wielding consumer. The moment is all that counts.

Add to that how social media integrates all of us as participants in the reproduction of the dominant narratives, and we have a cumulative propaganda effect that’s really tough to crack. Everyone’s invited to participate in the discussion, and everyone is awarded dopamine-releasing “likes” and social credit for voicing the correct opinions. And just like that, you have free activists. There’s a concept called “horizontal propaganda” which goes into detail about these types of processes, and I think there’s an argument that a good deal of our contemporary digital communications can be characterized in that manner.

And that brings us to what I consider a key factor in the successful marketing of (rebranded) covid. It has become inherently rewarding. It effectively plays on, and actualizes, the key myths of our society. Democracy’s struggle against darkness. Science and hard-won progress being threatened by vice, superstition and selfish ignorance. And you get to be a hero in this holy war, which with quite little effort on your part serves to reestablish and focus your identity in the framework of the myths that provide the foundation for social reality.

Covid has basically become a significant meaning-making activity on a societal scale, so a lot of people will happily embrace the agitprop that reproduces the phenomenon as such.

“If you’re going to tell a lie, make sure it’s a really fucking big lie.”

Then again, a lot of people have made quite a bit of fuss about it, and this is quite possibly the reason we now seem to need another Hate Week.

In case you haven’t arrived at that conclusion yet - this is not going to stop. It’s never going to be over. The covid event is cover for the most far-reaching restructuring of any human society throughout history. This restructuring is predicated upon a deep and wicked resource crisis that at its heart is about immutable energy limits, as well as the related destabilization of the global economy and the legitimacy of our political institutions. And what the system will naturally tend to do in this set of circumstances is to preserve itself and the power structure it’s been designed to foster and reproduce.

This is the bottom line. However the details look, this is a repackaging of the controlled demolition of late-stage industrial society, whose purpose is to preserve the class hierarchy and the core precept of growth at all costs. Let the chips fall where they may, and all of that would be lost. The contraction, the collapse, needs to be harnessed, and it must be branded and marketed as something entirely different. Something that makes sense. Something that even seems meaningful.

Yet we do well to remember that these are the reactions of a brittle and failing system. These are desperate moves which reveal cracks that tunnel down through the entire foundation of this horrible machine.

And in those cracks, new grass might well sprout.