"Even in an emergency, the authority of government is not unfettered"

 

By Mike Smith
21st of September 2020

There is an old saying that yesterday’s hardship is today’s “Good-old-days”.

I call it misapplied nostalgia and you see it everywhere from okes who were in the military to people who lived through Communism or Apartheid.

In psychological terms it is called Pollyannaism or positivity bias. The human mind tends to block out the bad things and remember only the good things. It is actually nothing but self-deception.

That is why, when you speak to people who lived in the Communist GDR (Est Germany), many will tell you, “Oh, but it wasn’t all that bad. We also had good times”.

Yes, People would stand three hours in queue to get a ration of two bananas and a packet of strawberries. They would wait 12 years for a two-stroke Trabant car, and still not get it. People would get shot for fleeing this Socialist paradise, yet hundreds of people attempted it every year with tunnels, makeshift windsurfers and hot-air balloons. But it wasn’t all that bad.

Today we see the same with Corona. In the future people will look back to Corona 2020 and tell their grandchildren, “Oh, but it wasn’t all that bad. We had fun times too.”

Human beings are extremely adaptive. It is probably the ONE characteristic that made us survive so well. Slowly we are seeing people getting used to “The New Normal”…getting used to wearing those filthy mouth nappies…People are self-deceiving in order to survive, to lessen the pain of being in a concentration camp…Like Alexander Solzhenitsyn who wrote in “The Gulag Archipelago” about his experience in the Communist Hell-camps… “It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy?”

Bullshitting yourself is therefore a survival instinct and a reaction to harsh times. The problem with self-deception is that people deceive themselves that they are deceiving themselves.

You try to point out to a person that he is bullshitting himself, he will go on the defence and bullshit himself that he is NOT bullshitting himself.

Take the masks…these mouth nappies people wear…Most people think it works like a strainer. When you breathe out, the baddy germies stay behind and only the clean CO2 and air passes through the mask.

I saw some YouTube videos that people fwd’d to me about how the N95 mask actually works more like a spider web catching spiders in your breath and again… the clean CO2 and air passes through the mask.

I am sitting there, thinking, “Hang on a minute. That is NOT how these masks work! My mask works more like a table-tennis table. Everything ricochets”

When I breathe out and I put my hand in front of the mask, FUCK-ALL comes out through the mask. Instead, all the CO2 and air are deflected upwards or to the sides. In fact wherever there is an opening, it will come out. The air follows the path of least resistance and 99% of whatever you breathe out NEVER passes through the filter. It simply passes out the openings UNFILTERED. A bit of moisture from your lungs sticks to your glasses, your face or the inside of the mask, which starts to get soggy and drippy after about five minutes use…and then you watch them take it off with their bare hands, lay that filthy piece of shit on their desks or heaven forbid, on the lunch table, as if it is the cleanest thing ever, and afterwards don it again.