The Coronation: Essays from the Covid Moment

by Charles Eisenstein

That is why the overarching crisis of our time—more serious than ecological collapse, more serious than economic collapse, more serious than the pandemic—is the polarization and fragmentation of civil society. Wit...

The more locked down, policed, and regulated a society, the less tolerance there is for anything outside its order.

Both Soviet Communism and Nazi fascism had a strong puritanical streak, as both were hostile to anything outside their own order.

Fascism is essentially an extended antifestival,

We seem today to be partially emerging from an extended series of antifestivals, otherwise known as “lockdowns.”

Our social responses to Covid bear so striking a resemblance to ritual practices and ideas (masks, potions, tabooed persons, sanctification, and so forth) that we have to ask how much of our public health policy is really scientific, and how much is religion in disguise.

Ultimately the argument comes down to whether our systems of knowledge production (science and journalism) are sound, and whether our medical and political authorities are trustworthy.

One contemporary term for a heretic is a “conspiracy theorist.” The term belongs in quotes because it is one thing to claim our institutions are unsound, and quite another to claim that a conscious conspiracy makes them so. “Conspiracy theorist” has become one of the ways to dismiss and dehumanize dissidents to public health orthodoxy.

A perennial human reflex, in times of trouble, is to find or create heretics and outcasts. Today they are called “anti-maskers,” “anti-vaxxers,” “science deniers,” “Q-adjacent,” “conspiracy theorists,” “covidiots,” and “domestic extremists,”

What totalitarian societies, traditional antifestivals, and Covid lockdowns have in common is a reflex of control. This reflex meets any failure of control with more of it. When herbicide-resistant weeds appear, the solution is a new herbicide. When immigrants cross the border, we build a wall. When a school shooter gets into a locked school building, we fortify it further. When germs develop resistance to antibiotics, we invent new and stronger ones. When masks fail to stop the spread of Covid, we wear two. When our taboos fail to keep evil at bay, we redouble them.

There will be no room for any bad thing to exist.

A subtle parallel connects the dynamics of the sacrificial victim with other programs of control. Ultimately, both depend on a false reduction whose temporary appearance of success allows deeper problems to persist.

The cause of immigration is not just immigrants; the cause of school shootings is not just shooters; the cause of disease is not just pathogens; the cause of climate change is not just greenhouse gases.

These are but the terminal agents of a long process; they are the most conspicuous among a complex of causes; they are, like a scapegoat, convenient targets for the exercise of power. Having exercis...

The alacrity of the mob to pile on demonstrated that, indeed, our society is just as prone as ancient sacrificial societies, and maybe just as prone as 1930s Europe, to eruptions of mob violence that can be co-opted by fascistic political powers.

“Combatting hatred” is combatting a symptom.

Scapegoats needn’t be guilty, but they must be marginal, outcasts, heretics, taboo-breakers, or infidels of one kind or another.

Civil strife burns ever hotter, without the broad consensus necessary to transform it into unifying violence. For the Right, it is Antifa, Black Lives Matter protesters, critical race theory academics, and undocumented immigrants that represent social chaos and the breakdown of values. For the Left it is the Proud Boys, right-wing militias, white supremacists, QAnon, the Capitol rioters, and the burgeoning new category of “domestic extremists.”

And finally, defying left-right categorization is a promising new scapegoat class, the heretics of our time: the anti-vaxxers.

This program is well underway toward the Covid-unvaxxed, who are being portrayed as walking cesspools of germs who might contaminate the sanctified brethren (the vaccinated).

The mechanisms for controlling misinformation work equally well to control true information that contradicts official sources.

Evidence from literature and anthropology suggests that in many societies, the original sacrificial victim was the king. As the one responsible for the well-being of the nation, if ever calamity befell it, the king would be the natural choice to represent order-turned-to-chaos.

One might imagine that the king was not always enthusiastic about ritual regicide. He might have suggested, “Don’t sacrifice me, let’s sacrifice this criminal over here.” Eventually substitutes were found, such as prisoners or children, or animals

Or a special temporary king would reign in unrestrained debauchery for the duration of a festival, which concluded with his sacrifice (and therefore the symbolic removal of his sins from society). The carnival king often took the form of a fool or a buffoon, someone to display human faults, foibles, and failings in exaggerated form. One cannot help but wonder at the latent psycho-social forces that propelled Donald Trump to power and then tore him down again.

Not only do the people naturally impute such crimes to their elites, but the elites seem inexorably drawn to depravity.

Power and depravity seem to go hand in hand; when scandal erupts, we are rarely surprised.

Censorship, disinformation, and propaganda have a crucial ally without which they would never be effective. The ally is mob psychology and the social habit of dehumanization. These tactics work only when we are ready to see others as the propaganda says we should, and don’t try to find out for ourselves by actually listening to them.

My message here is not to automatically trust everyone.

The biggest crisis facing humanity today is not vaccines or their resistors; it is not infectious disease, chronic disease, overpopulation, or nuclear weapons. It is not even climate change. The biggest crisis today is a crisis of the word.

This still applies even if some people are evil. Surely there are some truly psychopathic individuals among the elites, but even normal people, under the intoxication of ideology and power, can carry out heinous policies. Conversely, one cannot

assume that just because most scientists and policymakers are decent people that they are immune to the contagion of mob psychology.

Good people can do evil things, all the while firmly convinced of their righteousness.

Basically, vaccines are a way to keep society as we know it functioning as usual. The idea is, “Everybody get the jab and we can go back to normal.” It is much like psychiatric medications. Taking for granted a society that makes vast numbers of people miserable, maybe we need those drugs to keep them happy, or at least functioning. They can get back to normal—the life defined by society’s norms. Yet that life is what may have made them miserable to begin with.

Bravery means acting when you know it is time to act. It isn’t the convenient time. It is simply the time.

Courage and cowardice both are contagious.

George Orwell’s 1984, Winston’s interrogator O’Brien states: “The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism.”

Let’s tell them that masks don’t work, and then reverse it and require them to mask up. Let’s tell them they can’t shake hands. Let’s tell them they can’t go near each other. Let’s shut down their churches, choirs, businesses, and festivals. Let’s stop them from gathering for the holidays. Let’s make them inject poison into their bodies. Let’s make them do it again. Let’s make them do it to their children.

Let’s feed them obvious absurdities to see what they’ll swallow. Let’s make promises and break them. Let’s make the same promises again and break them again. Let’s require authorization for their every movement. Wow, they’re still going along with it? Let’s see how much more they will take.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

Power is not a means, it is an end.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order...

“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?” Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said. “Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.

Covid-era policies cannot be understood merely through the lens of public health.

Seeing through the lens of power, we cannot be so sanguine, any more than the bullied child can hope the bully will stop because, after all, “I’ve done everything he told me to.”

The principal issued a series of trivial rules under the pretext of “maintaining a positive learning environment.” Neither the students nor the administration actually believed that wearing hats or chewing gum impeded learning, but that didn’t matter. Punishments were not actually for the infraction itself; the real infraction was disobedience.

Thus, when German police patrol the square with meter sticks to enforce social distancing, no one need believe that the enforcement will actually stop anyone from getting sick. The offense they are patrolling against is disobedience.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Even if we sometimes must fight, we will prevail only if we are fighting for something, not just against something. When we fight for rather than against, often we needn’t fight much at all. That’s because winning no longer defines success.

Today, society is dividing along political fault lines, even to the point of splitting families in two. One side crushing the other is not an acceptable outcome—especially knowing which side is likely to be doing the crushing. Let’s uphold an end goal of unity.

Any secret wish that “someday, the other side will regret it,” any wish that one’s opponents will suffer, reveals a loyalty to something besides healing in the world.