Wednesday Morning Guest Rant: The Press' Mental Slaves [Joe Mannix]

Friday saw the publication of an article in the Salt Lake Tribune, where the editorial board of the paper argued that the National Guard should be deployed to isolate and freeze out the dread unvaccinated. The general content of this article has already been examined, including by Ace on Monday and I will not rehash it here. These paragraphs, though, stood out to me for a different reason:

... Any move or recommendation to mask up or, when safe and effective vaccines became available, to make vaccination a requirement of admission to public places and society in general was shouted down as an unwarranted imposition on individual freedoms.

So now we are free all right. Free to fend for ourselves. To watch our children lose weeks, months or more of their precious educational opportunities. To wonder whether it is safe to go to work or to the store or to sporting events. To see businesses close for want of employees or lack of customers.

This is a fairly remarkable statement for how it reveals the mindset of the people who call for these policies. Opposition to mandates (not suggestions, as the article states, but mandates) because they curtail freedoms has only given us the freedom to be hurt and afraid and on our own.

The terror dripping out of that second paragraph is palpable. The editorial board is terrified of responsibility. They are afraid and don't know what to do and so, like the mental children they are, they demand that someone else make the choices for them. What is the source of those consequences they call out (correctly) as bad? It is the imposition of external, centralized rules that destroyed those businesses, closed those schools, instilled that fear. What do they want to do to fix those problems? Impose more external decision-making - and do so at the point of a gun.

They don't want - and are desperately afraid of - the responsibility of choosing and living. They don't want to live in a real world where one must choose, they want to be told what to do. They don't want to be independent, they want to be taken care of. This is the mindset of a slave. They are afraid of the responsibility of choice, both theirs and the choices of others. They are as terrified as they are cowardly and desperately want, more than anything else, to be absolved of the responsibility of individual liberty.

They want, in short, not to be men but to be robots - mindless automata who blindly follow the orders of their masters. They are not free men. They are not citizens, they are subjects. They are mental slaves of their own making, and are unworthy of any serious consideration or the trappings of a civilization they do not deserve and in which they cannot function.

posted by Open Blogger at 11:16 AM

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