Do you already have a chip in your head? I try to check it myself every day, but without success. Although, if that chip was secretly planted there, I probably wouldn’t be able to detect it myself anyway – so stay tuned, readers.
That chip, introduced via Covid-19 vaccines with the compliments of Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum, was one of the more creative conspiracy theories that were circulating during the corona years. It would be a way for billionaires to enslave the world’s population. Nonsense, but according to some sociologists (who would of course formulate it more academically) it is still a kind of social criticism for dummies: you shouldn’t take it literally, any more than Trump, but sometimes they have a point.
Philosophers who prefer not to sit in the ivory tower but behind their own market stall in the public debate also contributed. What we experienced, with the lockdowns and closure of schools “fascism without fascists”according to philosopher René ten Bos, Thinker of the Fatherland (2017-2019). Already in the first year of the pandemic, when the entire country was still in turmoil, he made that devastating diagnosis his book The corona storm. You think for a moment of the Chinese diplomat Zhou Enlai, who said to Henry Kissinger in 1972when asked what the effect would be of the French student revolt of 1968 (sometimes confused with the French Revolution): “Too early to say.” Zhou was therefore not a philosopher.
It is a pity that the parliamentary committee does not also make a few philosophers accountable
Ten Bos was certainly not the only philosopher who came up with 100% views with fifty percent knowledge. Others bombarded the media with warnings of dictatorship or with Delft blue wisdom that death is part of life – just like in traffic (it was still too early for a philosophical judgment about fat bikes). It is a shame that the parliamentary committee that is now investigating corona policy does not, in addition to an urgent GP, also ask a few public philosophers to justify themselves behind the table. Especially now that we now live in a country with fascists – but, very strangely, precisely the kind that do was the loudest against the “corona deception” (Baudet).
Because what has become of that totalitarian state, the Leviathan that would emerge from the corona foam to gag and suck us dry (philosophers have also been carried away by the pop metaphysics of the film TheMatrix)? Anyone who opens the newspaper, let alone their daily potty doomscrollsencounters a completely different state. One that is constantly under fire because it doesn’t get anything done, fails again, blunders wildly with allowances and compensation, is overwhelmed by AI, or capsizes under a ‘crisis of authority’.
This is the dilemma of the modern government, face to face with a society that has not only become increasingly complex but also increasingly assertive. With our corona feet still wet, the accusation is that the government is scaring us for nothing, periodically injecting us with hastily prepared substances and locking us up at home. Once back on dry land, the pendulum swings back to a deeply indignant call for tough action from a night watchman state that must ‘deliver’.
The government “does not bear the sword without a cause,” to quote an ancient wisdom (Romans 13). But then I always prefer to tackle the others. The success of Forum for Democracy, the party that capitalizes on every sick conspiracy theory about a cosmopolitan (Jewish?) elite, stems from that hypocrisy about a state that is above all not allowed to draw the sword, except against public enemies in politics, media and culture. Corona has been replaced in that idiom by the war in Ukraine, but the pattern is the same: we are being cheated by a lying government. What was then the vaccines, is now the drones. What was said then about the World Economic Forum is now about NATO.
What does that say about the effect of the corona years? Philosophers will probably be able to say all kinds of things about this in about ten or a hundred years’ time, who knows, even sensible things.
