The policies, reactions, lockdowns, social distancing, mask mandates, and unmitigated disaster inflicted on human progress and flourishing is staggering. It’s easy to recognize how this altruistic notion of protecting others has crossed the fine line into pathology. It may have even gone a step further into parochial or pathological altruism.
At some point all individuals have to deal with their own cognitive dissonances and the gaslighting they’ve endured at the hands of the State and other pathological and parochial agents, altruist or otherwise. These revelations are much harder to recognize in the self and so much easier to recognize in others. Outward projection is a deflection of individual responsibility onto the collective in-group or out-group. Inward reflection is individual recognition and ownership of responsibility.
The Future is Full of Opportunity
It is evident that social distancing, lockdowns, and pandemic policies have had minimal (if any) positive impact. Divisive in-group and out-group conflict due to misinformation, catastrophically overstated predictions of death, and unyielding state propaganda are drawing out global, social, and economic instability that will continue for quite some time. We are now hearing more about starvation, overdoses, deaths of despair, and many other unintended consequences from lockdown policies.
Misguided and sociopathic passions have fed us fear every day since March of 2020–destroying economies, lives, businesses, hopes, and dreams. It will be difficult to recover from these tragedies. However, a healthy altruism resides in the concepts of liberty, free markets, free trade, and beneficial exchanges. If in the spirit of entrepreneurship, the defectors from the status quo, the disruptors and the innovative can rise up to challenge the “new normal” and break away from the cult of blind obedience and pathological altruism, then there is still hope.
Originally published at Brownstone Institute. Read the full article here.
