I CONTINUE to see people driving alone in face masks.

These people are not just victims of false theories of contagion. It seems that they have slipped into a generalized antipathy toward the physical world, believing it to be fundamentally dangerous and predatory. I can only imagine how miserable this state of mind is. While it’s true, nature is against us, the COVID believers so exaggerate this danger that every particle of air and solid surface is potentially lethal. They are at war with nature itself. Some of these people will never recover a state of ease, except in their own micro-managed, anti-bacterial homes.

The plannedemic spawned a seemingly new religious cult in America, but actually it is one with deep ideological roots in this country. Covidianity is quintessentially American.

Two main aspects of this cult’s belief system are 1) a Gnostic belief in the evil of physical matter and 2) morally-righteous utopianism.

I offer a few quick thoughts here on these roots, but they are entirely inadequate to the subject.

The Puritans brought similar harsh views of the physical world to these shores. Their Sabbath protocols, for instance, were opposed to any kind of natural pleasure. They disdained all ornament in dress, which would be too reminiscent of the feasts and festivities of Old Europe. Their worldview would later develop into the Prohibition movement, which banned the sale of all alcohol. The Puritan was extremely moralistic and totalistic in regard to sensual dangers.

The Puritans also brought utopianism and a spirit of activism, what Scottish philosopher David Hume called a “gloomy enthusiasm.” From Hesiod’s Corner:

When the Puritans landed in New England, they set out to build the new towns and cities of America with deliberate utopian intent.  Cities were planned based on the visions of the New Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel and Revelation.  New Haven, the very city where I attend at Yale, was consciously constructed with the New Jerusalem dimensions as recalled in Ezekiel and Revelation.  The First Congregational Church on the Green, which still stands today, originally had a stream running out from it into the green lawn toward the new “tree of life.”

The moral righteousness of COVID true believers is a familiar phenomenon. COVID activists are a type of the American “Progressive,” in direct descent from the Puritans. We cannot help but be reminded of this when encountering the moral righteousness of COVID true believers. They would make a new society.  From “The Puritan Origins of Progressivism:”

Progressivism’s modern call for a universal community of moral righteousness and equality is but the unconscious theologizing of the Puritan theology of confrontational progress.  It is deeply Rousseauian, the yearning for the restoration of God’s original creation—or for a more secular audience, the primitive state of nature of equality and liberty before the advent of social institutions that buttress inequality in society.  (The Puritans were the most successful movement in Christianity to preach progress as restoration, something that later became common to Rousseau and the Jacobin tradition, that a return to purity over some straw-man force of corruption was the essence of the unfolding of History.)

The Puritans believed that government would liberate human beings from their fallen nature:

For the Puritans, much like contemporary progressives, the state was not an enemy of liberty.  The state ensured liberty.  But more importantly, the state was society’s moral agent.  If individuals would not conform to the moral righteousness of the collective covenant agreed upon, the state would ensure it.

The COVID believer not only sees nature as evil, but believes a successful war can be won against it. Nature can be conquered by human effort and a new world of perfect physical safety will result. The state is the main defender of progress in this war, as it was to the early Puritan colonists. It is the hero and protector.

The COVID cult is both very old and very new.

The moral thrill many COVID believers have taken in evicting people from restaurants and stores is all too reminiscent of the “gloomy enthusiasm” of the past.

— Comments —

Hurricane Betsy writes:

What a terrific article.  Germaphobia is actually in the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.)

However, it would be a good idea if you also inserted a good  kick in the pants to the self-righteous anti-smoking movement.    Drinking alcohol is apparently still okay but tobacco smoking is the greatest of sins, to oneself and the people around you – that is the message we’ve been bombarded with for two generations, at least.

Let’s rethink this.  To make yourself or anyone else sick from smoking, you’ve got to smoke heavily or for a good long time.  To kill yourself, and others, or to cause unspeakable misery, or to ruin yourself socially, you have to get drunk only once.  Persons of common sense and morality are turned into crazies on just that one occasion of too much alcohol. Tobacco does no such thing.

I am not defending Prohibition.  If anyone tried this once again,  I’d be marching, even though I don’t consume alcohol except except to  have a small serving of someone’s home made wine so as not to offend them by rejecting it completely.  More than once,  I’ve had drinkers hand me a glass of liquor, knowing I did not want it,  in order to cause a fuss – but I always took a bit with a pleasant attitude,  to demonstrate that I’m not going to take their bait.

I would like to add that I don’t smoke around anyone who is bothered by the smoke or even those who aren’t physically sickened but – like the puritans – just self-righteously peeved to see someone enjoying herself (though I smoke only a few times a year and enjoy it thoroughly.) Different strokes for different folks.  Smoking tightens you up if you are too lax, apathetic or lacking in concentration; it improves overall mental functioning.  Alcohol & marijuana just make you stupid. In excess all these drugs make you physically sick.  It is a matter of quantity, discernment and judgment.

I’d like to add that there was no one more anti-smoking than my grandfather, he railed against it to make sure us kids didn’t take up the practice, yet he kept a few cigarettes around – he told me this – for the pleasure of visitors to his home.  Same with alcohol.

“The COVID cult is both very old and very new.”

And it still exists in the antismoking crusade, enthusiastically embraced by all and sundry   and enforced by the government.  Puritanism never went away, it just shifted around a bit, as your great article notes.

Laura writes:

Thank you!

Please follow and like us: