What purpose does a COVID-19 population lockdown serve, other than to test the compliance levels of a region’s citizenry?
On 12th February 2021, the state of Victoria, Australia was sent into a snap 5 day COVID-19 lockdown by its manifestly incompetent, CCP compromised Premier, Daniel Andrews. Another apparent debacle centring on another hotel quarantine fiasco emerged, and 6.4 million Victorians were ordered to close their businesses and remain indoors. 4 valid reasons to leave the house were allowed – shopping for essential items once per day, caring for the sick or elderly, getting vital exercise for up to 2 hours per day, and to perform professional duties that could not be completed from home. Masks were to be worn at all times while outside the home. Travelling more than 5km from your residence was banned. These measures were supported by the threat of hefty fines. The Australian Open tennis tournament was allowed to proceed when players were deemed ‘essential workers’ alongside doctors and paramedics.
For long-suffering Victorians, such draconian measures are sadly all too common. The majority of 2020 was spent labouring under such COVID-19 restrictions. During the annus horribilis hundreds of thousands of jobs disappeared, and tens of thousands of businesses were forced into liquidation. The emotional toll on the populace cannot be measured and its horrific extent will never be known. Loneliness and silent desperation do not show up on government statistics.
The latest lockdown of over 6 million people was based on active virus case numbers never higher than 30. The imposition of such laws force people to take ridiculous and illogical actions. A farmer some 800 km from the infected quarantine hotel is compelled to wear a facemask while plowing an empty field. Will the farmer follow such orders because the man on TV told him to?
How many people will believe an incompetent government when it declares that the new virus strain is smarter than the old strain, despite a virus being an inert entity entirely incapable of thought or smartness? How many citizens will be tempted to travel 6 km from their home to purchase something they desire? How many will exercise for 3 hours, dammit? How many parents will force their children to wear damp, unhygienic facemasks? Put simply, how many Victorians will continue to follow patently absurd rules because they believe the lies they are told? What percent will blindly follow all government rules forever? How powerful is fear as a motivator, even when the chances of death are statistically remote? What are the exact limits of government control? At what point will the people push back, or just ignore ridiculous restrictions and enjoy their lives? How intrusive can legislation become before wide-scale resistance is encountered?
The only way to answer such intriguing questions is to impose such a lockdown. The world’s smartest psychologists and human behaviour experts could postulate for a lifetime without knowing how an educated population would react to such irrationality. But in Victoria, we are now finding out. The answers are readily available. The population has been instilled with fear, and compliance is almost universal.
Such lockdowns also allow government departments to root out trouble-makers, the ‘conspiracy theorists’ that do not blindly believe what they are told and think for themselves. This group presents a danger to herd-like human conditioning. The free-thinkers seek alternate information and call bullshit on absurd government responses to imagined emergencies. They don’t watch TV. They are immune to mandated and irrational fear. They protest and disobey. They communicate among themselves, spreading alternate views and citing evidence. And governments fear them. Their whereabouts must be noted. Police officers attend protests with cameras, and recorded images are fed into facial recognition software so the troublemakers can be identified and be entered into a special database. Organisers and agitators have their front doors kicked down and are arrested at dawn. Businesses that remain defiantly open are catalogued for later attention.
While locking down an entire state for a handful of cases of a virus with an exceedingly low death rate makes no sense for health reasons, it does serve other purposes. It provides data that can be fed into insatiable artificial intelligence programs. These ravenous machines then produce models and predictions that can be shared with the world. The raw lockdown data is worth its weight in Bitcoin.
Unfortunately, Victoria and New Zealand appear to be the testing grounds for the latest CCP style social experiments being trialled on the western world. Canada and the UK appear next on the list, followed by the ‘land of the free’. As long as there is widespread compliance, the intrusions will be expanded. The Nuremberg Code appears destined for the scrapheap. The boundaries of voluntary medicine are eroded daily by the all-consuming COVID-19 narrative. The truly gullible roll up their sleeves to receive experimental medicines while wearing multiple facemasks.
Meanwhile, lockdown-free, mask-free Florida continues to lead American states in Covid statistics despite its aged population. There exists no credible evidence to suggest that locking down an entire population for a handful of cases of a mild virus is anything but illogical and motivated by dictatorial ambitions.
The final word on such matters of course word belongs to George Orwell, whose eerily accurate book 1984 sits near the top of best-seller lists across the globe some 72 years after its publication.
George Orwell – “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.”
Jackson Byrne and G G Novack