The Politics of Debilitation

the fabric of government is people

Start by noticing this, and we’ll go from there:

Dr Sho Jacobs @shoshanahjacobs

I went to a party last night. Here's how we reduced the #COVID19 risk: - we all wear masks in public spaces and at work - we planned well in advance and monitored our health - we use Enovid - we met on an outdoor, heated patio and we measured the ventilation - we put on… https://t.co/RCY13vV3nH

Now, one of the strangest things I’ve noticed in my woke little suburb is the growing popularity of reflective safety belts among people taking an evening walk. In particular, I’m seeing these on a small but seemingly growing number of young adults on the sidewalk in the city:

Ditto the weird prevalence of flashlights. I can drive from my house to downtown Los Angeles in about eight minutes. It’s never dark here; in our bedroom at night, the curtains glow with the aggregated light of the city, no matter what lights we turn on or off on our own property. But I see people, mostly younger people, walking at night under streetlights with flashlights in their hands, shining light at the lighted sidewalks. You know, with their fur babies.

The calculations about risk and physical difficulty are becoming…interesting. Young adults, in particular, are having less sex, losing physical strength, and — okay, some of them — walking down the street in cities in safety belts. Clearly, this is not only true in suburban Los Angeles; it’s a disease of affluent Western societies: alienation from the body, discomfort in physical space. And so, I think, we get this:

Our focus is mostly top-down: What is our governing class doing to us? Why is Dr. Fauci such a scumbag? Are there any political leaders who don’t lick Klaus Schwab’s reptilian loafers? But who they are has some connection to who we are, and growing numbers of our fellow citizens want to be governed harder, daddy, because they’re uncomfortable with the messiness of bodies. We went to a party — we all wore masks, and we measured the ventilation levels, and and and….

Masks and lockdowns and school closures weren’t merely imposed on us. People sought them, wanted them, demanded them, and felt comforted by them. Vaccine mandates come in part from the psychological foundation of body-fear and the view that the interaction between the body and space outside the body requires management; a shell has to be maintained to keep the dirty world out of the already disturbingly dirty body. The fear of contamination percolates into the discourse about discourse, the language we use about cultural openness: If you want free speech on social media, you’re exposing us to PUTIN!!!!!

Michael Tracey @mtracey

Truly demented outburst this week by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) -- fulminating that a bill to limit censorship of social media by government agents should be called the "Putin Protection Act," because what Republicans really want is for "Putin and Xi to run free over our platforms"

A growing appetite for a guardrailed society — guardrailed speech, guardrailed public space, guardrailed social interaction, guardrailed bodies — drives a grimly insipid politics of lazy paternalism. I’ve said that we’re “healthy from the bottom up, and sick from the top down,” and I mean it: I think this politics of debilitation is a minority politics. But it’s disproportionately powerful, in part because power-seeking degenerates in the political class find it convenient to elevate it above normal behavior, and it’s a sickness that has to be contained. Weakness prevails. The crybullies are winning.