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THOUGHT LEADERS
The American People Versus A Tyrannical Elite Author Walter Kirn discusses the approach of lockdown and mandate leaders: ‘Reality is what I say it is’ e sit squarely in the middle of an absurdist drama,” Walter Kirn says.
In this episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek and author and journalist Kirn discuss lockdowns, mandates, and the frightening possibility of a union between Orwellian tyranny and the soft totalitarianism of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” JAN JEKIELEK: People keep
sending me your new essay, “The Power and the Silence.” WALTER KIRN: That essay
came from an anecdote told to me by a former president of a major U.S. bank. He was in a tournament at Warren Buffet’s golf course on the morning of 9-11-2001. Warren had a rule that cellphones were not allowed to disturb the golf tournament. When the news of 9/11 caused those phones to ring, the CEOs and celebrities snuck away to learn that the Towers had fallen in New York. But so cowed were they by Warren’s ban on cellphones, they couldn’t show their reactions to this attack. Their fear of displeasing Warren, their business superior, was greater than their need to react to an emergency. I used 52 I N S I G H T March 4–10, 2022
that anecdote to illustrate the point that pleasing those who have power over us seems the most prominent social instinct in people. I think that explains a lot about human behavior, especially lately. The disasters and difficulties people are facing in this COVID era are inconvenient to the state because the line coming from the top is “we’ve got this handled,” or “the vaccines are working,” or “lockdowns have no cost.” People tend to yield to those lines of command and propaganda and suppress their own observations. MR . JEKIELEK: There’s also
some portion of the population that seems to enthusiastically support whatever these decrees are, and in a cruel way, to vilify the people who aren’t participating. MR . KIRN: Time and again
during COVID we’ve created scapegoats. Before the vaccines, before the scapegoats were the unvaccinated, it was the people who were reluctant to wear masks or the people who were keeping their businesses open. At every step, we’ve been asked to blame someone rather than those above us for the pandemic and the toll it’s taken.
MR . JEKIELEK: You described
this whole thing as a drama. MR . KIRN: If we confine it to
the last couple of years, the drama consists of a hidden enemy suddenly showing itself with powers not yet comprehended, which forces us into a defensive position personally, professionally, and politically. And then we are directed to do various things to protect ourselves which become more and more absurd. If you mask, they tell us, you’ll be out of the pandemic. If you distance yourselves, if you stay in your homes, if you take the vaccine, if you take the booster. Every one of these commandments led to a new surge of hope. Then came a crashing wave of disappointment. We’ve gone from a dark tragic drama to a dark tragic farce. We sit squarely in the middle of an absurdist drama where the common sense ways of taking care of yourself and treating diseases with medicines became forbidden. You do everything but what you used to do when you got an airborne virus. I really think we’re in the grips of some sort of capricious monster. MR. JEKIELEK: By monster,
you’re not referring to any one person, but some emergent
