Articles, News, Psychology

Will we go back to “normal”?

People who know me know that I have been very critical almost from the very start of the whole global reaction to “Covid” and the unprecedented use of authoritarian measures such as forced masks and “lockdowns”, among other measures which have proven to be not only useless, but harmless.

I am also very wary of this strange mass vaccination campaign with a new technology whose long-term effects we do not know, and ideas such as “vaccine passports” (to my mind, vaccinations should be optional and never forced, directly or indirectly).

Now, many people are hoping that as the pandemic eventually subsides, things will get back to “normal”. But will they? Hasn’t “normal” already changed by the imposition of such norms and such technology?

Let’s say the pandemic ends, everyone is happy, we don’t hear so much about “Covid” again. Great. But then, some other virus comes up, or perhaps it’s “global warming”, or “bio-terrorism”, or some other natural or artificial accident. Won’t governments and authorities immediately go into the same, or perhaps even worse, measures?

Once they have been deployed, things like constant surveillance, almost total digitalization of money, education and entertainment, imposition of “social distancing”, etc, won’t go away. Just like having to take off your shoes or not being able to bring a water bottle before boarding a plane have never gone away, even if there was only one (very suspicious) case of a “shoe bomber” and, as far as I know, no cases of “water bottle” bombers.

So, no, I don’t think we will go back to “normal”, we are already in “normal”, this is “normal” now. Whether you like it or not.

(For more about where this “new normal” can take us, read my short story “The Great Unvaxxed” published at the Off-Guardian.)