Notes

 Almost everything we know about the world, we learn from other people.  It follows that our ability to understand the world depends on our ability to understand people.

What we can observe directly is the behavior of the people who control the information.

The technocrats are acting like they've got something to hide.  They are showing with their own actions that there's something there.

I don't have a lot of specialized expertise.  I look at what I can observe directly.  What I can observe directly is the people in power and their actions; what I can observe directly is the media and their actions.

We make practical and moral decisions primarily, and most reliably, on the basis of first-hand knowledge.  The function of propaganda is to supplant what we know from direct observation.

Human beings are competitive, like all living things.  Unlike other creatures, we have the ability to follow a moral code, and we are competitive even in that.  Virtue envy - the resentment of another person's moral standing - is as old as Cain and Abel.  Even when we stand to gain nothing by it, it is easier to take the other guy down than to build ourselves up.

There's a deliberate strategy to decouple moral reasoning from the objective, observable consequences of your actions. Global warming, pandemic masks. It's so that your sense of guilt can be properly manipulated.

Performative virtue:  disconnection of perceived "virtue" from any tangible results in the real world.

If I convince myself that most people are ignorant bigots, then I get to feel "special" just by not being a bigot.  If I believe the other guy is a nazi, then I only have to be 1 percent better than a nazi to be the good guy.

The Covid scare campaign appeals to a certain strain of vanity: the conviction that "I am among the selfless few, bearing the burden for an ungrateful and ignorant humanity".  

What "climate change" and the covid scare campaign have in common is that they are designed to focus your moral decision-making on things that you cannot directly observe - global temperatures or infection rates - so that you must outsource your moral decision-making to the Authorities.  This is the same top-down model of the communist command economy, applied to our social, moral, and cognitive universe.

The goal of the technocrats is to get you to subordinate your local, mundane knowledge - things you can observe directly - to the "information" you are fed by authorities.