Neurotic COVID Policy as "The Error of Confusing Cause and Consequence"
Of the "Celebration of Mental Illness"
A DarkHorse Livestream from November 12th poses the below question:
7:00 — "Why are we letting the un-investigated and wrong conclusions of those who are celebrating their own anxiety drive people's sense of what makes sense at an individual and public-health level?"
This follows from their talk of a comic by Alecia Gatlin, a self-described “queer, disabled, non-binary comic artist” whose “Anxiety Garden” cartoon is published in Oregon’s Willamette Week.
Nietzsche's "Four Great Errors" and its "Error of Confusing Cause and Consequence" come to mind (available here in Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols; the applicable section I will summarize below).
Nietzsche talks about Italian nobleman Luigi Cornaro in this respect, who, in the 1500s, was known for being exceptionally old (he lived to have 82–102 years) yet he remained in good health. Because of this notoriety, he published a book on the "secrets" to his long life, citing a particular diet. This book was then adopted as a diet manual by people who wanted to live long lives (i.e., this was a 16th century fad-diet).
The error here that Nietzsche points out is that Cornaro's diet was not the secret to long life but was merely a reflection of Cornaro's personal disposition. That is, Cornaro confused his long life and his slow metabolism (the cause) with his diet (the consequence), and people took Cornaro's diet as the cause and assumed that the consequence would be long life (an error).
(Incidentally, Jordan and Mikhaila Peterson perhaps commit this error with their “Lion Diet” — at least if/when they promote the diet for others rather than as something that “worked” for themselves.)
We saw that this same error repeated in the “one-size-fits-all” COVID responses (language from the Fifth Circuit filing against the OSHA mandate). The state determined that people's anxieties were the consequence of COVID (the erroneous cause), whereas people's anxiety came from their disposition (the cause) which created COVID policies (the consequence). That is, instead of COVID policy being written around COVID's transmission variables, it was written based on the anxiety of people who had weak views of themselves and of the public at large. Their social-engineering omitted agency because they themselves abdicate it in their own lives.
We saw this in weak people such as Fauci and Walensky being the sources of these error-prone policies, as well as in anxious deciders such as Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Breyer, whose dissent and arguments on the OSHA and CMS mandates in early 2022 were fueled by their anxiety rather than by their duties as judges. Good judgment requires a firm grasp of causality, but their sense of causality was supplanted by their anxiety and their other immoralities, which became the cause of their decisions.
(Fortunately, better judges prevailed for the OSHA mandate; but the CMS mandate succeeded, the better judges apparently not realizing that the CMS secretary’s expanded powers represented the DNC’s plan for state ownership over bodies — using federal dollars as leverage to guarantee that hospitals comply with future top-down policies.)
And why were these error-prone people enabled to make these corrupt decisions which failed to reconcile proper causality?
Slave morality — the inversion of morality and its consequent reversal of causality.
We are seeing the intentional use of slave morality as a weapon within the managerial state, placing these incompetent and weak people in charge so that their errors are mass-produced onto the whole of society.
Totalitarian states love these sorts of fools of slave morality because people of slave morality cannot see the cause of their own power, which, here, is the total-state's appointing of useful idiots into “middle-management” (as opposed to the Inner Party architects). They instead only wield their new powers over others to feel a sense of mastery. A person of slave morality desires mastery over others by reversing power without themselves achieving virtue (e.g., 'winning' a competition not through better performance but by disqualifying better competitors). This is why weak people such as Alecia Gatlin gleefully assign error-laden "solutions" (consequences) upon the world when they alone are the cause of their own weaknesses. She has abdicated control over her own life, and likewise she wishes a total-state to seize control over the lives of others.
People of slave morality are the ideal servants of a totalitarian state.