As I write this, Baroness Hallett has just started the inquiry into the U.K.’s response to COVID-19. It has already been said that the inquiry will investigate aspects such as the preparedness of the U.K.’s response, the initial response and particularly the impact of lockdowns. But questions remain about whether the inquiry will deal with internal Government communications (or the lack of any record of such communications).
This latter point raises an important question – is there a case to be made for the official suppression of information if the release of this information would undermine the public’s support of authority and increase dissent?
Note that I’m not stating that there has definitely been a suppression of truth and promotion of ‘official misinformation’ to stop the public understanding what is being done to them. I happen to think that this has been occurring, but this isn’t necessary to have the discussion about what should be done if there have been efforts made by officialdom to misrepresent the situation to the public.
There are four aspects of the behaviour of our Government (and governments worldwide) that raise questions that have a significant ethical component:
- The use of lockdowns and whether there were any data at all on whether they would offer any net benefit. It is worth noting that preparatory documents relating to an influenza outbreak suggested that lockdowns wouldn’t offer any significant benefit and would introduce harm, yet we locked down anyway. Also of consideration should be the use of hard-line policing of the lockdowns, rather than their being merely ‘strongly recommended’.
- The use of vaccines with only short term testing for efficacy and safety. Again, what is of concern isn’t simply that the vaccines were authorised for use, but also the role of the Government in strongly recommending their use nearly to the point of mandate (a point passed by other governments). Related to this point is whether there were any conditions connected to the supply of the vaccines (the secret T&Cs) that have forced the Government to suppress anything other than support for the vaccines.
- The suppression of the investigation into generic drugs as prophylactics and treatments. Again, the Government wasn’t simply ambivalent about their use, but appears to have actively suppressed any discussion of their use, other than a few ‘preferred’ solutions.
- And, most importantly of all, the use of advanced psychological techniques by the Government to support its policies, and the rigorous suppression of any discussions that might undermine the Government’s position. These psychological manipulation techniques appear to have been used at all points of the pandemic, from lockdown behaviour to vaccination. Even now, there are ‘nudges’ from the Government’s official communications arm (BBC) questioning the actions of those who declined vaccination and once more pushing the ‘wet market’ theory of the origins of Covid.
Taken at face value, it would seem obvious that the inquiry should look into all these aspects of the Government’s response to Covid – but is there a deeper ethical consideration at stake?
The Suppression of Truth and the Noble Lie
Around 2,500 years ago Plato wrote about a somewhat similar dilemma. The Republic documents a dialogue between Socrates and others about whether there was an ethical case to be made for the promotion of a lie if it would offer social cohesion. The point of the Noble Lie in The Republic was whether a lie that had little in the way of negative aspects and some positive aspects could be considered as ethically correct even though it involves the deception of the public. There’s another ethical dimension to this question, not discussed in The Republic, which is whether it’s ever ethically acceptable to suppress the truth to maintain social cohesion or to avoid the social unrest that would occur if the truth were to be disclosed?
If it was the case that the Government knew that it had made decisions that have resulted in enormous harm across the population then it is very likely that were the truth to be revealed there would be significant public unrest and a real chance that the Government be overthrown and any replacement would find it difficult to regain control. Furthermore, the exposure of any significant use of psychological manipulation techniques would make it difficult for the public to ever believe anything governments and their agencies said in future.
Thus it could be argued that the best thing to do at this point in our Covid story might be to actively suppress any information that undermines the Government’s position – after all, even if it isn’t noble, the lie would help maintain public order and prevent the unrest that could follow if the lie was exposed.
But still my doubts remain – should the public be deceived in such a profound way? I’m going to divide my discussion of this into four areas:
- The consequence of failure – the level of unrest that would follow the lie being exposed.
- The level of ‘bad’ that the lie supports.
- The ongoing difficulty of maintaining the lie.
- The wider consequences of the lie being successful.
The consequence of failure
An important aspect of the ethical suppression of truth are the negative consequences that would occur if the truth were revealed. These range from violent protest through to a general decrease in the level of trust in government. Note that ‘distrust’ can itself have long term damaging consequences, such as might happen if people have distrust in medical authority or in policing.
Of course, it might be that individuals in Government might themselves get harmed should the truth be told, but this is often the case for people in positions of authority and isn’t really an aspect that should be considered in a Noble Lie discussion.
Nevertheless, there comes a point where the amount of harm that comes from the lie being exposed becomes considerable. At this point the ethical case for a suppression of truth becomes apparent. The question then becomes whether the other aspects of the situation might support a suppression of truth.
The level of ‘bad’
In The Republic the Noble Lie made society better (than the neutral state without the lie), but the reality of official lies is that they so often hide an unpleasant truth. There then becomes an ethical concern about the suppression of information about a harm that has occurred (and might be ongoing). Surely, it is important to consider the level of harm that the lie is supporting. Indeed, is there a level of ‘evil’ where there can never be an ethical case for keeping it secret?
To consider an extreme example of a hypothetical officially sanctioned lie (and rapidly fall foul of Godwin’s law), would there have been an ethical case to be made for the Nazi’s to have suppressed the truth of the Holocaust if they’d have won WWII? It is likely that many nations (surely all) would have recoiled in horror at that truth, resulting in an unwillingness to accept Nazi rule. Of course, the ruling Nazis would likely have responded with violent suppression of the population to continue their rule, but this is an ethical consideration – the vast majority of sane individuals would surely consider that there is no ethical case to be made for the suppression of a truth of that magnitude, and that a period of violent unrest would be worthwhile if it had any chance of overcoming an authority that had behaved in such a way.
A large part of the ethical argument for or against the suppression of the truth is whether the impact of the lie has any ongoing effects. Perhaps if the actions supported by the lie are stopped and society allowed to return to normal without the lie being exposed then this would be preferable to the period of unrest that would come with the truth being suddenly revealed. On the other hand, if the suppression of the truth allows ‘bad actions’ to continue when they would have had to stop if the truth were exposed earlier, then the suppression of the truth would have led to additional harm being done. Furthermore, the continued ‘bad actions’ would almost certainly result in an increased and more damaging period of unrest were the truth to become known, resulting in it being ever more important that the increasingly ugly truth not be revealed.
The maintenance of the lie
This then brings us to the difficulty of maintaining the lie. Some lies are easily maintained – if a series of poor economic decisions are made by a government with outcomes that were beneficial for a few insiders but disastrous for the population in general there would be no easy way for the population to tell that this had occurred – after all, there’s no easy comparison that could be made, no readily available way to ‘try out’ an alternative decision and see that things would have been different had the original decision gone the other way. On the other hand, it can be more difficult to maintain lies where the consequences of actions can be tested properly and where large numbers of people are involved in decision making processes.
Often political decisions to suppress the truth for a long period of time work out for authorities. For example, the decades long delays before the inquiries into the Bloody Sunday massacre or the Hillsborough disaster worked, in so far as the Government managed to keep the truth suppressed for long enough that the majority of people had ceased to worry about the problem and evidence of any wrongdoing (including recollections of the time) had dissipated enough for any malfeasance to be unprovable. I believe that this is the general approach taken by governments on occasions when terrible mistakes are made by those in authority that would result in public disorder if the truth came out – and, sadly, it actually works most of the time. Perhaps all we can look forward to is a new inquiry into our country’s response to Covid in the 2040’s?
However, other decisions are less readily maintained. It might be simple to keep a secret where all of the paperwork is locked away in a safe and where there are very few people who know the truth… However, decisions based on a specific interpretation of science are not like this – there is never widespread consensus in science (despite what our authorities and media tell us) and those with alternative theories will always be there to challenge the orthodox view. Any suppression of the truth that relies on claims of ‘follow the science’ is likely to come unstuck should the scientific rationale supporting it be presented as overwhelming but where it is actually based on careful selection of only those aspects of the science that supported the Government’s position.
The wider consequence of success
Many of those who have discussed the problem of the Noble Lie considered that it is always a dangerous concept and should be avoided – a sufficiently noble lie might well offer advantages in keeping society happy, but the problem comes where the authorities see the success of the lie and start to lie in other areas. Human nature being what it is, the likelihood is that those in authority would lie more often, potentially about things that don’t offer any advantage to society and only benefit those in authority. Thus a sufficiently noble lie might well offer a net benefit at one point, but it risks the start of a journey into totalitarianism.
This aspect of the argument over the Noble Lie would maintain that were such a lie to be told, the decision that would be most beneficial for society would be to ‘come clean’ as soon as possible, even if there were short term negative consequences.
Thoughts on the application of the ethics of truth to the Government’s Covid response
I believe that the application of the ethics of the suppression of truth to the Government’s response to Covid is much more simple than is the case for the majority of lies in politics. No matter what decisions were made and when, the science will come out in the end – it doesn’t matter what our authorities do to suppress this, scientists (in general, not the subset of Government-approved career science-politicians) are the type of individuals that will doggedly keep on exploring until they find something to report. At that point the lie would be exposed and the social problems would come anyway. Furthermore, given the pace of science, these truths are likely to come out sooner rather than later. Thus the futility of the attempts to maintain the lie is enough argument in itself to support full disclosure of all information as soon as possible.
The problem then becomes not one of whether the lie should be exposed or not, but one of how to limit the fall-out when it does. I suggest that we’re already in rather deep, but that no-matter how bad the response would be if the truth came out now, it will only get worse if governments continue to suppress the truth anyway. Or, put another way, when you’re in a hole you really have to stop digging.
To help limit societal disruption following the disclosure of the truth, I suggest that there should be a type of Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), offering immunity from prosecution if people come forward and tell the truth. This sits uneasily with me as I don’t like people to ‘get away with it’, but this would be the only way to get the truth out now and avoid much more serious problems in the future. An important aspect of this would be that people would only have protection if they came forward and told the truth – anyone that withheld information at that point would be exposed to the threat of rigorous prosecution in the future (possibly based on what others said to the TRC).
One final point. It isn’t simply about the societal disruption if the truth were to be out – there’s also the impact on the individuals that made the decisions. Even if there was protection from prosecution, any individuals that perpetuated a lie at the expense of the public will surely be vilified – thus it is only natural that all those involved in the decision making around the response to Covid would strongly oppose any disclosure of the lie. This is especially true of politicians, who are trained to never own up to their mistakes and who seldom have anything but the most basic understanding of the nature of science. As a result, the individuals deciding whether to hold a type of TRC, and the members thereof, shouldn’t have had anything to do with the Government’s response to the epidemic (and that includes members of the media that have been complicit in any lying).
Unfortunately, this is surely wishful thinking on my part – I fear those in power would do anything to perpetuate the lie and not face the consequences. I think this would be futile, but is nonetheless likely to happen – perhaps we’ll get a totalitarian state yet.
But ethics isn’t about what I think – what do readers think about this ethical dilemma?
Amanuensis is an ex-academic and senior Government scientist. He blogs at Bartram’s Folly.
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That a government scientist can think like this fills me with hope, thank you for brightening my day. I did not manage to finish “Republic”, you have motivated me to do so, thanks.
“I did not manage to finish “Republic”, you have motivated me to do so, thanks.”
Far be it from me to discourage people from reading, but IMO it’s TLDR. Summary: The ideal form of government is for people like Plato to be in charge. The allegory of the cave is neatly done though.
Agreed, most of it is a little bit boring
“The Great Reset” of its day. Maybe if one has a long beach holiday.
I’m an ignoramus/heathen/philistine but a better philosophy book IMO is The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch.
It is a bit of a painful read (probably reads better in ancient Greek, but that’s an entirely different story and not available to me at least).
For normal people wanting to have an easy life I’d recommend these two:
https://historyofphilosophy.net/plato-republic-soul-political-philosophy
https://historyofphilosophy.net/plato-cave-allegory-republic
I rather suspect Plato liked the idea as long as he and people like him got to decide what was truth, what was a lie, what was noble and what was good for society.
Isn’t the progress towards happiness and perfection for the individual and for society inextricably linked with the ability to see things as they really are?
Anyway, to screw up royally and then cover it up is hardly noble. Saying it’s to preserve trust and cohesion is just a rationalisation for covering your arse. Totalitarian regimes now and throughout history have claimed to be acting to promote harmony while suppressing dissent.
We have gone well past the point of debating whether those in power should get away with something that is very far removed from a “Noble” Lie.
Even if one were to say that in the first wave, the first 3 to 6 months in 2020, there was genuine concern about what was happening and real fear on the part of the authorities that this coronavirus had indeed escaped from a lab or even been a bioweapon, this should have been done with by the end of summer 2020. We knew then it was simply not that dangerous. The only actions that should have been taken was to get health care services as prepared as possible for the inevitable winter wave and opened up all avenues of possible treatment, including things like ivermectin and HCQ. Instead, billions upon billions were spent on what will have been known to be pointless measures such as testing for a virus that had already spread across the world, using a meaningless test, utterly pointless (in terms of infection control)
spyingtrack and trace systems, PPE that made buddies of government officials very wealthy but harmed society (and the environment) and utterly ridiculous measures like masking to walk around in a pub but taking it off when you sat, or walking in one way systems past people breathing out virus in all directions.The wholesale pushing of a novel, known-to-be-toxic, untested vaxx was nothing short of criminal, even without the coercion. The CONTINUED pushing of that poison even now, even as unexplained excess mortality continues across highly-vaxxed countries is outright criminal and must be stopped, whatever the cost.
The refusal by most Western countries to even allow people themselves to elect to use ivermectin or HCQ is beyond disgraceful. The vaxx clearly doesn’t work, the safety profile for the other two is well known, there is no reason to prohibit their use, even if they turned out not to do anything (I’m not saying they are not effective, I think they are, I’m saying it’s not relevant to this debate – people should have the choice of treatment).
As far as the fact that some people might face wrath – that’s a bit like saying if people find out the bloke living in the house at the end of the road is a pedo or serial killer, he fight face some harsh consequences so let’s keep stumm. Nope, a day of reckoning is required, led by people of integrity with a strong spine. That might actually restore some faith in our governments, continued lying and, worst of all, continuing on the criminal path they have been on for over 2 years may destroy it beyond repair.
Thanks for that. The idea that those responsible might ‘get away with it’ sits very uneasily with me. My only justification for it is that by letting them off it might reduce the death and misery that would come with an anarchic state.
But another aspect of it is: if you don’t punish those responsible is it more likely that a similar situation will occur in the future? Thus ‘more pain now’ might reduce the risk of much more pain later?
Yes, unfortunately I think we are at the “more pain now” stage. Not just with regard to the corona approach, but everything these megalomaniacs touch turns to the proverbial – the green agenda that may well see us sitting in the dark freezing away this winter being a prime example. Absolutely absurd in 2022 – and utterly galling to hear these people tell us we must accept a reduction in our standard of living because they say so. Truly Plato’s know-it all elite (in their minds elite – I think we need to start using a different word – immoral, unscrupulous criminals who will sell every granny on earth down the river for a sliver of power).
The Dutch health minister said some months back there would almost certainly be another round of pharma-profit boosters in the autumn, he just didn’t know whether it would be confined to those over 60 or would cover everyone over 18. It has just been announced it will be ‘offered’ to everyone over 12. This is simply obscene. They know full well that this stuff does not work and offers no observable protection for anyone under 50, they have no idea about ADE, immune exhaustion, autoimmune diseases from continued poking and yet they are going to go ahead with it. I bet anything they will try to link it to the apartheid app again. As far as I’m concerned, from this point forward any death in any way linked to the vaxx is simply murder, no ifs, no buts. They are doing this because there has not been enough push back. As far as I’m concerned they have already made it quite clear they will only stop when they are made to stop.
There’s another aspect of this that I didn’t touch in the post, both because it was long enough already and because it is drifting into the realms of ‘conspiracy theory’: The international nature of the Covid nightmare.
I do think the idea of throwing away decades of knowledge on how to deal with a respiratory virus pandemic was to some extent planned and intentional. Not necessarily that all countries were pushed into it, there was a lot of ‘monkey see monkey do’ going on. I remember at the time being quite impressed by how level-headed PM Rutte remained in March 2020 and that he seemed to be a bit amazed by how other countries were going so overboard. He followed the advice of the outbreak management team, at that time still obviously working with the original pandemic plan. Why he/the OMT changed course – definitely a question I want answered. Definitely external pressure, blackmail, bribery?
Was it China to screw over the West? Certainly possible, they have been infiltrating academia and politics in Western society for 2 decades without anyone realising. They have form when it comes to destroying society from within – this time, instead of doing it to themselves, they cleverly used the tactics of the Great Leap Forward and the cultural revolution to cause trouble in the West. Certainly the involvement of the likes of Fraudci with the GoF work in China suggests he and his associates had every reason to cooperate with the CCP in causing this havoc – instead of casting him as the villain he is, for 2 years he got to play hero. That is starting to unravel, between Birx and Redfield it’s starting to look like a play from the theatre of the absurd, with everyone contradicting each other and themselves at every turn.
It could be a joint effort of the EU/WEF/big tech/big pharma, they seem to be very chummy indeed – and not one of them accountable. The EU, as we well know, have given themselves unaccountable power and privileges, the WEF – why does this self-invented forum get any attention on the world stage? Big tech determines the propaganda, big pharma (with big hedge funds holding big stakes in both, coincidentally) rakes in big, easy profits with no liability.
Exactly.
Except the EU. They’re the useful idiots that don’t realise that they’re being played.
The EU is not what you believe it to be and it can’t give itself anything. It’s a confederation of states and not a federal state. The equivalent of the head of state of the EU is the European Council. It’s composed of the leaders of all governments of EU members an responsible for setting general political targets and ways to accomplish them. The EU commission is the executive working for the council. It’s job is to come up with specific proposals for laws supposed to implement what the council wants to implement. These proposals are then voted on by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union. The former is elected by the citizens of all member states. The latter is composed of the ministers/ secretaries of state of all governments of EU members responsible for a particular sector, eg, finance or agriculture (and the most dishonourable Laywoman is the head of the EU civl service, nothing more).
NB: This is not supposed to be a statement in favour of the EU. But Know your enemies.
What I can never forgive is masking, because it has changed our society for ever. It has introduced something which is continued by a significant minority of people to this day, who presumably believe that it protects them from infection with Covid, Flu or Monkeypox. The hiding of the face is something totally alien to western societies and it really saddens me to see people living their lives in fear. Those masking have recently increased in number. I still have former friends who won’t engage socially the way they used to do, in the supermarket as well as in church.
There is nothing noble about the lies which SAGE and the Government have systematically told us for the past two years. Or the methods they used to control the population.
They do not deserve any forgiveness.
I tried to go through it to remove suggestions that any of what’s occurred is ‘noble’.
I left it in the title because I liked the rhyme.
It’s a good discussion of the ethics but it is predicated on the hypothesis that those in power know that they are telling the noble lie. If Mattias Desmet is right, then the mass formation has basically hypnotised even those in power, so that they actually believe that what they did was necessary and proportional. When you see how the judiciary, and even bodies like the British Psychological Association, has aligned themselves with the narrative, where there is no obvious incentive to toe the line, I am inclined to think that Desmet is right. This doesn’t mean that all of the politicians necessarily believe in all of the logic of the actions taken (for example, I can’t imagine anyone thought that the rules about wearing masks when standing up in pubs made sense), but once they bought in to the delusion, they accepted anything that supported the fundamental policy choice, which was to limit the spread of Covid by all means possible.
I should say that this doesn’t let politicians off the hook any more than we can say that the Nazis were not culpable (whoops, fell foul of Godwin myself!). We are all responsible for our choices in life and the choices they made killed thousands and have blighted a generation. That is unforgivable.
I think it’s highly likely that some of them know very well they are lying. Whitty, Vallance, Van Tam are all clever men and were set on herd immunity until some mixture of political expediency and orders from somewhere made them change their tune. Some of the senior politicians probably know they are lying too – they are not stupid and they lie for a living. Others are most likely deluded. But there’s far too much evidence of deliberate attempts to suppress the truth to think they all believe they are doing the right thing.
I agree that the unholy trinity you mention probably know they are lying. They have a huge financial incentive to do so. However, I am not so sure about the politicians – maybe, maybe not. I don’t see the supression of the truth as being the smoking gun—if they are in the grip of the delusion they would see what we call truth as ‘misinformation’ and would see supression as part of the game plan. Again, I stress that this does not excuse their behaviour – it was, and always will be, their duty to challenge narratives, do the research and come to logical conclusions based on evidence. That they have not done so makes them, at the very least, unfit for office, and, I would argue, criminally liable.
We may never know, short of smoking gun evidence which if it ever existed has long been destroyed. You’d need to get one of these buggers and inject them with a truth drug. I just get the feeling that some of the more astute among them would have smelled a rat and wanted to find out exactly how badly they had screwed up, and looked into it. If you suspect you’re wrong/lying you can go one of two ways, if you’re smart – you either bury the thought so deep in your mind it never surfaces and when the truth comes out you can plead ignorance, or you look into it to see exactly what the lies are and how bad they are and you act rationally to cover it up.
I think if any of them had anything approaching a moral compass, then alarm bells would have rung, for example when they saw the Police harrassing people in public, or when the idea of vaccine mandates were floated.With a couple of exceptions, such as Sir Desmond Swayne, they clearly had no moral compass whatsoever.
Expecting them to have a moral compass is not, it turns out, a great idea. This book is interesting: The Dictator’s Handbook – Wikipedia
In short, they argue that leaders in democratic countries don’t act less badly than dictators because they are nicer people but because they can’t get away with as much. Trouble is, if you can seize on a “pandemic” and manufacture consent through fear and misuse of your huge advertising budget, you can get away with a lot more. Persuading people that our leaders cannot be trusted, even educated and in other respects intelligent people, is bloody hard work.
They reach positions of power precisely because they have little in the way of moral compass (the are a few exceptions).
I am sure you are both right. Perhaps I am hopelessly naive, but while I didn’t expect politicians to be paragons, I did think that they had some respect for core enlightenment values, such as freedom of speech, rights of association and so on. I would agree though that at the very least these values were abandoned as soon as thought expedient.
I’d be content to allow them ‘to get away with it’ if it would stop a journey to totalitarianism.
I understand what you’re saying about getting our societies back on the right track being, in a general sense, more important than actually punishing the perpetrators of this scam.
However, they have been getting away with murder (some would say quite literally) for over 2 years and look quite happy to continue along the same path. New “updated” (with less testing than the previous poison) vaxxes are being prepared and pushed for the autumn, while at the same time still pushing people to get the old, by their own actions (why else a new version) useless vax in the meantime, FOI requests showing they have no data to show for their so-called rigourous checks of vaxx-related AEs and deaths, Germany gearing up to introduce masks again in September, just because, France still maintaining its vile apartheid app for travellers – even as we’ve all seen infections go up and go down all by themselves, proving the measures never did anything.
So unfortunately I think we are now past being able to give them a way out – they could have easily reversed on the vaxx coercion in July 2021, when it was beyond clear that it did not stop infection or transmission. They could have reversed in October 2021 when it became clear it wasn’t keeping people out of hospital. They could have reversed now, summer 2022, a link between boosters and excess mortality looks to be undeniable. Yet they still proceed.
Nope, time to set some examples – pour encourager les autres. Any politician who wants to get ahead in the game should understand this is the way forward, otherwise they too will go down with the ship.
Excellent article, as per usual
I also think Desmet is correct.
The interesting aspect then becomes: Does the formulation of this hypothesis inform as to what must be done to stop it (by the population, as the leaders are neck deep in it all).
According to Desmet, all totalitarian regimes contain within them the seeds of their own destruction. How long it takes depends on whether the minority who are not deluded continue to speak out against the narrative. If they fall silent, then it may take a very long time, but it will fall eventually. He says that this is why it is so important that we continue to challenge, speak out to our friends and neighbours (online and in person) and generally be awkward buggers (my words, not his!).
A great article that in my childhood would have been given prominent placement in a broadsheet newspaper, with the writer safely able to give his name.
From lockdowns to manmade climate change to using nudge units, we’re in the era of ‘noble lies’, plural. We’ve had newspapers forced to publish what the state tells them, due to being made dependent on state advertising when all other business was shut down, leaving their columnists (and cartoonists) to tell readers what is really happening. On a whim, the columnists can be disposed of: cartoonist Bob Moran was fired for slagging off a doctor on Twitter outside of his job, for example.
The Telegraph, in receipt of a £3 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, ran a ‘Global Health Security Team’ that pumped out lies and fear porn in contradiction to reporting in the rest of the paper. Just think for a moment: ‘Global Health Security Team’. How totalitarian does that sound? It’s reminiscent of Hitler putting a party worker in a factory in order to make sure bosses conform to Nazi rules.
We speak of people being terrified of the virus. I’m terrified: terrified of the zombie-like conformity of the population. Terrified of the Government, the Police and and the wider state machinery. I can’t bear to be among people who now see each other as ‘disease vectors’ and seeing people wearing masks. I really need an eye test, but I’ve never worn a mask and, as long as my opticians persist in enforcing a mask mandate, I won’t go.
The most chilling moment I remember was in December 2020. I banged on the door of some family friends. They had become hardcore lockdowners. There was a moment where they spoke a couple of sentences about how at their age they ‘could die’. The sentences weren’t so chilling in themselves, except for that someone else I know – who doesn’t know these people – a few months earlier said the exact same thing to me, word for word, in the exact same tone of voice.
That’s when I appreciated how ruthlessly the audiovisual media had been used to program people. I get migraines and I don’t watch TV much, so I only read reports and transcripts of what was broadcast, so I was spared the mind tricks.
What’s needed is a Press takedown of the nudge units and wider psychological programming techniques. They are impacting our entire society now – I know two lovely, vulnerable people who watched BBC coverage COVID-19 endlessly – both are now agoraphobic. First it was COVID-19 and now it’s manmade ‘climate change’ (a rebranding of ‘global warming’, because the planet wasn’t warming up enough!) with weather maps coloured to look like fire. ‘Ignoble lies.’
I suggested a Truth and Reconciliation Commission a long time ago. They are brilliant at debunking state lies and even if bad people aren’t imprisoned or officially punished, the truth will ostracise them. COVID-19 has brought supranational organisations’ baleful influence on national governments into focus: the Chinese-manipulated UN and WHO, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, George Soros’s Open organisations and the WEF are the tip of the iceberg. Plato’s Republic was a place of horror. Time for a bit more Aristotle in our society!
I had similarly chilling experience. I was in a group chat with some people I had met on a couple of holidays and was explaining that I would not travel if it required vaccines or facemasks. The responses were all parroting the propaganda such as ‘I wear a mask for you, not for me’ and other nauseating nonesense. I gave up with them.
A very academic discussion.
The only purpose of public enquiries is to protect the establishment by producing a set of “lessons to be learned” that give the impression of trying to improve things. They are always based on the assumption that well meaning officials got it wrong and at worst were guilty of incompetence.
In other words it’s just another corrupt part of a corrupt system.
Take the Chilcot enquiry. We all know they lied to force us into the invasion of Iraq. People should have gone to jail for it. Instead no one was.punished and Tony Blair continues to prance around as a peace ambassador no less. They couldn’t be laughing in our faces more blatantly if they tried.
The covid enquiry will be used to further cement the advances of global government by a global elite.
Yes — if you ask leaders to have an inquiry then they’ll create one that ensures they’ll ‘pass’.
I’m reminded of the four rules of management:
If you are trying to get away with something that would never be supported if the truth were known, it is useful to have a “cover story”. One version of a cover story is the noble lie. To operate that, there needs to be a controlling group (who might consider themselves as “the elite”) and believe themselves to “know better” than the rest of society, whom they will deceive. A simpler version of this consists of a controlling group using deception to rob the rest of society of resources.
In a democracy the controlling group would be elected. But denying the electorate access to the truth is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. It is to be hoped that the electorate will continue its recent process of discovering the extent to which they are being lied to and thereby make appropriate adjustments to their voting.
Our salvation will not come via the ballot box.
How exactly is the electorate to adjust to this latest set of lies? By voting for Labour and Starmer?
The system is rigged.
They have all the media control to feed people what to think.
If that doesn’t work and there is dissent, they have all the media control to suppress the dissent (and they are rapidly closing any temaining loopholes on the internet too)
If that doesn’t work, they have a political duopoly that offers no actual alternatives.
If that doesn’t work, they have protest laws and police powers to keep potential “troublemakers” under control before anything big can get started.
This only ends with massive violent revolt which to be frank is pretty unlikely. Most people are hypnotised by electronic devices now. Just look around you in public.
I would have thought only persons can be noble or not. If one can believe that the one who tells the lie is noble and doing it for good reasons one might accept it.
We don’t need to look back very far to see where suppression of truth can lead.
Just take religion as an example. One true God and all that, anyone who questions the faith is a heretic, blasphemer or Satan worshipper. They deserve to be punished because there’s no place in heaven for them anyway.
Looking at the present, claiming a monopoly on truth simply means the freedom to lie and not be questioned.
Wait, what’s that? Apparently they’ll be changing the definition of lying next.
There is one rather obvious flaw with this essay – it takes as a given that we as a country reacted to an alleged viral infection in ways that were not of benefit to the population and these cock-ups were continued in order to save face- the Noble Lie. The starting point is that C1984 was a natural, unfortunate but highly dangerous disease that threatened millions of lives and that the government’s actions from March 2020 and thereafter were wholly in response to this fact.
Given this starting point the direction of travel for the essay is miles off.
C1984 was manufactured, its release may or may not have been accidental but the response to it was pre-planned and co-ordinated across the world. Lockstep in other words.
The suggestion therefore that perhaps the UK government over reacted initially and continued to over react simply to cover up their initial blunders is nonsense. There was NO noble lie to cover up because the whole charade had been planned in advance.
If one very clear lie can be identified in the government’s response it is this –
We were led to believe that all their actions: masks, antisocial distancing, groups of six or 10 etc, no congregating, closing pubs, schools, churches, and all the rest were designed and implemented in order to protect people and their health. This was blatantly false at the time of introduction and was pointed out by numerous experts at the time. Real experts and not the bought, puppet experts such as Whitty et al.
The real purpose of all the “health” regulations was to seriously destabilise the mental and physical health of the persons of this country and in terms of Mass Formation it largely worked. Following on from these initial successes the government then moved to the coup de grace – the “vaccines.”
Having successfully immiserated the nation’s physical and mental health it became relatively easy to deliver what will probably prove to be the killer blow, the injections.
There has been a multitude of lies but not one can be described as ‘noble.’
Pandemic, killer disease, safe and effective, look her in the eyes…, nobody is safe until we are all safe, or some such BS and on and on.
I commend Amanuensis for all the undoubted work put in to this article but as the original premise is wrong the piece unravels thereafter.
C1984 has been one massive, humanity destroying lie from the start and sadly it is a long way from finished.
As Dogman wrote upthread, all totalitarian regimes hold within them the seeds of their own destruction.
In this post I argue that the seeds are the nature of science, which is different from the usual ‘controllable narrative’ that politicians are used to.
I think we’ve got a rocky road ahead, as the situation becomes more clear that we’ve been duped.
I’d like there to be an ‘easy way out’ — but I very much doubt it’ll happen. I nevertheless want it to be written that it could have happened that we’d tried to ease our way out of the madness gently.
I’m sure that TPTB will ‘solve the problem’ by giving us more things to worry about. This might well delay the inevitable.
Thank you for your kind response.
I don’t share the author’s squeamishness about anarchy, bloodshed or even civil war. The entire overclass in the West should face a reckoning for their actual or attempted genocide, eugenics, forced infertility, authoritarian censorship, harsh economic deprivation, mass loss of livelihoods and so on. This should take the form of full-on populist street vengeance…no tribunals. Otherwise they will have another go at it.
Thank you for this article. This aspect has been worrying me. What happens if/when the truth comes out?
I wrote to BJ in April 2020, making the point that there was at that point an easy way out for the government (we took the precautionary route, now we know more, cost/benefit analysis etc.), and there were further subsequent points where they could have used new scientific data or vaccine rollout to the vulnerable to stop all NPIs. Instead they hunkered down and persevered.
So here we are. I do think more and more people have lost trust in government and this is actually not just a UK phenomenon.
For governments to regain trust the only way is honesty. Anything less will not bring back trust.
I agree with you that time may help governments however I for one have become extremely distrustful. How many people feel the same way? How does that work moving forward?
I like your idea of a truth and reconciliation committee, but it needs to happen fast. I personally would prefer government to simply hold their hands up and say ‘we got this wrong’. We don’t want this unscientific approach to become embedded.
You are stuck with cock-up theory Myra and we are not living through a cock-up.
This is the Reset, Agenda 2030.
When you accept the Lockstep theory you will understand.
There is no lie related to the management of the Covid plandemic that is in the slightest bit noble.
The billions of abused citizens around the world need to fight tooth and nail in any way we can to expose the atrocities inflicted upon us. Let there be anarchy, prosecution, and retribution for all remotely complicit.
we are on the fast track to a totalitarian dystopian nightmare and only blood on the streets will stop it. The Governments, Media and Medical Fraternity need to be purged of the filth that has taken them over. We are facing the biggest crime against humanity in our history.
Thank you. At least I have somebody else who has seen the light.
People need to drop their pre March 2020 view of the world, those days are gone. It’s Agenda 2030 everybody.
Wake Up!
I am writing from Holland at the moment where the farmers protest is still going on.
Listened to a very interesting discussion program where it was highlighted that the disconnect between government and citizens is growing. The Dutch government was seen as inward looking, obsessed with small stuff such as some governmental emails (see analogy with partygate) whilst not tackling the bigger issues.
it was said that 1 in 5 Dutch citizens was in favour of forcibly overthrowing government according to one poll… probably an overstatement as it is easy to say,but more difficult in reality, but even so. Not a good sign.
https://www.technocracy.news/how-the-great-reset-is-accelerating-into-global-tyranny/
An article from the brilliant Dr Mercola. These will open eyes to Lockstep.
This pandemic response all started with an avalanche of fakke news from China showing people dropping dead in the streets, Chinese authorities welding shut people’s doors with lockdowns in Wuhan and video of dead people being buried in mass graves in Italy. These were shown by MSM including public funded media, all over the world and extensively covered in social media. This effort to sow panic did not happen by itself.
People were genuinely panicked. Elected governments were resisting a panicked response including BJ who came on TV to say this was a disease very similar to the flu. His government also published a study saying over 200,000 could die from lockdowns themselves.
People were literally screaming for the government to do something to save them. Remember the polls showing 80 to 90% of people agreed with lockdowns and Manny thought they were not severe enough.
It is not beyong reason to assume that this was all started in an organized and deliberate way, just a few propaganda videos to panic people. The ability to reach people today with a message has never been greater.
The level of trust in government, the expert class, the medical authorities, the police, the justice system, the complicit media and so on should definitely go down to zero to be able to rebuild our societies. There is nothing wrong with a kicking out those in power for having conspired against the people who naively trusted them. Society will not break down in the absence of these managers, it will simply become more free and voluntarist. The fall-out that the author seems to fear is entirely salutary. Contrast that with the extreme cost of maintaining the vaccinators’ lie. This is already visible in their relentless push to eliminate the vaccine control group…namely the unvaccinated (children and refuseniks). They don’t want people around who are living proof of their crimes. The ethical dilemma is simple and straightforward, our societies can no longer be run by this crowd of inept and self-serving authoritarians. The cost and risk of removing them through force pales in comparison with the cost and risk of keeping them in place by softly adjudicated by a TRC or other tribunal the population will never accept as legitimate…not after the mass slaughter and deprivation inflicted upon the people.
The one of the biggest surpression events was that of the removal of discussion about Covid 19 being the result of accidental or deliberate emission from the Wuhan laboratory in China. The development of what became Covid 19 was financed there by America as approved by its medical official Fauci who somehow remains in post despite his vile actions and activity to conceal them and control initially of any discussion about them. The WHO are equally responsible for concealment of what actually happened by undertaking a deliberately inadequate investigation at the time when it would have been possible to accurately establish how the virus was created and discharged. Now some worldwide governments including ours and America’s are attempting to give the WHO control of how future epidemics are dealt with when it is clearly riddled with corruption. This has only been avoided in its extreme by some African countries voting against it.