How Can We Ever Forgive Them?

Or shall we just say goodbye to family and friends on the other side?

As we survey the rubble of the world that is left after Covid, the most pressing question we face as sceptics is this: 

How can we ever forgive them?

How can we forgive our family and friends who stood idly by while we were discriminated against, banished from society and stripped of our livelihoods? How can we forgive those who looked on in silence while our children were denied education and socialization during their most precious years? And how can we forgive those who turned a blind eye when a gang of tinpot tyrants used the pretext of the pandemic to build a digital prison around us?

Anger, even rage, is a natural response to this. Indeed, I expect that many sceptics secretly harbour a desire to see immense suffering visited upon the Covidian faithful – perhaps a dreadful effect of the jabs that is too great to ignore: Vaccine-Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (VAIDS) or a plague of fast-acting cancers that afflicts every last one of them.  Some, no doubt, spend hours savouring the delicious fantasy of their most ardent Covidian friend, stricken with some dreadful vaccine injury, finally breaking down and saying those sweet words: “You were right all along! Why didn’t I listen to you?” 

Here’s the problem with such fantasies: The people we are talking about are our families and friends. 

Unfortunately, the mere recognition that we are talking about friends and family is not enough to soothe the deep well of anger we all feel. 

First, perhaps, we should ask why we are so angry. I would suggest that the anger is really rooted in two things:

1) The knowledge that if they, like us, had simply refused to go along with the Covid farce, it never would have gotten off the ground. Indeed, we’d still be living in the world of 2019.

2) The sense of betrayal. Because the people in question are our family and friends, we naturally assumed a certain commonality of outlook. But, more importantly, we assumed that when push came to shove, they would stand with us against the tyrants. 

But however intense our anger and deep our sense of betrayal, I think most of us know this: That if we allow Covid to destroy our most precious and oldest relationships, we will have lost far more than the Covidians have already stolen from us. 

Of course, there is also the question of what we must forgive. For some of us, the only thing we must forgive is the fact that our family and friends refused to listen to us. That is relatively trivial. But, for others, there is much more. Some have been excluded from gatherings due to being unvaccinated. Others have been treated like untouchables or accused of selfishness or stupidity. 

In my case, the knowledge that every member of my birth family voted for politicians who destroyed my business has been nearly impossible to forgive. I found myself walking in the woods with my dog and practicing withering diatribes aimed at them: “You have betrayed me in the deepest way possible! You voted for those bastards knowing it would destroy the business I spent decades building! A lifetime of goodwill and happy memories has been undone by your cowardice and idiocy these past two years!” 

Others diatribes were aimed at friends: “You say I’m a bad friend for questioning the safety of the vaccine? You say it makes you uncomfortable? How dare you? You blithely go into businesses with your vaccine passport knowing I would be excluded! If you were suffering discrimination, I would never participate in that system! I’d be shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with you!” 

Fortunately, the only one who heard these rants is my dog.  

If we are to avoid the dreadful fate of going to our deathbeds (or allowing those closest to us to go to theirs) with our relationships ruined, it is going to take a conscious effort and some real work. Forgiveness will not be easy, but there is one thing that will make it much easier: understanding. 

If we understand one simple fact, we will be most of the way there:

We live in an entirely different world from the Covidians. 

I don’t mean this in a glib or facile way. I mean this literally. We modern humans exist in something very much like virtual reality. That is, we live within the media we consume. We leave our digital pods from time to time for short “moonwalks” in the real world – a bit of grocery shopping or to post a letter – but for most of our waking hours, our brain is in cyberspace. And, of course, this ontological inversion was cranked up to 11 early in the pandemic, particularly for those who were most vulnerable to the fear porn of the Covid media masters. 

For those of us who never fell for it, or who did so only briefly at the start of the “pandemic,” it is nearly impossible for us to understand what it must be like to be a true Covidian. It’s a task on par with trying to understand what it’s like to be a bat: Good luck if you’re not a bat. But, there’s something to be gained by trying.

Imagine this:

You believe that the mainstream media is trustworthy; that our politicians are honest people doing their best for those who elected them; and that our health agencies are populated by scientists completely uncorrupted by financial concerns. 

And now imagine that early in 2020, you were put into a condition exactly like that used by cults to brainwash new recruits: isolated, cut off from family and friends, bombarded with messages, and scared of the evil “out there” from which adherence to the cult was the only salvation. In short, being subjected to the kind of extreme conditioning performed on the character Alex in Clockwork Orange: eyes propped open, electrodes on head, forced to absorb an endless stream of lurid images on the screen before him. 

And the end result is this:

You believe that Covid is a terrible disease that is killing millions of people, including young and healthy people with no pre-existing conditions. You keep imagining the following scenario: You catch “it” and you get sicker and sicker until you’re taken by ambulance to a hospital where they put you in an isolation ward. Your only contact is with doctors and nurses who look like aliens dressed in HAZMAT suits. You lungs slowly fill with fluid, until you’re drowning in it and they have to intubate you. And then, when it’s clear you’re not going to make it, they give you an iPad to say goodbye to your loved ones, who cannot visit you lest they suffer the same fate. And, if by some miracle you do survive, you’re facing a lifetime of long Covid, which is like chronic fatigue syndrome, clinical depression and Lyme disease all in one. 

And then, one day, they announce that there’s a vaccine for this terrible disease. All the scientists, politicians and media you follow tell you one thing: “If you take this vaccine, you will not get Covid.” And then, only a short while later, they add this little caveat: “It only works if everyone takes it.”  

If you swim in a different media ecosystem from the Covidians, it’s nearly impossible even to imagine thinking this way. And yet, we know that many Covidians actually perceive the world exactly as I’ve described above. And since they perceive the world this way, it is only natural that they would judge you for not taking the vaccine and even supporting mandates to force you to do so. It doesn’t matter that their mental model of the world has almost nothing in common with the actual world. You would not judge a paranoid schizophrenic for believing the hallucinations that plague him, nor would you condemn him for acting on those beliefs. You would understand that he was in the grip of a dangerous disease and hope that his symptoms somehow resolve. 

Of course, there’s a large group of people who don’t fit into the sceptic vs Covidian dichotomy I’ve described above. I’m talking about the Great Middle. These are people who went along with lockdowns, masking and vaccination simply because it was the easy and expedient thing to do. At first glance, it’s easy to be angry at them, because these people literally sacrificed the freedom of our children and grandchildren for a nice sit-down meal or a summer holiday abroad. But, again, if we are going to forgive these people, we have to understand what it is like to be one of them. And, just as with the Covidians, they’re nothing like you.

If you’re reading this, I assume you’re a sceptic. You’re the person in the Asch conformity experiment who not only pointed out that everyone else was wrong, but positively enjoyed telling them so. Or the guy in the Milgram experiment who, when told to increase the voltage, wheeled on the guy in the white coat and said, “No I’m NOT going to increase the voltage, and if you don’t shut your mouth, I’m gonna put those electrodes on you and crank it up all the way and see how you like it!” 

I mean, being the odd man out comes as naturally to you as breathing. This was never a choice for you: It’s in your blood and genes. A certain number of disagreeable misfits who point out unpleasant truths has clearly proven advantageous for our species.  Indeed, it’s necessary for our survival, because our large brain and deeply social nature predisposes us to occasional outbreaks of mass hysteria. We sceptics a pain in the ass most of the time; but we’re the most important person in the room for a few days each decade. 

But the people in the Great Middle are nothing like us. For them, safety has always consisted in belonging to the group. And I’m not trying to imply that they conform merely because they are too stupid to have an original thought. Just like us, they are wired to be that way, because there is a huge survival advantage for a group that has a high number of cooperative individuals. For the sceptic, behaving in accordance with the dictates of reason, their own sensory experience and the best available data is the only way to live. Sure, an agreeable conformist may pay lip service to reason and data (or, “The Science”) but that is not, and has never been, the guiding principle of their actions. The guiding principle of their actions is staying within the safety of the group, which means an almost supernatural sensitivity to “the narrative." 

To sum up: If your family and friends are true Covidians, they are literally living in a different world from you. And if they’re agreeable conformists, they are wired differently from you. And many of those around you, no doubt, are both conformist and deluded to some extent.

Most likely, you’ve already tried countless times to convince your family and friends of your position. And, all you’ve done is make them angry and resentful. In the case of Covidians, you’re asking them to fundamentally change their orientation toward reality, from trust to scepticism. How many people are willing to cast aside their entire mental construct of the world – their very identity – when presented with data from a source they have been conditioned to doubt? It’s simply not going to happen. And if you’re dealing with an agreeable conformist, by asking them to step out of the comfort of the crowd, you’re asking them to act in a way that they have never acted in their entire life. It goes against their deepest instinct. It’s like asking a deer to suddenly become a predator. Again, it’s simply not going to happen. 

Now, I am not making excuses for cowardice or wilful ignorance. I am merely explaining that those who fell for the Covid scam never had any choice in the matter – they were born to do exactly as they did. They were victims of what Majid Nawaz calls a “military-grade psy-op.” 

And make no mistake: The criminals behind the Covid scam preyed on exactly the two traits I’ve outlined above: They knew that they could use the media to create a mass hallucination in a significant number of people. And they knew that the Great Middle, composed of agreeable conformists, would obediently follow the narrative wherever it led.  

Our anger, therefore, must be directed at those who took advantage of the trusting and good nature of our friends and family. They poisoned those who gave birth to us, grew up with us, and formed the happy fabric of our lives. They stole two years of our lives, tortured our children, and nearly destroyed all our bonds, in order to make obscene profits and rob us all of our natural freedoms. 

If we are ever going to get those freedoms back, we will need the help of our friends and families on the “other side.” We cannot risk driving them away with attempts to change their minds. The most powerful argument we can make is not with words. Covid is, first and foremost, a theft of joy and a tyranny of fear. Living free from fear and experiencing joy is the most powerful weapon we have against this empire of death.