Thread by @JewhadiTM

“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”

Why Most Fell for the Lockdowns, While a Few Stood for Liberty fee.org/articles/why-m… via @feeonline

How did it all happen so fast? Why did people give in so quickly to such a sweeping assault on liberty, even in America, “the land of the free”?

In a word, they let their guard down. They stopped being vigilant.

But tyrants long ago learned a method of making free people drop their guard. The trick is to use an emergency as an excuse for power grabs, telling the people that the sacrifice of their liberty is necessary for their safety.

“‘Emergencies have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded...”
F.A. Hayek, 1973.

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”
William Pitt the Younger, 1783

“And with necessity,
The tyrant's plea,
excus'd his devilish deeds.”

John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667

The COVID mega-emergency was an especially convincing excuse for suspending liberty: an exceptional situation that called for exceptional measures.

And so, the people let down their guard and trusted their guardians.

The tyrant’s plea for COVID lockdowns also seemed to be “supported by science,” which lent it even more credibility.

Scientists naturally fit the role of “sage and savior” in times of emergency.

“Science,” after all, is derived from the Latin word for knowledge. And “those who know” are the heroes we need in an emergency, which is the rise (emergence) of the unknown.

The “novel” (new, emergent) coronavirus is an invisible killer that works in mysterious ways. Only epidemiologists understand it, we reason. Thus, to survive the menace, we ignorant lay folk should defer to their expert knowledge and advice.

And who are the top epidemiologists? Presumably, the ones working in the highest levels of government: like Anthony Fauci, Neil Ferguson, and the experts at the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization.

If these good doctors give humanity a diagnosis of “too much liberty to get through COVID” and a prescription of “more lockdowns,” who are we to question their expert opinion?

And so, the people let down their guard and trusted their sages.

Biden-Harris boast they will “listen to the science” and “dial” up and down the lockdowns according to local circumstances. But that is nothing but delusions of epistemic grandeur.

No government can know enough to fine-tune physical proximity in society. The more it tries, the more lives it will trample in its blind blundering.

To reject the lockdowns is not to reject science. It is to recognize that science is not omniscience, and that central planning amounts to an arrogant pretense to godlike knowledge.