The free world has been driven insane by China's coronavirus. https://twitter.com/9NewsAUS/status/1318632532716457986

The root of that madness is sadly easy to understand. Western politicians have lost the ability to measure costs against benefits, to weigh one problem against another, to understand that no "solution" is perfect and they always have drawbacks.

Easily stampeded by the media, eager to use crises to increase their power and batter their opponents for not taking the marquee crisis seriously enough, politicians across the free world collapsed into a singularity of opportunism and political posturing.

The hideous costs of the draconian measures taken against the coronavirus - and their minimal effectiveness at doing anything more than slowing the pandemic down a little - are becoming difficult to ignore... but the Western political class DID ignore them, and still wants to.

It's a perpetual motion engine of politicized hysteria now. The human costs of lockdowns are studiously ignored. The purported threat is maximized by using whatever metric seems most alarming. No politician is willing to admit they were wrong or take responsibility for the cost.

Those costs will accumulate for years to come. We don't even fully understand what the school lockdowns are doing to our children - it will take years to fully analyze the damage. People will be dying because of the lockdowns long after they finally end.

The Chinese Communists are using their plague for political advantage in every possible way. They will argue the hysterical and ineffective reaction of the free world reveals a fatal flaw in democracy. Only wise authoritarians with iron fists can handle a crisis like this.

That's not true. It only looks plausible because iron-fisted authoritarians lie shamelessly about crises, concealing any information that makes their response look bad. Unfortunately, Western media treats their false data as valid, especially when it's politically useful.

What IS true is that Western electorates must demand their political and media class become better at measuring costs and benefits, better at resisting stampedes, less eager to use every crisis for selfish political gain. They WERE better once upon a time, although never perfect.

The weakness the Chinese virus truly exposed is the ravenous appetite of the Western political class for increasing centralized power without taking the final, terrible step into China-style fascism. They dream of getting all the benefits of fascism without the horrors.

The Western political class is accustomed to downplaying or ignoring the costs of its agenda, disregarding the rights of individuals who disagree, attacking dissent instead of understanding and respecting it. Scientism made all of these tendencies much worse.

The corrupting influence of scientism has been on clear display during the coronavirus emergency. "Science" says X is Absolute Truth today, and anyone who disagrees is a "Denier." X might change tomorrow, at which point anyone who remembers yesterday's truth becomes a Denier.

Scientism doesn't empower science and reason - it weaponizes ignorance and hysteria. It chokes that crucial ability to measure costs and benefits, to think clearly about problems and solutions. It arrogantly destroys the humility that is vital to reasoned analysis AND democracy.

Interesting, isn't it? The vital ingredient of reason, capitalism, and democracy is the same: humility. None of them works without that crucial ability to concede the possibility of error, take responsibility for mistakes, and learn from them.

Every arrogant society is sliding into totalitarianism at varying speeds. The eventual conclusion that dissent is unacceptable, and disobedience cannot be afforded, is inevitable. The solution to every problem is more power for the elite. Where else could that ever end?

We SHOULD use the coronavirus postmortem to rediscover the value of humility, reject the corruption of science into quasi-religious hysteria, and insist our political class rediscover the virtues of reason and restraint. Let us recover our sanity as well as our health. /end