An Immense Solitude
I really don’t know where my mind would be right now as regards COVID issues if I utterly lacked the ability to seek out like-minded people.
There is an appearance of irony here, since part of what I hated in 2020 is the overwhelmingly collectivist narrative. However, rage against the storm of extreme collectivism should never be confused with dismissal of the value of community. The two are actually distinct from each other.
The best communities act as shields for their constituent members who would simply be bulldozed, buzz-sawed, or otherwise dismissed under simple rule-by-mob. You know… protecting the vulnerable.
Individualistic culture (or more fittingly, its members) may not always appreciate this. Progressive and woke activists actually understand the power of the community quite well, better than their opponents seem to (I think part of this is that the very existence of community for a citizen of the modern West is taken for granted).
You can see that they understand it from the tactics used against dissenters. The dissenting arguments themselves are seldom addressed on their merits. You’ll often instead see imposed categorizations of “conspiracy theory” or “misinformation,” or even just employment good old Godwin’s Law. It’s thankfully become more common for these dismissals to be seen as the misdirections that they are: ad hominem, poisoning the well, guilt by association. However, a particular consequence of these types of reasoning often goes unnoticed: they undermine the sense of community.
It’s not only that you’re supposed to renounce the “misinformation” in and of itself — it’s that you are to cease identifying with those who are putting it forward. You are supposed to remain isolated from anyone who might share your hopes and fears. Consider the following concept of the origin of friendship by C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves:
Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one."
... It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision - it is then that Friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude.
When your favorite bad kitty-cat gets banned from Twitter, it’s not just about hiding mere information or inconvenient counter-narrative arguments. It’s about reinforcing loneliness.
“Yes, you are the only one.” That is the implicit lesson you are to be taught by censorship.
You are alone in your misgivings.
You are to have no unprescribed friendship.
You are not to commiserate, lest these privately spoken words beget a publicly-issued challenge.
To again point specifically to pandemic issues: COVID lockdowns are uniquely able to facilitate this isolation by definition. Look at the closure of bars and restaurants. It’s extremely advantageous, when preemptively quelling revolts, to have ironclad justification for shutting down the kinds of institutions which were found at the roots of the American Revolution.
No one is immune to divide-and-conquer tactics if they are sustained for a sufficiently long time. Like I said in that first paragraph above, I know that I am not. That’s why, in spite of the many (and mounting) issues with big tech and modern online platforms, I’m still grateful for places like /r/LockdownSkepticism and the numerous channels for discussion of actual science on YouTube (and Odyssey if the line of questioning gets too spicy for YouTube).
Are they as good for effecting change as those revolt-fomenting taverns of old? Maybe not, but they’re better than outright despair.
A game can have many loss conditions, but the earliest and easiest one for a player to bring about is his opponent’s belief that victory is impossible.
Put another way, the least costly way to win a battle is for the enemy to surrender, and what better motive for a soldier to surrender than for him to believe he is the only one on the battlefield?