Fast Friday: Institutional Decay
Sure, Public Health has been bad, but that's just one part of a bigger picture.
So, I have a piece I am working on that is a follow-up to last week’s post on Government, Corporations, and the People, but it needs a bit more work.
As an audible, I want to expand a bit on a superb piece by The Bad Cat:
It’s worth reading now (and sending to everyone you know). As he points out: we knew within a month of rollout, January of 2021 at the latest, that these Covid “vaccines” were dangerous enough to be pulled immediately from the market by any and all pre-existing standards. But instead of making the smart-but-tough call to pull them from the market, they double and tripled down on lies.
That is nothing short of criminal. Crimes were committed and we should not stop until people are in jail for those crimes.
But as fun as it is to focus on the failure of public health, there is a broader theme here: Institutional Collapse.
I’m not quite old enough to tell you when our Institutions worked well. I am sure they were always messy, and it’s dangerous to hold up some time in the past as an idyllic representation of virtue. But what I can say with certainty is that we have seen all of our institutions become less effective, less functional, and less trusted over the past 20 years.
Thankfully we have some measure of this: Gallup has been tracking this for some time.
The first thing I think when I see this is “what the fuck is wrong with the 27% that still trust these institutions?”
That’s also my second, third, and fourth thought. But after that, I see the general decline as appropriately reflective of a material decline in the capacity of our institutions. Covid showed it for public health, but like, have you seen our educational outcomes? The failures of our schools is equally as stark if you just look at the data.
When I think about why our institutions are failing, I arrive at three factors that seem to be disappearing from our culture:
Critical Thinking
Principles
Cajones
To touch on each briefly:
Critital Thinking skills have been declining for a while as our education system has become much more task-focused and people outsource more and more of their critical thinking as they live in comfort.
Relatedly, one does not arrive at staunch principles and adhere to those if they haven’t given them the thought necessary to know why they believe what they believe and have thought deeply about how they should act. For my part, The Book of Principles is one small attempt to help with this:
And lastly, cajones. While such a term seems gendered, it’s actually not anymore as “man” and “woman” are simply social constructs that can be switched on a whim according to the latest and greatest woke ideology. But we’re basically speaking about courage. Standing up to a decaying institution takes courage, and not just from one person. Change can start with one person, but if few around have the courage to stand with them then the change will not go anywhere. There are several potential reasons, but we are broadly seeing a lot less courage to stand up against injustices or failures.
What this all means is simple: our institutions will keep decaying and the problems will get worse before they get better. If you thought that the death of several hundred thousands due to Public Health’s Covid Vaccine fiasco was bad… just wait.
The simple fact is that life is too easy right now. It’s easy enough that you can get by without critical thought (come on, we all know people like this), without principles, and without courage. This creates a downward spiral that will keep destroying things until it is bad enough that people see it is necessary to reverse course.