The pandemic has made public a form of necessary punitive-justice-through-scission that has previously been pervasively experienced only in the private dimension of liberal society around liberals' careerism and moral sanctimony¹.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Hoping that the COVID State will eventually come to its senses and lift all of its baseless, anti-science restrictions is a waste of time. It's never going to change, because this is who liberals are. It's most perverse expressions were once consigned to the realm of the petty political private life and the inter-personal politics that arise around liberals' careerism and moral sanctimony, but COVID has now liberated not only this form of politics, but indeed the very personality itself, out into public life. The COVID State is an expression of who liberals are and now that they've consolidated themselves in the form of a government and global society most suited to them (or at least the tantalizing possibility of its immanence), its never going away until liberal culture itself goes away. So, its pointless to hope, and a waste of time to continue directing diatribes against those that continue to still today spout anti-science vaccine propaganda. It's a waste of time to think vaccine passports are going away, or that the global push to vaccinate every living thing on the planet will come to an end. What will happen instead is what always happens with liberals: the unvaccinated will simply be forgotten and ignored (as they currently already are²). Ghosted, just like every other person who ever dared question a liberal's selfish decisions on anything.

In a world that has long ago ceased to be oriented around truth and justice, where one has given up on love itself, what we have in liberalism now is a perverted form of anti-truth, anti-justice cynical 'realism'. The truth of the world lies in its disavowal of truth—this is the very principle according to which it operates. It is as predictable as it is certain. It's only the naive idealist or the withered and anachronistic misanthrope who any longer lives according to principles of truth and justice; most have already realized that the real 'truth' of this world resides actually in the denial of truth. Rationality in this context means justice through political expediency which, in turn, means justice through punishment. Why any longer risk justice on the fiction of human solidarity and decency? Real justice—double justice—is the simulacrum of punishment that provides not only the feeling of compensatory justice through the politically expedient application of readily-available violence but that also happens to more broadly validate a pervasively understood, and palpably sensed lived-history of cynicism with life that is its actual justice. This is a produced (human) truth and justice.

This isn't only the justice of the liberal COVID-regime that finds in anti-scientific vaccine passports that perfect mixture of the knowingly contingent (fiction) and the politically-expedient. It's not just that its rational to calculate the risk of a public admission of wrong and the messy undoing of years of destructive pandemic restrictions against the much simpler proposition of forcing-through that final 5%-opposition to the calm serenity and (liberal) freedom of post-accountability, in-group clique-stability. And its not simply that liberals valorize dishonesty as a legitimatized politics of the self liberating itself from cloying social and family dependency. Rather, this is more fundamentally about the version of truth upon which social calculus is based, and the practiced history of the application of its logic in the lives of those liberals who have until now been forced to practice their beliefs only privately. Through the pandemic, the burden of emotional and psychic wounds liberals' moralizing scissions have produced in the pursuit of their career and the imagined moral Star Trek universe they see themselves in the long-duration throes of creating finds the potential for public expression and, thus, validation. The COVID regime is the shared, public articulation of a false, cynical anti-truth and justice.

Thus, it sees in punishing and cutting-off the unvaccinated from public life not only an expression of fidelity to a future moral project (of creating a society of those concerned with the moral Public Good), but also more importantly, finally a moment of shared, public expression of the most fundamental form of punitive, politically expedient cynical anti-truth upon which liberals' cynical philosophy is based. It is Good because it strives for Humanity (so it tells itself); and it is Rational because it refuses to be held hostage to a naive faith in humanity that has long-ago proven itself incommensurate with reality. By being capable of ignoring that which doesn't conform to its plans, liberals have always been capable of the most viscous form of disgusting ambition; now, however, that ambition is becoming externalized in shared, globalized public exhibitions of its core internal logic, of which COVID-19 is only the most obvious recent example³. As such, the COVID-19 regime is only the most conspicuous and recent example of a long list of endeavors in which liberals transform the modern understanding of absolute existential contingency into the violence of a purely contrived moral purpose⁴.

In short, this is how liberals take control of their lives and ensure that not a single aspect escapes their control and is left to the random chance of (mis-)fortune, and also how they maintain a sense of intentionality in a world that is increasingly ineffable (intensified even through their project). Submitting to the contingency and unpredictability of open-ended (love) relationships (with others and humanity) means leaving some aspect of life beyond one's control. Knowing that the world itself has become so thoroughly corrupted by self-interest and alienated from truth, it becomes, according to liberal's perverted analysis, no longer rational to enmesh oneself in hopeless social processes that can only lead to eventual disappointment, embarrassment, and shame. Why subject oneself to those predictable harms when one can rather externalize it onto others first, thereby saving oneself from them while simultaneously expressing the enlightenment of their discovery of the more profound (human) logic of existence?

It is not some guarantee that society—that life—be oriented towards truth and justice, and that the 'struggle' of justice will always go on. What the COVID-19 regime makes clear (and public) is what many have already known from their personal lives living with liberals now for a long time: that an entire other form of abject sado-masochistic truth-denied existence is also possible, and that, it is, in fact, also durable. Not only for the liberals who make the cuts, but also for those forced to endure them.

Footnotes