Covid: the real and abiding symptoms
Covid has delivered us into conditions whereby the presumption of arbitrariness on behalf of ‘authority’ has become the default response to reality of the average person.
Post-Apocalyptic Apocalypse. Now!
‘Glad we are over all of what happened during Covid, right?’ asks the blurb of a new video, ‘Society’s Great Gaslight: Everything is Back to Normal After Covid’, (find link at end of article) posted by Teal Swan, an American ‘spiritual influencer’, author and life coach. ‘I mean, it’s been five years after all. Life has pretty much gotten back to normal, hasn’t it? Well, the answer is no. In fact, this is one of the biggest gaslights that is happening in human society the world over. Allow Teal Swan to un-gaslight you.’
Teal Swan self-describes as ‘a New Thought Leader and a Bestselling Author who is an expert in human development and relationships’. She has over a decade of experience working with people of all walks of life ‘with a mission to reduce human suffering.’
She’s also an international speaker, having facilitated retreats and life changing workshops worldwide. She was ranked 15th on The Watkins Most Spiritually Influential Living People in 2023.
I had never heard of Teal Swan, and know only sketchy details about her life and work, but I found this video interesting. It opens up an important front on the Covid crime that has, to some extent, been under-attended in the immediate aftermath of the ‘pandemic’ (not). What she addresses are the hidden or buried after-effects of something that, in truth, never ended, but has left behind a trail of pathological damage and societal rupture. I also disagree with a couple of her conclusions, though not vehemently, as I believe that the ones I most disagree with may have been added as an insurance policy against Woke or Branch Covidian retaliation.
She treats neutrally of Covid in the sense that it is superficially impossible to describe her as definitively a ‘Covid denier’, or, for example, more of a lockdown sceptic than a Covid sceptic. Either might be true, as might other interpretations. No one who is not criminally implicated in the Covid crime, no matter where they stand on the issues, could take umbrage at anything she says, a great deal of which is constructive and important. It is clear that, overall, she is of the view that the episode caused untold damage to human society, but it is impossible to say how much of this she attributes to the ‘virus’, and how much to the measures introduced to — as was claimed — combat the ‘virus’. If you put a gun to my head, I would hazard that she attributes the lion’s share of the damage to the ‘cure’ as opposed to the disease.
She lists eleven features of human welfare and stability that have been affected or undermined in the Covid period, and have not yet recovered or shown signs of doing so. Indeed, some of her categories contain more than one significant issue, making her analysis even richer than she admits to. Just below, I have broken her dissection of the issue down into what I feel are its discrete elements, and counting these, conflated what I regard as inter-related phenomena and eliminated the ‘insurance policies’. Further on in this article, taking my cues from Swan’s prompts, or reacting to what she proposes, I have compiled my own slightly different list and arrived at precisely eleven key factors, although this number might well be expanded in several directions as a result of a further teasing out the various aspects.
My revised list of her eleven crucial elements is as follows:
— that Covid has settled into being code for a permanent condition of menace, since its tyranny and cruelties have already been inflicted and can be repeated at any time;
— that these circumstances have deposited our societies in a state of collective PTSD;
— that Covid has stranded us as the hapless victims of a constant power-struggle by unseen actors seeking control over our futures and our lives, who now have the ears of those we elected to serve our political and economic needs;
— that Covid has delivered us into conditions whereby the presumption of arbitrariness on behalf of ‘authority’ has become the default response to reality of the average person;
— that these circumstances have left most of us with a gnawing sense of powerlessness;
— that, for all these reasons, Covid has caused a loss of trust in the world and in authority;
— that these circumstances have left us with a sense of fragility, and consequently bequeathed each of us an individual safety-obsession arising from fear of risk;
— that Covid has caused us to lapse into a demeanour of uncertainty before the world, unable to say what is right or wrong, true or false, and accordingly more fearful concerning the future;
— that Covid also imposed unconscionable economic costs and losses;
— that Covid imposed a degree of disorientation that still impinges on our sense of time and the reliability of our memories;
— that Covid has radically ruptured our relationships;
Point for point, Teal builds a convincing sketch of a necessary project of self- and societal investigation, if only there were some honest actor or body capable of or willing to undertake it. It is important to watch her video and glean a sense of the interconnectedness of her analyisis.
The following is a more in-depth summary of her key points, including those I disagree with. I tweak her outlines of these marginally, on occasion, on account of reading into some of them more than she states explicitly:
(1) There is ‘no after Covid’, she says. It is still happening, still worming its way through the psyche of humanity. Once you have seen something terrible, you cannot unsee it. ‘What happened in Covid times was not something that they could have ever imagined to be possible. It never crossed their minds. But now that everyone has experienced it, everyone knows it can happen, and so the fear of it — or anything like it — happening again is something that people are living with now. You can consider this the foundation of a collective societal case of PTSD. This makes living in the world a very different experience, and, yes, a worse one.’
(2) She seems to misunderstand Covid to the extent of imagining that it was merely opportunistically weaponised to exercise a power grab — at this stage we know that it was engineered for this purpose. But that does not detract from her analysis, and she understands that this power play was in train for a long time before. ‘You can think of this power game like a massive — unfortunately very real — game of risk. The world has fallen under the control of select individuals, and the corporations they control, who are obsessed with power and who do not actually have the best interests of others — such as the people of the world — in their mind or in their hearts.’
She gets that this was, in multiple senses, a very perverted and ominous game. Dark things that we imagined to be behind us — receding into the past — now threaten our futures, our grandchildren’s futures. Far from being over, the power play initiated in Covid is ramping up. Yet, normalcy bias is preventing many of us comprehending that something unprecedented has happened and is still happening. ’The reality is that we are headed towards repeating history and towards recreating the nightmares that we thought could only happen in the past. Most people can feel this reality. They can feel this power game that's being played over their heads. They can feel that things are not okay at all. . . . We are in a time where uncertainty as to what this world is going to look like politically in the future is at an absolute all-time high, so the world doesn't feel good again.’
(3) During the Covid episode, she says, ‘much of the world got its very first taste of what government control can look and feel like.’ Covid was a mind-game, in which governments without the authority to do so, altered fundamentally the conditions of what had been free societies, and much for the worse. ‘This made people feel like control and freedom and having a say is, in fact, an illusion. Even the people who think their government should have been stricter, so as to keep people safe, felt negatively at the mercy of their government, and so what's happened is a big divide between the people and authority figures, especially a divide between the people and their governments.’ The consequent loss of trust in authority is causing enormous tensions and distress, which are all the worse for not being recognised.
(4) The resultant state of felt powerlessness is generating also unacknowledged fear, apathy and a sense of pointlessness. ‘[I]t’s a very painful state of being, to live like you have no control over the life you are living.’
(5) More than anything, Covid generated a crisis of feeling, a sense of betrayal, which led to widespread distrust in previously relied-upon institutions and belief systems. ‘Covid caused people to lose their trust in the media, in doctors, in businesses, in schools, in friends, in family, in neighbours, in their own bodies, and in the universe, and/or what people call God.’ That trust has not returned, and nor has this widespread state of distrust been recognised.
(6) As a result, each of us has been thrown back on him-/herself, on what Swan called our ‘protector personalities’ — a selfish reflex which causes us to disregard the needs of others, provided we are okay. ‘This brings about a kind of spiral whereby one person's protective personality causes the protector personality of another person to come up and flare up when a big unsafety happens — like the Covid crisis — and this process is amplified big time, and pretty soon we are living in a deeply inflamed world, where everyone is trying to protect themselves from everything, and everyone else.’ These tendencies have made the world a much harsher, colder, more painful and more narcissistic place to be.
(7) ‘The crisis itself came with so much uncertainty: not knowing what was right or wrong to do; not knowing if you had the correct information; not knowing how long lockdowns are going to last; not knowing if people would be okay or not, or live or die; not knowing how things would turn out; not knowing if you would see people that you were separated from, ever again; not knowing if you had job security; not knowing if there would ever be an end to the crisis; not knowing if life would ever return to normal, or would never return to normal again. The COVID crisis made tomorrow totally uncertain.’ This has imposed enormous amounts of psychological/emotional pain, which again is going largely unacknowledged.
(8) Self-evidently, Covid imposed enormous economic shocks and consequences, and much of this — contrary to the impression given by normalising rhetoric — has not been recovered, and may never be.
(9) Covid delivered enormous shocks to our sense of time, snatching away our routines and work/life patterns, disorienting us and damaging our memories. ‘This was compounded by how surreal everything felt to people, as life as they knew it suddenly changed — a surrealness that, quite frankly, is not totally gone. Covid disoriented people; it messed with every different way that a human being relates to time; and warping of time means trouble with memory as well, and people are still experiencing this.’
[This topic — the creation of a constructed amnesia as a result of incessant entrancement, indoctrination and brainwashing — is explored in some detail in The Indoctrinated Brain, the 2023 book by Dr Michael Nehls, which I wrote about in a previous article.
(10) Far from bringing people closer together, as per the rhetoric of the manipulators, Covid actually did untold damage to human relationships. ‘It made people deeply lonely. It made people feel detached and disconnected. It made people fear each other. It decreased social support. It affected the way that people enter into relationships with each other. It has negatively affected the way that children have developed socially. It has normalised people to interacting via technology, rather than in person. Covid was socially traumatising. There's no way around that it made relationships worse, and it made people worse at relationships, and people now have to integrate and heal from all of that trauma.’ The consequences of this include ‘increased rates of anxiety, depression, stress, PTSD, suicidality, and other forms of emotional distress.’
After these unsettling observations, Teal goes, in my view, somewhat off-message, doing the usual thing of emphasising Woke talking points about enhanced damage under headings like ‘gender’ and ‘race’, which is barely relevant, if at all, or at least not in the way that such language implies. I’m aware of no evidence that the ‘pandemic’ impacted disproportionately on any particular ‘gender' or ‘race’, in the senses that these terms are generally used. On the contrary, it was the indigenous peoples of Western countries who seemed to be the key targets in the crosshairs of the manipulators. For example, migrants coming into Western societies during the ‘pandemic’ were not required to be vaccinated, even though the indigenous populations of those societies were under the threat of ‘measures’ and sanctions if they declined to receive ‘jabs’ of untested and (subsequently found to be) dangerous serums.
Even more oddly, Swan bemoans the ‘pushback on globalisation’ that she claims has arisen from the Covid episode. ‘In essence it created a conscious and very unconscious swing towards nationalism. It has caused countries — both governments and citizens — to go in the direction of erecting barriers and separations between themselves and others — things like multilateralism, exchange of trade, goods, travel, exchange of ideas between people, and immigration, are under a progressive crackdown and this is changing the human experience on Earth in many really negative ways.’ Some of these observations may be individually arguable, but must also be lightly laid down as little more than debating points, since the entire edifice of the Covid subterfuge arose from the overwhelming force of organisation and coercion made possible by dint of the reach of acquired power of globalisation — this arising in large part from the prior weakening of national governments to the point where they were powerless against the menace of supranational organisations, unaccountable to anyone. The ‘Covid Project’ (© World Bank) would never have been conceivable without the UN, the WHO, the EU and the WEF bearing down on individual governments, rendering the authority of electorates a thing of the past, and constitutions, charters and conventions no longer worth the paper they were written on.
(Some of the factors identified by Teal Swan, though couched in somewhat different language, are explored in my new book, The Abolition of Reality.)
What Teal Swan describes are societies without sociality, rapidly losing socialisation, a condition more or less equating to that named by the Dutch psychoanalyst, Joost Meerloo, as ‘Totalitaria’, which is the place most of us now live. ‘Totalitaria’, to remind ourselves, is a word Meerloo coined to refer to ‘any country in which political ideas degenerate into senseless formulations made only for propaganda purposes . . . in which a single group left or right acquires absolute power and becomes omniscient and omnipotent, any country in which disagreement and differences of opinion are crimes, in which utter conformity is the price of life.’
Prompted by this connection, I would like, off my own bat, to list some after effects of Covid that Teal Swan has not explicitly referred to:
mutism: my word for the silencing of entire publics, not merely on controversial issues but also on nondescript ones, arising from a fear of being cast out as rehearsed in the Covid episode. This is one of a number of recent eruptions — arising from cancel culture and Woke fanaticism generally — which are really building blocks of an entirely new kind of society, characterised by a neo-feudal digital serfdom, constructed on technological/technocratic foundations, with artificial intelligence (AI) in the driving seat. Among the earliest symptoms of this proposed ‘new normal’ is a form of self-silencing rooted in fear, which infects virtually all interactions between human beings, in public and private. The word ‘muteness’ — or, medically, ‘mutism’ — expresses a silence that is psychosomatic, but also existential, mental and spiritual. It is something that happens to people, rather than something in which they acquiesce. It befalls them — like lockjaw, perhaps, but not randomly. It is also capable of being inculcated — usually by the use of threats or implied menaces. It suggests something almost involuntary, but also intuitive, a kind of learned consistency of avoidance in respect of certain kinds of thoughts, or categories of thoughts. There have been instances in which a child who had been able to speak was cast into muteness by a great fright or trauma. But something like it can be imposed on entire populations by the deliberste cultivation of what Dr Joost Meerloo called ‘inner silence’.
Meerloo writes in The Rape of the Mind:
The citizens of Totalitaria do not really converse with one another. When they speak they whisper, first looking furtively over their shoulders for the inevitable spy. The inner silence is in sharp contrast to the official verbal bombardment. The citizens of Totalitaria may make noise, and utter polite banalities, or they may repeat slogans one after another, but they say nothing.
Muteness, or cultural mutism, does not merely censor, or effect a process of self-censorship; at an advanced stage, it arrests the thought before it occurs, and at an even more refined stage cleanses even the possibility of the thought by essentially destroying all critical faculties. It might seem that what we speak of here is of a lesser kind to that postulated by Meerloo, but that is to discount the role of the mob — or, less prejoratively — the crowd, the collective, which, in certain circumstances, stakes a claim on the speech or silence of each of its members. Mutism is not a stilling of words on the tongue, but their apprehension long before, in this case by a culturally-imposed ‘lockjaw’ that acquires its paralysing capacities from the instilled fear of being cast out.
From this foundational condition, other pathologies flow like blood from a slit artery:
the consequent privatisation of thoughts and the evisceration of collective and personal conversation;
the resultant division of the population into those who know and those who don’t want to know, those who are prepared to eyeball the truth and those who glaze over when certain lines are crossed in any conversation they’re involved in;
the construction and acceptance of pseudo-reality, a form of spell which insinuates an entirely different reality to the one the objective observer might detect, in the now unlikely event of coming to things without prejudice or damage;
the elimination of consequences. One of the things we have puzzled about for the past five years is the way power seemed no longer to be amenable to public opinion — whereas, in the past, an act of criminality, or serious failure or negligence, on the part of a public functionary or figure of responsibility, would have encountered serious consequences in a predictable manner, so that every attuned citizen would have been able to anticipate his downfall within a measurable margin of error. This more or less ended in March 2020. From then on, it was not that evidence of criminality or serious error evaporated, but that these things appeared to occur in a different crucible of evaluation. It was true, of course, that the media was entirely bought and paid for, but this did not seem to provide the entire explanation. There was something else, some strange shift in the culture that seemed to suggest an entirely different moral framework, an entirely different time, perhaps an entirely different planet. All was changed without notice. The connection between wrongdoing and consequence seemed no longer to be an issue. The demise of the malefactor was no longer predictable on anything like the same basis as before.
The necessary corruption of every instrument of public communication or conversation, and the banning of those failing to comply, were essential elements of policing the mutism. Part of the explanation for why such abuses of truth became possible was that an unannounced contract of omertà was in place between the media and political and official entities and bodies, in circumstances whereby the business model of media had flipped from truth to lies. This arrangement required that the media should do or say nothing to draw attention to the perpetration of fraud, or the self-evident institutionalisation of mendacity to protect this, but simply report deadpan whatever was issued by way of a formal script by the Regime, no matter how ludicrous, spurious or contradictory. This meant that the Regime was at all times guaranteed that none of its nefarious acts or statements would be highlighted sufficiently for the ‘coverage’ to have any meaningful impact.
the normalisation of the bizarre, whereby reality is sanitised not so much to conceal what has happened as to deny it by implication — i.e. a form of gaslighting-by-omission (Teal Swan refers to something similar en passant, but does not develop this idea);
the involuted thinking prompted by the poison shots, which results, for example, in the relatives of its victims lining up to defend the forces that have murdered their beloved;
the continuous humiliation by virtue of gaslighting and burlesquing of the respective indigenous peoples of Western societies, formerly described as ‘democracies’ or ‘constitutional republics’;
a gnawing, growing fear-of-hoping, with cynicism becoming the default position of virtually everyone;
This strange, as though permanent, sense of ambiguity that attends virtually every public issue in every private conversation, where utterly diametric interpretations may be ‘live’ in any single moment. As a result, two people seek to converse but find they have diametrically opposing impressions and positions on just about everything. No common ground is possible, because their sources of information are not the same. Nothing is resolved and nor is there any indication that this pattern will alter or revert to former patterns of clarity. There is no possibility of reconciliation — not, it seems, ever. And any attempt to pursue such a course is likely to end in blows.
All these factors, together with the ones listed by Teal Swan, accumulate to create a condition that, though I detest the term ‘sheeple’, does result in a condition that might be termed ‘the sheepification of humanity’. Among the symptoms of this are a disposition of lostness in open spaces, especially where a crowd is gathered, for example upon disembarking from a plane, or waiting for admission to a just-opening supermarket. I notice that people, especially the most elderly, tend to congregate in such contexts with an air of mutual confusion and alienation, darting looks hither and thither, as though in search of cues or clues, walking in one direction, then tuning 90 degrees and heading in another. It is as though they have expected a shepherd to guide them towards the next gate or doorway, and are confounded that he has not materialised. This condition also involves another — a form of infantilisation, whereby people who once had control of their own lives have surrendered to what they deem to be ‘authority’, oblivious (because no one they listen to will point it out to them) that this Regime has no authority except what it had usurped from the people it is oppressing.
The strapline on Teal Swan’s video is therefore intensely apposite: Society’s Great Gaslight: ‘Everything is Back to Normal After Covid’.
Gaslighting — i.e.attempting to convince a potential victim that he/she is going insane — has multiple internal elements which contrive to further and deepen its effects. One of these is the fact that the gaslit person may often be fully aware that he/she is being gaslit, but declines to confront the situation or the gaslighter on account of the dynamics of their relationship. This is extremely germane in respect of the effects upon us of the Covid tyranny, which has prompted both fear and shame in more or less equal measure, and which those affected are reluctant to admit to, either to each other or to the perpetrator, who very likely would glean satisfaction from their disconcertion. These involuted undertows serve to intensify the mutism, isolating each one from each other.
Swan’s analysis is timely and thought-provoking. It reminds me of the analysis of postcolonial pathology contained in several of the works of the Caribbean-born psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, who constructed the most coherent and complete study of the after-effects of radical interference in the lives of whole peoples. One of his books, Black Skin, White Masks, describes in a series of case studies the psychic and psychological effects of this interference, with emphasis on the tendency of subjugated peoples to emulate their oppressors by dint of mimicry. In the case of Covid-imposed pathologies, seeking a fitting motif, we might arrive at a different but derivative title: Blue Masks, Blue Skin — blue being as though the emblematic colour of what was — is — without doubt, the Most Heinous Crime in All History. Such a title might simultaneously capture something of the horrendous taking of human life, the infliction of misery and despair on entire populations, and the unfamilian demanours of menace and contempt exhibited by elected politicians towards the people who paid their salaries.
‘Turning blue’ can have a few different meanings. It can refer to a medical condition called cyanosis, where the skin, lips, or nails turn blue due to a lack of oxygen in the blood. Additionally, ‘feeling blue’ is an idiom that means to feel sad or depressed. It can also be an idiom meaning to swear a lot or use offensive language. (Wikipedia)
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