Original Sin, Mark II — the Covid Variant
Covid has entered a post-religious culture in which responses rooted in mankind's spiritual past have been weaponised against the human being and human family, with likely lethal intentions.
There are those who speak — from a sceptical perspective usually — of Covid as a form of religion. They point to the role of ritual and rite, of sanitiser shrines and the sack-and-ashes connotations of the face mask. The Irish vlogger Thomas Sheridan has done this most effectively and engagingly in a riveting sequence of YouTube videos over the past year and a quarter.
People like Thomas are on to something that is important not merely to understanding what is happening with the Covid vujà dé, but perhaps something that has shifted in the human understanding of the nature of human existence. But what they suggest, more precisely put, I believe, is that Covid is a phenomenon that entered the human imagination by virtue of its effectiveness in supplanting — as a surrogate for — the mechanism once activated by religion. It is not simply that the aspect of the public towards the ‘virus’ apes the most religiose demeanours of the now only faintly remembered and ill understood past, but that the impulse towards these responses has been reawakened in even the most sceptical of the spiritual dimension — perhaps especially in the most sceptical of the spiritual dimension. The atheists and secularists seemed to cling to the Coronafaith more so than others. They it was who, almost by an act of collective willing, permitted or even unconsciously mandated the closing down of the churches to ensure that everyone would transfer their attention and obedience to the new deity.
I don’t mean just that Covid replaces religion in the daily life and routine of the individual. Occasionally, it may do so, or at least begin the process of doing so. But I have in mind rather more than a filling of the ritualistic vacuum created by the demise of religion — in particular, for obvious reasons, Christianity — in virtually every society in the West. Although it is true that the holdouts to Covid often turn out to be devout Christians, the remarkable thing is that Covid unites many ritualistic or lukewarm Christians with those who, under the attrition of secularising and de-absolutising conditions, have decrementally clear beliefs or none at all. Some people may remain, ostensibly at least, believers in Christ, and yet become fixated on Covid in a way that cancels out the prior openness to Christianity. Whereas Christ, at least in one dimension, increasingly invites both a personal relationship and a collective one, Covid offers a renewal and revivification of communal experience, entirely transmitted via the herd mind, and has only a very minor personal dimension.
The conditions for this had been in motion for a long time, perhaps decades before we truly began to appreciate that something was shifting in our public culture.
With the Covid-19 disruption of the spring of 2020, there were several immediately discernible contexts in which it was clear that we had arrived in a world in which not only was God no longer to be regarded as a serious force, but that the role formerly left to Him had been usurped, in their own minds at least, by particular, identifiable human beings. Without stating as much, they launched a new religion in the name of a virus.
It may be that, sensing the impossibility of surviving without a transcendent imagination, the human race has shifted its focus from extending its hoping for eternal life from an afterlife to a quasi-eternal existence on this side of the ultimate horizon. The new religion promises to meet Death and turn it around in its tracks, to bring us to a place where every tear will be wiped away right here on earth. That this seems impossible ought not be a reason to dismiss it.
To achieve this end, the Cult of Covid plays with the concept of death — pushing it away and then pulling it back by way of reminder, before pushing it away again. The implicit promise is essentially, or superficially, indistinguishable from that of religion: Death can be defeated, if only symbolically. To question the ‘measures’, therefore, is to endanger the possibility of salvation, not merely for oneself but even more pertinently for others.
I remember being struck, during one of the court hearings relating to our lockdown court challenge of the early summer of 2020, by the way a judge read out from a document about the rules relating to Covid as they impacted on his court and thinking that it would not have seemed inappropriate, momentarily at least, had an altar boy appeared from behind the bench brandishing a thurible, and the judge instructed us to kneel as he offered up our fears and hopes of salvation to the Goddess Covid. I say ‘Goddess’ because it seems axiomatic that the ‘new religiosity’ is, in certain respects antithetical to the most recent prior understandings and assumptions, and therefore is intuitively likely to suggest itself as female rather than male.
A secondary indicator was the eruption of a previously unsuspected level of superstition on the part of people who in living memory had manifestly regarded and presented themselves as too rational to believe in God. Long had they railed against the social controls said to be exercised by crozier-wielding bishops, a phenomenon actually disappeared from public culture since long before they were born. Yet, the word of the World Health Organisation, or the local hierarchy of NPHET, was sufficient to have them huddle terrified in their homes, or, if they emerged to obtain the basic sustenance of their continued existence, walk in ever expanding circles around one another in public, their faces obscured by cloth coverings that had no discernible practical use or benefit other than the outright humiliation of the wearer and the occlusion of his face
Yes, Coronavirus was indeed the ‘new religion’, with its own rituals, superstitions, shrines, doctrines, symbols, talismans. The medics became the priests and priestesses, not merely functionaries, co-celebrants and servers, but objects of adoration in themselves.
Having destroyed Catholicism, Christianity, theism, together with all the other content of the collective transcendent imagination of the world, and realising that they had removed elements that was both essential to the general functioning and useful to themselves, the secularists architect of the Cult of Covid arranged to replace these quantities with a set of entities and attendant beliefs that were even more intangible, less disprovable, and ultimately more sustainable than God had been for a very long time.
In the middle of May of 2020, I was asked to write an article about the situation for the Italian newspaper The Daily Compass.
This was still early days, and what I was trying to get at was that the orchestrators of the tyranny were seeking to close off from an infinite connection with reality those — Christians, mostly — who had remained connected, but also, in a different sense, those who depended for their meanings on what I called the ‘little infinities’ — of ‘false infinities’, as described by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger: the incremental everyday joys which add up to a life in the parched plains of a quotidian life in secular reality.
It was clear by then that the ugly subterfuge that was already eating away at our spirits was some kind of escalation of the conditions the pope had in mind in mentioning the promises of ‘scientific knowledge and . . . scientifically based politics’, which had displaced the City of God with the City of Man in the imagination of humanity, and – inevitably — was ‘constantly receding’.
Since the 1960s, I observed, we had been constructing cultures in which the religious dimension — that certain sense of a place beyond the beyond — had become ‘broken off from the collective consciousness, and can be preserved within the individual consciousness only with the greatest attention’. The human spirit, in the main, had fallen back on the ‘little infinities’, which had come to bear the full load of man’s desiring: ‘With God eclipsed in culture, even the best-adjusted souls need to utilise as stepping stones the tiny pleasures that enliven an otherwise nondescript, meaningless-seeming day.’
It was early days in the horror show and I was grappling with conflicting understandings concerning the longer-term implications of what was happening. It did not occur to me that what we were observing was a kind of herding process: a closing off of both the true and false infinities so that, leveraging our desires for meaning and destination, we could be steered towards the gate of the prepared Cult of Covid, and our hunger for freedom could be weaponised to imprison and enslave us.
The central, largely unnoticed problem besetting the human race in secular reality is an atrophying of human desire, a retracting of the reach of individual desire from the horizon that symbolically denotes the line between the earthly world and the transcendent world. There are limited means of measuring this, but those we can depend on tell us that there has been, over the past 25 years or so, a retracting of the range of the average human desire, as the implications of the collapse of formal Christianity began to sink in. I have written here before — and in my 2012 book Was It For This?— about the 2010 Italian Censis Report (an annually collated state-of-the-nation summary of the essential patterns and issues affecting the collective well-being of the nation, far more elaborate and penetrative than any Irish equivalent, combining elements of demographic survey and social/philosophical analysis, and claiming to describe Italy ‘in its most intimate essence’. This particular annual report told of the condition of Italy two years after the great economic meltdown of 2008, and was striking for its pessimism and solemnity. It found a society possessed of ‘a collective unconscious without any law or desire’. Italian society, the report outlined, ‘slides under a wave of disorderly instincts’, becoming ‘dangerously marked by emptiness’. The report spoke of ‘a painful alienation’, of a ‘flattened society’, dazed and disoriented; of nihilism and of the weakening of the individual citizen’s sense of connection to the pubic realm. It identified profound patterns of cynicism, indifference, passivity, and excessive enslavement to media perspectives and prognoses, which condemned the population ‘to the present without possibility of going deeper in the memory and in the future’. Trust in long-term drifts and in the effectiveness of the governing class were declining alarmingly.
The lockdown brought such vagaries into clearer focus, making us aware for the first time of a shift some time before in the workings of the ‘little infinities’ of many people due to the easy availability of constant ready entertainment. A friend, a relative of whom took her life during the lockdown, wrote to me as follows: ‘If the lockdown and current crisis happened in the more exciting times of yesteryear; times of great music, cinema, TV, radio, theatre, sport, dancing and dating, entertainment, concerts, etc (think 1950s to 1980s/early-‘90s), people might have revolted against it. Why? Because life was so exciting outside of our homes back then compared to in 2020.’ It is true. Many of the ‘little infinities’ had become transposed, from outdoors to indoors. A related point is that the cultural instruments comprising much of this ‘false infinity’ material — music, cinema etc. — had already become industrialised and reduced to formulae, so that the average person no longer felt connected to them, or had the possibility of being able to access them as creative beings, which was strangely axiomatic for us in our own heydays.
The lockdown had opened up a division between people who remembered the way things had been in this connexion — those who had seen these artforms as sources of inspiration for personal creativity and those who consumed them passively as mere distraction from the encroaching banality of reality. Many of the latter category — those, mainly from the later generations, with no actual concrete lives — were clearly gripped by a profound jealousy of those who insisted on maintaining their own creativity by making music or films, writing books, plays or poems, and who had thereby sublimated the products of others’ creativity into fodder for their own, thus transforming, transmuting, transubstantiating such material into a tool of personal expansion. In the emerging world this remains a red rag to the passive and unengaged, who sit at their keyboards most of the day, sniping at those whose capacity to belong to the real world drives them mad with envy. The lockdown was a ‘godsend’ for them, because it became a kind of leveller, briefly bringing the objects of their jealousy down to their level.
The lockdown happened at a time when all those cultural phenomena had been, imaginatively speaking, flatlining for some time, so that the secular world had become meaningless and boring for those who depended on them for diversion, with enormous suicide rates and escalating consumption of anti-depressants telling the tale. Perhaps that's why most of the godless contingent couldn't care less about the encroachment of the Covid rules. Over the previous couple of decades, most young people’s face-to-face social lives remained indoors, as technology provided them with a virtual ‘social life’. Thus, the contemporary godless person suffers from the melancholy of having lived vicariously in a life of consumption, delving by proxy into many experiences, yet having almost none to call his own. Many among the young had already all but given up the ghost because their desires had reached their limits, with no roots or moral or social values or duties to provide roughage in a life of bland ease. The ensuing breakdown of society, both socially and economically, was put down to extraneous factors. God, for such people, was an entirely implausible idea, so much so as not to merit a moment’s thought. Hence, concepts like infinity, eternity, the Absolute, were alien to them too, and they were beyond persuading. It might well be possible to construct a rationale whereby to demonstrate how their inability to imagine God is a trick of a culture that hides away from questions of origin and destination, hunkering down in a scientistic bunker and glossing over everything, including — indeed especially — the given self-evidence of the human soul. But this would be a massive cultural undertaking, requiring an almost total consensus of willingness to begin with, and we could hardly be farther from that possibility.
This has left these generations of the godless at once frightened and oblivious as to why. Indeed, they do not even know they are frightened. They simply hide themselves unknowingly away — in their foxholes, on the Internet, in dead-end tech jobs they imagine as the cutting edge of science. The world scares them. The future scares them. The past baffles them. They are possessed by fear and lack a place to rest or dump it. And the drugs don’t work, at least not well enough to facilitate a normality that, for all their rejectionism, they still crave. They are the first post-pharmaceutical generation in the sense that they have arrived at a place where the disruption of their humanity by modernity is no longer medically containable.
Their last place of refuge is the state. We are talking here about generations who have grown up, virtually from birth, with people other than their parents in authority over them. After several decades and generations in which rebellion seemed to be a natural disposition of youth, the young of the early third millennium have thrown themselves back into the arms of authority. Unlike recent generations, they have no shame at being supported by the state, when this proves necessary. But it is not simply that they rely upon the state — they love the state as their Big Brother. Stripped of the competitive and meritocratic possibilities that benefitted the prior generations in self-realisation, dispossessed of their capacity to generate decent lives for themselves by their bootstraps, they turn blind eyes towards the reasons for these phenomena, and under the guidance of the Combine and its battalions, busy themselves with conjuring up phantom enemies, who also happen to be the enemies of their benefactor, the state. In the era of Covid, they have become defenders of, evangelists for, the state and its corporate partners, which is to say of fascism precisely defined, and Twitter provides the perfect medium on which to do this. On Twitter they are the praetorian guard of the state, justifying its every word and action, proclaiming its virtues and good intentions, denouncing its opponents and critics. The State has become God.
Since the objective is, in part, to define a post-religious culture in which all the old certitudes and planks have been dismantled and God replaced by the state, the young are the chief targets of the cult. But, because of the conditions in which they have been reared, their loyalties are shockingly unlike those of any generation in living memory or before. Being easily persuaded of the wickedness of others, it is from there but a short hop to Covidian jihad: where snitching demonstrates a devotion to authoritarian mandates tantamount to an extreme religious fanaticism of the Middle Ages, a preparedness to unleash oppression of others that occurs not merely by the writ of authority, but by the interventions of what might have seemed until recently our neighbours and our fellows.
Things, one might imagine, would or ought to be different for the religious-minded — for Christians, for example, who think of themselves as not belonging ultimately to this world but to the continuum of eternal existence. Followers of Christ are supposed to live out their earthly lives as though in a kind of cosmic waiting room, doing their bit for fellow humans and society, before entering the eternal Beatific Vision. But, more and more, involuntarily drawn into a narrowing existence dependent on fleeting ‘false infinities’, even the intensely religious are now beginning to fall prey to the encroachment of atheistic meaninglessness.
These, precisely, were the conditions out of which the Cult of Covid was wrought to unleash into culture something that almost nobody had hitherto realised was either necessary or possible.
In the Cult of Covid, dread of ‘the virus’ has replaced what we used to call the ‘fear of God’, suggesting that this fear is something necessary, or perhaps, more precisely, that the fear exists anyway and merely seeks some cause or trigger, which for aeons religion has provided, but which for some time has lain there without correspondence or object. Of course, this is no real ‘fear of God’ anymore, but something else. Once it meant a fear of judgement, punishment, Hell; now it has attached itself not to the afterlife but to the present existence, and to an extent the void which is culturally presumed to lie waiting beyond it, the absence of being. The ‘fear of God’ era seemed in man’s make-up to be directed at ameliorating this last-mentioned terror — of death, essentially — and replacing it with hopes of salvation and redemption. Having transferred this fear to God and His judgment, it became manageable, allowing for a degree of hoping to enter in. But now, due to the increasing mindlessness of the background cultural radiation, and with the belief in a deity no longer culturally plausible, this ‘trick’ of transference no longer worked for the generality of people.
Even with the best of wills, religious faith becomes hard to cling to in these circumstances, and may only be possible through total immersion almost to the level of what to the uncommitted looks like madness. The older generations of Irish people today, being more or less spreadeagled across the rupture between two utterly different understandings of reality, are understandably confused. Many of them continue in the habits of mind developed during the religious era. Many of them, perhaps, barely able to cling to absolute faith, continue to live and behave as if nothing has fundamentally changed for them, thereby pushing the conundrum out of consciousness in the hope that it will resolve itself. But it floods in, causing the doubting to break out occasionally like a drunken uncle from its lodgings in the unconscious, and so a new litany emerged to supplant the Litany of the Saints and the Litany of Loreto:
The litany of the Little Bottles:
Monoamine oxidase inhibitors;
Norepinephrine and dopamine reuptake inhibitors;
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors;
Serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors;
Serotonin antagonist and reuptake inhibitors;
Tricyclic antidepressants and tetracyclic antidepressants.
Religion, properly understood, enables and fulfils the human person, stretching him or her to the fullest extent in the infinite space that is reality. It leaves no need for crutches. The ‘new religions’ — by which I mean religious ‘replacements’ in culture — are, of course, nothing like that, being mere manipulations of the potentialities of the human. The Cult of Covid takes things to a new level, exploiting the religious impulses within the human to enslave him or her.
In by far the most dramatic example of this, the Cult of Covid has replaced the Christian idea of Original Sin with a new and more effective concept: Original Infectiousness, the sense of ourselves and other human beings as biohazards representing a mutual lethality, festering messes of germs and pathogens, fallen organisms posing a deadly danger to others, who in turn represent a lethal danger to us. That this diabolical meddling in the human structure is accompanied by the countervailing claim that we are ‘all in it together’ is an example of the satanic gaslighting that has attended the ‘measures’ from the beginning.
Perhaps the worst of the many nefarious things that have been done to the world by the Cult of Covid — and perhaps the most fundamental — is this leveraging of the doctrine of original sin, which despite widespread secularisation still penetrates deeply into the consciousness of the Christian West, as an instrument of humiliation and control.
There is no mention of original sin in the Bible, not even in Genesis, where one might expect to find it. It comes to us from St. Augustine, who is said to have developed it through a mistranslation from Greek to Latin of a passage in chapter 5 of St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. It has been observed that the doctrine of original sin — the theological one — is counter-productive in that it generates a sense of pessimism, even hopelessness, concerning the possibility of achieving virtue. If I am already damned by virtue of inherited sin, what’s the point in trying to be good? My failings are the fault of Adam and Eve! There is no prospect of fighting against its grip.
The Covid version of original sin took a new secular form. It was a sin that bypassed the spirit and conscience. It allowed for no exceptions, unlike its Christian inspiration. It was the virus that tapped into the original frailty of the human person, and not merely destroyed his own health but rendered him a risk to all others. There was no defence against it, other than to cease behaving like a human being: to self-isolate, stay apart from your fellows, wear a mask to give a warning reminder to approaching others of the threat you represented. All this without even a scintilla of proof that such a virus actually existed.
I remember learning about Original Sin for the first time for my Confirmation, when I was nine. I had been away from school for a long time, due to illness. This happened a lot as I suffered — ironically now — from what at the time was called bronchitis but may have been asthma or some other respiratory illness. The chief symptom was that, every time I picked up even the slightest bug, it would ’go to my chest’, causing intense, body-heaving coughing, wheezing and attendant unmentionables. Prior to Confirmation, the tradition was that the local bishop, in our case the Bishop of Elphin, ‘Dr Hanly’, would come to the school to examine us on our Catechism Q&As. You could be asked any question from the Catechism and, if you failed to answer, so the legend went, the bishop would deliver a clatter to your face and declared you ineligible for Confirmation. Before that, we had to be vetted by our teachers — in my case a psychopath called Brother Terence.
I ran right up to the wire. Every day, lying in bed, I studied the big green Catechism. It was an ordinary book, with a cloth cover, ‘big’ only by comparison with the red Catechism, reminiscent in appearance of Chairman Mao’s infamous book, which we learned off by heart for First Communion. Like its predecessor, the green Catechism was in question-and-answer format, encompassing both the contents of the red Catechism, beginning with ‘Who made the world?, but with much additional material. Every night, my mother would examine me on the day’s designated pages. If I failed to remember an answer correctly, I had to spend the next day revising and could not progress to the next section.
Section V featured Original Sin, the sin we had never committed but which still dogged us because we were human, and followed inexorably from the story of Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden.
Question 56 demanded: Have we, the children of Adam, suffered because of his sin?
The answer was:
‘Because of Adam’s sin, we are born without sanctifying grace, our intellect is darkened, our will is weakened, our passions incline us to evil, and we are subject to suffering and death.’
There were further, elaborative questions, but this was the heart of the doctrine. We were required to remember that this essential state of the human person, into which each one is born, is called ‘original sin’, that this is so-called because ‘it comes down to us through our origin, or descent from Adam, the head of the human race’, and that the only human person ever to be preserved from this was the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, who was preserved free from original sin, a ‘privilege’ called ‘her Immaculate Conception’.
This was the most interesting series of questions in the entire Catechism. It is also the territory the bishop, on the day of my examination, chose to ask me about. I arrived back in school after a long absence on the precise day of Dr Hanly’s visitation. Brother Terence greeted me with a smirk. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he asked without visible irony. I said I had come for the examination. He said it was out of the question as I had not attended any of the special Christian Doctrine classes he had conducted in preparation for Confirmation. I would have to postpone receiving my Confirmation for another four years, this being the gap at the time during which no such ceremonies were held. I rather nervously informed him that I had learned the entire Green Catechism off by heart. Being what my father would have called a ‘ruffian’, he took me through most of the book on the spot, but my mother had done her job well. The ruffian could not catch me out. He reluctantly gave me the nod to be tested by the bishop, who interrogated me, much more gently, on Section V. He asked me: ‘Have we, the Children of Adam, suffered because of his sin?’
I responded, word-perfectly: ‘Because of Adam’s sin, we are born without sanctifying grace, our intellect is darkened, our will is weakened, our passions incline us to evil, and we are subject to suffering and death.’
It was perhaps because of this experience that I eventually tumbled to what the architects of Covid were attempting to achieve with their ‘pandemic’.
The original ‘original sin’ is defined thusly: ‘Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God's command.’ This is what man's first sin consisted of. All subsequent sin would be disobedience toward God and lack of trust in his goodness. In that sin, man preferred himself to God and by that very act scorned him. He chose himself over and against God, against the requirements of his creaturely status and therefore against his own good. Constituted in a state of holiness, man was destined to be fully ‘divinised’ by God in glory. Seduced by the devil, he wanted to ‘be like God’, but ‘without God, before God, and not in accordance with God’. Scripture portrays the tragic consequences of this first disobedience. Adam and Eve immediately lose the grace of original holiness. They become afraid of the God of whom they have conceived a distorted image — that of a God jealous of His prerogatives.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (adult version) describes original sin as ‘the ‘reverse side’ of the Good News that Jesus is the Saviour of all men, that all need salvation and that salvation is offered to all through Christ. The Church, which has the mind of Christ, knows very well that we cannot tamper with the revelation of original sin without undermining the mystery of Christ.’
God and man, though made in the same image, are in a different sense at odds, and this is resolved for us only in the incarnation of the man-God Jesus Christ:
‘Although to some extent the People of God in the Old Testament had tried to understand the pathos of the human condition in the light of the history of the fall narrated in Genesis, they could not grasp this story's ultimate meaning, which is revealed only in the light of the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We must know Christ as the source of grace in order to know Adam as the source of sin. The Spirit-Paraclete [Holy Spirit], sent by the risen Christ, came to “convict the world concerning sin”, by revealing him who is its Redeemer.’
In the Covid saga, the ‘Spirit-Paraclete’ is the expert, the doctor, the scientist-on-message, all of whom impart the message of the original sin of human imperfection and convict the human race concerning the sin of infectiousness. Covid was the banner under which it was announced that man had a new ‘creator’. This put an end, in the first instance, to the idea of man as a creature of God, declaring him henceforth a subject of the secular power. It seems not to be connected — though it is, as we shall see — that this could also spell the end of democracy.
The Catechism further tells us: ‘God created man in his image and established him in his friendship. A spiritual creature, man can live this friendship only in free submission to God. The prohibition against eating ‘of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ spells this out: ‘for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die.’ The ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ symbolically evokes the insurmountable limits that man, being a creature, must freely recognize and respect with trust. Man is dependent on his Creator, and subject to the laws of creation and to the moral norms that govern the use of freedom.’
In preparation for this moment, mankind has been weaned off its spiritual dependency on God, and instead rendered physically dependent on the combination of state corporate and elite interests — the ‘Combine’ of Chief Bromden’s dreads — which now, in the Cult of Covid, seek to transfer all of God’s power to itself, declaring themselves the inheriting ‘creators’ of the species which they reserve the right to destroy.
But what in this analogy is the equivalent of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? It has to do with an inversion: The Tree is Democracy, the idea that has infected humanity with the certainty that it has the right to run its own affairs. This has annoyed the new, self-appointed ‘creators’ of the human race, who need to get things done in their own interests. They have grown weary of the interloper sometime hired help, milling about in search of pleasure, diversion and meaning.
It strikes me, too, in passing, that Adam and Eve’s eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil has availed their descendants not at all, since in the Covid episode we have succumbed to evil as though unaware of even its most elementary characteristics. The second tree, which, had the pair not been intercepted, they might have gone on to eat from, was the Tree of Life, which offered an eternal existence. But God has warned them that, if they ate of that second tree, they would ‘surely die’, i.e. as a direct consequence of this transgression they would commit an infringement that would cancel any right to claim benefit from the eaten fruit. But part of what the elite seeks from the Covid enterprise is to be able to build a path to immortality for themselves through recreating the world so that it becomes safer and healthier for them while it becomes more dangerous for everyone else. That this too amounts to a self-cancelling play remains the possibly last hope of mankind.
The Catechism elaborates:
‘The harmony in which they had found themselves, thanks to original justice, is now destroyed: the control of the soul's spiritual faculties over the body is shattered; the union of man and woman becomes subject to tensions, their relations henceforth marked by lust and domination. Harmony with creation is broken: visible creation has become alien and hostile to man. Because of man, creation is now subject “to its bondage to decay”. Finally, the consequence explicitly foretold for this disobedience will come true: man will “return to the ground”, for out of it he was taken. Death makes its entrance into human history.’
It has become obscured in culture that democracy is an outcrop of Christianity, that before the story of Christ took its grip on the world, man was ruled by kings and emperors and pharaohs. Covid was the signal that we were destined to return whence we came. In future, we could live in ‘freedom’ only by submission to the Power, the New World Order, the Combine, in which the principles of democracy had been converted to an algorithm that excluded actually existing human beings apart from those setting themselves above the mass as the new gods. What it feels like right now is that the lifespan of democracy has run out, not by the will of the people but by the resolve of the elites plus the indifference of the people, that a weariness has crept into the human spirit since man switched it off from God.
Those who aspire to control have always been inpatient with the chaotic, 'inefficient' and 'time-wasting' aspects of democracy. Even if not malevolent (to begin with) they regarded it as an ineffective and wasteful mode of governing, and wished to move on to something they regarded as more 'modern': themselves in the driving seat, doing what they regard as the optimum thing for humanity (defined as themselves and as few others are actually necessary) cutting out the uneconomic processes of public freedom and choice — voting and all that nonsense. That this was the way before — the ways of Pharaohs and Emperors and Sultans and Kings — gives rise to a kind of bookends format that suggests what is returning as the natural order. And barring a miracle, it is possible to see all that unfolding in the not too distant future. And, as we have seen, this really is what the Covid programme was about: training the Western population in unquestioning obedience, in anticipation of rule by the faceless tech version of the ancient Pharaohs and Emperors.
The ‘public information’ torrent unleashed by the WHO and world governments in March 2020 told us that the sanctifying grace we had been born without was immunity to SARS-CoV-2. It told us that our intellects had been darkened because we, not being experts, were no longer to be deemed capable of judging or deciding upon questions relating to our own health. It told us that our wills had been weakened, so that we needed state coercion to compel us to obey the strictures and diktats of the authorities and ‘health experts’. It told us that our desires to live our lives as we had always done — hugging our grandchildren, walking along the street with our friends, drinking a coffee in a café, driving to the countryside, all these things and many others were the new equivalent of crimes, and had to be stamped out to ensure that the Goddess Covid was appeased. It told us that the suffering and threat of a terrible death promised by Covid would be with us all the days of our lives, unless we did exactly what we were told, wore face masks to announce our unclean natures, and agreed to accept vaccination without question once the authorities announced that a suitable vaccine had been developed.
Covid was unleashed by a jealous would-be god. It was as though all human life up to that point had been analogous to the period before the eating of the apple in the Garden of Eden. We had displeased our new ‘creators’ — by both our unclean natures and our desire selfishly to exploit the resources of the earth as God had permitted us to do. More precisely, we had outlived our usefulness and, soon, technology would deliver them of the need to have us around. Liberalism had already accused the human species (excluding liberals) of being a ‘cancer on the face of the planet’ and yet also imbued them with a sense that they were naturally good. This became a problem that required to be culturally addressed. Perhaps the answer was to persuade the ‘useless eaters’ to liquidate themselves?
The presence in such escalating numbers of the human race as a whole had, in the estimation of the elites, left an insufficiency for them, they who wanted all things to be theirs. The harmony between the people and the hidden elites had suddenly revealed itself as fictional. The self-proclaimed gods had become ‘alien and hostile’ to man. Because of man’s selfishness — his insistence on filling his own and his children’s bellies, commuting to work, taking an annual holiday in the Canaries — the new creators had been left not just with less than they might otherwise have had but actually themselves placed in danger, a danger that is no longer necessary: The world might end as a result of man’s selfishness, with them — the new creators — still in it! They might even find their quotient of time on earth curtailed by the selfishness of the rest of humanity. Clearly, this could no longer be countenanced.
Perhaps the purpose of Covid, at some level, was indeed an attempt to restore to the human understanding of its own structure the idea that man is not, after all, in spite of liberalism, fundamentally good and wholesome. It might well be argued that the catastrophes of the twentieth century — Auschwitz, the Gulags, the Laogai, Hiroshima, Vietnam — give the lie to this idea. Perhaps, as God’s death became a matter of common knowledge, some smart(ish) people thought that, since it was self evident that more people had been killed because of the belief that humans are naturally good than for any other reasons, we needed some way of making human beings feel inadequate again.
Just as Adam and Eve had committed a personal sin, which had affected the whole of human nature transmitted on by them in their fallen state, so the sin of failing to think twice before indulging in selfishness had infected the whole of humanity in a way that had annoyed the elites. Just as original sin was passed on through every generation of humanity, so the secular sin of unsustainable living had passed like a virus from one human to another, depriving each in turn of original ‘holiness’ and ‘justice’. The Catechism makes it clear: ‘And that is why original sin is called “sin” only in an analogical sense: it is a sin “contracted” and not “committed” — a state and not an act.
‘Although it is proper to each individual, original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam's descendants. It is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin — an inclination to evil that is called concupiscence.’
So it was with Covid. It’s nothing personal. In the Covid accusation, man is subject to an inherited corruption that, though ostensibly natural, is actually not to be considered his own responsibility, at least in as far as containing it is concerned. And yet it remains a problem It is not so much an original sin as an inherited guilt, from which there is no escape via, for example, confession or psychotherapy. Man is born not so much evil as dirty, which is, for the elites, much less tolerable. This charge, unlike the charge of possessing an evil nature, is undeniable, indefensible. At best the charge can be mitigated by reference to man’s countervailing qualities, or — as until now — his usefulness.
Concupiscence, desiring provoked by the lower appetites contrary to reason, is analogous to the sin of humanity in the context of modern life: humanity’s insistence on its own rights and freedoms. Covid came as a chastisement, but also, in a different sense, as a metaphor, a mnenomic of the Christian warning concerning man’s fallen nature and a dramatisation of the process by which the selfishness and concupiscence might be punished. Wishing to eat, drink, love, walk, sunbathe, drive, fly, all those tendencies of man had cause distress to the new gods, and now had to be atoned for. It was not possible to evade this, just as it was not possible to evade Covid. Though you might not contract it, the fact that you were prone to contracting it was sufficient to merit punishment. And this was to become a metaphor for humanity’s proposed wider fate arising from these events. In proposing to save man from Death, the Combine would acquire the power of life-or-death over the remainder of the human race, and the discretion to decide the timing and manner of humanity’s ultimate punishment, a punishment likely to be much, much worse than its first.