Why Are You Dying On This Hill, Bro?

This one is for the normal people. Those who can’t understand why people like me are going on and on about the WEF, the WHO and the bIo MeDiCaL SeCuRiTY sTaTE. Give it a rest already!

I want you to know that I understand. It’s tiresome to hear variations on the same theme over and over again. You get it. I’m not happy with the direction in which geopolitics is going. Who is? But why can’t I just go back to focusing on baseball or football or whatever it was I was into before this covid-induced obsession?

Disclaimer:

I am only speaking to the normal people who have retained their rational faculties. Not those who dismiss everything as “a conspiracy theory” or “misinformation.” Those who have simplified their world views such that they are convinced nothing unusual is going on should simply unfollow, mute, block, avoid.

A common expression of this sentiment is: “Why are you dying on this hill, bro?” The phrase implies that whether or not I have valid concerns, it’s a mistake to stake one’s entire (virtual) identity on these issues. It’s frankly amateurish, like a naive college student who thinks he can save the world by complaining about its ills. Be more savvy and realize, like an adult, that things are the way they are and focus on what you can control like your job or hobbies.

Normally, this would be sound advice, and while I’ve always been outspoken about my views, political or otherwise, I’ve mostly heeded it. Prior to 2020, most of my commentary was indeed on my professional interests and hobbies. But one must agree if an actual army of barbarians were coming to kill you and your family, one would be obligated to drop what he were doing, grab a musket and head to the hill. The relevant question in that case would be, “Bro, why are you not joining me on this hill?”

The question then isn’t who can be the most sarcastic and dismissive of whom, but in which set of circumstances we find ourselves. Are we in relatively normal ones where getting exercised over political matters is a waste of time? Or are we in unprecedented ones, wherein your day job and hobbies are but trivialities by comparison?

I don’t know about you, but I had never in 51 years on this planet been ordered to stay in my house and/or neighborhood for two months. I had never been told to “keep walking” when I was sitting on a blanket in the park with my family. I have never been told I cannot travel, or enter a restaurant without showing my papers proving I took the latest pharmaceutical product. I’ve never seen the United States executive branch set up a Homeland Security Bureau of Disinformation, i.e., to tell adult US citizens what they are and are not allowed to say. (Mercifully, this was shelved after people went to the hill and gave it the mockery and derision it deserved.)

There are many other unprecedented things I could mention, but I’ll stick with the uncontroversial ones above, for they are enough. There has been a transfer of power from the individual to the state such that your fundamental rights of free expression and movement are now contingent about the whims of government bureaucrats who can unilaterally declare a “state of emergency” and extend it indefinitely.

For some who grew up in western democracies, perhaps they don’t think it possible we’d suffer the atrocities inflicted by totalitarian regimes of the past. Even given the lockdowns and mandates which they experienced first hand, they don’t see the risk. (Again, I am not talking to those who are in favor of such measures. If you are one of them, please move on, as this post is not for you.) They simply assume it will just pass of its own accord like every other issue of apparent consequence passed for as long as they’ve been alive.

But Bertrand Russell warned of the dangers of this kind of inductive thinking, saying it’s like jumping off the Empire State Building, counting the windows as you go down, and when you get to 80 saying, “So far, so good!” Just because it hasn’t happened to you yet, doesn’t mean it won’t happen, and historically it has not only happened, it’s basically the rule that governments with an imbalance of power over their citizens abuse those powers.

Moreover, if such a dangerous transfer were happening most people would be in denial of it, both for social and professional convenience, and also for emotional self-defense. To acknowledge what is happening is to be troubled by it, and many will naturally choose to avoid that level of anxiety altogether. No matter how bad it gets, people will often choose denial. For a good example, consider this quote from They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1933-1945, by Milton Mayer:

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head…

In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’ And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end?.. 

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed…

So whether or not one should speak out and “die on this hill” is not a matter of whether doing so is appropriate generally, but depends on the situation in which we find ourselves. We have experienced an unprecedented curtailment of our basic rights over the last two years, and that those abuses might get worse if they are not stopped should not be ruled out because of your narrow experiences to date. Imbalances of power portending abuse of the citizenry are not, historically speaking, exceptions but the rule, and in such a case, one should expect most people to be in deep denial even after things like lockdowns and mandatory injections have already happened.

So I get why people don’t want to hear about it, and I get why people assume this is just another outrage du jour, something that’ll pass of its own accord and over which it’s not worth dying on this hill. I am telling you you feel that way because you have not thought it through, and you haven’t thought it through because you are afraid of the implications if you do. Going to the proverbial hill is not what anyone wants to do — you could get shot, so to speak. But if the invasion were actually happening, it would be our last chance to defend ourselves.