Fighting the Covid Narrative

Humble pies all around

One of the anti-medical-authoritarianism tasks still ahead of us is ensuring that the Covid narrative we leave for the next generation is not that a heroic bunch of experts and a selfless population worked tirelessly for the good of all to minimize the damage from the Great Covid Pandemic, and that they successfully defeated evil selfish interests who denied there was a problem, rejected the interventions, and put the world at risk.

We are kidding ourselves if we believe that that’s not the dominant narrative today.

Narratives, once formed, are practically impossible to undo because they have properties highly analogous to blockchain. Both exist to ensure the legitimacy of currency transactions, reputation currency for social narratives, and cryptocurrency for blockchains, something I cover in my book Expressly Human and also in this LooFWIRED piece below.

The primary function of social narratives is to preserve who has what reputation, and how reputation has changed over time. Stories are part of it, but principally so as to help elegantly summarize how those events led to changes in the reputation of people or sociopolitical groups within the social network. That’s why so much of our history, and even science, is taught with specific personalities associated with them, and why it’s so easy for each new generation to learn the narratives, as I discuss here.

To change the narrative, we need to uncover the truth, of course, but, more than that, we must endeavor to place the blame on the most culpable parties. More important than criminal charges, which are a pipe dream, is that the Covid Cult leaders worldwide are soundly humiliated for their role.

It is large changes in reputation that social narratives “want” (are selected) to record most of all. The sudden explosion of reputation to the no-name upstart boxer that beats the cocky champion. The social currency crash of the esteemed minister found to have been having a series of extramarital affairs.

To counter the mainstream Covid narrative, some of the most culpable must be thoroughly reputation-ruined, and some of the most effective anti-lockdowners must end up in the narrative as having won all that lost reputation.

There is no magic bullet for making this happen.

But it won’t happen if we don’t continue to hold those most culpable to the fire.

And we cannot hold everyone’s feet to the fire. Remember, it became a totalitarianism, and a majority of the world was complicit, even if most contributed negligibly.

We must target those who contributed most to the Covid Cult, those with the loudest voices, those who did so longest, and those who had the greatest formal responsibility.

Targeted for humiliation at levels worthy of a good story.