The Lesson of the COVID Mess

I think it is pretty clear, by now, that the masks and the shutdowns and the vaccine mandates that were pretty universally applied by the world's governments during the COVID era Did Not Work.

And there is a real possibility that the government actions and mandates Made Things Worse.

Of course, I am biased here. I believe that, in general, government action Makes Things Worse.

Why? Because governments are an expression of politics, and politics is all about uniting to defeat the Enemy. And then sharing out the loot among the supporters.

And that is all.

Five hundred years ago there was little doubt that every human community needed a brave king to defend it from marauders and looters. And the way for a human community to thrive was to conquer and plunder. Anyway, that's what all leaders did, and nobody seemed to have much of a problem with that, except for the people on the receiving end.

But then emerged the modern economy in which ordinary people grew their own food less and less and labored instead for wages that they used to pay for food.

And the natural conservatism of the peasant -- for whom an agricultural mistake could result in starvation -- began to be supplanted by the creative experimentation of the business entrepreneur.

In the last 200 years, with one entrepreneurial revolution after another, the average real income of people in the developed nations has gone up by 30 times. You could look it up.

Nobody predicted it; nobody planned it. In fact, if the powers that be had an inkling of what was coming they would have strangled the baby in its cradle.

But the culture of the lord in his castle dies hard. Today, we don't have many lords in castles, but we do have lots of administrators in offices.

This is weird, because the science™ says that the world works not by top-down planning but by "creative emergence." Somebody has an idea, it works, and lots of people copy the Somebody's idea, and the world changes.

Thus, it is not surprising that the administrators in their offices all responded to the COVID crisis with top-down plans and regulations and mandates. That is what administrators do.

And administrators do not respond to changing conditions the way that markets do, by making bets on the future. They regulate and command. And then, long after the fact, they change their policy in the dead of night hoping that nobody will notice.

Because they are government they cannot make a mistake, because there is only one thing for a political or administrator to do when he makes a mistake, and that is to resign. That is why, when they make a mistake, they deny it and blame saboteurs and wrecker.s

In fact, I would say that the mistakes of the COVID era issue mainly from the necessity that administrators and politicians cannot ever admit a mistake.

When political leaders and their administrators make a mistake there is really only one thing for the people to do. They must form a mob and embarrass their leaders into resigning and leaving the leadership for others, sadder and wiser after the event.

This, of course, is the sense of René Girard's Scapegoat mechanism. We all get together to blame someone for what went wrong, and then come together and live happily ever after.

But I think that the whole COVID experience is telling us that there must be a better way, a different way from top-down administration and ukase. A way that issues out of modern science and its present doctrine that the world works by way of creative emergence: people having bright ideas that work and everyone else going along. Not because someone forced them but because humans naturally want to do what works.

Could that happen after the COVID screwup? Maybe, but I wouldn't place a bet on it.