When I saw this title “Medical experts urge political leaders to shut the country down and start over on COVID-19 response“, I immediately agreed with the subtitle: Bad idea
Related: Durham NH, Unanimously Passes Public Face Mask Mandate with Fines up to $500.00
This is like the “forever” situation. Those professors in the Ivory Tower have spent many years doing nothing but learning and acquiring a passel of degrees. So, they get upset that the rest of us don’t pay them as much attention as they think we should because of their “learnedness.” Even though they have learned ever so much about smaller and smaller slices of life writ large.
So, they drift off to political philosophies (e.g., Communitarianism, Socialism, Communism) in which they believe they can take their “rightful” place in society. Push aside those evil bourgeois moneymakers who don’t care a whit about their expertise.
Their Fatal Conceit is that they believe their expertise in one area carries over into another. And so do these Medical Experts.
Sure, in the medical field, give them their due. Their Fatal Conceit, however, is the blinders they have on concerning areas outside of their expertise – governance and human nature in free societies. We are not patients that can be bossed around in the confines of a hospital environment that isolates just that aspect of life. But that’s how they come off:
A group of medical experts believes state and national leaders should take the country back into lockdown and start from square one in trying to contain COVID-19, CNN reported.
Some states are just now starting to return to some level of normal activity, but as the total number of cases increases, some experts believe that’s a sign that more lockdowns are needed, including the widespread closure of businesses that decimated the economy from March through May.
“Non-essential businesses should be closed. Restaurant service should be limited to take-out. People should stay home, going out only to get food and medicine or to exercise and get fresh air,” the letter states. “Masks should be mandatory in all situations, indoors and outdoors, where we interact with others. We need that protocol in place until case numbers recede to a level at which we have the capacity to effectively test and trace. Then, and only then, we can try a little more opening, one small step at a time.”
Save the patient and utterly destroy the economy that would sustain that patient afterward. Don’t these “medical people of merit” understand that Society is, just like the human body’s system of different parts, an aggregation of various aggregations of functions? That if you wreck one large part, the rest goes into “organ failure”? In their single-minded obsession (and in the right situations within a hospital, I’m glad they have it), they ignore that the human experience entails much more than their specialty.
Instead, they’re trumpeting as if they had been elected to be in charge – and they are showing the same exasperation that the “politically minded academicians” have – they’re upset that people, like me, have a different status viewpoint of them than they do for themselves.
Yes, Doc, your input is valuable but not valuable enough for me for all of the other aspects of my life WHICH ARE sometimes more IMPORTANT than you. We have wives, husbands, children, extended family members, friends, jobs, other interests that are a bigger part of our lives. You are temporary and unelected; stop making yourselves more into than you ought.
‘Cause right now, you’re making us ignore you with the constant hectoring about how stupid we all are to you.
