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America’s COVID-19 Death Cults
As with everything in contemporary America, people seem to be divided into two different camps about Coronavirus and how our world should respond. I’ve spent a lot of time in different online social circles (Liberal and Conservative) over the last few weeks, trying to understand this gap in belief.
Both viewpoints are starting to look like death cults — groups that obsess about death and often seek to hasten it. Though they are mostly heading for the same result (many people dead + a caveat, more on that below), it’s amazing how little they understand each other and how impossibly fraught the dialogue is between them.
This is indeed very frightening for those of us in the middle trying to find ways to keep the best parts of our humanity and societies intact. When large numbers of people join these kinds of extremist factions, many people tend to perish. This pandemic appears to have generated the kind of fanaticism that the kings and popes of the middle ages only dreamt of.
The Conservative Death Cult is primarily focused on reopening the economy, regardless of the optimal public health strategy. Their argument is that either COVID-19 is a hoax or COVID-19 is not that bad, and letting the vulnerable die is part of the natural cycle — worth it for the restoration of essential liberty. Someone who believes this is obviously going to stage a…
