Globally Covid was governed by religious myth straight outta the Temple. Wise elders expressed wise hysteria. Some were concerned not masked copulation in Canada was risky. Written into the Emergency Laws was compensation. According to most emergency laws enacted under the 666th Concurrent Resolution of Congress in 1984 regarding Covid a number of Executive Branch budgets approved to stop Covid Catastrophe would be top secret and after enactment shredded.
Imagine in March 2020 Congress voting yes or no on a Budget so top secret none knew how many votes or when it was passed. These important laws set forth the designation of Tzaddik.
Collective silent agreement to rule by Wonderworker is our civilizational resignation to death. Resignation to consequences of decisions. Labor in unsafe conditions say when Union bosses like it. Need Job says to Straw Boss “Dude, I’m in the Union, with it and for it. Shake hands. I’ll take a shift in the mine for those picket busting wages.”
The triumph of Thanatos is self interest. There is no possible political solution, all governance is the practice of unfreedom under implied agreement. Implied by law as command backed by force.
Ellul's most important work, The Technological Society (1964), was originally published in French as La Technique: L'enjeu du siècle (literally, "The Stake of the Century"). In it, Ellul set forth seven characteristics of modern technology that make efficiency a necessity: rationality, artificiality, automatism of technical choice, self-augmentation, monism, universalism, and autonomy. The rationality of technique enforces logical and mechanical organization through division of labor, the setting of production standards, etc. And it creates an artificial system which "eliminates or subordinates the natural world."
Regarding technology, instead of it being subservient to humanity, "human beings have to adapt to it, and accept total change." As an example, Ellul offered the diminished value of the humanities to a technological society. As people begin to question the value of learning ancient languages and history, they question those things which, on the surface, do little to advance their financial and technical state. According to Ellul, this misplaced emphasis is one of the problems with modern education, as it produces a situation in which immense stress is placed on information in our schools. The focus in those schools is to prepare young people to enter the world of information, to be able to work with computers but knowing only their reasoning, their language, their combinations, and the connections between them. This movement is invading the whole intellectual domain and also that of conscience.
Earlier in England with less refinement-
An arrow against all tyrants and tyranny, shot from the prison of Newgate into the prerogative bowels of the arbitrary House of Lords, and all other usurpers and tyrants whatsoever
Sir, To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature not to be invaded or usurped by any. For every one, as he is himself, so he has a self-propriety, else could he not be himself; and of this no second may presume to deprive any of without manifest violation and affront to the very principles of nature and of the rules of equity and justice between man and man. Mine and thine cannot be, except this be. No man has power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man's. I may be but an individual, enjoy my self and my self-propriety and may right myself no more than my self, or presume any further; if I do, I am an encroacher and an invader upon another man's right — to which I have no right. For by natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like propriety, liberty and freedom; and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, every one with a natural, innate freedom and propriety — as it were writ in the table of every man's heart, never to be obliterated — even so are we to live, everyone equally and alike to enjoy his birthright and privilege; even all whereof God by nature has made him free. https://www.yorku.ca/comninel/courses/3025pdf/Arrow_against_all_tyrants.pdf
I am re-reading Berdyaev. I was reading him before and during the insanity of 2020 and a few other philosophers of Century 20 who appeal. Gabriel Marcel and Jacques Ellul. I am deeply drawn to how Berdyaev thinks about the spiritual crisis. “But the chief cosmic force that is now at work to change the whole face of the earth and dehumanize and depersonalize man is not capitalism as an economic system but technics, the wonder of our age. Man has become slave to his own marvelous invention, the machine. We may well call our epoch the epoch of technics. Technics is man’s greatest and latest love. At a time when he has ceased to believe in miracles, man still believes in the miracle of technics.” (Fate of Man in the Modern World. 1935!)
Ontological exigence presents humans with a challenge, it is a task to be carried out. A person who does not accept this exigence, is actually not yet a person, that person is a commitment that must be fulfilled. Therefore, the following applies: “... I am not, I have to become”, and “... I am not
free, I have to become free (Marcel, 1963, p. 88).
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