No to the ‘new normal’

“The absence of any cohesive strategy behind the ‘new normal’ means anything goes, as long as it leaves society in a kind of spotless, bleached-out, virus-free state of pristine lifelessness.”

The arrest on 2nd September of pregnant mother of two Zoe Lee Buhler in Victoria, Australia, for writing a Facebook post urging her fellow citizens to gather for a socially distanced, peaceful protest against the state’s strict lockdown measures was a horrifying violation of civil liberties. What added to the shock for anyone who watched the viral video of Buhler’s arrest was the manner in which it was done.

The officers were wearing no uniforms except bland, black fleeces and office shirts. They wore masks and blue, plastic gloves. They could be identified only with the corporate lanyards around their necks. They prowled Ms. Buhler’s household and confiscated all her hard drives and electrical equipment. Jotting notes on their clipboards, they spoke to Buhler’s partner in a business-like manner, as if they were insurance men asking for a contract signature.

There were no jackboots. There were no evil, cartoonish Nazi-types hectoring Buhler. The whole procedure was conducted with a chillingly bureaucratic tone by softly spoken yet obscenely powerful managerial officials who violated a pregnant woman’s rights with the breezy complacency of jobbing civil servants.

Here in the UK, this same dystopian, tyranny-with-a-smile attitude is most acutely embodied by our Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, with his glib, daily finger-wagging at the British public. Dressed in his close-cut, single-breasted blue suit, and grinning artificially as he introduces his latest diktat dreamt up in his narrow, menacing little mind, he exercises his power-lust not with a violent fury, but with the passive-aggression and resentful officiousness of a call-centre supervisor.

Former Supreme Court Judge, Lord Jonathan Sumption, warned of the dangers of giving jumped-up administrators like Matt Hancock too much power when he spoke to Julia Hartley-Brewer on her talkRADIO show on 14th September. He was asked whether he thought there would be any permanent damage to our civil liberties after the pandemic is over. He said:

‘I think that what will survive the current crisis is a taste for coercion. Because governments have learnt, or our government has certainly learnt in the course of this current crisis since March, that if you frighten people enough, they will in large numbers submit to your wishes. Power is intoxicating. This is a government which is completely obsessed with coercive remedies, even when other remedies are available. I can only describe Mr. Hancock in particular who has driven most of these measures through, as a gimlet-eyed fanatic.’

Despite the sane warnings of people like Lord Sumption, the advocates of the 'new normal' continue to warn us not to expect sanity any time soon. In an article for the New York Times, Aaron E. Carroll cheerily warned Americans that even after a vaccine is discovered they should not expect to go back to anything resembling their old life. The message is clear: this stilted, isolated existence that we have had forced on us by our busy-bodying masters is here for the foreseeable future. Any desire to return to privacy, proportion and liberty is dangerous and selfish.

There is a reason why so many officials and technocrats are so keen to suspend us in this horrible soulless reality. They have been waiting for this moment for years. The 'new normal' is the fulfilment of their agenda, the technocratic plan to turn our once liberty-loving nation into a micromanaged, South Asian-style regime of benevolent tyranny, where safety and efficiency take precedence over independent thought, creativity and individual liberty.

The vision of society that underpins these sinister, bureaucratic bossy-boots’ plans is generations in the making. They have seen their chance to finally crush the forces of messy cultural bombast and satirical mischief, to silence once and for all the pesky decadent individualists that have been such a foil for their sanitised, collectivist, managerial, utopian schemes for so long. And they have the ace card now — a virus that is just complex and dangerous enough to confuse people into an ongoing terror of the unknown, while not actually being dangerous enough to cause plague levels of damage.

This is not a conspiracy theory. The coronavirus is too good to be true for the technocracy, so much so that they would be incapable of designing such a weapon. Rather, this is just another instance of the managerial class’ credo that one should ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’.

The beauty of the phrase ‘new normal’ is that it does not actually denote anything in particular. No one country’s response fully characterises what is meant by it. No set of principles or values undergirds it, no bullet-pointed list comprehensively describes what reality is supposed to look like in a post-coronavirus world. The 'new normal' stands for nothing more than a systematic re-alignment of the relationship between citizen and state.

When some faceless snitch warns you that ‘you better get used to the 'new normal’, what they are really saying is that you can forget your freedom, forget independent thought, forget your right to scrutinise state policy — this is how the world is going to be and if you resist it you will be considered an enemy against ‘the health of the nation’.

By submitting to this invasive reality, we are effectively giving our leaders a blank cheque by which they can enact any stupid and frightening method they can think of to terrorise ordinary people into obedience.

Behind the bland, technocratic language there is a revolutionary spirit, a year-zero agenda, whereby a genuine health risk is weaponised in order to dismantle our historical traditions of liberty and due process in favour of a system of intrusive managerial diktat. We are no longer citizens, we are subjects. We are no longer innocent until proven guilty, we are each potential threats to be neutralised and contained.

The absence of any cohesive strategy behind the ‘new normal’ means anything goes, as long as it leaves society in a kind of spotless, bleached-out, virus-free state of pristine lifelessness.

In an often-quoted passage from his essay The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, C. S. Lewis beautifully captured the nature of the world that awaits us:

‘Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.’