Throughout the course of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, political leaders and medical experts have implemented restrictive lockdowns, upending nations’ economies and people’s lives. While these have been implemented in the name of keeping people safe from the virus, they hay have also made people more susceptible to totalitarian social engineering.
This is according to an op-ed by conservative commentator Birsen Filip, published by the nonprofit think tank, the Mises Institute.
“Since the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, governments around the world, along with a handful of unelected medical experts, have been behaving as though they are the social engineers of totalitarian regimes (e.g., fascism, Nazism, and communism),” Filip write. “To be more precise, this select group of political leaders and medical experts have upended economies, as well as the lives of billions of ordinary people, by implementing extremely coercive and restrictive lockdowns and physical distancing measures for the stated purpose of bringing the pandemic under control and preventing future outbreaks.”
Governments, medical experts, mainstream media and social media collaborating in social engineering
In her op-ed, Filip points to the various measures that have been implemented by governments around the world. These include curfews; the compulsory closures of so-called “nonessential” businesses, schools, and institutions of higher education; the banning of social gatherings; the suspension of religious services and restrictions on personal movement outside people’s homes.
She also points out how it has become not uncommon to see excessive police force used to enforce these restrictions.
Despite these, she notes that mainstream media and major social media platforms have been “fully on board” with the restrictions. She states that they’ve become “willing collaborators” in these matters, going as far as to censor critical viewpoints while fostering a culture of surveillance and spreading fear.
“If Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek had witnessed the type of central planning that has taken place since the beginning of the pandemic, they would have called it ‘holistic social engineering,’” she states, referencing Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek, both champions of free-market capitalism.
She points out how Popper and Hayek thought that supporters of the concept of social engineering sought to “extend the power of the State” to control and reshape society in accordance with their own goals. Hayek himself stated that the best way to make the people serve the ends of social engineers is “to make everybody believe in those ends.”
“To make a totalitarian system function efficiently it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends,” wrote Hayek in “The Road to Serfdom: Texts and Documents,” published in 1944. “It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends”
According to Filip, the social engineers of the pandemic have been “largely successful” in convincing people that the oppressive measures being forced on them are for the greater good.
