We are in a battle

But there will be a time to write the stories and the songs

Our time and efforts are being expended in the battle between two sides of a great divide that has been exposed, vividly since the lead up to the ‘deplorable’ 2016 US election, and even more vividly since the declared covid pandemic in 2020. It has been exposed mainly in countries once connected with the British empire, but also in those influenced by other European powers. The divide separates members of the same political parties, members of church congregations, and of families, and so it blocks communication even between people who have known each other well.

Many attribute this divide to whether individuals are fixed to the political philosophies of the ‘left’ or ‘right’. But then why did such a division seem to heal after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, even within political parties, only to gradually reveal itself again over the next few decades? And why are the Freedom movement and the pro-government movement each made up of people from both the left and right?

I offer a different model to explain the differences on each side of the divide, one that allows for population-wide changing tides of opinion. And I suggest a way to steer opinion so that the divide can be healed again, so that we can have what remains of our time and efforts, one day.

How we currently see the divide

Many divide the proponents of an argument into collectivists and individualists, sometimes (confusingly¹) using the terms 'left wing' and 'right wing'.

Collectivists base their philosophy on the self-asserted moral right of leaders of a collective to impose rules that, in the opinion of those leaders, will benefit the collective. And to achieve this benefit they rely on Trotsky's notion that any means is justified if its end can be justified. For example, collectivists often believe that fairness is expressed in equal outcomes and that the state has the moral right to assert coercive powers to achieve equal retirement benefits for males and females, by any means; they may also believe that the state may appropriate to itself the rights of parents to decide what is in the best interests of their children. In supplanting the rights of parents, the state may exert its power even to the extent of requiring children to be injected with inadequately-tested genetic medicines, ignoring even tests for carcinogenicity and genotoxicity, to achieve the end of protecting them from a virus essentially harmless to those children, or to the extent of facilitating a process of 'mutilation and sterilisation' (as mentioned by psychologist Jordan Peterson) to achieve the end of gender tolerance.

On the other hand, individualists base their philosophy on respect for the God-given free will of each person and the right to live without interference, subject only to His laws, which are modelled in the secular philosophy of liberal democracy as the duty to do no harm.

But this division of proponents is not leakproof for every argument. Consider the argument over government responses in many countries to the covid pandemic declared in 2020.

The proponents of one of the sides promoted the lockdown of social and economic interactions of whole populations, and in some island nations they promoted sealing the borders. What was their declared aim? To slow the spread of a purportedly highly-contagious coronavirus, perhaps even to eliminate it². And perhaps the aim of a few in control was to keep our immune systems naive until several new-technology genetic 'vaccines' could arrive in compacted and overlapping time³.

Amongst the other side were those who thought that widespread lockdowns and novel genetic injected medicines, inappropriately termed vaccines⁴, could be harmful, and implementing them in haste would be reckless; those who thought the covid virus was merely a rebadged flu virus and that many ‘covid’ deaths were either from flu or from inappropriate hospital protocols; and those who promoted focused protection of individuals who felt vulnerable and wished to be protected, with a view to allowing the rest of the population to build natural immunity, generating herd immunity for the whole population.

As many have seen from personal experience over the past four years, the 'lockdown and vaccinate' proponents were made up of a mix of both collectivists and individualists. And a similar mix made up the 'focused protection and natural immunity' proponents. Indeed, the argument over the covid response has divided members of the Conservative Party in Britain, the Liberal Party in Australia, Republicans in the USA, church congregations, married pairs, parents and their children, siblings, work colleagues, and friends.

If a division into collectivists and individualists is not always leakproof, is there a better way to describe the proponents of each opposing group? I think there is.

A different way to understand the divide

I suggest we can describe one group of proponents as one that lives in a paradigm of truth. For this group, every opinion under consideration is either true or false. This group believes that its views are true, and therefore that the 'other' side promotes views that are not true. In exasperation, proponents offer reasons for why those on the other side promote views that are not true, which may include that they have been bribed, or coerced, or they are stupid, or uneducated, or because they are dishonest, or they believe in the superiority of man's two-pint brain over the mind of God, or that they have submitted to the will of Satan. They believe that the purpose of education is to give people the building blocks for thinking for themselves.

But, I argue, the opposing group does not live in a paradigm of truth at all. Instead, the opposing group lives in a paradigm of conformance with the prevailing tide or fashion of authorities and their peers. For this conformance-based group, every opinion under consideration is either consistent with the flow, or not. In their paradigm, proponents are normal, and those who do not conform with their view are not normal. Proponents are friendly, congenial, agreeable, and trusting. In particular, they trust those in authority, and experts, they follow their peers, and they use their intelligence to justify the views and behaviours of those whom they trust. They would fall amongst the majority of test subjects in the Milgram shock, Asch conformity, or Stanford prison experiments⁵. To them, antagonists are, by definition, ‘mad’ and ‘bad’. Terrorists, quite possibly, deplorables at the very least. They must be identified, labelled, controlled, excluded, or ‘re-educated’.

Conformance-based people can be dedicated to either collectivism or individualism, depending on which philosophy prevails at the time. Some conformance-based people can become ‘red pilled’ and sceptical, but many will never be ‘wrong’. These can believe, for example, in late 2020 that the genetic covid injections were safe and effective, and in 2024 that the same injections actually caused harm to too many and did not prevent infection or transmission or give protection. But because they adhered to the approved beliefs at each time, they were never wrong.

Conformance-based people may believe they are factually correct, but they arrive at that belief from their trust in the views of authorities and peers. This makes them essentially ideological. Perhaps it’s no surprise that conformance-based people often hold ideologies such as vaccine ideology and climate ideology, which they do with certainty. There are further differences between truth-based and conformance-based thinkers and I have summarised my view of some of them in a table below⁶.

But can an opinion even be true or false?

Let’s consider ‘truth’ in relation to the process of science. If the role of scientists is to observe and model natural phenomena to help humans understand the impossible complexity of reality, then an opinion is no more than a simplified model of reality. Hopefully the model has a quality of being useful, but it cannot be ‘true’. The brightest minds can develop better models, or can at least understand them, but none of us can ever hope to understand reality itself.

Models are always being challenged and improved and are never true. This means, for example, that if a government wishes to empower a body such as the ACMA⁷ in Australia, to ‘reasonably’ determine whether a particular opinion is false, so that they may censor it, then they will always be able to find a way of doing so for any particular opinion they choose.

Is there even a benefit in searching for truth? I feel that a benefit of an enduring search for unattainable truth may be the building of an improved future. In contrast, a search for what is false, such as that proposed to be carried out by the ACMA, will be successful and brief, but may lead to destruction.

How can truth-based people relate to conformance-based people?

Many truth-based people had already had long and close relationships with those who landed in the conformance-based tribe in 2020. Those who conformed may have been a wife or a brother or a daughter who before 2020 often showed high integrity and independent thinking. But when it came to the crux in around April of 2020, they found they were more comfortable conforming with the tide and trusting authority and peers, spurred by propaganda-induced fear, than taking the risk of thinking for themselves and confronting their fears. This separated them from truth-based thinkers who were, nevertheless, faced with the insight that their conformance-based loved ones had not been bribed, or coerced, nor were they especially stupid, or uneducated, nor were they simply lying.

Nevertheless, each group is a mix. Almost every one of us possesses the components both of willingness to conform and to think independently. It’s hard for anyone to feel dismissed with a label intended to be pejorative, such as ‘anti-vaxxer’, or as being susceptible to Russian propaganda, or a mad cooker, especially by someone you have known and loved for a long time. Most truth-based thinkers must recognise in themselves some inclination to conform and to trust. It takes courage for any of us to disrupt the harmony of a dinner party and disagree with the common flow. And we must each admit that groups would get little done if we did not allow ourselves even a tiniest drip of trust. This means that each of us, whether truth based or conformance based, has the ability to step into the shoes of a conformance-based thinker.

Equally, many conformance-based thinkers will be able to draw on their education to enable them to impose an analytical, scientific, and dispassionate approach to forming their opinions, and to facing their fears.

So, while some are inherently more trusting than others, and others are more inclined towards facts, logic, details, and facing their fears, people in each group still have some capacity to see the world from the perspective of the other group.

Which begs the question, why are the groups so very far apart? The greatest separator between any groups is quite possibly a lure of tribal association and rivalry. We humans readily adopt a tribe. Just think about a city with two football tribes (teams⁸). Even if the two teams draw fans randomly from the population, so there is little difference in the mix of culture, wealth, religion, or ethnicity, fans are often seen identifying with the colours of each team and seemingly behave as if they are prepared to die or to kill for the glory of those colours. A man on a Clapham omnibus⁹ may see this unfounded adoption as unreasonable, especially in teams where few of the players or coaching staff are native to that city, and may not even be fluent in the local language. This ready and unfounded adoption of a tribe affects both truth-based and conformance-based people, so we all have to be prepared to think outside of our tribe and into the mind of a rival tribe, if we are to have a productive interaction.

How to make progress: focus on the rogue, don't fight the whole system or the tribe.

Let's consider the different ways truth-based and conformance-based thinkers might assess the recent behaviour of a regulator of drugs, therapeutic goods, food, or medicines in the USA, Australia, or UK (FDA, TGA, or MHRA) whose ostensible role is to defend the interests of consumers.

A truth-based thinker may be happy to entertain the notion that a potential for conflict of interest may increase with the proportion of the regulator's funding that is derived from the supplier whose products it regulates. After all, funding pays the salaries and other benefits of employees. A potential for conflict of interest is even greater if employees of the regulator are also faced with munificent prospects as a future employee of the regulated supplier. So, a truth-based thinker may readily accept that an entire governance system may have become corrupt. But for a conformance-based thinker, who relies on trust, the implied corruption of an entire governance system is step of intolerable scale. A more tolerable step is that a rogue individual may have breached its bounds, or perhaps a small group of rogues, who must be brought to justice. So, conformance-based people may be prepared to cast out a rogue, but not to accept that an entire system is corrupt. Of course, governance systems will have to be rebuilt, but to make progress in this scenario, a truth-based thinker must, as a first step, adopt a friendly visage and help to identify and build the case against an individual rogue.

Take another example, the role of an Australian state premier during the declared covid pandemic. Victoria would be a target-rich place to begin. We can see from recent government news outlets that negative stories about the premier of that state are now being released to the public. One story is of an earlier traffic accident, and another is his decision not to honour his promise to host the 2026 Commonwealth Games. This may mean that conformance-based thinkers in the government or the Labour Party are preparing to cut him loose as a rogue, rather than to confront his performance as premier. But a truth-based person is more likely to see the massive and consistent support he received during the declared pandemic as a sign of a more systemic problem.

Truth-based people may consider facts such as that the premier encouraged, and in many cases mandated, novel genetic covid injections for everyone, vulnerable or not, including for children and pregnant women, for the purpose of protecting others. To this end he seemed to have the firm support of some armed enforcement agencies, media, education establishments, and academic journals. And all this for three therapeutic goods that were described by the TGA in its public assessment report (PAR) for each good as not designed, or tested, for the use of preventing transmission, and were not approved¹⁰ for that use.

A truth-based thinker may see the premier's actions as the execution of a fantastical marketing strategy on behalf of some pharmaceutical suppliers, breaking a great many rules, including one requiring informed consent and another, in Australia, forbidding false advertising of an unapproved pharmaceutical¹¹. Again, to make progress in this scenario, a truth-based thinker must adopt a friendly visage and help to build the case against an individual rogue.

An fascinating example of history being altered to justify a belief ...

Many conformance-based people now admit that governments and health authorities may have made some mistakes, but nevertheless that the protests at the time were reprehensible, and governments responses were indeed justified because they were well-intentioned, and also because they reportedly ended up saving millions of lives¹².

But here is twist on that justification theme, in which facts from the past have been actually altered. Here is a brief transcript of a rare discussion between a truth based person (Tru) and a conformance-based person (Con), faithfully transcribed by Tru 48 hours after the interaction that took place on the 16^th October 2024. Comments added later by Tru are in square brackets.

Tru: I didn't think it was right for social media such as Facebook, and also Twitter at the time, to censor information on the covid vaccines.

Con: Oh no, I think that was right

Tru: Ah, why do you say that? [Tru didn't say that democracy and science depend on freedom of speech]

Con: Well, the vaccines did work

Tru: But lots of people caught the virus after getting vaccinated?

Con: No, those reports depend on what feeds you are getting from social media ... there was a study showing how your facebook feed changes according to what you select ...

Tru: OK, but I don't get any facebook feeds, and also I have first-hand experience of people getting covid after the vaccines. For example, my wife's dad got it after being vaccinated 3 times, and her brother has had covid several times while being up to date with the vaccines. Also, the vaccines don't prevent transmission.

Con: True, they don't prevent transmission, but they were never intended to. No vaccines ever prevent transmission

Tru: Then what was the justification for mandating the injections for jobs and for travelling on an aeroplane? [Tru didn’t say that infection did give sterilising immunity, nor that vaccine mandates would not be justified even if the vaccines had prompted sterilising immunity, because it’s up to each person to choose how to execute a duty to do no harm ... such as by building natural immunity to the virus]

Con: I think governments were trying to protect people from severe disease

Tru: But they said the injections would prevent transmission, and the directions issued by one chief health officer I know in one of the Australian states and territories specifically gave ‘protecting the vulnerable’ as the reason why some care workers must be vaccinated. [Tru did not say that state-enforced powers to protect individuals contradicted the principle of informed consent; and hundreds of years of liberal democracy according to which people have the right to act without interference as long as they maintain their duty to do no harm]

Con’s wife: I think the main reason was to protect us all from covid.

The justification stated for mandates at the time was to prevent transmission. That was not a valid justification because people could have chosen to fulfil their duty to do no harm by developing better sterilising immunity from natural infection, or by other means. And it was unfounded if the vaccines were not approved for the use of preventing transmission. And it was widely seen to be incorrect because many were catching the virus from injected people. So, authorities later switched this justification to preventing serious harm from the virus.

In the transcript, we see conformance-based people followed this switch in narrative. And they were ready to cast out every principle of liberal democracy, of the scientific method, of freedom of speech, of the governance role of regulators, and of the duty to provide informed consent, simply for the expedience of justifying their trust in authority. It’s a fascinating demonstration of human behaviour.

Actually it’s terrifying. We can see this switch from unfounded ‘prevention of transmission’ to ‘personal protection’ für ihre Sicherheit in the justification for the quarantine camps. In the back of Tru’s mind was the fact that several states in Australia had built camps to ‘quarantine’ people. Traditional quarantine was temporary, so that the quarantined would not infect others while sick and they would be released after a set time once they had shown they were not infected or had recovered and had gained natural immunity. But authorities later redefined ‘quarantine’ to include protection, so they could justify indefinite confinement of the vulnerable¹³. And as later stated by the then premier of Queensland, being “unvaccinated” meant you were vulnerable. So, this meant that at the end of a quarantine period a vaccine-free person would immediately qualify for a further period of confinement, ad infinitum. I think that’s why the camps had to be so large. Remember, they built the camps!

Conclusion

It is difficult to convince conformance-based people that authorities and experts have had poor judgement, have acted in contravention of every rule in the book, or have caused serious harm to many. They use their intelligence to justify the status quo set by the authorities. A truth-based person is unlikely to convince a conformance-based person of this in a single encounter. Possibly a conformance-based person may become less confident after several similar encounters, but unfortunately, the best trigger for jumping a person out of comfortable conformance is being damaged by one of the injections. Even serious damage will not convince a die-hard conformance-based individual that its trust was misplaced, but the tide of opinion can be successfully changed without convincing every single person in the population.

Back in 2020 it took just a few vanguard truth-based people to risk all to stand against the lockdowns and then against the injection mandates, as long as those few were soon supported by more. Now we can see that because those covid camps are empty, truth-based people did win that round. The fight in that round took intense sacrifice and many have lost everything, even their lives. They are heroes.

The next rounds are now being played, for example there is legislation being considered in several countries for controlling misinformation, for achieving zero carbon, for ‘one health’, for 15-minute smart cities, centralised digital currencies, and for autocratic pandemic responses. But, truth-based people have learnt how to win. And many conformance-based people have now been immunised against untrustworthy authorities and experts, and they are ready to adhere to the opinions of a different authority.

In this moment, truth-based people are still fighting to change the tide of opinion. But once they return this tide toward liberal democracy, perhaps in ten years or more, the great mass of the conformance-based population will again bend in the flow of the new opinion, confidently believing that they were always on the side of freedom; that it was others who conformed to totalitarianism, not them; or perhaps more annoyingly, that totalitarianism failed because their governance systems worked! Then we will have our time to write the stories and the songs to remember the sacrifices and the heroes.

Happy days

References

1. The ‘left wing’ and ‘right wing’ were two sides of the French National Constitutive Assembly leading up to the 1789 revolution in France. The left wing aimed to diminish the power of the Louis XVI, and ended up promoting property rights and the rights of Man, and the ‘right wing’ aimed to sustain the monarch’s power of veto. This is confusing because the term ‘left’ is now used for those who espouse socialism, or collectivism, under which all rights are ascribed to the modern state, which has all the powers of a pre-revolutionary absolute monarch, and the ‘right’ are those that promote modern democracy, and rights of the individual.

And how did modern democracy arise? Not, I believe, from ancient democracy. It’s hard to find a link between the ancient democracy of Greece and Rome and the modern democracy of England. After all, when emperor Claudius invaded Celtic Britain in AD43, Rome had long been a dictatorship. No one argues that he introduced democracy to the Celts. Instead, we can follow the thread of modern democracy in a series of steps from its hatching in the Charter of Liberty in 1100, through the Great Charter signed at Runnymede 115 years later, through every declaration of liberty, and through every constitution world wide according to which 'the people' in Liberal Democracies periodically grant limited and temporary powers to its elected servants.

Ironically, La Fayette derived the inspiration for the liberty of the ‘left wing’ in revolutionary France from the American revolution, which was driven by British freedom fighters who had colonised America and who wanted the same political rights as they had increasingly been accustomed to in Britain since 1100.

As a further irony, those British freedom fighters in America were supported by Louis XVI’s royalist navy, and the cost of that naval support bankrupted monarchist France and helped to provoke the revolution thereby promoting British liberal democracy in France through La Fayette! (Britain was already a constitutional monarchy run by a well-established parliament, not an absolute monarchy, under George III)

2. Of course, elimination of the virus within sealed borders was impractical for a virus said to be more contagious than a flu virus. Even if the borders could be completely sealed, this would have had to be indefinite for a coronavirus that was already prevalent outside of the sealed borders.

3. Clinical phases are supposed to run in series so that the tests in each phase are informed by information derived from previous phases. Running these phases in parallel was a direct contravention of not just the rules, but of the spirit of the rules. And there were several missing tests, such as those appropriate for a genetic medicine. There were no tests for assessing long-term effects, for example, the Pfizer trials ended after only two months when the experimenters injected the control group. There have also been serious concerns raised over alleged unreported deaths in the drug arm of the Pfizer trial; DNA contamination in the RNA medicines; and endotoxin contamination from the manufacturing process for the mass-produced medicines. Also of concern at the time, in 2020, was the knowledge that no safe vaccine had ever been successfully developed for a coronavirus.

4. See karenkingston.substack.com. Injected flu vaccines, and by the same token, covid vaccines, are intended to limit symptoms and are not intended to prevent infection or transmission. Therefore they are medicines (not good ones) and not vaccines at all.

Flu Vaccines Are NOT Vaccines Per New CDC Flu Vaccine Campaign

"Per Jacobson vs. Massachusetts (the landmark trial that established the legally binding criteria for vaccines), vaccines must be proven to prevent infection and transmission (provide immunity), otherwise they are just palliative treatments to alleviate symptoms and not vaccines."

As you will remember, we ended 2020 with government proclamations that people must take the ‘vaccines’ so as to prevent transmission, otherwise they could become “grannie killers” and be a threat to other vulnerable people: carers must be vaccinated if they work with vulnerable people; travellers must be vaccinated to prevent the spread. This, despite the TGA in Australia (and, I believe, regulators in other countries) not authorising any of the genetic ‘vaccines’ for preventing transmission.

Then in September 2021, when evidence showed the failure of the ‘vaccines' to prevent transmission, the government messaging shifted to … people should take the ‘vaccines’ to prevent serious harm.

But, as pointed out in the Jacobson vs. Massachusetts case, a medicine for preventing harm that does not prevent infection or transmission is NOT in fact a vaccine at all. 

5. Milgram obedience to authority shock experiment (65% obeyed), Asch conformity experiment (75% conformed), and Stanford prison experiment (all the guards and prisoners conformed).

6. Table

7. ACMA is the Australian communications and media authority. The Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024 is being considered at the time of writing. If passed, this bill would give powers to ACMA to reasonably determine whether on-line content that they choose to assess is false.

8. e.g. Manchester City and Manchester United

9. Lord Devlin introduced the notion of a man on a Clapham Omnibus as an example of a reasonable man in English common law. 

10. See https://homocomfortus.substack.com/p/the-covid-response-in-australia

11. The Australian Therapeutic Goods Act 1989 is contravened if a person advertises a 'biological' (such as a genetic covid injection) that is 'included in the Register' (these injections were included), for an indication (such as preventing transmission) that is not accepted ...

https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2004A03952/latest/text

Section 32BL 'Civil penalty for advertising biological for an indication'

 A person contravenes this section if:

(a) the person, by any means, advertises a biological for an indication; and

(b) the biological is included in the Register; and

(c) the indication is not an indication accepted in relation to that inclusion.

12. The paper often cited to support the ‘millions of lives saved’ claim is by Watson et al, ‘Global impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination: a mathematical modelling study’, published in Lancet Infectious Diseases 2022; 22:1293-1302. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(22)00320-6. Although people claim that this paper shows that an estimated 14.4m people were saved by vaccines in the first year, in fact it clearly states, even in the title, that it is only a mathematical projection.

It was also clear that the prime input assumption adopted in the study was that vaccines protected against infection and severe disease, and reduced transmission: “Vaccination was assumed to confer protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection and the development of severe disease requiring hospital admission, and to reduce transmission from vaccine breakthrough infections (i.e., we assumed vaccinated individuals who develop infection would be less infectious than unvaccinated individuals).”

That’s circular reasoning. Little wonder, then, if a model is based on the assumption that the vaccines saved lives, that the model output would be ‘saved lives’!

13. Under Section 51 of The Australian Constitution, parliament has the power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to: ix. ‘quarantine’. However, in my view, the term quarantine must have the meaning given at the time the constitution was granted. If parliament is permitted to change the meanings of terms in the constitution, then it has unfettered powers.