A 74-year-old woman lies on her back, writhing in pain and clearly in distress on a blacktop road in Melbourne, Australia.  Two police officers stand over her.  Are they coming to her rescue and bringing her to her feet?  No, they're dousing her with two separate streams of pepper spray while keeping their free hands on military batons in case the tortured septuagenarian somehow springs up in attack mode to wrestle down the pair of twenty-something jackboots "just following orders."  The woman had been participating in a freedom march against Australia's COVID-1984 insanity, but the government proved that Grandma was no match for goon squad brute force.  Forget chivalry and common sense.  If senior citizens refuse to believe that a respiratory illness might kill them, well then, by golly, the authorities will just have to spray them with so much poison that they can't breathe.  That'll show 'em!

Chalk this incident up to yet another one of countless examples of the globe's ruling faction losing control over its precious narrative.  You can't scare schoolchildren into wearing face masks for the next ten years in order to "save Granny" while getting caught clubbing and macing Granny in the street.  That contradiction just won't do.  Yet contradictions abound, and normal people are opening their eyes long enough to notice.  That's no good for the powers that be.

In describing how to create a commercially successful product, industrial designer Raymond Loewy argued that familiarity must be balanced against novelty in order to appeal psychologically to the greatest number of consumers.  Should a new version of an old product become too futuristic or fanciful, too many people will refuse to adapt.  His MAYA principle — selling the "Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable" widget on the market — is the golden rule behind every new iteration of most companies' product lines today. 

In the "free world," Western governments have adopted a similar MAYA principle — "Most Authoritarian, Yet Acceptable" — to slowly assimilate their populations into living with fewer freedoms under more expansive government powers.  Giant administrative states filled with unelected bureaucrats who exert enormous control over the minutiae of each individual's life have slowly grown one tiny regulatory rule at a time until the majority of citizens learned to accept the existence of intrusive government agencies as perfectly normal.  This "frog in the pot of boiling water" approach to implementing "rule by elite" socialism has worked remarkably well for the last century.  One decade, free speech and gun ownership, and anti-government slogans are considered part of every red-blooded American's birthright.  A few decades later, after the slow but steady chipping away of constitutional protections, entire generations of self-described "progressives" argue that "progress" requires censorship, gun control, and obedience to government authority.  Swapping freedom with servitude, one dictate at a time — it's the MAYA way!

What's going on today is radically different.  The whole "Yet Acceptable" hook for tricking the people into compliance has been tossed out the window for smash-mouth "do it our way or suffer" governance.  The end result is that people are finally refusing to adapt to the government's new rules.  Why should Americans be punished for choosing to remain unvaccinated when the federal government is actively transporting unvaccinated illegal aliens for resettlement around the country?  Why should ordinary American workers have their jobs threatened for not complying with White House vaccination demands, while U.S. congressional staffers and the U.N.'s global elite remain exempt?  Why must two-year-old toddlers be abused by mask requirements when celebrities party live on television mask-free?  Why should any thinking person put stock in mandatory social distancing rules when the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration admits that nobody has a clue why federal health authorities began insisting on six feet of separation in the first place?  Why should anybody trust the government's recordkeeping of COVID cases and deaths when it has been discovered that even incidents of murder-suicide have been fraudulently included in those numbers?  Why should schoolchildren be forced to become test subjects for the pharmaceutical industry's experimental faux vaccines when schoolteachers are balking at being treated as test subjects themselves?  Why would any American trust the politicized "science" being peddled by the flip-flopping Dr. Fauci when reputable colleagues in his own field accuse him publicly of flagrantly betraying the impartiality of rigid scientific research by engaging in campaigns of intimidation against those who have refused to toe the line of state-sponsored medical propaganda?  

A little manipulation at a time over many years — maybe Americans and other Westerners can be expected to comply dutifully with all these counterfactual realities.  An avalanche of mendacity and treachery landing on them all at once, and the narrative engineers have real problems on their hands.  You knock Granny on the pavement and nearly kill her for "her own good," however, and the jig is up.  You call Granny a "domestic extremist" and the young men slapping Granny around "heroes," and people start wondering whether their government is even capable of telling the truth.  You wake enough people up with that uneasy thought, and the whole MAYA Project comes crashing down.  You end up in a situation where less than half of the country believes that the installed U.S. president is even mentally stable enough to be putatively in charge.

People who formerly had little interest in the everyday goings-on of politics begin asking uncomfortable questions out loud.  For instance: How are "free" societies that have embraced medical censorship and state control over the economy at all different from communist China's?  Why are Western political leaders using the specter of catastrophic climate change to make it more expensive to manufacture products domestically while China is gobbling up control over most of the world's supply chains?  Why are Western corporations shaming citizens for unconscious racism at home while simultaneously profiting from the modern-day slavery powering China's manufacturing advantage over the rest of the world?  Why did ordinary soldiers have to sacrifice for twenty years to prop up a fabricated government in central Asia that couldn't last two weeks on its own?  Why would anybody sacrifice a son or daughter again to another foreign war when the political and military leadership responsible for their survival are more concerned with identity politics and craven political games?  In other words, is there anything to suggest that those in charge have been good custodians of our government?  And if not, is it perhaps time for the people to govern themselves?

The drip-drip-drip of the COVID narrative collapse is starting to spiral into something that can no longer be controlled.  Western governments have lied so many times that nobody believes anything they say.  They have become "the boy who cried wolf" one too many times, and if they're not careful, they will surely get eaten up in the end.

Image via Pixabay.

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