The big lie is a falsehood so outrageous and so obviously wrong, in retrospect people can hardly believe that anyone took it seriously.
The most famous example of the "big lie" is the Salem Witch Trials, where four bored teenage girls convinced their pastor they were possessed by the devil and that dozens of people in their community were agents of Satan. The pastor, in turn, convinced most of Massachusetts that the colony was inundated with witches.
Even though it's hard to imagine today, some 200 people were arrested over the next year. One poor man, Giles Corey, was crushed to death under a pile of giant rocks because he wouldn't confess to being a witch.
And what happened to those who did confess? They were forced to name more witches. Then they were hanged. Before anyone came to their senses, 30 people were put to death.
We "modern" Americans look back at these events and wonder how anyone could have taken seriously a bunch of teenagers prattling on about witches and devils.
But don't be too proud... A court in Arkansas sent three teenage boys to prison in 1994 for murders they couldn't have possibly committed, mostly because the jury firmly believed they were devil worshippers and thought they'd used black magic to pull off the crime.
And with COVID-19, Americans have become just as irrational as those Salem witch hunters or that Arkansas jury.
What's the big lie today?
The big lie today is that "we" are all in "this" together.
It's utter nonsense... "We" – the people of the world, the people of our country, of my state, of this city (Baltimore), and even the people in my neighborhood – do not share the same values, ideals, or circumstances. We do not have anything like the same immune systems or face the same risks of this virus.
While it might sound friendly to say "we're all in this together" – the reality is that we are not. And enforcing policies that treat all of us the same is the very worst approach we could take to dealing with this health crisis.
Some of us are at much greater risk of serious harm by this virus. Some of us are much more susceptible to infection. Some of us own businesses or work for companies that haven't been impacted at all. Others have seen their livelihoods, their careers, or even their life savings wiped out.
We are NOT in this together. As with everything else in our lives, our abilities and our priorities and the risks we're willing to take all differ. We are individuals – not a monolithic polity. Saying "we're all in this together" sounds like Mao's China, where people abandoned the cities to die from starvation on communal farms. It seems like a disaster in the making... because it is.
Rather than assessing our own risks and our own priorities and then making our own decisions, we have decided to allow the government – really just a handful of governors and the president – to make one decision for all of us. And we're told not following the rules means we're putting other peoples' lives in jeopardy.
It's complete and utter nonsense. What's putting all of us in jeopardy is the idea that Washington D.C. knows best and we could follow directions – because "we're all in this together."
Adolf Hitler, in his book Mein Kampf, explained why such "big lies" are at the foundation of all tyranny. If you want to understand how despots operate, you should consider how one of the worst in history manipulated large groups of people...
In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie...
one can read the rest here
https://stansberryresearch.com/articles/the-big-lie-behind-covid-20
