Noble lies are still lies

A US poll on COVID vaccination refusers gives the interesting result that the proportion of refusers is high in the least-educated classes, but highest amongst those at PhD level. It is, of course, rather tempting to identify the lower refusal rate amongst the moderately educated with what some would call “midwits,” but the real significance, it seems to me, is how those educated and interested enough to research the issue are discovering something suspicious. That seems to accord with experience of many I’ve encountered here on The Hump and elsewhere.

This does not only apply to the vaccines, of course, but to a whole range of issues related not just to COVID, but to a number of other related issues dear to governments and commercial and educational elites. What does differ is the supposed nature of the rat that different people smell. It ranges from mere incompetence, through corporate greed, to full-blown global conspiracies (in which one must, I suppose, include those conspiracies that advertise their intentions publicly and are therefore, properly speaking, not conspiracies but manifestos).

Dr Robert Malone favours a mixture of groupthink and the Platonic concept of the Noble Lie. In The Republic Plato proposes, through the lips of Socrates, an ideal society in which the necessary social divisions are maintained by a myth about the gods’ creation of castes with different giftings, but occasional genetic exceptions, so that all men respect all others in their various roles, and people can be allocated to different castes if they don’t fit the bill for their birth-caste.

The idea that official lies are necessary to maintain stable societies has, since Plato, developed a long history which is often most associated with the name of Machiavelli. In recent times it has been applied not only to the COVID crisis, but to other issues such as the ideological stance of the BBC, as described by Robin Aitken in his book The Noble Liar. Noble lies seem to be everywhere. It has been argued that things were always thus, but that better communications have made Noble Lies that much more difficult to maintain undetected – that at least is Robert Malone’s impression. I would add that there has never been propaganda like that of our age, and that, like the devil, Noble Liars have overplayed their hand and been exposed for what they are.

The trouble with Plato’s idea is that it’s actually quite hard to establish a universally-believed myth from scratch. Additionally, governments are never run by true philosophers, and even if they were, power would soon corrupt philosophers as much as anyone else. The question Plato never handles was the inevitable one – what do you do when people start to suspect the myth is fiction, and question whether the perfect society is actually just at all? The only solution that seems to have turned up in history is to repress the dissenters, until eventually the myth collapses, and the ideal regime with it.

We have seen this happening with the COVID “Noble Lie.” According to Dr Malone, the policy was deliberately and officially enshrined in US policy several decades ago in relation to polio vaccination. In that case it meant the deliberate suppression of any information about adverse effects that might discourage uptake, the intention being that this would save lives. You can immediately see a flaw here. If there were indeed reliable information about adverse effects – particularly death – one would not be saving lives by suppressing it, but only the particular kind of death, from measles, which the State has prioritized. In other words a centralised policy of narrative-control is only as noble as the people in control, and I would have severe doubts about that even if it were Socrates, let alone Anthony Fauci, Matt Hancock, Emmanuel Macron, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus or any of that crew.

A second problem is that such information always does get out, and the policy creates a whole welter of conspiracy theories (in that case arguably true) and an anti-vaccination movement which grows until, in the USA under COVID, it amounts to 40% of the population. That is not a sign of a contented utopia. This recent development stems from the particular problems of mRNA and related new technology and the widespread knowledge (because it was trumpeted as a selling point) that safety trials have been truncated and the vaccination is still not licensed, although that information too is quietly suppressed from those being vaccinated.

The trouble is that, as with all lies, the more you lie the more lies you have to tell to cover them up. How much of a problem that is depends on how big the Noble Lie you’re telling is, which as I said at the outset is a matter of conjecture amongst dissidents. But it would be easier if it were only a question that the governments see COVID vaccination as a public good, and diverted attention away from its problems to further that good. In that case only one myth would have to be constructed, albeit that would require nobbling the media and the medical profession, bypassing true informed consent by sticks and carrots in breach of medical ethics, and so on.

But as it is, whatever the actual Myth under construction, it is far wider than vaccination, and needs to involve lies about the profits being made by Pharmaceutical companies, the backhanders to politicians from lucrative contracts, the peculiarly concealed lockstep policies of governments across the world, lies about distortions of basic medical science, lies about the benefits of lockdowns and their lack of precedent, lies about the diagnostic capabilities of tests and the lack of any robust diagnostic criteria, lies about the costs of COVID policies, lies about protests across the world, lies about the personal and professional bona fides of those contesting the myth, and a hundred other track-covering untruths, including the covering up of the fact that the whole thing is about controlling behaviour more than maintaining an ideal Platonic community.

Indeed it takes very little scratching of the paint to suspect that the lies are all about forming a new society that doesn’t sound very attractive at all, except for Globalist billionaires and the politicians who seem intent on gaining their own share of the loot. And if that isn’t the case, governments have lost the moral capital to deny it, though peddling so many lies.

In short, the perpetrators of this Noble Lie appear entirely to lack the philosophical spirit which alone gave Plato’s myth any semblance of legitimacy. Without that, what one has is merely a loose affiliation of more or less corrupt people with little in common except duplicity, but with enough shared interests to make complicity in falsehood worthwhile if it will gain them control of everyone else.

But that is not so much a Noble Lie as a conspiracy.