It's funny, one of our elderly neighbors from our church group stopped by yesterday to see how we were doing and we were lamenting this very thing. The warm sense of community is being replaced by fearful isolation, and the joy we found in worship is being replaced by a cold adherence to new, empty rituals. And that's if folks even bother to show up anymore. These lockdowns are tearing apart the very fabric of society, exactly as we predicted they would.
... Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.
Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we “ought to have known better”, is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image.
In reality, however, we must face the possibility of bad rulers armed with a Humanitarian theory of punishment. … And when they are wicked· the Humanitarian theory of punishment will put in their hands a finer instrument of tyranny than wickedness ever had before. For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call “disease” can be treated as crime; and compulsorily cured. It will be vain to plead that states of mind which displease government need not always involve moral turpitude and do not therefore always deserve forfeiture of liberty. ...
It's funny, one of our elderly neighbors from our church group stopped by yesterday to see how we were doing and we were lamenting this very thing. The warm sense of community is being replaced by fearful isolation, and the joy we found in worship is being replaced by a cold adherence to new, empty rituals. And that's if folks even bother to show up anymore. These lockdowns are tearing apart the very fabric of society, exactly as we predicted they would.