Soon after the farce of let it rip got underway in workplaces, for Covid, the EAPs were thrust in everybody’s…
Soon after the farce of let it rip got underway in workplaces, for Covid, the EAPs were thrust in everybody’s faces daily. Outright abuse of people, mandatory infection, with the inevitable trauma to them re-framed as an issue with their mental health. /1
Similarly while public health measures were in place earlier in the pandemic, some workplaces (such as mine) ran ‘resilience’ workshops, to make sure all of our ‘mental health’ was OK. I actually said to the HR person who invited me to go, ‘are you kidding?’ /2
That in a workplace like most others, where people rush out the doors on a Friday afternoon with big smiles because a week of drudgery and routine and abuse from the public is over, now that routine had been interrupted we were struggling? /3
I’ve never seen happier people than those being disrupted by the pandemic. Where their bullshit jobs suddenly let them do things like work from home. Where ‘work/life balance’ suddenly wasn’t just somebody’s lip service KPI. /4
Absolutely some peoples’ experience wasn’t that, they lost income and even businesses. But it’s not them being offered EAPs and mental resilience training.
To this day I’m certain others in my workplace think i have a mental health problem, because I still mask. /5
I’ve flipped that narrative back on them. I tell them all the time that I wear a mask because I don’t have the mental health problem of thinking being sick all the time is good for me. That this is what resilience means, looking after yourself. /6
All of this gaslighting is just another example of something I Tweet about a lot, the renaming of some basic social processes. It’s more subtle ways of enforcing social conformity.
Societies don’t run on information. They run on people doing what everybody else is doing. /7
When I see senior advisers to government smirk and mock those who still try to prevent catching a lethal virus, I see the schoolyard bullies we all remember from school, getting aroused by their brutalisation of others.
They were forced into the background until late-2021. /8
By the emergency of Covid. But they weren’t going to let the social status hierarchies stay disrupted like that for long. Their ‘let it rip’ is truly the most stupid thing humans have ever done, at any time. And that’s a strong field. /9
They got away with it because society and even our personal lives are now transacted through social media platforms, that entrench that old bullying school culture into every facet of life.
It was easy for them to get ‘go out and get infected’ to trend. /10
To get people to say ridiculous things like ‘we need to learn to live with a pandemic’, without even pausing to ponder at the stupidity of what was coming out of their mouths.
Social conformity is not a knowledge-based activity. It’s a status-based activity. /11
The bullies knew that by pretending Covid was all now our ‘personal responsibility’, the basic dynamics of social life would destroy public health. Societies were transformed into competing status-seeking gangs.
Public health always was a tool to disrupt conformity. /12
To ensure things that are unpopular but necessary, are done. As in WHS practice, we’ve known forever that leaving it to personal responsibility (i.e the ‘market’) will always just mean the bullies ruling everybody, in their gangs. /13
So now, as I always say, we’re still at school. Not an analogy. But in this school nobody is punishing bullies, that small handful of sociopaths. There are no staff, no detentions or rules.
The bullies crow about this being a victory for the ‘elected’. /14
Betraying the popularity culture that was always their route to power in school. Where they brutalised the knowledge-based culture of the rest of the school.
Social media is what entrenches this model. It needs to be switched off. /end