Covid mask obsessives teach youngsters that freedom is to be feared

In England, the right-thinking set denounced the freeing of faces as a form of selfishness. Some condemned the abandonment of masks as a “dangerous, unethical medical experiment”. Hinting at the preferred new normal, others expressed their disbelief that we had even accepted a world where we “breathed and snorted and coughed over each other”.

Increasing cases of Covid continue to hit the headlines and talk of a crisis in hospitals has accelerated. Ironically, much of this talk bypasses the reality that most of the problems faced come not from the dangerousness of the virus itself, but from the collapsing staff numbers available due to the enforced self-isolation for anyone who has come into contact with someone with the disease.

READ MORE: Coronavirus Scotland: Unmasking the real reason for politicians' Covid hysteria, by Stuart Waiton

Self-isolation, however, as a recent report observes, is not simply associated with Covid, but has become a wider social problem, especially for young adults. According to the right-of-centre think-tank, Onward, young people in the UK are facing an epidemic of loneliness, something that has only been made worse by lockdown restrictions.

Identifying a wider social trend, this latest research reveals that a fifth of under 35-year-olds have only one or no close friends. This epidemic of loneliness is three times as pronounced as a decade ago. Millennials are not only more distant from one another but are also far less likely to chat to neighbours. They lack, the report notes, the community roots of previous generations, something that “if left unattended, will erode the glue that holds our society together”.

In this world where young adults have, “fewer friends, trust people less and are more alienated from their communities than ever before”, we find another report, this one for the Economist, that notes that a significant minority of people, especially young people, want to keep aspects of the lockdown forever.

Remarkably, this Ipso Mori report found that a third of those asked were happy to have social distancing in public venues become a permanent feature of life and a quarter were happy for nightclubs and casinos to be closed down, forever. And it is the young, those aged 16 to 24 who are the most keen for these restrictions, with forty percent wanting to close down clubs!

READ MORE: Health and safety obsessed politicians can't beat coronavirus. Opinion by Stuart Waiton

Today, we rightly look back at times when the “fear of the other” degraded society and led to a period of repression for certain groups in society. But we appear not to notice that a new, far more significant fear of the other has grown and is now promoted as a form of moral code by our right-thinking betters.

Tragically, over the last few decades, the new elites have become addicted to a diseased model of society, one in which fear, safety and a culture of protection has become the norm, the good, a strange moral code that elevates a consciousness of self-isolation.

Within this climate of protection, young people have learned to keep their distance from others and have equally learned that freedom is something that needs to be managed and regulated, whether that be by covering other people’s mouths for fear of what they say, or now, covering our mouths for fear of what we breathe.

Those who celebrate indefinite mask wearing attempt to elevate their moral goodness. The reality is that they express well the new isolated elitism that instinctively treats other people as a form of risk, as diseased.

This anti-mass, anti-‘other’ sentiment is not a new form of sociability, it is the opposite, an expression of our asocial elites, who, if left unattended, will further erode the glue that holds our society together.

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