“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden
This quote, though iconic and frequently cited, expresses a fairly basic idea. Don’t most of us come to understand it in some form as teenagers, before our brains are even fully developed? So then what happens? Do we forget? Do we get lazy and decide “go along to get along” is just too much easier? Do we think we’re too small, too unimportant, too uneducated, too powerless to think and decide for ourselves? Whatever the reason, most of us allow the perceived majority, authority, experts, to think and decide for us.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, political philosopher Hannah Arendt writes the following on Adolph Eichmann, who was in charge of transportation of the Jews during the holocaust:
“Although he had been doing his best right along to help with the Final Solution, he had still harbored some doubts about ‘such a bloody solution through violence,’ and these doubts had now been dispelled. ‘Here now, during this conference, the most prominent people had spoken, the Popes of the Third Reich.’ Now he could see with his own eyes and hear with his own ears that… the élite of the good old Civil Service were vying and fighting with each other for the honor of taking the lead in these ‘bloody’ matters. ‘At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt.’ Who was he to judge? Who was he ‘to have [his] own thoughts in this matter’? Well, he was neither the first nor the last to be ruined by modesty” (114).
History is outlined by the people whose names we all know, e.g., Galileo, George Washington, Ghandi, because they heard a different drummer. They were sufficiently lacking in modesty to go against the status quo and create something new. The outlines are filled in by the people you’ve never heard of, those who believe and do what they’re told. Many times, there’s nothing wrong with that. Other times, namely, in the face of the totalitarian tiptoe, the frog slowly boiling in the pot, the consequences history teaches us speak for themselves and inspire Arendt’s warning for the future:
“…once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been. The particular reasons that speak for the possibility of a repetition of the crimes committed by the Nazis are even more plausible. The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population ‘superfluous’ even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler’s gassing installations look like an evil child’s fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble” (273).
“It is quite conceivable that in the automated economy of a not-too-distant future men may be tempted to exterminate all those whose intelligence quotient is below a certain level” (288-89).
Consider current events. Examples are beyond the scope of this article, but if you’re paying any attention, you know it’s difficult to exaggerate how far gone we already are. A recent public statement expresses our status well:
“This message goes out to the people in Australia. My name is Christine Anderson. I’m a member of European Parliament, and I am answering your SOS call. I will do whatever I can to make it known to the world that your once free and liberal democracy has been transformed into a totalitarian regime which tramples on humans’ rights, civil liberties, and the rule of law. I am imploring, all of you, around the world who still think your governments are looking out for your best interest. At no point in history have the people forcing others into compliance been the good guys. The welfare of humanity has always been the alibi of tyrants. Do you not realize that this vaccine does not protect you from COVID? It does however, protect you from governmental oppression, for now, that is, but don’t think for a second that is not going to change tomorrow. I am a German, and we once asked our grandparents how they could have just stood by in silence, allowing a horrific totalitarian regime to come about. Anyone could have known, all they had to do was open their eyes and take a look. The vast majority chose not to. So, what will you tell your grandchildren? Will you tell them you didn’t know? Will you tell them you were just following orders? You need to understand, it isn’t about breaking the fourth wave, it is all about breaking people.”
This is no exaggeration. What we are facing has been described, appropriately, as genocide: “…my family lost 40 or so relatives in the holocaust…. So I don’t use the word genocide loosely. This is a genocide…. This is a carefully coordinated, brilliantly orchestrated and executed evil plan to damage and hurt billions of people,” and as: “a period of history without precedent, a war for the world.” How will we define our period of history? Will we be among those who outline it? Will we save humanity from the Great Reset? Or will we be ruined by modesty and march to the drum of global totalitarianism instead?
CNN says doing your own research is dangerous. The New York Times tells us not to critically think.
Other sources offer a different perspective:
“If, on looking within, one finds oneself to be in the wrong, then even though one’s adversary be only a common fellow… one is bound to tremble with fear. But if one finds one-self in the right, one goes forward even against men in the thousands.”
– Confucius
“Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric…. …and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.”
– John Stuart Mill
“So far as a man thinks, he is free”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“A lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right, and evil doesn’t become good, just because it’s accepted by a majority.”
– Booker T. Washington
“…we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse…. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre
“What we have demanded in these trials [Nuremberg and Eichmann’s], where the defendants had committed ‘legal’ crimes, is that human beings be capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is their own judgment, which, moreover, happens to be completely at odds with what they must regard as the unanimous opinion of all those around them. And this question is all the more serious as we know that the few who were ‘arrogant’ enough to trust only their own judgment were by no means identical with those persons who continued to abide by old values, or who were guided by a religious belief…. Those few who were still able to tell right from wrong went really only by their own judgements, and they did so freely; there were no rules to be abided by, under which the particular cases with which they were confronted could be subsumed. They had to decide each instance as it arose, because no rules existed for the unprecedented” (295).
– Hannah Arendt
So perhaps, instead of trusting the science related to the pandemic, we should be “arrogant” enough to try actually reading some.
Doing so reveals inefficacy and extreme danger with regard to the vaccines.
Deferring to “experts” who lie and whose ends are explicitly, admittedly, profit and power, allowing them to do our thinking and deciding for us, will result in a disaster of never before seen magnitude. It is essential that we think and act as the free human beings that we are.
“It was sheer thoughtlessness… that predisposed [Eichmann] to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace…. That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together… –that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn from [Eichmann’s trial in] Jerusalem” (287-88).
“The greatest sin of our time is not the few who have destroyed, but the vast majority who sat idly by.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.
“The medical profession and institutions were radically transformed, academic science, the military, industry and clinical medicine were tightly interwoven, as they are now…. The stark lesson of the holocaust is that whenever doctors join forces with government and deviate from their personal professional clinical commitment to do no harm to the individual… medicine can then be perverted from a healing, humanitarian profession to a murderous apparatus…. Medical mandates today are a major step backward to a fascist dictatorship and genocide…. And today, some are beginning to understand why the German people didn’t rise up. Fear kept them from doing the right thing.”
– Vera Sharav, holocaust survivor
We cannot afford to make these mistakes: thoughtlessness, idleness, being too fearful to do the right thing. We cannot afford to be like Eichmann who “…had consoled himself with the thought that he no longer was ‘master of his own deeds,’ that he was unable ‘to change anything'” (136). So what do we do instead?
“Telling the truth has become a revolutionary act. Telling the truth to everyone you meet will save humanity, so keep doing it.”
Here are a few links to materials to help get the conversations started:
COVID-1984 Flyer
Top 10 Reasons Not to Let Your Child Get a COVID Shot
Top 10 Things You Should Know About COVID-19 Vaccines
Other flyers
Signs/flyers
Stickers
It is not the collective, but the plurality of individuals which has allowed societal progress. Without it, a great number of inventions wouldn’t have been invented, thoughts wouldn’t have been thought, knowledge wouldn’t have been known, achievements wouldn’t have been achieved, and we wouldn’t stand a chance of success in defending our freedom and humanity today. But as things currently stand, we do. We do because you are an individual. You are big enough, important enough, educated enough, and powerful enough to participate in, and have an impact on, shaping the future you want to see. Moreover:
“…when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.”
“…54% of Likely U.S. voters are concerned about the potential of harmful side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine, including 27% who are Very Concerned.”
Though you’re not hearing about it on the news, people are standing up for themselves all over the world.
Arendt quotes Peter Bamm, a German Army physician who served at the Russian Front, on the use of mobile gas vans to exterminate people:
“We knew this. We did nothing. Anyone who had seriously protested or done anything against the killing unit would have been arrested within twenty-four hours and disappeared. It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian governments in our century that they don’t permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr’s death for their convictions. A good many of us might have accepted such a death. The totalitarian state lets its opponents disappear in silent anonymity. It is certain that anyone who had dared to suffer death rather than silently tolerate the crime would have sacrificed his life in vain. This is not to say that such a sacrifice would have been morally meaningless. It would only have been practically useless” (232).
She responds:
“It is true that totalitarian domination tried to establish these holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear, but just as the Nazis’ feverish attempts, from June, 1942, on, to erase all traces of the massacres–through cremation, through burning in open pits, through the use of explosives and flame throwers and bone-crushing machinery–were doomed to failure, so all efforts to let their opponents “disappear in silent anonymity” were in vain. The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. Hence, nothing can ever be “practically useless,” at least, not in the long run” (232-3).
She goes on, referring to the story of Anton Schmidt, a sergeant in the German army who was arrested and executed for helping the Jewish underground in Poland by supplying forged papers and military trucks:
“It would be of great practical usefulness… if there were more such stories to be told. For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everyone’s grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation” (233).
Arendt, H., & Elon, A. (2006). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Penguin Books.