The unending horror of masks

Popping a mask on to go to Sainsbury’s or get on a bus is a small imposition, the pro-maskers cry. As Adam Sandler’s character intones in Uncut Gems: “I disagree.” Mask mandates are just as monstrous as they’ve ever been, more so, considering around 95% of the population is said to now have Covid antibodies, the vast majority of the country has been double (or triple) jabbed and cases are low and falling. This new variant is, by all accounts so far, mild. And there is still no robust evidence for the efficacy of fabric face coverings as worn by most people in most situations.

If masks work, then why do we need other restrictions? The pro-maskers would counter that they are one part of our armoury, that they do do something, but other measures are needed alongside them. Let us grant them this for the moment. The trouble is, though, the costs of mass-masking are not low.

We won’t know the long-term consequences for many years of course, but I don’t expect them to be anything but dire. We must assess how the rules affect day-to-day existence in the here-and-now. 

Mandating them in shops and on public transport is a terrible idea, for many reasons. There’s the drip-down effect. You see many more masks in the street, because people often don’t bother to take them off when they have exited the shop or bus, and this creates a creepy, alarming environment. Which is one of the reasons why they were mandated.

They have the general effect of increasing paranoia and fear in places where they are not even seen; a dark, paranoid, repressive mood falls across all the land. They make you less want to pop out to the cinema or the theatre or a restaurant. Another reason they were mandated. Masks also sow rancour and discord, being a big part of governments’ divide and rule policies. Footage of masked police officers threatening to arrest someone for not wearing a mask is deeply grotesque, the sort of thing unimaginable in this country just a couple of years ago.

I’d be interested to see if there was data showing that the amount of Covid tests taken rises when mask mandates are in place (thus more money for test makers). I suspect this would be the case, as people’s general sense of anxiety is heightened. 

When you live in mask-land, you’re on the edge. Other places, besides those ordered by the state to enact mandates, might also require their patrons to wear one. So you might go into a hotel lobby and find that the staff are masked and they expect you to do so also. Or a church or a bridge club. Some people hate giving offence, or hate being challenged, so they will pre-empt any possible rulings by sticking a muzzle on, just in case. Their use is subtly and unsubtly encouraged far more widely than in shops and on transport; it is suffocating.

And so we have the insidious creep of masks into deeper society. The abnormal is normalised. It is in no way normal that human beings, who have faces that express a multitude of different moods and feelings, and immune systems that have evolved over millions of years to protect us, cover their mouths and noses for substantial periods of time. Tragically, this is the age of the abnormal being normalised: despite the fact that there are a thousand reasons why it is ridiculous to do so, most footballers ’take the knee’ before matches now. The dumb, divisive, craven gesture is now accepted by many as part of the pre-match rituals. But this is what happens. Many still say “Bless you” when someone sneezes, quite unaware of the fact that people centuries ago said this because they believed the devil would rush into you as you sneezed. Any idea why you put a tree in your front room every December? Of course, this sort of ritual is harmless, whereas widespread mask-wearing is not. Not being able to fully see a person’s features sets off an alarm deep in our brain: there are reasons why Doctor Who and Sapphire And Steel have both used faceless creatures as monsters.

It is staggering to me that more people cannot see through the theatre - how they are not mandated in offices but they are in schools (shamefully); how they're mandated in shops but not in cinemas. If you accept this mandate, the state knows you are compliant, and they will push further: governments are like little children, they will push and push to see what they can get away with. This thing will only end when we say that it is over; it's pretty clear that governments never want this to end. 

I will never wear a mask, I prefer to eat well, sleep well, keep active and not smoke to maintain good health. But because of the new rules I've had to again temporarily give up my volunteer shop work as I won't be able to properly exchange smiles with my customers, or have proper conversations with them. The public health mafia pushing for these mandates see us only as vectors of transmission, they see us as 'dirty' - they are anti-human, or, as Alex Epstein might put it, they are 'human racists'. 

The mask cheerleaders say wearing a mask shows that you are nice. There are a million other ways to show you are ‘nice’ - give someone plenty of space, don’t cough near them, give them a big smile. That counts for much more than wearing a mask that you've been told to do by someone with dubious motives.

The longer we stay in this state, the longer the ‘tail’ of it will be. Masks will now be everywhere till late spring 2022, and expect to see them every winter for the rest of your life - the pandora’s box has been opened, and despite the World Health Organization never, previous to mid-2020, recommending the use of masks in everyday settings as a means of curtailing viral spread, they will become common. This is because people, particularly frightened older folk, have been encouraged to view them as necessities. We mandated them to make people feel more safe, says the government who spent 18 months terrifying their citizens at every opportunity (paid for by those same citizens’ taxes).

In snobbish arrogance typical of her publication, The Guardian’s Marina Hyde rants about the ‘anti-mask babies’. So says a woman who doesn’t have to wear a mask for eight hours straight, standing on her feet all day trying to interact with other faceless beings, as an ordinary shop worker has to. Even Rod Liddle, often a fountain of common sense, has said that masks are a minor imposition. They are not a minor imposition: they are the most drastic change in the relationship between the state and the individual that this country has seen for hundreds of years. Philip Johnston was on the money when he said that they are dehumanising and controlling.

Any good psychologist will tell you that if you have a fear of something you must confront it. Jordan Peterson describes how if one of his clinical patients had a fear of getting into elevators (lifts) then the correct course of action is to dissuade them of the notion that elevators are scary by going through a series of steps. So on day one you might show them a picture of an elevator. On day two you might have them stand at a distance from one. On day three you would get closer. On day four you might get into one and immediately get out again. On day five you might go up one floor. On day six, two floors. On day seven, five floors, and so on. Allowing people to cling to their masks - which they erroneously believe will protect them from harm - is the worst thing you can do. It is false consolation. It means they will find it extremely difficult in the future to break free from the habit. These people may become anxious when they do not have their mask on - in any setting.

Things were just beginning to get better. The proportion of shoppers in my local supermarket had gone from about 80% masked to 50% in the last few months. When I looked into buses in Bath - and, boy, there are a lot of buses and boy, a lot of them are empty - most people had stopped wearing them. But Jellyfish Johnson, he of the ‘irreversible’ end to restrictions in the summer, reversed once again and mandated them. In an instant, in one Downing St press conference with no Parliamentary vote, all the progress was halted. 

Of course we were being softened up for this a few weeks ago when those clueless numpties on the government front bench suddenly started wearing them again. So we can guess that this had been planned for some time. Throw in a couple of by-elections that the Tories didn’t want to lose, and with a load of terrible headlines about illegal immigration and sleaze, and it's obvious they wanted to do their We Are A Responsible Government bit, and make all the simpletons think oooh, aren’t they good and kind protecting us from this terrible new variant by getting us to mask up (and destroy travel and tourism and hospitality a bit more).

If we presume that the maskers are correct, and transmission rates are reduced, is that necessarily a good thing? Bear in mind that most healthy people, if they get Covid, get a mild to moderate illness, or no symptoms at all, so it’s actually not a bad idea to get healthy people infected, so they get naturally acquired immunity. That was the way we used to do it. But in the old days the pharmaceutical industry did not have the control it now has over global governments. As Lionel Shriver has written: “Natural immunity seems to annoy public health authorities, because it isn’t within their control, and they can’t take credit for it.” She adds: “Western governments and the medical-industrial complex will not let go of the self-serving notion that they can control an inexorable natural process.” And as Allison Pearson has pointed out, there is no money to be made out of natural immunity, but there is billions to be made out of vaccines. 

Those responsible for mask mandates will never be held properly accountable. Yet the sidelining of our immune systems will have unwelcome results in the years ahead. The mandating of something wisely thought of until very recently as unnecessary, and inhibiting human flourishing, has been a disaster for the human race (and the planet, as billions of used masks fill the land and the sea). Global data clearly shows that there is no correlation between mask mandates and better health outcomes. Whichever way you look at it, mandating masks has been one of the most appalling decisions of our lifetimes.

PS I wrote some of this article in a pub. At one point three masked twentysomethings came in and sat on a nearby table. They did not then go to the bar to order drinks, they sat there, the three of them staring at their phones. I suspect they were trying to use the pub’s app to order drinks, and it seemed to say so much: people addicted to masks and shunning basic human contact, not wanting to engage in communication with the bar staff. These two things are surely not unconnected.