Interview with Eugyppius! On Scientific Consensus, Germany's Covid Response, WHO Treaty Collapse, and New FOIA Documents
Hi everyone,
As you know, Jay and I launched season 2 of The Illusion of Consensus podcast a couple of weeks ago with our first guest being Russell Brand. In this new season of the show, we endeavour to interview and spotlight dissident voices contributing to the public discourse.
One fellow dissident who has been a voice of reason throughout the pandemic is Eugyppius. His pieces on Germany’s authoritarian response to Covid are incredibly illuminating — some of which we discuss here.
I hope you enjoy the interview and check out his Substack.
1. In line with the theme of our show, what do you see as the most pernicious manifestations of illusory consensus during the pandemic?
"Illusory consensus" is an interesting concept, I've never really thought about the phenomenon in precisely these terms before. We're increasingly governed, in many areas, by people who present themselves as experts, and whose opinions because of their allegedly greater learning and knowledge preempt public discussion and all possible dissent. This is basically what we mean when we speak of 'technocracy.' The problems with this vision are twofold: First, it's premised on a kind of fabulistic understanding of a unified, oracular Science, which provides always and everywhere unambiguous answers to policy questions. Second, to sustain this fable of Science, it's necessary for the technocrats themselves to present a united front. Dissenting opinions within the technocracy undermine its own mythology and vitiate its political power.
The pandemic-era technocracy proved disturbingly capable of crafting and deploying false consensus in many areas. Three I think mattered more than the rest. In the debate about virus origins, a small group of compromised virologists convened by Anthony Fauci and Jeremy Farrar managed to establish the illusion of unified expert opinion on the natural origins of SARS-2, all within the space of just a few weeks in February 2020. In a much more diffuse process, wherein Chinese government officials, the WHO and the Imperial College team around Neil Ferguson all played crucial roles, the pandemic establishment presented mass containment as a scientifically respectable strategy, in the absence of all evidence and in contradiction to their own internal planning going back decades. Finally, in an equally diffuse way, politicians and public health authorities across the West united in arguing that the vaccines would stop virus transmission and possibly even eradicate SARS-2 in humans – again in the absence of any reason to believe this was even possible, and many reasons to doubt the vaccines could work this way.
In each of these instances, the false consensus emerged with disturbing swiftness, and proved remarkably resistant to falsifying evidence – decaying only after virus hysteria became impossible to sustain and political interest in these debates evaporated.
2. Since you are based in Germany, what was unique about your country's response to Covid compared to others?
Although this is rapidly changing, German political culture is typically less intensely polarised than in some other countries, and more rooted in cross-party consensus positions (however notional). Throughout the pandemic, all mainstream politicians supported containment, with the only meaningful opposition coming from Alternative für Deutschland – a party derided by the establishment as extreme right-wing populists and excluded from governing coalitions on this basis. The centre-right CDU under Angela Merkel emerged as the driving force behind mass containment and mass vaccination, in no small part because of Merkel's personal fear of the virus, but also I think because ageing CDU constituents were the most susceptible to the virus terror propaganda put about by state media.
On the one hand, this made speaking out against pandemic policies particularly dangerous socially and culturally – the rough equivalent of outing oneself as a racist. This rigid social consensus faded in the course of the pandemic, but it was still quite terrifying right through the early days of the first Omicron wave. On the other hand, because hygiene tyranny was never really subject to debate domestically, things like vaccination and masking never acquired the political signalling power they did in some other places, like the United States. Oddly, Germans as a whole are probably less radicalized on Covidian matters than many progressive Americans who personally identified with things like mask mandates and the unending eternal booster schedule.
3. What do you think of the recent FOIA emails showing extraordinary back-channel communications between leading Covid actors?
There have been a lot of these releases lately, especially in Germany, and I'm not sure I've kept up with the most recent American news on this front. If you mean the new revelations surrounding Fauci advisor David Morens's back-channel efforts to hide his sensitive communications from potential FOIA requests, then I can say it's at least interesting that his evasions begin so early, in July 2020. In general I've found the document releases, both in Germany and America, vindicating for my theses of the pandemic. Collectively, they point to the crucial early role played by China (via the WHO) in establishing mass containment as the primary Western pandemic response; to the importance of informal relationships among relatively small groups of actors in reaching crucial decisions, which were then swiftly propagated to our respective national public health bureaucracies by the political arm; and to a relatively high degree of manipulative behaviour by our precious avatars of 'the Science.' What has been persistently missing from these revelations, is any suggestion that the pandemic response reflected a central international conspiracy by the World Economic Forum or any other coordinating international institution or lobbying group. I think it's best to conceive of the managerial bureaucracies which govern Western states as consensus manufacturing and propagation machines, which have become very good at presenting a united front domestically and also at imposing very uniform policies across borders.
4. The WHO Treaty plans have collapsed. Are you happy?
Yes, I am happy, although my unpopular opinion is that many in the alt-Covid sphere have wildly exaggerated the importance of the WHO Treaty and also the (potentially more significant) proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations. If your readers are interested, I wrote two long posts about the proposed enhancements to both instruments:
The WHO is often portrayed as a rogue international agency bent on world domination, when in fact it is an unwieldy bureaucracy enslaved to the member states of the World Health Assembly. This doesn't mean the WHO has no agency at all, but rather that its aspirations are an unholy sum of its own internal always-metastasising bureaucratic momentum and those things that the 194 WHA members want. I found the proposed treaty, in its various iterations, to be a largely banal and often vaguely worded document laden with a host of bureaucratic provisions that aimed, above all, to weaken intellectual property rights in wealthier countries for the purpose of making pharmaceutical products more abundantly and cheaply available in the developing world. The incursions on national sovereignty that this project entailed are in my opinion the primary reason that this thing went nowhere. Indeed, many predicted this outcome.
Still, it's good that it collapsed, because these proposals did contain an array of soft authoritarian measures that portended nothing good for us, and also because the collapse itself illustrates what a failure the pandemic response really was, and how it has succeeded in dividing rather than uniting the international pandemicist establishment.
Check out season 2 of our new show:
5. What is the biggest takeaway from the pandemic in your view? I think if we don't learn the necessary lessons about what we did wrong, we are doomed to fail again.
My biggest takeaway is somewhat depressing, because I'm not sure there's much we can do about it, at least immediately. The pandemic illustrated above all how we are governed by complex bureaucratic systems that are very hard to understand from the outside, that aren't really under any kind of firm political control, and that increasingly behave in radical and unpredictable ways. These systems are nothing new. They emerged following massive changes in the nature of the state that have been ongoing since the latter stages of industrialisation gave rise to mass society. The pandemic was merely the first moment that these insanely complex systems misfired massively and openly, impacting public life in a huge way not seen since World War II. At least the war was a serious event; our reaction to Covid was largely unnecessary, in response to a virus that for most people was never really that dangerous, and all the things we did were some mixture of counterproductive and obviously ineffective.
If you take any particular obnoxious pandemic policy – mask mandates, say – and trace its origins through the dizzying array of ad hoc advisory groups, scientific committees, government agencies and political decision-makers who brought it into existence, you're left utterly at a loss as to how this insanity might be prevented in the future. The primary culprit seems to be a decay in the nature of state power; over many generations, this power has been bled outward and downwards, from the political arm into a wide array of lobbying operations, academic bodies, contractors and corporations, and even state-adjacent journalistic enterprises like public media. This has had the effect of insulating the state from criticism, because whatever modern states do necessarily involves untold thousands of individual actors distributed across a maze of institutions, both within the state apparatus and beyond it. It has also, in a curious way, demobilised the state, again because so many people must be involved in every last significant decision. To stir this massive apparatus to action requires some kind of coordinating impetus. Hysteria and panic, promoted by the press, have thus become a key feature of state power in the West, important not only for propagandising citizenries but also for coordinating state actors internally. Once the elephant begins to move, everything it does is subject to incredible inertia. It will persist in obviously ill-advised policies for years, blind to their destruction and expense.
Only routine state actions, like tax collection and the enforcement of the traffic code, remain the exclusive province of the state as formally conceived. All specific initiatives and campaigns, whether in the realm of climate change or pandemic response or foreign policy or highway safety, appear to emerge from what I call 'influence nodes.' These are informally organised interest groups both within the state and in private institutions, responsible for formulating specific policies and promoting them to the political establishment. These nodes are forever angling with each other for influence and access to the levers of state power. While the actors inside these nodes have formally defined agendas with respect to the outside world, their real purposes are necessarily careerist – they want more funding, more jobs, and more prospects for themselves, and so they prefer interventionist approaches to everything. Sometimes, as during the Covid era, events will conspire to place one particular node in a position of ascendancy, and then you're basically along for the ride. Crucially, the pandemicist 'influence node' spent decades advocating mostly benign pandemic response plans before a strange sequence of events in February and March 2020 radicalised its members, causing our public health establishments suddenly to throw all the weight of their influence and scientific authority behind mass containment and later mass vaccination.
The greatest danger, as I see it, is not necessarily that we'll get another round of lockdowns and vaccine hysteria when the next fashionable virus happens along (though that could certainly happen), but rather that this same pathological process of radicalisation around a single narrowly defined threat could happen across any number of domains, placing any of a wide variety of 'influence nodes' (many of which we're hardly aware of) in a position to hijack our lives and our societies in service of God knows what lunatic project.
6. How did you get into writing about Covid and why? What's your background in? Did you expect you'd be this successful on Substack? How did that happen?
I started writing about Covid in late Fall 2020, out of exasperation with the unrelenting and increasingly irrational virus hysteria, but I didn't really gain a substantial audience until the mass vaccination craze set in a year later. I never expected to be this successful at all, but after a few of my blog posts when viral after August 2021, I realised I had accumulated a substantial readership and started putting more time into writing. This was pretty easy to do, as by that time I had spent over a year underoccupied in home office. I have no professional background in public health or virology at all; I am – or until I quit to write for Substack full-time, I was – an ancient historian/philologist.
7. Covid is a dying topic. What other topics are you focused on these days?
In moving on from Covid, I've tried to focus on those areas German politics that seem to have been affected by pandemic insanity. The German political establishment learned from lockdowns and mass vaccination that the state could afford to be much more interventionist than they had ever imagined, and they have accordingly become very activist in their attempts to impose climate policies to effect the energy transition, and to suppress the free expression and political preferences of the political opposition that they characterise as the 'populist right.'
Watch our new interview with Russell Brand:
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"This is basically what we mean when we speak of 'technocracy.' The problems with this vision are twofold: First, it's premised on a kind of fabulistic understanding of a unified, oracular Science, which provides always and everywhere unambiguous answers to policy questions. Second, to sustain this fable of Science, it's necessary for the technocrats themselves to present a united front. Dissenting opinions within the technocracy undermine its own mythology and vitiate its political power. "
Well said. I used to teach science. And I live my life pretty much by the scientific method. The ideology of the "Follow the Science" crowd is actually anti-science.
I've seen the educational establishment degenerate into an indoctrination machine. That was bad enough. But now science has been perverted and weaponized into an excuse for further totalitarianism by incompetents.
Eugy coming in from cold and moving closer to centre of alt-media universe =)