I Am Insane

(Don Boudreaux)

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This conclusion is now firmly set in my mind: If humanity’s reaction to Covid-19 is sane and rational, then sometime in the past 12 months I’ve lost my mind and I am now certifiably insane. If, instead, I remain reasonably in touch with rationality and am not completely insane, then most of my fellow human beings are utterly bonkers-mad.

Truly, I see no other alternative.

Recognizing that my attachment to reality might well be all but completely severed, I speak from the vantage point of my reality, as I perceive it (what else can I do?): The single-minded obsession with avoiding contact with the coronavirus, or with avoiding illness and death from Covid, is beyond my ability to comprehend. This obsession strikes me – in what I no long doubt is my lunacy – as being as idiotic as obsessions can become.

Why does illness from Covid differ categorically from illnesses from other sources?

My fellow human beings seem now to be willing to suffer without limit deaths from causes other than Covid – to avoid Covid they’re willing to endure indefinitely isolation and misery and tyranny – they seem to have a fetish to be frightened out of their skins by incessant reports of Covid’s devilish dangers and to react to these reports like mindless lemmings.

I truly don’t get it. I look at the data on Covid and then at my fellow human beings – many of whom are close friends – and conclude, tragically for me, that I now inhabit a different reality than they inhabit.

Occam’s Razor leads me to the conclusion that the lost mind is not that of my fellow human beings but, rather, my own. I am insane. There’s no other plausible explanation for what appears to me to be humanity’s inexplicably lunatic hysteria over Covid-19.