COVID’s Social Autopsy — How a Society Was Divided From Within
The Strategy of Division
What happened to families, friendships, and communities during COVID was not an unfortunate side effect of a public health crisis.
It was the predictable and in some cases deliberately engineered, outcome of a communication strategy that required an enemy.
Every effective propaganda campaign needs a target. Someone whose existence explains the ongoing threat. Someone whose behaviour justifies the continuation of emergency measures. Someone onto whom the fear and frustration of the compliant population can be redirected.
During COVID that target was the non-compliant.
The unmasked. The unvaccinated. The people asking questions. The ones who looked at the data and reached different conclusions than the institutions wanted them to reach.
They were not simply wrong in the official framing. They were dangerous. Selfish. Responsible for the deaths of others. A threat to the people you loved most.
That language was not chosen carelessly. I wrote about that in my Autopsy of the Psychological Language being used during the pandemic.
It was chosen because it works. It transforms a policy disagreement into a moral emergency. It makes the questioning neighbour feel like a physical threat. It gives the compliant person not just permission but obligation to enforce, to cut off, to report, to condemn. And it worked.
Across millions of families. Across decades of friendships. Across communities that had survived economic crises, political disagreements, and genuine tragedies, but could not survive this particular, carefully manufactured divide.
They want us to be divided and against each other, so instead of fighting and fueling the fire. Use that energy towards those who initiated it.
To understand what happened you need to understand what fear does to the social brain.
Human beings are tribal animals.
The deepest evolutionary programming we carry is oriented toward two things, belonging to the group and identifying threats to the group. These are not rational processes. They operate beneath the threshold of conscious reasoning and they operate fast.
When fear is sufficiently activated and the COVID communication strategy was designed to maximise fear, the social brain begins sorting. Safe and dangerous. Us and them. Compliant and threatening.
This sorting is not primarily about evidence. It is about emotional contagion and social signal. If the people around you are frightened and the institutions you trust are saying the threat is real and human, the programming activates regardless of whether the underlying claim withstands scrutiny.
And here is the part that makes it so effective as a tool of social control.
Once the sorting has occurred, once someone has placed a family member or friend in the category of threat, reversing that placement is psychologically costly. It requires admitting that the fear was manipulated. That the relationship was sacrificed on the altar of a manufactured emergency. That the person they cut off or condemned was not dangerous but simply inconveniently honest.
Most people cannot afford that admission.
So the division persists long after the emergency has passed.
The government did not need to keep the divide active. It had been internalised.
Jesus Did Not Come to Bring Peace. He Came to Bring a Sword.
Matthew 10:34.
Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
This passage has confused comfortable Christianity for two thousand years. How does the Prince of Peace speak about a sword?
Because He understood something that sentimentality about faith always tries to avoid.
Truth divides.
Not because truth is divisive by nature, but because truth, when it arrives in a world organised around comfortable lies, necessarily separates those who are willing to see from those who are not. It separates those who will pay the cost of honesty from those who will pay any cost to avoid it.
The sword is not violence. It is discernment. The cutting edge of genuine reality meeting a world that has organised itself around its absence.
COVID drew exactly this line.
Not between vaccinated and unvaccinated, that was the line the institutions drew. The deeper line was between those willing to look honestly at what was happening and those who needed not to look. Between those who could tolerate the discomfort of an inconvenient truth and those for whom that discomfort was genuinely intolerable.
That line ran through families.
Through marriages. Through friendships of decades.
Jesus said it would. He said a man’s enemies would be members of his own household. He was not predicting something that should not happen. He was describing the inevitable consequence of standing for truth in a world that prefers its absence.
COVID did not create the narcissism epidemic. It revealed it.
A culture that had spent decades optimising for self-image over character, for performance over substance, for the carefully curated presentation of the self over the honest encounter with what is actually true, that culture produced people who, when the moment of genuine moral test arrived, could not access the resources they did not have.
Courage is not available on demand. It is cultivated over years of small choices to tell the truth when lying would be easier. To stand apart when belonging feels essential. To sit with discomfort rather than immediately seeking its relief.
The compliant, the enforcers, the people who cut off their families for asking questions. they were not villains. They were people who had never been asked to develop the inner resources that the moment required. And the culture that raised them had not asked. It had rewarded self-promotion, social approval, and the appearance of virtue over its substance.
That age is ending.
Not because the culture has been reformed, it has not. But because the consequences of what that culture produced are now visible enough that people who are paying attention cannot look away.
The Renaissance of Love that must follow is not sentimentality.
It is the hard, patient reconstruction of the things that were destroyed.
Community built on genuine mutual knowledge rather than ideological uniformity.
Relationships honest enough to survive disagreement. Families strong enough to hold people who see the world differently without needing them to comply.
Trust rebuilt not through forgetting what was done but through the honest reckoning with it that genuine restoration requires.
There will be a split. I believe we are headed for a split maybe more than just one I don't know how that looks, but I don't see how moving forward so many are so adamant about their position. I think the Lord will sort us out.
The division will not heal by itself.
Time does not do this work. It requires something more deliberate and more difficult.
It requires the people who enforced the divide to acknowledge what they did. Not in a grand public gesture, in the small, private, costly moment of saying to the person they cut off. I was wrong about you. I was frightened and I let that fear make me cruel. I am sorry.
Most people will not do this. The psychological cost is too high and the cultural permission to do it is too low.
But some will. And those who do will find that the relationship on the other side of genuine honesty is stronger than the one that existed before, because it has been tested in a way that comfortable relationships never are.
The Renaissance of Love begins there.
In the small rooms. In the family dinners where the conversation finally happens. In the friendships that were fractured and are being slowly, carefully repaired by people willing to value the relationship more than they value being right
.
And it extends outward, into communities choosing genuine connection over enforced consensus. Into a culture learning, slowly and painfully, that unity built on the suppression of dissent is not unity at all.
It is a managed division waiting to be reactivated by the next manufactured emergency.
Real unity is built differently.
On truth. On love that does not require agreement. On the willingness to see the person in front of you even when what they are saying is inconvenient.
The sword divided.
Love is what rebuilds.
And that work, patient, humble, costly, is the only Renaissance worth having.
I think another additional mechanism is this: Many did not at all like complying, but felt it was moral to do so. They were saturated by nonstop conflicting pseudo scientific messaging. They tried, with difficulty , to digest and understand it. That it was contradictory, simultaneously and across time, did not alleviate their overwhelm. Whatever they made sense of, they endorsed, not noticing that understanding an argument doesn't oblige you to endorse it. But it had been so difficult to wrap their heads around it, and it was so gratifying to feel they understood the discourse going on, that they thought that understanding that stuff was already the iq test, which it wasn't. In any case, they were manipulatively made to spend all their attention, brainpower, and also willpower! on overcoming their will to be free. They did overcome it, with much effort and subconscious resentment against those who followed their will to be free. The important point from my perspective: They used up their energies on involuntary compliance, so had no energy left to even begin tackling the other paradigm, the one about not unloading their responsibility on others, the one about valuing freedom being just as much a moral virtue as protecting others from infection with something irreversible. Their action, inside their paradigm!, was effectively moral - but they never got around to asking, let alone ascertaining, whether that paradigm was at all the relevant one to be acting inside. Which it wasn't. It was a big, big distraction from the relevant one which was how to position yourself toward "states and powers of emergency" which are the recurring theme.
Amen.