A couple of weeks ago I had a decent start to a blog on this topic and then Evernote, my usually reliable mobile word processor of choice, decided to send my work into the sea of forever-lost things. My hope was to describe something that I’ve noticed for years and has become even more pronounced in my mind as I observe the Covid-19 pandemic response.

Before I get started, and so nobody is unduly offended or thinks this explanation is personally directed at them, it is not. I wrote most of this before the latest round of conspiracy theory videos and adding this part later because some might assume that my commentary has something to do with that, which it does not. Any similarity between my words and a particular person’s response to the pandemic (over the course of recent days) is purely coincidental. If the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it!

That out of the way, the first two categories of response that I’ve observed represent the extremes. These two groups are the louder less rational of the three. The tools have the power of institutions behind them, the system is stacked in their favor and they feel special. The fools, on the other hand, are the unappreciated, those mocked as “deplorables” by political elites, and are being increasingly rebellious against the belittling authorities. The rest of us are in the middle somewhere, rejecting both extremes, seeing a little of both sides, and independently make up their own minds.

Anyhow, I have to be careful which group that I start with because once people who tend towards one group recognize themselves in my writing they might stop reading and dismiss me as being the much-loathed ‘other’ extreme. But, since there’s definitely a difference of tolerance for ideas (other than their own) in the one group, as compared to the other, I’ll start with the fools. They are used to taking a beating and will be more likely to hear me out than the tools.

So, fools, you’re up…

The “You’re Not the Boss of Me” Fool

They say to compliment a person before you lay on the insults and so I’ll stay true to that format by noting that the fools are more likely to be in that “essential worker” category as those who are willing to get their hands dirty for everyone else. They are mechanics, farmers, cooks, garbage collectors, contractors, and factory workers. These people might not be able to articulate themselves very well, yet they do know when they are getting the shaft and have been getting the shaft for quite some time. It is only right to mistrust the tools that have sold them out.

I’ll admit, I have sympathy for the fools, they are nose to the grindstone workers, won’t hesitate to help without asking for a dime, and are basically the bedrock of this nation. They are also the ones who suffer the most due to imported labor and outsourcing over the past few decades. They have seen their wages flattened and opportunities dry up. Smarmy politicians, with beautiful polish, told them how much they cared, that new jobs would come and then never delivered. In 2016 these people (some who voted for Obama and don’t care about political affiliation) came out for Trump in large numbers because he spoke a language they, as the blue-collar workers, could appreciate.

The fools, despite lacking a four-year degree, are not dumb and have “street smarts” that allow them to see things that their intellectual tool counterparts do not see. That said, they are as blind by their own biases much as anyone else and are quick to spread conspiracy theories that validate their mistrust for authority figures. And that is exactly what they think about this Covid-19 global pandemic, they aren’t sick themselves, they don’t know anyone who is sick, they don’t see the hospital parking lots full and therefore the shutdowns must be some sort of nefarious scheme. Of course, who can blame them? Only a month or two ago the corporate media was telling us that the virus in Wuhan was nothing to worry about, that we should be more concerned with the seasonal flu, etc.

The fools are right in that they are mistreated by the elites. They are also right to question the official narrative. I mean, let’s be real here, politicians do lie (both parties) and members of the media most certainly do have political agendas as well. At some point, and very often for good reason, the fools have become disenchanted with the establishment and sometimes they simply take this too far. They reject even common-sense recommendations, like wearing masks, because they a) don’t like being told what to do and b) they read some meme put out by some random internet user who agrees with them. A fool could be dying in an ICU bed, gasping for their last breath, and still in denial of the severity of a pandemic.

“The way of fools seems right to them, but the wise listen to advice.”

(Proverbs 12:15 NIV)

The fools are like Joker, they are agents of chaos that arise in response to an unjust order and challenge Batman (a tool of the system) to take off his mask so everyone can see who he really is. Perhaps the dark knight would look a bit less heroic, as one of the primary beneficiaries of the system he is defending, once his pretense of moral purity was removed?

The problem with the fools, is that they are like the zealots before the fall of Jerusalem (eventually destroyed by their own infighting, which is what happens when the inmates run the asylum) or the Anabaptist “Tailor King” who led a rebellion in Münster, they are able to expose the corruption of the system and yet unfit to lead themselves. The fools, useful as they are, were made to perform the mundane (yet essential) tasks and would perform them well, without protest, if their efforts were properly appreciated by their betters in government and the social hierarchy, they deserve to be heard as much as anyone else. But I do implore the fools, read the account of Josephus about the fall of Jerusalem, consider the end of the Münster Rebellion, become wise to your own foolishness!

For the waywardness of the simple will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them; but whoever listens to me will live in safety and be at ease, without fear of harm.

(Proverbs 1:32‭-‬33 NIV)

Humility is the first step to wisdom. It is knowing your place before God and respecting those whom God has ordained as his servants. Rebellion against all authority, except one’s own understanding or that which one agrees with, is a path to destruction. A fool remains a fool so long as they are so arrogant as to believe that they, some blue-collar yokel who can barely spell college on a good day, knows more than those who have spent their entire lives studying a topic and have become respected in their field enough to serve Presidents of both parties. Sure, the experts get things wrong, but so do the fools and often (as the victims of Dunning-Kruger effect) more than they’ll ever be able to realize and would be smart to stay humble.

The “I’m Too Smart To Hear You” Tool

The tools took their guidance counselor’s advice, they believe in the fiction of “settled science” and have an undying trust in their institutions. They are basically fools, but with a larger vocabulary and a much more blinding subservience to the system that they have bought into. Now, in defense of tools, many are in the professional class, they are teachers, professors, nurses, doctors, and lawyers, often people on the government payroll, and deserve credit for being able to navigate their way through the ranks. Unlike the fools, who could not make it through a college-level class, the tools are masters at learning what they are supposed to learn.

However, despite their snobbery towards those of a lower social order, the tools are often no better than the fools whom they ridicule and are simply parrots using bigger words. A month or two back, when the corporate media (and NPR) was telling them that the seasonal flu was a bigger threat than Covid-19, they snickered at us dolts making our own alternative judgment of the facts and getting prepared. And now, when the same media tells them that the sky is falling and we must close everything forever, these tools soak it up like a sponge then lecture their neighbor, out mowing his lawn, for breathing the fresh spring air. Or call the snitch line set up by other tools. I mean, how dare he defy the experts! Of course, they themselves, like the media they consume, aren’t actually the experts and should probably question the experts as much as they do Trump.

Oh, and did I mention that the tools absolutely hate Trump?

To the tools Barack Obama was the pinnacle of the Presidency, they swooned as he read the teleprompter in his “clean” and “articulate” (thank you Joe) professorial tone. He could have spoken complete nonsense and they still would’ve been breathless about how ‘presidential’ he sounded. And then, in walks the brash billionaire, a Twitter troll, who uses crude blue-collar language and has a kind of humor that they can’t comprehend. The tools are horrified by Trump. He falls outside of their understanding of the world, an anomaly, and they believe that he is a fool because he is not like them and that’s what the media tools tell them. But the reality is that they hate Trump because he exposes their system for what it is, his mere existence creates cognitive dissonance for them and therefore he must be destroyed so they can go back to their religious faith in their system.

This is why, when President Trump, makes some off the cuff suggestion, something even the fools know to take with a grain of salt, they take him completely literally and (to the amusement of everyone else) have a conniption fit. Even if he muses something completely reasonable or worthy of consideration, such as his mention of hydroxychloroquine as a potential lifesaving treatment, they are desperate to prove him wrong and show the rest of us how intelligent they are. How dare he! It has side-effects, don’t you know! People might drink fishbowl cleaner! They are the rightful rulers, after all, they took AP Biology in high school, and the fools need to be put back in their place!

It has gotten absurd to the point that even when one of their own, a Democrat lawmaker from Detroit, gives the President’s advice credit for their recovery from a deadly disease the tools feel the need to punish that person. When everyone else hears Trump use colloquial terms to describe the goal of any medical intervention, to disinfect, they freak out and claim that he said the equivalent of “drink bleach” and then wonder why the fools aren’t taking them seriously anymore. They are not the bastions of rationality and pure goodness they see themselves as. No, they are tools for those more powerful, their reward for compliance is the right to exploit their lessors and thus they are as corrupt as their masters.

Every self-righteous tool in the universe is going to go nuts for me saying this, nevertheless, if they hear me out they’ll know it is true. Trump, like Sampson who was an unruly and disruptive character married to a foreign woman, is a type of Christ. Obviously, although I need to say it in case there are still some tools left reading at this point, Trump does not have a moral character worth our emulating and should never be regarded as being our Savior. But how the tools of our day oppose him as an uncanny similarity to how Christ was opposed by the social elites (and underlings of the Romans) of his day. For example, read the account of a man healed by Jesus in the Gospel of John (read the whole account here) and how the Pharisee tools weren’t having it:

They brought to the Pharisees the man who had been blind. Now the day on which Jesus had made the mud and opened the man’s eyes was a Sabbath. Therefore the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. “He put mud on my eyes,” the man replied, “and I washed, and now I see.” Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.” But others asked, “How can a sinner perform such signs?” So they were divided. Then they turned again to the blind man, “What have you to say about him? It was your eyes he opened.” The man replied, “He is a prophet.” They still did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they sent for the man’s parents. “Is this your son?” they asked. “Is this the one you say was born blind? How is it that now he can see?” “We know he is our son,” the parents answered, “and we know he was born blind. But how he can see now, or who opened his eyes, we don’t know. Ask him. He is of age; he will speak for himself.” His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders, who already had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. That was why his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.” A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. “Give glory to God by telling the truth,” they said. “We know this man is a sinner.” He replied, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!” Then they asked him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” He answered, “I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?” Then they hurled insults at him and said, “You are this fellow’s disciple! We are disciples of Moses! We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, we don’t even know where he comes from.” The man answered, “Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly person who does his will. Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” To this they replied, “You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!” And they threw him out.

(John 9:13‭-‬34 NIV)

Obviously what this man was telling them didn’t comport with their religious ideology or preconceived understanding of the world. Instead of celebrating with the blind man who was healed, they sought to discredit him so they would not need to acknowledge the truth of their own spiritual blindness. Jesus was a threat to their system, he was turning everything they knew (or thought they knew) on its head and was a very real threat to their own prestige. They, like the safety-conscious leaders who had it out for Sampson, muttered amongst themselves about how Jesus was a threat to their way of life and obsessed on finding a way to destroy a man who held a mirror to their own narcissism and true cowardliness.

Still don’t see the parallel?

Try this…

The chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were looking for evidence against Jesus so that they could put him to death, but they did not find any. Many testified falsely against him, but their statements did not agree. Then some stood up and gave this false testimony against him: “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple made with human hands and in three days will build another, not made with hands.’ ” Yet even then their testimony did not agree.

(Mark 14:55‭-‬59 NIV)

They misrepresented what Jesus actually said. Yes, certainly, he had talked about the destruction of the temple. But he was making a metaphorical reference to himself, something they could have or should have known and probably did secretly know, and they were simply blinded by their agenda and irrational hatred of a man who defied their system.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Trump is no Jesus, neither was Sampson. But all three of those characters could expose the tools for what they really are.

The tools think they are smart because they follow the rules and are given the privilege of maintaining the system that subjects the fools. They enthusiastically latch onto anything their own masters (academic institutions, government agencies, corporate media, etc) tell them and yet refuse to acknowledge the reality that is right before their own eyes. Tools, as slaves to the system that created them, hate innovators and those who challenge their own status quo. Under their eloquent and silky words is a spirit of entitlement and a nastiness worse than that of the blunt and unsophisticated language of the fools whom they self-righteously condemn. They are like the enemy spoken of by David:

His talk is smooth as butter, yet war is in his heart; his words are more soothing than oil, yet they are drawn swords.

(Psalms 55:21 NIV)

I think we are all familiar with those who, pardon the expression, think their own shit don’t stink. The tools see their own motives as being pure as the wind-driven snow and beyond reproach. They even act as if they are patrons for those whom they claim to be disadvantaged, pushing social justice and identity politics to further their own advantage. It is not true love or compassion, if it was they would show equal concern and offer an open ear to those who weren’t as useful for furthering their own ideological agenda. In actuality, the tools are simply better at hiding or rationalizing their own toxic attitudes. They are as prone to confirmation bias as anyone else, blind to their own inconsistencies, and the least woke people of the planet despite their self-gratifying delusion of the superiority of their perspective.

Tools are tools because unlike the other fools (which they also are despite their intellectual advantages) they are quite unaware of the flaws of the system that they worship. They do not even realize that they are an apparatchik, an instrument manipulated, and are way too willing to do whatever they are told without asking enough questions. These are the people who know nothing outside of their own specialties and then will arrogantly lecture someone for deviating too far from the narrative-based in their own independent observation. It’s as if they do not realize that every advancement that they now enjoy and take for granted didn’t come as the result of someone silly enough to try something new and different.

The “Can’t We Just Get along” Messy Middlers

Okay, if you have put up with me this long, here’s the big reveal: Most people are not complete fools or totally tools and instead reside in the murky middle ground between the extremes.

Most of us didn’t go fill ten carts with toilet paper nor would we call a snitch line (other than to prank the authoritarian control freaks on the other end) and are willing to wear a face mask while also able to question the wisdom of months of economic lock down. We don’t worship at the feet of any politician and yet are able to cooperate with those who are authorities over us. We are skeptical of the official narrative, realizing that there are humans involved and often with agendas, but without turning to conspiracy theories.

Speaking for myself, my own worldview has been shattered enough times that there is very little smugness left about the power of my own reasoning or the authority of my own opinions. I mean, I still have an opinion and can’t really claim to be all that humble either, but one might say that I’ve been broken by the School of Hard Knocks. I’m smart enough to know that I’m basically average, certainly not extraordinary enough to call myself an expert at anything and yet not a blithering idiot or at least I’m not an idiot who lacks in words to express his perspective. I’m also too contrarian to be a tool. I zig when too many people are zagging. I think this puts me somewhere in the middle.

The middlers are those of us who readily agreed to concepts like “flattening the curve” and giving our medical professionals time to gear up. That made sense. There were shortages of masks and other protective equipment. We didn’t know what we were up against given the misinformation coming out of China. So we took the precautions that were recommended. That said, when “flatten the curve” morphed into “stop the spread” and months-long shutdowns, while the dire predictions of models proved false, many in the middle have begun to grow uneasy about the growing economic consequences, note the arbitrariness of the rules (crowded Walmart is okay, but beach and park is not?) and rightfully wonder if this strategy was well thought out.

No, middlers aren’t necessarily ready to join the fools in their protests. Or, if some of the middlers did, they at least wore masks or protested from their vehicles. However, middlers are also seemingly more able than the tools to see a broader perspective than that of the tools, like those celebrities who tell us “please stay at home” and apparently think that we make our decisions based on their pontifications, and think for themselves. The middlers, unlike the tools, aren’t consigned to the established dogma nor do they foolishly reject anything they cannot comprehend. Whereas fools are too stupid and tools too lacking in their own The middlers are the true critical thinkers, the Elon Musks who defy everything, those actually capable of creating advancements in science, technology, and medicine.

The middle is messy, especially in a world that has become increasingly complex and socially fragmented, where truth has become secondary to position and our institutions have failed to deliver as promised. Us middlers, like the decent people in Jeruselum before the fall, get caught in the crossfire. The zealous fools think we are “sheeple” for not joining their revolution of idiots. Meanwhile, the tools dismiss us as fools, with an indignant snort, because we dare to suggest that there’s another way to look at the facts and go against the narrative that they now accept as Gospel truth—until their masters tell them to believe something else. The middlers get that even experts and government agencies get things wrong, that experts don’t always agree and that’s not always a conspiracy or nefarious plot, it is just the reality of the world we are in.

It is hard to be in the middle. We suffer the excesses inflicted upon us by both extremes. We put up with the condescending tools and try to ignore the obnoxious fools. We aren’t always right ourselves, finding the truth can be a messy business, and being caught between two sides fighting for narrative control can be exhausting. It takes more work to maintain some independence in a world that has become increasingly polarized. It means standing up to both sides and also recognizing our own blind spots as well. We have been tools and fools ourselves, on occasion, and therefore try to stay humble.