Advantage: Realist

Face Masks (the panacea effect)

Three points of entry for a pathogen: mouth, nose, and eyes. Observe the preponderance, however, sporting masks with the hope they’ll avoid being stricken, oblivious to the third entry point. Reason: the programmers haven’t supplied the input to faithless automatons that do not recognize personal, independent analysis.

As one fitly exhales through a mask, one also inhales. The simple hope is that the mask will prevent dangerous airborne particles, and only salubrious, pristine air will penetrate. Inexplicable.

Prevailing duplications refuse the influence of empirical evidence because, like the central governing authority they look up to (like offspring to parents) they’re blinded by prejudice. What the controllers impart, whether right or wrong, reigns supreme. Rationale: banished to the recesses of one’s mind for fear of taking a contrary stand against a mortal mob. Fear of a mortal pathogen is indeed secondary. Masks, therefore, soothe one’s conscience amid misbehavior.

Crystal Gazing (crystal screens great and small)

Tell-a-visions and mobile phones occupy the minds of children and childlike grown-ups (grown-ups proving the science of extended adolescence). Both parties wallow in entertainment and share the view that beyond primitive essentials there is little else to contemplate. While masses frolic, officials fully engage in substantive, cerebral matters that remain lost on the enjoyers of stylish crystal balls—which inspire through luminous visions.

Denouement

Parlous medical injections, the mobile phone mania, and the TV craze (TVs outnumber inhabitants in an average household) are not for patricians. Rather, the credulous plebeian class that, by its extravagance, sanctions aristocrats.

Political leaders (political in the broadest sense) are at least actively involved in shaping the world. Contrasted with disreputable propagations composing the hoi polloi spouting their political opinions. Yet, a sober view comes from pondering what reputable people actuating levers of control think of those within the mass.