Many have compared the world as depicted in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four to observations of society in this modern era. Perhaps a few more have been made recently during this plandemic.
The imposition to wear a face mask in some parts of the world as a means of psychological conditioning and control (in many aspects) seems obvious to me. It’s the first thing that came to mind. Initially, the possibility that it also is a sort of ritual symbolism did not immediately occur to me, but the two go together.
In any case, the below from Nineteen Eighty-Four is interesting.
It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.
One would think the face mask helps hide any “improper expression”, thereby help hide facecrime as described above. There is that advantage. (And here, I am not dismissing the science behind the potential benefits or harm of wearing face masks. There are arguments for either way.) But setting aside that the technology exists to interpolate facial features (and probably expressions) covered by a mask, what if wearing or not wearing a mask is in itself an “expression” or a “suggestion of abnormality”? I just get the mild impression that some consider not wearing a mask is a facecrime.
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