Pride Comes Before the Fall

   

 Pride goes before destruction,

    a haughty spirit before a fall.

-- Proverbs 16:18

While I was listening to the Adam Carolla podcast the other night, Adam was telling the story of how his good buddy (and long-time radio show/podcast co-host) Dr. Drew had recently gotten a strike against his YouTube account for a video he made about COVID. This video apparently broke YouTube’s rules about “medical misinformation” and they had to promptly delete the video. Dr. Drew is now essentially under probation and if he posts any more videos that break YouTube’s “medical misinformation” rules, he will get two strikes on his account. After three strikes? Well, his entire YouTube channel will be terminated.

What, exactly, was this forbidden video about? Nothing incendiary: just a few doctors talking about COVID treatments. Not only is Dr. Drew a board-certified physician, but he also just had COVID and wanted to talk about what he learned from the virus. Apparently, at some point in the video, one of the doctors must have said something that is not quite in line with what the World Health Organization says and, according to YouTube, any medical information that goes against what the WHO says is deemed “medical misinformation”. So, if a doctor, for example, wanted to talk about, say, Vitamin D or Zinc or Vitamin C or Vitamin A as being beneficial supplements for a COVID prophylactic and/or therapy, that could be deemed medical misinformation. In other words, there is hardly any room for alternative discussion, alternative ideas, alternative prophylactics, alternative treatments, alternative anything. YouTube says that what the WHO says is gospel. And that’s the key word here: gospel, because YouTube is basically playing God. Let me explain what I mean by that:

Dr. Drew’s censored video is just one example of an ongoing trend today where Big Tech companies like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Google are all trying to control information, which is another way of saying they’re all trying to control what is and isn’t truth, which is, in turn, another way of saying they’re trying to play God.

Indeed, all these Big Tech companies are guilty of committing one of the deadliest of the seven deadly sins: that of Pride, or Hubris—whatever you’d like to call it. You’re guilty of pride when you’re trying to play God and it’s not an overstatement to say that this is exactly what is happening in the Big Tech world right now. Companies like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google etc. are bursting at the seams with hubris.

Now, their excuse, of course, is that their efforts to control information, mainly through censorship, are well-intentioned. It’s being done in the name of squelching misinformation or hate speech or speech that may incite violence or that kind of thing. But it’s all bullshit. What we are seeing is fascism rearing its ugly head in America and what is fascism but Pride, pure and simple. It’s PRIDE.

But, yes, fascism has to be sneaky, especially since it wasn’t really that long ago since it last reared its ugly head in Germany. This time around, it has to disguise itself as being…well, a good thing; otherwise, everybody would be able to immediately see it for what it is. So, it talks a big game about trying to stop misinformation, hate speech, government insurrection, violence and what-have-you, or, in other words, it tries to convince people that it is an anti-fascist movement when, in fact, it is the exact opposite: fascist.

So that’s the deal. What we are witnessing today is a censorship movement that claims to be an attempt to weed out all the evil in the world but this movement is, in fact, the evil itself. That’s right: this is not exaggeration. It’s time we call this movement out for what it actually is and that is pure hubris, an arrogant display of the Sin of Pride and, thus, evil.

But never fear. One shouldn’t get too upset about all this, because, if history is any indication, Pride always comes before the Fall. We saw this with Icarus who flew too close to the sun and got his wings burnt. We saw this with Adam and Eve who ate from the tree of Forbidden Knowledge. We saw it with Oedipus, Dr. Faustus, Dr. Frankenstein, Napoleon, Hitler…heck, we saw it with Satan himself. There is no doubt in my mind that this egregious assault on free speech done under the guise of controlling dangerous “misinformation” will result in the fall of the Big Tech companies and also the fall of those politicians and so-called “journalists” and pundits and corporations and universities who are enabling or even outright cheerleading these companies. Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube…they’re bursting at the seams with hubris at the moment, but they are all going to fall soon enough. One way or another, their days of possessing so much concentrated power—near-monopolistic power—are numbered. As we have learned from history, such hubris has never been able to sustain itself for very long and this will be yet another example for the history books.

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MATT BURNS is the author of THE BURNZO PAPERS: Selected Articles & Essays and also the novels JOHNNY CRUISE, THE WOMAN AND THE DRAGON and WEIRD MONSTER. In addition, he’s published a memoir called GARAGE MOVIE: MY ADVENTURES MAKING WEIRD FILMS. Check out these books (and many more) on his Amazon author page HERE.