The Coming Lockdown Reckoning
Introduction
This essay articulates the growing scepticism which has come to define my position with respect to a number of political agendas seeking to mobilise large numbers of people to action. There is, I would argue, always a need to be sceptical, and critical, with respect to various claims and platforms being advanced in politics. People who engage in politics are always seeking to move people in some particular way, resorting to dubious means of persuasion and even coercion, often in the name of truth, moral, religious, scientific, the lot.
The events of the past couple of years has started to make people wonder whether they are being told the told, most especially by those who are most insistent that they are telling the truth. ‘The truth will set you free,’ said Jesus Christ. But there is little freedom in the contemporary wave of truth-telling. Instead, truth is being told to pressurize, bully, intimidate, and compel people into actions they would not normally take by their own free will and choice. Such truth has more the character of propaganda in being fine-tuned to reach people in the gut instinct beneath reason and intellect. It is truth, but not as we know it.
My work since the 1990s has been organised under the heading of ‘rational freedom.’ The arguments I advance are premised on the view of human beings as intelligent, thinking beings capable of exercising reason to determine right action. That anthropological and democratic optimism is something that those seeking to move and manipulate behaviour in the contemporary world do not share. Means of communication and persuasion that ought to be attuned to the common moral reason are instead being perverted and supplanted by means of control and manipulation, with people armed with ‘truth’ seeking to drive behaviour externally, at a remove from people. Instead of being treated as active, informed, and responsible citizens of a democratic public, people are being subject to a psychic manipulation through the relentless application of fear. This is one truth that is at least out. In A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic Laura Dodsworth details the extent to which fear has become a virus unleashed and used quite deliberately for political ends. I haven’t read the book, so my observations are my own. In fact, my experience of the government ‘nudge’ units which Dodsworth critically examines goes back to what must have been their first appearance in 2010. At that time I was part of a group of long-term unemployed, people looking for employment which fitted their qualifications and professional experience. Such people found themselves confined within offices in Liverpool subject to the manipulations and machinations of A4E. This group of people included PhDs, engineers, mathematicians, project managers, biochemists, linguists, people with a range of talents, abilities, and achievements. They just couldn’t find the employment to meet their high expectations. The job of the people working for A4E was to get such people to lower their expectations and ‘accept’ whatever employment was available. The members of this group had thought that they would receive help to find the right employment. That was the reason I was there, seeking teaching hours to finalise my MA Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. I and these others received zero help in attaining our career objectives. Instead, the members of the group were subjected to an attritional strategy designed to break down their spirit and depress their expectations. I saw people being ‘advised,’ as in pressured, into ‘dumbing down’ their CVs. I saw people having to write papers in which they identified the internal ‘barriers to work’ that they were raising, effectively making public confession of their sins of unemployment. It was made clear that nothing could/would be done about external barriers. The fault for unemployment was placed squarely on the individual. This was all about breaking people down and rendering them complicit. The quite explicit aim of this strategy was to force people into taking whatever work was available on whatever terms it was offered. And pressure was exerted to inculcate a feeling of hopelessness, making resistance appear futile until people just submitted. I was present when the group were told that they should clean toilets if they had to. That group included someone who had worked as a project manager in Saudi Arabia, a mathematician who was one of those who developed the JavaScript programme at Bath University, a biochemist, and an IT specialist. Behind the application of psychic force was ‘nudge’ theory. I read up on it and found that the unemployed were being subject to a grotesque experiment to determine the effectiveness of targeted psychological pressure to change behaviour. I was present at the birth of ‘nudge’ and saw its cynicism, its inhumanity, and its miserable consequences first hand. Most of all I saw the extent to which the strategy is premised on the worst that life and people can be, reaching low in order to push human beings into acting low.
A decade on, and nudge tactics pioneered on the poor and the powerless are now being applied to the population at large. Governments across the west are employing nudge units to design ways to get masses of people moving in the directions our leaders wants. This involves the use of psychological techniques to move, shape, and manipulate the behaviour of people.
There are a number of things to note about this psychic manipulation.
The first thing to note is that the approach proceeds by way of external force and pressure. This is engineering rather than a genuine politics. Politics in its ancient definition concerns creative human self-realisation, involving a search for the regimen of the human good. Importantly, as rational and social beings, human beings are active agents in the search for the good life. Human beings are conceived to be knowledgeable, moral, and intelligent agents of their own self-actualisation, something that they pursue in concert with others as social beings. As Aristotle argued, the human being is a ‘politikon zoon,’ a socio-political animal who requires a public life in order to complete his/her humanity. The process of self-actualisation is internal, involving the creation of a eudaimonistic habitus in which the right character traits are developed and the virtues acquired and exercised within appropriate modes of conduct. This socio-ethical infrastructure within an overarching and authoritative moral framework is precisely what I have argued for in my work on ‘rational freedom.’ The argument is premised on the cultivation of the inner motives so that virtuous action is able to take place within right relationships. As a result, human beings do as they ought because it is the right thing to do, not because they have been persuaded by a wealth of right reasons, still less because they have been pressured. It really is an old lesson – the less internal agency and inner motive power there is, morally and socially, the greater the resort to external force. That, I would argue, is the situation a world that exists ‘after virtue’ (MacIntyre) finds itself in. I argue strongly for the recovery of character, conduct, and virtue, small-scale practical reasoning which builds upwards from proximal relations, building a sense of responsibility and ownership from below, fostering agency on the part of citizens. In the absence of this there can only be external force. Instead of agency, there is psychic manipulation; instead of practicable visions of constructive change, there is fear and threat of dystopia. Fear is an effective tool of political control and manipulation, one that ruling classes and would-be ruling classes have employed throughout history. There is no mystery as to why those seeking a direct route to their political ends should resort to fear: “No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as does fear.” (Edmund Burke).
The deliberate employment of fear as a tool of political management and manipulation constitutes a major threat to democracy, undermining as it the notion of members of the demos as reasoning and intelligent beings. Every crisis, real, invented, or exaggerated) is pitched at extremes to pressurize people into an immediate and unthinking response, taking a course of action that has already been determined by the architects of fear. Be careful of all those who seek to control you through the amygdala!
The populace is being terrified by a succession of crises and catastrophes. Every day a disaster and a prediction of doom to come. The test-effect of Covid has been to expose the unsustainability of the politics of fear. Citizens and the social and psychic fabric are being tested to destruction. Should the pandemic run out of steam, should people cease to be terrified by way of Covid fatigue, it seems we can be expected to be terrified into compliance by another threat. War and external aggression is always fit for such a purpose. I was brought up to expect the nuclear war that was always around the corner, having the 1965 film The War Game inflicted on us at school. I remember the warnings of acid rain, too, at school. Always there is something available with which to terrify and terrorize people into concern and complicity. The assumption is that people cannot come to see the light by way of their own agency but must always be educated/ indoctrinated.
Having had a lifetime of this, seeing the external pressures being pushed to extreme, thinking people are entitled to wonder if it really is the case that we are livening in the worst of times. This is another point to note about the psychic manipulation. The negativity driving psychic manipulation is destroying the very hope and confidence which civilisation needs to sustain and reproduce itself. We are hearing more and more reports of young people deciding not to have children on account of the future being so bleak. This is death before the fact, a self-fulfilling prophecy. That people are drawing these conclusions at a time when people are healthier, wealthier, better educated, and longer lived than at any time in history underlines the debilitating consequences of the psycho-politics of fear. And that leads to another observation: this is all a very low politics born of the absence of a genuine politics and a genuine connection to people. There is no internal connection, either at the level of character, virtues, social relations and practices or with respect to popular support. The cynical and manipulative approach, the approach which turns education into indoctrination, comes entirely from above and from the outside in being entirely lacking in inner motive power and connection. It is the very antithesis of my work in ‘rational freedom’ and I am calling it out. And I am calling it out in light of a quarter of a century spent in the environmental movement. I am not calling out the environmental crisis as a hoax, because it isn’t. I am calling out the way that the dominant mode of environmentalism does politics.
COVID AND LOCKDOWN
When the Covid virus struck, democratically elected governments opted for safety first in face of the unknown. It may have been prudence, but in retrospect it looks more like panic. Aided and abetted by their preferred scientific advisers, and ignoring and marginalising contrary voices, these governments abandoned their long prepared plans for dealing with a pandemic and instead opted in favour of the Chinese model of totalitarian control. Being charitable, we may be inclined to see this as the result of a panic born of the sense that current plans may well have been inadequate to the scale of the coming – unknown - challenge. If you fear the worst you tend to act for the worst. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. Had authoritarian rule been the objective of politicians all along, then they would have acted more decisively and effectively than this. The temper of politics is judicious, and it is apparent that we are dealing with huge judgement calls in face of a global threat of unknown proportions. So I am not going to condemn with the benefit of hindsight. I remember well the difficulties of making decisions under the pressure of uncertain events as they unfolded. I myself argued in favour of Lockdown and was critical of the US and UK governments for locking down too late and too weakly. That was my judgement call in light of scientific evidence and advice, that advice and evidence that was presented most prominently through government and media as well as ‘friends’ on social media, that is … Beware the perils of propaganda, political loyalty, and groupthink. And pay attention to contrary voices.
I had a terrible row with a US friend who argued for personal responsibility, hygiene, common sense, and minimal government. I accused him of having blood on his hands. Having consulted only the same sources I had convinced myself that the weight of evidence was on the side of those arguing for Lockdown. Without dialogue and debate, you tend to read the same thing day after day to confirm your bias. Not that I was ever keen on lockdown. Early on I was mildly reprimanded for having a blasé attitude towards social contact, celebrating my encounters with folk in the local community. I declared that I refused to live in fear. Then news from Italy started to pour in. It was a time for some hard thinking. I argued for lockdown. Even with hindsight I am not sure I would argue differently, at least in the first months to buy time to find a vaccine.
In my defence, I was living alone in the ‘at risk’ category, with two chronic illnesses. If the experts were right – the most prominent experts with the greatest public voice – then it seemed that I faced the likelihood of death in the near future. Chronic illness is itself a slow death sentence. Covid brought home the precariousness of my situation. In my isolation and my vulnerability, I was subjected to a daily dose of doom and death via the news, as were all other people. This strategy was designed to instil fear in people in order to ensure their compliance. The assumption was that people are unthinking children to be terrorised into doing the right thing, not adults who can be reasoned with and persuaded to do the right thing. Right here, from the very start, we see the anthropological and democratic pessimism that lies at the heart of policy- and decision-making, a pessimism that ought immediately to have our alarm bells ringing on red alert.
In addition to groupthink, the pressure of group loyalty was also at work. I was proud of my little job and the ‘key worker’ status it brought. I was working in my local community door-to-door, receiving the thanks and praise of ‘ordinary’ people under siege. People were pleased to see me. That encouraged solidaristic feelings between us. We were all in this together, supporting one another for the duration, however long that would be. It was long. In fact, it was a lot longer than anyone could have imagined in the early months of 2020. Once was more than enough.
During the first Lockdown, I turned on people who persisted in asking awkward questions. Such people struck me as not merely contrarians with a legitimate point to make, but anti-government ideologues who rejected Covid policies for the same reason that they rejected climate policies, because they entailed substantial government intervention and expenditure. Such people had a vested political interest in always minimising government intervention on each and every question, from the economy to the environment. They were not trustworthy, in that their argument is the same on every question. To them, collectivism is socialism and is therefore to be opposed. I therefore suspected their political motives and presumed that their contrarian positions were based not on reason and evidence but on politics. That caused me to identify with the advocates of Lockdown all the more.
In truth, I had fallen into the very trap of libertarianism and collectivism that I constantly seek to spring. The extent to which I missed what contrarian voices were trying to say from the first indicates the extent to which I had joined the cultists, the loyalists, and the authoritarians. I had succumbed to making choices in a world of false oppositions, presuming that if one side is wrong then the other side must be right. There is a feeling of safety in numbers which can be quite reassuring when you are alone and isolated. Join with others in a cause and you have a community in a flash. If it’s hard to be alone, it is harder still to stand alone against others you have been inclined to think as being on your side. Through political allegiance, I was committing the classic errors associated with groupthink. I had thought that I was in good company with like-minded others. But such people are not your friends at all. I have found that if you dare question, criticise, or deviate slightly from, or merely refuse to parrot the narrative, you quickly find that other members of the group become much less friendly than they have been. Their allegiance is not to your but to the narrative embodied and expressed by the group. Your value to the group is as a supporter and follower of the narrative, not someone with an independent view and creative input into that narrative. Dare question and criticise and you will find yourself treated as a pariah and heretic, as someone to shun and/or abuse. When I was called a ‘pretentious little fraud’ I took the decision to cease commenting on social media. I have zero interest in arguing with people who don’t listen. And I don’t take abuse from anyone. I left people to their toxic environment, where ‘tiny majorities’ persuade themselves daily of their fundamentally correct views on everything. That is how so many people become complicit in error. I drop hints and offer reasons in an attempt to persuade, and people either ignore or abuse because it doesn’t fit what they know. I can better use that time and energy indulging my passions and pleasures.
When I am wrong I will admit it, for the reason that it is better to live in truth than to try to live in falsehood. And it is better to be alone on the outside than be a party to error and wishful thinking on the inside, not least when that thinking is born of neurosis.
In locking people and society down, governments were aided and abetted by their preferred scientific advisers and the mainstream media. I have no grounds for thinking this was planned. (I have to keep denying the merest hints of conspiracy here given the tendency of so many so discomforted by awkward questions to dismiss those asking questions as conspiracy theorists). The response was too chaotic and too incompetent for it to have been planned. This was not a Plan B that had been hidden behind closed doors. What we do know – or ought to know – is that government possesses an inherent institutional urge to accumulate power to itself and retain it. Should any opportunity arise for the extension of power, then government will take it, not least when politicians are under pressure on a whole range of issues without apparent resolution. The politicians took it, and the combination of threat, fear, science, facts and figures, and media was something that members of the public couldn’t resist in their passivity and isolation. This is how ‘necessity’ works in politics. Indeed, in no time at all members of the public were policing and pressuring the behaviours of one another in order to ensure compliance. People expressed outrage that others weren’t wearing their masks properly! And the scientific basis showing the efficacy of masks was? Not for debate. I never failed to wear the mask in public, even when working outdoors, to reassure others that I and the goods I brought were clean and safe. But I was always interested to know the evidence in support of masks. I like to ask questions. It concerned me that people were more inclined to obey than seek reasons for just and right obedience. People presumed it. Authoritarian politics above moulded an authoritarian personality below, or maybe just encouraged people to find their own inner fascist and bring it out in public, for the health and safety of each and all, of course.
The democratically elected representatives of the people helped themselves to powers that are unprecedented in peacetime. This involved a worrying curtailment of liberties. The tax-paying, law-abiding members of the public were expected to carry on paying their taxes – soon to be increased to pay for this hugely expensive operation – and to carry on obeying the increasingly draconian law, whilst having less and less say in the policy-making and law-making, which had now become the exclusive preserve of the experts. This is not democracy, this is autocracy and technocracy, with the legitimacy of public voice being conditional on the possession of certification in the right areas. Note how many people demand to know the credentials and qualifications of people who dare raise their voices in debate. You don’t need to be certified to be a citizen. This is the silencing of the democratic voice. The irony is that the people who ask for expertise tend only to cite those experts whose expertise backs their already formed views. Funny that.
Very early on in lockdown someone warned me that the authorities will use this as a ‘dry run’ for climate Lockdown. And, sure enough, we are now seeing voices from within the environmental movement arguing for the suspension of liberal democracy under a climate lockdown (there is a paper by Ross Mittiga for one). Never waste a crisis. And if you don’t have a crisis, engineer one and ride the fear train to town. This gives us some inkling of what those climate campaigners demanding a ‘world war II style mobilisation’ have in mind when seeking to refashion the political under the sign of ecological necessity. We should be following the science after all, at least the science of the preferred scientists whose facts and figures fit a pre-determined (non-)political agenda. (Excuse my sarcasm, but I am leery of people who do politics by way of science as proxy. And I loathe those who employ fear as a tool of motivation. It always tends to authoritarian forms).
The result of this approach is that governments have acquired a range of powers over people that might give would-be universal despots very excited dreams. There are far too many would-be despots amongst us, constantly doing democracy down, constantly running people down. Human beings are too selfish and too stupid to take the actions needed, they neither know nor care. The people who say this don’t have much connection at all with people. Geeks, obsessives, and neurotics doing politics turns ugly and undemocratic very quickly.
But it’s all about saving people and is therefore an unarguable and unquestionable good. Public safety is the overriding concern of the guardians of the public good. Would you trust them with absolute power?
I would caution people to pay attention not merely to problems and solutions but also to process. Time and again people who seek to advance the right ends come are let down by bad process. Whatever the impatience to get things done, things have to be done well. People who think they know the problem and think they know the solution are impatient to get things done. They therefore pay scant attention to process, persuasion, consent, mediation. We can take it as read that anyone who enters politics and undertakes political campaigning does so because they feel that their cause is right and just, and is an expression of truth as against falsehood. They believe, in short, that their ends are right and rational, something which can lead them to ignore the political testing bench. The truth or otherwise of their claims is to be determined in debate with others in light of a check against reality. The problem now is that so many are so convinced of the rightness of their cause, in seemingly being backed by a wealth of science, evidence, and logic, that they feel justified in dispensing with the right means bringing us to the right ends. This is the fatal conceit. Once means and ends part company, the bad means will always come sooner or later to be so enlarged as to supplant ends. The means always need to be the ends in the process of becoming. The lesson is that bad process will always turn and bite you on the backside. Ideologues and activists are in a world of their own. We cannot take their claims to truth at face value. We see this time and again when activists are asked as to why they are engaging in public obstruction. Because they are so ‘convinced’ and so ‘passionate,’ comes the reply. Fanatics and extremists committed to any cause would say precisely the same. It’s not an argument. And it is bad process. Because fanatics and extremists committed to some very dubious causes could do precisely the same in circumventing democratic norms. There is a presumption that activists are on the side of the angels. Sweet.
With the craven complicity of the political classes (of all persuasions), media, and the most vocal members of the public on social media, governments drafted and passed hugely invasive laws with nary a sign of debate and discussion. The truth was asserted, deemed as being of such overriding importance as to brook no opposition. Critics were shouted down, abused, marginalised, and silenced. Before we knew where we were going we were there, locked down in a dystopia in which social isolation replaced socialisation.
It was a few months after the Covid outbreak that people started to question the confinement and conformity. A natural reaction against the stress of lockdown on the part of people explained this in part, but there were certain other anomalies and outstanding questions that had started to provoke scepticism and even criticism. The truth started to appear much less clear than we had been told, a truth that those looking the right way from the start claimed to have been obvious. Grounds for scepticism were provoked all the more by seeing the way that lockdown authorities and advocates doubled down on authoritarian imposition and the silencing of contrary voices the more they came under pressure. It is well nigh certain that people seek to silence others do so because they know fine well that their views and policies cannot withstand the light of critical reason. Whenever you see such keenness to silence and suppress then you can be sure that someone is trying to cover something.
The price of Lockdown has been high, and one that has been paid by some people much more than others. Those who have been most keen among the lockdown advocates and adherents are, I would suggest, those who live comfortably at some safe remove from the pressures of social existence. People with guaranteed incomes, people who are able to work from home, people, indeed, who have a home that is safe and secure, the well-off and well-connected generally. Such people live at a safe remove from the pressures of life and so can be enthusiastic about policies that destroy the social economy and local economy, destroy livelihoods, separate people from one another, and endanger the mental and physical health of countless numbers of people. That’s not a reality that they are a part of. That’s the reality that never shows up in the facts and figures of preferred scientists and in the narrative being promoted. The health and well-being of people has been sacrificed as a result of the myopic obsession with one health issue among many such issues. And by ‘health’ here, I mean social and economic health as well as physical and mental health. All of these things are of immediate and personal concern to me, as a result of having to confront issues of physical and mental health (two chronic conditions plus constant anxiety as a result of an only recently diagnosed ASC), family bereavement, (loss of) employment, (uncertain) income and (uncertain) housing. During this time I have been in dire and desperate need of social connection. I was attending anxiety classes at the local Adult Community Learning centre in the weeks before the Covid outbreak. Classes were cancelled and much more besides. Society was shut down, locking me into isolation at precisely the time I needed to reach out into the world in order to start resolving my many and mounting life problems. I have been confronted by an impossible set of circumstances, any one of which would have been enough to floor most other people. It was pressures arising from personal experience that caused me to break rank and start to question the narrative and all those who advance it. Surviving this might prove to be my greatest ever achievement.
I soon found that there were any number of not merely contrary but informed voices pointing out how wrong Covid lockdown was. Some had been arguing this from the first, others had come to draw this conclusion from experience. The anti-government ideologues are in there, of course. Such people argue out of an ideological predisposition towards small and limited government. I trust them as little as I trust those who argue ‘big government’ as the solution to every problem. But I learned the lesson not to believe that the opposite of what political opponents hold must be true. And in this instance at least, their scepticism of government has proven its worth. We have been party to a power grab in which the health and welfare of many has been sacrificed, for the greater good, of course. I am one of those who can be counted among the collateral damage, those whose lives are deemed to be ephemeral, and whose destruction is a price worth paying. I observe the extent to which those who are most vociferous in arguing for lockdown and for ‘following the science’ are also the ones who are most insistent on extensive and expensive climate programmes. And I am left concluding that such people would be more than happy to write off inconvenient people such as I as so much collateral damage in the cause of the greater environmental good. When asked to sacrifice myself to ‘save the planet’ I say, forthrightly, that I could care less for a Nature that cares nothing for me, and care even less for people who appropriate necessity to themselves in order to order and organise disposable others, and to decide who gets to die first.
Somewhere in the months of 2020 the scales dropped from my eyes. When you have seen the emperor without clothes, those clothes can never go back on.
When I looked, I discovered an interesting spectrum of dissenting voices, people of all political persuasions and none. I still seek to spring the trap of the libertarianism-authoritarianism/collectivism antithesis. I am not swinging from one position (authoritarianism/collectivism) to the other (libertarianism) and reject both sides as twin poles of the same false ontology. The voices worth paying the most attention to lie outside of the political fight, the scientists and medical professionals, particularly those with both expertise and experience in the area of respiratory viruses. That those people exist makes it clear that there is no such thing as the one homogenous science with a unitary voice. From the start, such people had sought to expose and to explain the wrongheadedness of much that was being done in the name of public health and science. These people made it clear that there were other options, ones which required less government intervention and expenditure and which inflicted much less damage on the social ecology and economy. From the first there were voices who said that a virus will do what a virus will always do and that when the final scores are totted up at the end different regimes will record more or less the same figures, given a like-for-like comparison. But some will have spent a lot more money than others and curtailed a lot more liberties and unravelled more social bonds in the process. There needs to be a reckoning to prevent errors being made in the future; there needs to be a reaction to nip the tendencies towards eco-authoritarianism in the bud. ‘Necessity’ is not an argument.
I don’t envy the politicians who had – and who will always have – the responsibility of making judgements and decisions without full knowledge and in the context of having to balance a range of issues. I argued for lockdown and criticised those who argued against it. And I got on with my job in the local community, all people pulling together as one with a view to coming out the other side. This was my position in the first couple of months – let’s keep together and get through lockdown. Some day soon, lockdown would come to an end.
One thing that has now become very clear is the extent to which science and scientists can inform and advise but not determine policy. Politics is and will always be a matter of judgement when it comes to weighing up a range of issues and priorities in light of often contrary advice. Not only is science unable in itself to decide policy, it is itself divided, with the result that expertise is not one homogeneous body dictating policy. Always with respect to science there is a need for judgement and selection, going with those who seem the most plausible and hoping that the outliers are not the geniuses who change history. Politics is dissensus and debate, something more than swapping preferred experts.
There are some big lessons of enduring importance here. ‘The science’ – science as authority - has had a bad Covid, with it now becoming clear that many Covid regimes and approaches are possible on the basis of scientific information and advice. The selection of which science and which scientist to follow is always and can only ever be a judgement call, and it is wise to be cautious of all those who claim certainty and authority here. This is politics, not science, and those who seek to advance political agendas by way of science as authoritative voice have had a very bad Covid. Those who are now eagerly presenting the Covid lockdown regime as a model for climate action need to reassess and quickly. They are seeing only what they want to see. ‘Never again,’ increasing numbers of people are saying. If you are entertaining hopes for a climate regime modelled on Covid lockdown then you are going to be disappointed. One thing that Covid lockdown has proven is that such a regime can only be maintained over any significant period of time by fear, by division, and by subjecting society to an impossible psychic and fiscal stress. The cost is unsustainable. And bear in mind that climate change will be with us not for a year or two but for a very long while indeed. The idea that a permanent climate lockdown is possible is the purest fantasy. An entirely different model of climate action is required, unless people really do intend outright authoritarian imposition, the health, happiness, and liberty of people be damned.
The penny started to drop with me that something was amiss when I started to notice a number of anomalies. Questions were increasingly being asked but never answered, merely rationalised away. What finally did it for me was the hideous spectacle of so many people who were Lockdown enthusiasts, insisting that people stay in their boxes, cheering on the demonstrations that erupted in the wake of the death of George Floyd. They either turned blind eye to or openly justified the violence and destruction, too. Hypocrites one and all. In their self-righteousness, they lost sight of consistency. Those who were the most keen impose laws and edicts on others reserved the right not to obey them themselves. They asserted some issues – their favoured political causes – to be exceptional. Such people cede from the society of mere mortals in order to be better able to order and organise it. The double-standards were breath-taking, the complete lack of awareness shown by these people even more so. I was left wondering the political company I had been keeping all these years. I shared certain ends in common with these people, but absolutely nothing with respect to means, approaches, attitudes, and actions. They were so authoritarian in the imposition and enforcement of draconian law on the one hand, and so anarchic in breaking laws when it came to their own pet causes on the other. I wouldn’t trust such people with an ounce of power, they are out and out authoritarians who like to get their way. They pay no attention to others. The effect was like the shattering of a mirror. In looking at others I had been seeing something of myself, thinking that they shared or were amenable to my views. Not a bit of it! With the shattering of the glass I came to see that I had nothing in common with such people. I observed a consistency between means and ends that others didn’t. I had denounced people for being anti-lockdown, feeling a certain safety in the numbers of lockdown enthusiasts who, armed with ‘the science,’ seemed surely to be right. I then saw these self-same enthusiasts eagerly supporting those out on the streets and protesting, or being out there with them. The rules applied to others, but not to them as the elect, the chosen people, the righteous who could do as they please and rationalise anomalies away after the fact. They claimed to be ‘responsible’ demonstrators, maintaining distance and wearing masks. Please! I was reminded of the truth of Robert Heinlein’s adage: ‘Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.’ I was in the company of rationalizers. Rather than trust any of these again and be misled into error by way of misplaced loyalty – a loyalty that has never been reciprocated – I prefer to go alone.
Apart from the hypocrisy at the level of actions, I also noticed many errors and falsehoods. I certainly noticed the tendency to employ science as authority and use pressure and fear as tools to coerce and maintain conformity on the part of the people. I noticed, too, a negative perceptions bias that was more virulent than the virus itself. One character I knew to be most insistent on science to the exclusion of everything else shot down in flames the suggestion that a vaccine would soon be available. He was most adamant that there was no vaccine in the pipeline, and not for a very long time. I thought that a vaccine was being developed but, not being an expert, deferred to his seemingly well-informed view. ‘Nice idea,’ he said, but it’s not going to happen. Lockdown, he insisted, should be kept in place for the foreseeable future. He was wrong. He was badly wrong. A vaccine appeared almost immediately. Wherever he was speaking from, it wasn’t science, reason, and evidence. It became clear to me that many of those speaking the most loudly in favour of science guiding policy and politics are little more than doomsters, neurotics, and autocrats who think that their bed-wetting constitutes a cogent argument. It doesn’t. I will defer to science and fact, but will never yield to others’ fear dressed up as necessity. And I don’t think I am alone in this. There are still many who, in the grip of fear, have been traumatised into becoming complicit and compliant authoritarians. There are many others who are rejecting the ecology of fear. Never again will people be so inclined to accept at face value the claims of those who claim that their arguments are based on sound science. Which science? Which scientists? Alternate views are possible. And none of them are ethically and politically decisive. I will defer to science and fact as science and fact, but not as ethics and politics.
The point applies generally. We should always be suspicious of those who rather than answer the questions of others choose to shout them down, ridicule, shame, humiliate, and even ruin them. Those who act in such a way seem to be somewhat less than confident in the truth of their positions.
The issue is, however, instructive and worthy of lengthy comment. The idea being put forward was not merely one of developing a vaccine but distributing it so that poorer nations would not be excluded. ‘Nice idea,’ my scientist friend declared, whilst denying the possibility of a vaccine in the near future. He was wrong on the vaccine but unwittingly right with respect to the impossibilities of the ‘nice idea’ of a global egalitarianism. That criticism extends to the global idealism that lies at the core of the dominant strain of environmentalism demanding climate action, which is effectively a call for an international reformism. The approach is hopelessly idealistic in being an attempt to override the realities of geopolitics. The reformers present a globalist ideal premised on a more equitable distribution of resources in time of emergency and demand the creation of a legally enforceable mechanism to it. They argue as if the whole dynamic of global institutions and power can be overlooked. This doesn’t solve the problem so much as avoid it. Which is to say that it is no solution at all, merely a pretence that could pave the way for much less than ideal forces. Global institutions and bodies don’t have anything that the world’s strongest powers need, with the result that those powers tend to ignore them and treat them with disdain and contempt. Of course, the role that these bodies and institutions perform is to try to constrain the great powers in the service of the global good, which effectively means in the interests of smaller and poorer countries. This is the assertion of the ideal over the real and is doomed to failure precisely on account of lacking in reality. The great powers have no interest in being constrained in the interests of others and have the power to resist such constraint. The smaller and poorer countries are, of course, in favour of a rule-based global system that gives all countries equal weight, but lack the power to bring that system about. These asymmetries in power relations lie at the heart of the entire dynamic, and nice ideas concerning a global egalitarianism with justice cut no ice here. Such ideas are either a waste of time and energy, drawing attention away from hard political realities, or may serve as a cover and a rationalisation of a globalism which entrenches and extends power imbalances. Idealism notwithstanding, any global climate treaty, like any pandemic agreement on vaccines, won’t really be about pooling the best scientific intelligence about combatting crises, but about how the richer and stronger nations who have the resources and innovate the solutions can be constrained into recognition of the common good when the crisis comes. And we ought by now to have learned that they can’t be so constrained and they won’t be. That idealism in politics dies a long and hard death, and lingers long after death, suggests that an awful lot of would-be universal reformers are bereft of real solutions. We saw it all in the Covid pandemic, with initiatives being proposed on high globalist principles, with governments paying lip service to the ideal whilst at the same time adhering to an unabashed vaccine nationalism. The people who think that because climate change is a ‘global’ problem that affects all people, therefore ‘we are all in it together,’ need to examine the fate of this idealism with respect to the pandemic, a global crisis that met with very different solutions from nation to nation.
Rather than keep pushing for something that is not going to happen, and in the process pave the way for a solution you wouldn’t want to happen, it is best to learn from experience and change tack. If you have got something to offer, that is. When idealists without power are pitted against realists with power, there can be only the one winner.
A crisis always reveals a person’s real nature. How interesting to see so many left-leaning, freedom loving, liberal democrats all enthusiastically advancing the most draconian Covid measures, pushing for more, harder, stronger, faster at every turn. The most caring and compassionate have shown themselves to be the most pious and self-righteous, and the most autocratic, happily overriding freedoms and democratic norms to follow the policies and politics of the world’s authoritarian regimes. Such people shut down the economy, destroyed local businesses, piled up debt, licence health systems to stop treating other ailments, and destroy lives. And they closed their eyes and ears to those voicing concerns.
This has cost a fortune. Debt, of course, comes with the advantage of burdening future generations with the weight of financial and economic necessity mediated by governments claiming ‘there is no alternative.’
The mask has slipped – these people have no time for democracy and freedom because they have no time for people: they are autocrats wedded to necessity. This is all performative, bad theatre, public virtue for show, and hypocrisy. It is also systematic lying.
I am not anti-vax. I am double vaccinated. My issue is not with vaccination but with compulsion. I argue for informed consent. And for personal responsibility, personal hygiene, and common sense. I look at the data. And I reject socially divisive, psychologically harmful, and economically destructive policies. The truth will out. This has been an assault on freedom and democracy, an assault that has bankrupted economies, divided societies, and undermined communities, and all to battle a virus that was bound to do what all viruses do. The scale of destruction will one day become apparent. It is no wonder that there is an attempt to turn people into a bunch of authoritarian conformists underway, because if people retain a spark of independence and critical thought they will turn with a vengeance upon all involved in this act of vandalism. Freedom, democracy, personal autonomy, freedom of speech and thought are all precious, and yet are being scorned and discarded by those concerned most of all to get their way. These people are bullies who want to turn the members of the demos into conformist cowards complicit it autocratic rule.
Politicians and governments did not, of course, act alone. A number of authorities and intermediaries have been involved, members of ‘the establishment.’ The role of the mainstream media has been the most interesting – and worrying – of all. The media has not merely been complicit but active in the spread of authoritarian rule. A compliant media is essential if authoritarian policies are to be effective. What is most interesting here is that government didn’t need to be too active in ensuring its control and manipulation of the media, but found the major news outlets and channels to be willing accomplices in the daily dissemination of propaganda. Government ‘messaging’ was designed to keep one and all in a constant state of alert.
It was rule by fear, with people groomed to listen to the daily death count and determine to keep doing as they were told. Governments, we now know, were employing psychologists in nudge units to devise ways of targeting the vulnerabilities of people in order to ‘motivate’ them into taking the right course of action. Note yet again the anthropological and democratic pessimism revealed to lie at the heart of this approach. The approach of the psychocrats is premised on the view that human beings are essentially stupid creatures driven by instinct and immediacy, not intelligent beings capable of rational thought. As a result, policy makers (and their supporters) seek action by way of coercion rather than persuasion. Rather than motivate and mobilise people around a positive agenda that could win their loyalty, inspire their effort, and warrant their obligation, there was an attempt by way of fear to stampede citizens into giving up their autonomy and power of initiative to form an unthinking herd. The fear train was fuelled up and everybody was forced on board. There was no need for government to ensure the control and manipulation of the mainstream media for the reason that the media were willing accomplices who knew their role and performed it perfectly. Being charitable, we could say that this was a state of emergency which required people to do their duty. I turned up for work as ‘key worker,’ despite being given the option of sick leave on account of being in the ‘at risk’ category. But, surely, one of the roles of journalism is to question and seek answers rather than toe the party line? The media have been faithful servants of government from first to last. The decision was taken early on that the members of the public were to be frightened out of their wits and steered in the direction of Covid compliance. Freedom and democracy were to be suspended, the economy bankrupted, and society shut down, all for the greater good. All aboard went the media, and large sections of the public so effectively persuaded, frightened, and propagandised. The result has been a damage to the social ecology and economy as well as the mental and physical health of individuals so extensive to have us wondering how much good is left.
But as soon as anyone dared to raise doubts or ask questions with respect to the reopening of society to let people socialise once more, visit family and friends, or try to save beleaguered businesses in the hospitality or other sectors, and loud voices could instantly be heard demanding a continuation of constraint. More, harder, faster: if it isn’t hurting then it isn’t working. There is an inverted pleasure principle at work here. There is a strong puritanical streak at work in all of this, a positive loathing of joy and all who have a capacity for it. The authoritarian insistence on compliance is an insistence that all share in the joyless condition. Dare break rank and you will be met with outrage and offence.
There seems to be a general neurosis that extends far beyond Covid politics. You can see the fear and neurosis at work in ‘cancel culture’ and the ‘culture wars,’ and you can see it in the endless catastrophizing of the climate crisis. With regard to the latter, it seems that the psychocrats have been at work here from the start. If you begin with the premise that human beings are stupid, self-interested creatures driven by instinct, then you will have a natural predisposition towards coercive, manipulative, and authoritarian means to push them into action as against democratic possibilities. I have spent decades arguing for a Green Republicanism premised on nurturing the associative and civic abilities of citizens. I have no doubt that the cynical will consider my view on rational freedom to be naïve. Abandon the cynicism and the anthropological pessimism, learn how freedom and democracy have advanced in history as supposedly ‘ordinary’ people grappled with the big issues of life, and you will see that my view offers the most realistic appraisal of how to solve the biggest social and environmental problems we face. But it’s an old debate between elite and democratic theory. I would just ask the elitists here that if you are right and if the only way to win this climate war is by sacrificing most that makes life worthwhile, what on Earth is the point? Anthropological pessimism is self-defeating in this instance: survival is not an end in itself, there has to be a reason to survive.
Two years on, are we any the wiser? Some are, some aren’t. It seems that the divisions opened up by Covid policy have hardened in many respects – divisions between pro- and anti- maskers and vaxxers. I’ve been vaccinated, so the abuse hurled by Lockdown authoritarians doesn’t apply to me. I wore a mask, too, without fail, even though I’ve seen no compelling evidence that it actually makes much of a difference. I complied because it makes people feel safe. Working in the local community I was concerned most of all to be a reassuring presence. I also sanitised my work equipment, materials, and products. I also worked as a steward at my local church, cleaning benches and other such hard graft. At the same time, I was horrified by the vehemence in the voices of those condemning those not wearing masks and those who were not vaccinated. It occurred to me that there was something much more than public health going on here, something deeper and more troubling. When I saw some of those among the most vehement cheering on mass demonstrations in favour of their pet causes, it became clear to me that we were in the presence of tribes, cults, and sides, in and out groups, dividing the world between us and them, the elect and the damned. And it struck me that, just as in all totalitarian states, some people were engaged in the heavy monitoring and policing of others’ behaviour. This is not healthy, this is not the right road.
Two years on and society is riven with deep divisions, between the pros and antis on questions on which universal conformity and compliance is obligatory. The approach taken was necessarily and inevitably divisive, and those divisions threaten to be with us for years to come. Most interesting to me is the division between those who are comfortably off, who are able to work from home, or were helped financially on the one hand and those who were hung out to dry. I’m in the latter group. During lockdown I received notification that I was a ‘key worker’ performing an ‘essential’ service to society. That didn’t stop me being made redundant when the financial day of reckoning came for the company I had worked ten years for. I also have a number of health issues, diagnosed as chronic. I also needed to move house. I sought help on all these things and found none. I was told that I was considered to be ‘low priority’ when it came to housing. ‘Low priority as in no priority’ I replied to the woman at the housing association who told me this. Her silence confirmed the truth of my observation. Dealing with two chronic illnesses brought on by relentless stress, itself the result of a then undiagnosed autism spectrum condition was deemed irrelevant. Worse, where once I had regular check-ups, including a diabetes review, I found that these were all ‘postponed.’ There is still no sign that they will ever be resumed. I completed two Patient Health Questionnaires in 2020, both times coming out with ‘severe depression.’ Absolutely nothing has changed, for the reason that the causes are as external as they are internal, and seemingly eternal. I don’t see a way out. As hard as I work at the things within my control, ‘events’ the result of policy decisions continue to go against me. The decisions to shut down society and close down the sites of human interaction and to turn the health service into a Covid regime could have been designed to finish me off. So pardon me if I refuse to see myself as one of the elect, one of the chosen people, the saved who reserve to themselves the right to dispose of the great unwashed as they see fit. In the context of the divisions that have been opened up, it is apparent that I am classed to be among the damned, one of Brel’s ‘Les désespérés,’ which at least affords me the advantage of being able to speak out of turn while I can. People like me have been thrown under the bus. This is apparent on Covid but, look closely, and you will see that it applies with respect to climate policy too. Jobs can go, consumption can be cut, energy prices can go through the roof, people can be plunged into energy poverty, and it is all justified for the good of the climate. And people like me, the poor, the vulnerable can go to the wall. On this at least the climate activists have been right, albeit not in the way they intended: the poor and the vulnerable will be the first and the hardest to be hit by climate crisis, and here is the austerian environmental regime to ensure that that is the case.
As for the saved, it will be the well-heeled, well-connected, and well-resourced as usual. These are the people who have been cheering on Covid lockdown. They are the same people who are vehemently anti-Brexit. What is it about unelected, bureaucratic bodies imposing policy without democratic check that these people love? They are the same people demanding ambitious climate action on the part of government. They are oblivious to the price to be paid for effective climate action because it is a price to be paid mostly by others, least of all by them.
I make these points not to argue against climate action, but to argue that any action that proceeds with a democratic deficit at its core is wide open to a revanchism against authoritarian imposition that will set environmental politics back a generation or more. Something similar happened in the aftermath of the Club of Rome and, to be blunt, environmentalists have had time enough to have learned why.
In the meantime, I am in no doubt that the climate is in far better health than I am, the same with respect to nations, societies, and economies. There is a staggering unreality about the demands for ambitious and expensive climate policies. Countries and individuals are deep in debt. People and places are struggling with their basic health. Many existing illnesses have gone without review to become worse these past two years. This certainly applies to me. Many other illnesses have gone undiagnosed, which means that people have not embarked upon the treatment that could in many cases have saved their lives. Millions of people are on NHS waiting lists in the UK. Now that it is semi-official that the NHS has become a Covid regime, do such people count anymore? Does anyone who makes Covid – or climate or anything – an overriding objective even care? People like me are collateral damage. And I reserve the right to speak out of turn. Because I am damned annoyed at the way that some so callously throw others under the bus for the ‘greater good.’ It’s the piety that irritates me more than anything else, particularly the self-sacrificing pose on the part of those who are all too keen to sacrifice others to their good/god, making no remotely similar sacrifice themselves. I’m also annoyed for the simple reason that there are much better ways of resolving problems, if only people could have more faith in human beings, more respect and less contempt. It’s a lesson that people who think themselves clever find the hardest to learn. Kant learned the lesson from Rousseau:
"I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge and a restless desire to advance in it, as well as a satisfaction in every step I take. There was a time when I thought that this alone could constitute the honor of mankind, and I despised the common man who knows nothing. Rousseau set me right. This pretended superiority vanished and I learned to respect humanity."
This is a lesson that I have sought to teach in my work and politics. I may as well have been writing in hieroglyphs. Clever people tend to think themselves so clever that others have nothing to teach them, ‘ordinary’ folk least of all. So they don’t listen. As a result, the clever miss the most obvious of things, fail spectacularly in politics, and then turn to condemn democracy for it.
I am looking at all the facts and figures of Covid policy and its consequences and I am struggling to make sense of the damage that has been wrought in the name of public health and safety. The thing that strikes me most of all is the wilful obliviousness of some people to the price to be paid for their demands, how much and by whom. It is always someone else. That obliviousness is apparent in the way that advocates and adherents presume that Covid lockdown has been such a great unqualified success as to justify a similarly extensive lockdown for the climate. Without skipping a beat, they move from Covid lockdown to a demand for a climate lockdown. The progression from one to the other is seamless. They have learned nothing; ideologues never learn, they simply carry on pressing their demands without regard for persons and consequences. They ignore the damage and the division, they ignore the exorbitant financial, social, and human cost, they ignore the dissenting voices, they ignore the calls for accountability. Most of all, they ignore the people who are demanding that this should never happen again. To climate activists and campaigners having excited dreams about climate lockdown, I simply say this: you’ve done your money, lockdown is a busted flush. If Covid really was a dry run for climate lockdown, then you have already exhausted the public patience, trust, and finances and are going to have to find a better way. (Clue, it’s the way I have argued in favour of for years). Because in the years to come, Covid lockdown may well come to be seen as the greatest policy blunder in peacetime history. It is no wonder that some climate activists are enamoured of the war analogy with respect to climate change, the pressure of ‘events’ justifying any number of blunders to get the job done. In war, there is no time for reckoning until the war is won, by which time the victors turn round and simply say it has all been for a good cause and everyone is simply relieved to still be alive.
Increasingly, though, people are beginning to see through these policies and reject them. Of course, this is speaking in hindsight, so I will again make it clear that I argued for lockdown in the early months of 2020, and argued with those who said it was a grievous error. But that makes it clear that other options were possible, but those arguing for them were shouted down. At one point I did some of the shouting, albeit under provocation. I had bought the narrative. Going into the unknown in the ‘at risk’ category, why wouldn’t I have succumbed to the fear being spread by the psychocrats? I am now concerned to expose these people for what they are – autocrats who will bring the curtain down on democracy. If environmentalists are determined to take climate politics down the same route then they are fools. Or anti-democrats with a contempt for people.
When the new crisis comes along, as it surely will, and governments attempt again to confine us in our boxes for our own good, then we are entitled to ask some impertinent questions in order to get the pertinent answers we need. And say ‘never again.’ The idea that climate policy can go down this route is errant nonsense which reveals how politically clueless and out-of-touch certain environmentalists really are.
As we await the next crisis in anticipation of renewed demands for authoritarian rule, we should take care to have a day of reckoning with respect to the events of 2020-2021, paying particular attention to the damage that has been done to society, the economy, to the health of people and to the wealth of social connection. And as we undertake this reckoning we should also ask which authorities and institutions, if any, we can trust with any degree of confidence, consent, and power. The people who repeat ‘follow the science’ like a mantra seriously need to find some new slogans, because this one is done. The things that have been done to health and wealth these past couple of years by people we have been encouraged to trust and whose expertise we have been told to follow will be difficult to forgive and impossible to forget. Those advocating lockdown as a model for climate action need to learn the hard lessons and learn them quickly. The fact that they have drawn all the wrong conclusions suggests that their minds are already made up. They are oblivious. They are ideologues and neurotics destined to repeat their obsessions.
FEAR
Resilience in face of crisis and stress is a trait to be encouraged over against a craven cowering under a protective arm. Courage is better than fear. The problem is that we are living at a time when the people who govern us are spreading vices among us rather than cultivating virtues, all to make the governed compliant in their hands. Compliance and conformity through the rule of fear has the advantage, to government, of ensuring that the damage inflicted by pandemic lockdown mandates is never subjected to critical scrutiny and accountability. That accountability is, however, needed to ensure that such a lockdown never ever happens again. The cost in terms of liberties lost, health sacrificed, and finances squandered is prohibitive. If this really was a trial run for climate lockdown then the jury is in and the verdict is damning.
A reckoning involves holding to account all those who pushed policies that were never firmly grounded in science in the first place, but were always political decisions promoted by fear and repression. The reasons offered were public health and the protection of the vulnerable. Looking at the deaths, it was the vulnerable who suffered most of all, the elderly and those with comorbidity. The virus did as a virus does. Time was bought to develop a virus, which was definitely a good thing and which possibly justifies my initial support for lockdown. But the consequences of closing society down for extended periods of time have been hugely damaging to economic and social health as well as to the mental and physical health of people. If the concern is indeed with public health, then the reopening of society is imperative. The damage to health and welfare has been incalculable: social isolation, mental and physical decline, depression, addiction, abuse, suicide. I faced these pressures alone in the aftermath of the death of my father. We had lived together at home for years and years. He died in December 2019. In the new year I started to look outwards in the attempt to begin a new life. I sought a new job and went to the local community college looking to train as a teaching assistant. I also enrolled on the anxiety classes. I met the woman taking the classes, who told me that there were more than a few people in the same boat as me and that sharing company was a good thing. A month or so later, and all classes were off with Covid lockdown. I have tried since to enrol at night class simply to share the company of others. Almost any subject would do. Learning a language is always a good option. It’s all at an end. It’s an age of social disconnection. I have been met with cheery on-screen images of happy people extolling the virtues of online learning. I despair. I despair of ever making social contact again with real flesh and blood people, with all the old sites of social encounter and intercourse seeming to have gone for good. (I’m not a pub and club person, for reasons of social anxiety).
I kept working in the lockdown years, despite being offered sick leave on account of being in the ‘at risk’ category. I preferred to work. It kept me active and allowed me to meet ‘my public’ (as I called them) in the local community. Work is good for the soul. But the stresses of returning to life alone at home proved immense, causing me to seek solace in the wrong things. I came off my healthy diet and started to indulge my taste for pies, pastries, cakes, and biscuits. The odd treat became the normal diet. I slacked off with the exercise, too. I was no longer being examined and hence had no health professional to impress. Of course, it is self-discipline that really matters, but facing crisis alone in grief is well-nigh impossible. I reached out to social media for connection and support and found only people who were concerned most of all to grind their political axes. Social media is a thoroughly disagreeable sphere of universal antagonism and is to be avoided. In 2017 I had enjoyed joining with others in the gym, exercising, showing off my rippling muscles and inexhaustible energy. That kind of thing. It was all closed down, you were on your own. I speak as someone who has always been self-driven and self-motivated. This came out clearly in my health and fitness classes. In cardiac rehab, one woman was so impressed by the speed of my step-ups that she said ‘I wish I had your energy.’ ‘It was that energy that brought me here!’ I joked. But my point is a serious one. I was one of the strongest performers in the exercise classes and, later, one of the most confident people in the anxiety classes. In those classes I saw people in terrible mental and physical trouble, people who needed to be with others to encourage them to take the steps they needed to take in order to take better care of themselves. If I was struggling during lockdown, then how on Earth were they coping? What chance did they have? I was getting out of condition physically, mentally too, recording two results of ‘severe depression’ at my medical surgery. I wasn’t alone in having that sinking feeling. This closing down of social connection has caused immense damage to people, the most vulnerable most of all. We are now seeing the fallout of closure, social distancing, distance learning, and the horrible and enduring effects all of these things have had on people, both the old and the young and all those with vulnerabilities.
Experts say Covid-19 has seriously exacerbated problems such as anxiety, depression and self-harm among school-age children and that the “relentless and unsustainable” ongoing rise in their need for help could overwhelm already stretched NHS services.
If I may, I would like to give myself huge praise for having survived an impossible set of circumstances, until now at least: I faced social shutdown and disconnection whilst dealing with family bereavement, chronic illness, anxiety grace of a then undiagnosed condition of autism, loss of the only home I have ever known and the problems of moving to a new home with zero help from the authorities, uncertain employment and income, and no-one to talk to and confide in other than the relentlessly bickering heads of anti-social media. The social restrictions imposed by lockdown could have been designed to test the healthy, sane, and wealthy to breaking point. They threaten to finish the rest of us off.
I already had more than enough issues to be dealing with. In the anxiety classes I attended we were taught that the greatest causes of stress were: the death of a partner or close family relative, the loss of employment and income, the loss and lack of friends, the loss of shelter. Frankly, I had the full set, and learning this did nothing to ease my anxiety. But I retained my sense of humour and shouted ‘house!’ much to the amusement of the class. There was merriment at my mordant wit. And at least I was among people in the same boat. Then Covid hit and the boat was sunk. To repeat, I was one of the livelier members of the group, confident, vocal, and witty. Others were much more withdrawn. One woman spoke endlessly of the death of her mother, speaking of her mother as if she were still alive. Another woman came in one afternoon with bloodied wounds on her scalp and was clearly picking at her skin. I ask again, if I have barely survived these past two years, with all of my self-discipline and determination and good habits, then what has become of these people? The same with respect to the cardiac rehab classes, where there were people who found the motivation to exercise only in the company of others. People need the support and encouragement of others. When people become disengaged and are discouraged, their performance dips and doesn’t come back. The effects of lockdown’s remote control are entirely negative. So I shall once more pay immense tribute to my good self for having survived the maelstrom. I think I must have been doing something right, in face of the plenty that has been going wrong. And I wonder what has become of the others in my health and anxiety classes.
Looked at through a conspiratorial lens it can seem as though the authorities have been conducting a grotesque social experiment to see how far people can be tested before they are destroyed, and how far they can be accommodated to authoritarian rule without rebelling, maybe even becoming authoritarians themselves. The imposition of lengthy closures is a tactic that has never been used in previous national emergencies nor in previous pandemics. The pandemic plans that governments had were thrown overboard for the Chinese model. Why? I would imagine that those plans were deemed inadequate in face of a seemingly unprecedented threat and politicians opted for safety first. The idea that the politicians are would-be authoritarians who can’t wait to get their hands on draconian power is a conspiratorial leap too far. The chaotic steps taken early on suggest that they didn’t quite know what they were doing. They soon found their feet. Once lockdown was in place you can see how it was fine-tuned, and could indeed be observed as a social experiment from which lessons for future action could be learned. And maybe the leniency of my view is derived too much from the British experience.
So let us treat it as an experiment and seek to draw the right conclusions in order to learn the right lessons. The first lesson, I would suggest, is to never make one thing of such overriding significance that everything else comes to be relegated to mere secondary status. Any immediate imperatives need always to be weighed against and balanced with other imperatives that are just as important when it comes to leading a healthy life: the importance of maintaining social connection; the importance of kinship, friendship, and neighbourliness; the importance of mental health; the importance of social sites of interaction, encounter, and joy; the need that human beings have for physical proximity to others; the importance of routine and ritual, shared space and, last but never least, sacred space. Oh, and economic life, the making of the money that is squandered so easily by those with ambitious plans and policies.
We need leaders with the wisdom to factor all these human essentials beyond mere physical survival into their policy-making. Instead we have witnessed a lack of courage, a lack of moral imagination, and a lack of leadership, people who demonstrated a cowardice in face of uncertain events, a cowardice that expressed itself in a taste for authoritarian imposition.
People suffer, society suffers, and taxpayers suffer and this suffering will continue for years to come – and those issuing the mandates seem oblivious or indifferent.
We were already experiencing a mental health crisis before Covid struck. My doctor signed me up to an anxiety course in the early months of 2019, and I was participating in another anxiety class in the first months of 2020. A lot of people were already struggling mentally. There was already an epidemic of loneliness in the UK, with Theresa May as prime minister appointing a loneliness Czar, which was helpful. We have had two years of economic disruption and social disconnection, two years of looking at the world through our screens, two years without a normal kind of routine and rhythm. Recovery is needed and needed quickly. So, too, is a reckoning to ensure that this never happens again. Those fantasising about a Climate Lockdown need to wise up quickly and understand that that ‘the science’ no longer commands authority and respect and that when it comes to expensive climate programmes you have done your money. You really are going to have to persuade people and earn their consent, built a sense of joint ownership when it comes to problems and solutions, develop small scale practical reasoning and ground ambitious plans in proximal relations. That has been a crucial part of the answer all along. Push for a lockdown authoritarianism and promote it by fear and you will fail and will deserve to fail.
THE BALANCING OF IMPERATIVES
Throughout this piece I have been a voice protesting against the inhumane regulations and restrictions of the past two years, emphasising the disastrous impact that these have had on the physical and psychological health of people. As one of those people, and as someone who has been in the company of people who face health struggles on a daily basis, I know what I am talking about. The conversion of the NHS into a Covid regime shows the error of making one health imperative something of overriding importance. Neglect other health issues and they will sooner or later make their appearance with a vengeance.
There are a number of reasons why I am making an issue of this. First of all, it is bad policy and bad process which generates harmful consequences. Secondly, there are people who think Covid lockdown offers a viable model for climate policy. Already we can see academic papers flying the authoritarian kite citing the successes of Covid lockdown as an example to follow when it comes to climate policy (Ross Mittiga). To which I say you must be joking. The people making these claims are simply not looking at the impacts and not looking at popular protests; their claims of success suggest strongly a predisposition in favour of lockdown regardless of the evidence. And thirdly, I speak from a background of personal concern with mental and physical health. And social health. I was aware from the start that Covid might well become the pandemic of the mentally ill, the physically ill, and the lonely. That was my concern as I worked door-to-door in my community. People would wait for me just to wave from their windows, to say hello at a distance, express their joy at seeing a familiar and cheery face, leave notes and messages for me, ask for help, give thanks, or just to shout encouragement, ‘keep going,’ ‘you’re doing a great job.’ Social isolation and separation has an enormously detrimental impact on the health and happiness of vast numbers of people. None of this ever seems to filter through to those devising grand schemes and strategies in their safe spaces.
I experienced the struggles with social isolation at first hand. I then saw the rank hypocrisy on the part of those most vociferous in demanding lockdown to be harder, longer, people who were out in force on demonstrations for crying out loud, or supporting those on demonstrations, justifying riots, public desecration, even robbery, assault, and violence. I offered some sharp words to ‘friends’ on social media who couldn’t resist joining in the wave of protest, people who diverted criticism of looting by reference to the contents of the British Museum and other such fashionable nonsense. That must have been great comfort to those who had seen their businesses looted. I paid no heed to the abuse of the ideologues and hard-core activists, since such people cannot be reached. I did manage to get the attention of the more moderate folk who were being led astray. At the same time I reduced my presence on social media. People who will follow any fashionable nonsense if it sounds radical are not good company; they never get deeper than the next outrage on social media.
Bear this in mind when we are being presented with a call for not merely greater international coordination with respect to future pandemics, but for the creation of a global authority invested with the power to command and enforce common response. There is a need to gather evidence and discern what works and what doesn’t. The value of the idea, though, lies in its execution, and here we have reason to embrace a critical scepticism rather than an idealism that takes claims at face value. The problem is, in the midst of a crisis, the people under pressure in both government and health institutions tend to have a mixed record when it comes to the quality of advice and practice, and also exhibit an unfortunate tendency to slip into propaganda mode, their arguments changing according to preferred politics.
“Risking their lives to save lives: Why public health experts support Black Lives Matter protests.” (Tara Haelle)
And the looting and violence? We saw the same inconsistency with respect to climate protests. Some are allowed to break rules, some not. This arbitrariness indicates the presence of a political dimension to the expertise, making it much less authoritative and much less trustworthy.
Once you have seen people demanding lockdown and denouncing those who protest them as irresponsible, yet in the next breath say other protests are legitimate, you have a right to be sceptical whether various bodies and institutions claiming extraordinary power and authority can be trusted. Is it possible that these bodies and institutions capable of the integrity needed to justify ‘global’ power and authority? You can argue that such power and authority is needed to address issues that are ‘global’ in scale and significance. But in doing so, you need also to ensure that the means of delivery are up to the job. There is a need to ensure integrity with respect to the means and processes involved in execution. The problem with global bodies and institutions is that they tend, in their abstraction, to be susceptible to geopolitical priorities.
I would suggest not.
Once you have seen the emperor without clothes, you can never see them dressed up in their finery ever again. They have nothing.
Things got as far as they did because of the fear that was instilled into people. This fear not only encouraged people into conformity and compliance, but also encouraged them to police others’ behaviour in order to coerce them into and lock them into that conformity and compliance. This is a totalitarian step too far. Genuine social connection has been replaced with a mutual monitoring of behaviour, and the mutual mistrust that results from that. People start to watch one another, and be on their guard. Neurosis spreads like wildfire. And the fear feeds on itself. External forms of repression have been supplemented by informal and internal forms with the result that people are more remotely connected but socially disconnected than at any time in history. The psychic stress is unbearable, condemning people to lonely lives and lonely deaths in the judgemental gaze of remote and anonymous others.
The myopic concern with Covid has led to the neglect of other, no less important, health problems. There are a lot of people suffering health problems out there and there are countless deaths being caused by lockdown. This was entirely predictable and was certainly commented on. I noticed during 2020 that my regular diabetes and blood checks were no longer taking place. I presumed that one day they would be back. In the meantime I couldn’t help but think of the advice contained in the letters I used to receive, to the effect that these regular checks were crucial in determining the state of my health. Had these checks suddenly ceased to be crucial? If they remained crucial but unavailable, what would the health consequences be for me and for others? People sought to raise the issue but were simply drowned out by the massed voices of lockdown authoritarians, people who seem to function by obsessive, myopic focus, seeing the one thing of overriding concern and nothing else. It became apparent that people like me were being thrown under the bus and those for whom Covid was the one and only health issue in town could care less. The plain facts show that the collateral damage of lockdown has been absolutely horrendous. But who cares? There would appear to be a clear class differential at work in all of this. The people worst affected are outside of the white middle class bourgeois, so why should they care? The people who have a secure income, who are comfortably off, who can work from home, if they need to work at all, are very different to the people who live in council houses, estates, and tenement blocks, the people who under financial pressure, the people paid by the hour in the gig economy, the people who have nothing. There are a lot of people with a lot of time and money on their hands, people who can put the world to rights at a safe distance from the social effects of the policies they demand. Then there are the people who are living with the Sword of Damacles constantly raised over their heads. Which is to say that lockdown is the policy of the privileged bourgeois, those who can legislate and live by remote control. They live in another world. Covid has to be a wake-up for climate campaigners with respect to the democratic deficit at the heart of environmental politics. The war of attrition being waged against members of the public seeking to go about their daily business and go to work indicates a remoteness born of social privilege. It’s not persuasive. As a tactic, it makes sense only if it is an attempt to push governments into a climate lockdown. It’s a dead-end.
As I write this I am reading that paramedics are reporting that 70% of their call-outs concern cases of mental health distress. I can well believe it. In 2018, 2020, and 2022 I have been sent to hospital by ambulance with heart attack symptoms, each time no evidence of a heart attack was recorded. I keep telling doctors that this is stress and anxiety in face of impossible circumstances. I read also that people are committing suicide under the pressure of events. People cannot live in a constant state of fear and uncertainty, and yet we have governments employing psychologists in nudge units to manipulate and shape behaviour by subjecting people to fear. Political activists and campaigners are also engaging in the same tactic, constantly making claims at extremes in order to pressure people and governments into taking action. Constant climate doom is fostering a climate of fear and doom. People can’t live under such stress. We have a massive mental health crisis on our hands, and yet those most vocal in catastrophizing their pet issues maintain complete silence, drawing a veil over it all. I return to the concept of collateral damage. That’ll be me, then.
I’ve seen it all happening from the inside. I’ve seen it with my own health issues. Doctors and nurses are working tirelessly but hopelessly, propping up a disaster of a system with their efforts. I’ve seen it also with respect to my work within the environmental movement. Fear is being used as tool to ensure conformity and compliance. This is a very low politics indeed. By spreading fear like a contagion, the fear-mongers are spreading mental illness and people are cracking under the strain. At a time when people are already struggling, this tactic is unconscionable. We see it being used constantly by both authorities and activists, and by the mainstream media. I return again to the anthropological and democratic pessimism that the resort to fear reveals. Human beings are treated not as intelligent beings capable of being persuaded and motivated by reason, but instinctive animals driven by the basest of motivations. This is behaviourism at its very worst. A war of psychic attrition is being waged against people who are already suffering from impossible stresses. The mental health of people is certain to crack under this kind of assault. The cultivation of this ecology of fear is odious and pernicious; it is the psychic preparation for entry into a full-blown authoritarianism regime. The emphasis on doom and death is something that people cannot bear mentally for any length of time. It is obvious why the there is a recourse to fear: fear gains the attention, fear sells, fear motivates, but it is also a cheap and nasty politics, a short-cut to ends better obtained by reason, by social practices, by virtuous action, by democratic consent, by all the things that require nerve and nous, patience, social connection, empathy, hard work. Fear is what happens when you allow STEM people to take over ethics and politics. They treat people as things. They are wrong and badly wrong. The approach is inhumane. I know this for many reasons. Most of all I know this from battling back from the brink of death. Negativity saps the energies; it depresses and demotivates, it causes despair. The road back to health comes via positive energies, hope, and optimism. “Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.” (Helen Keller, the deaf, dumb, and blind woman who find a way through).
Instead of these things, the world is in the grip of a Covidian cult of fear and death, the same with respect to the climate cult. People are being terrified into handing their liberties over. This is the death of any political cause. Because the authoritarians really don’t know better as they claim. Once power is removed from democratic check and critical scrutiny, it will soon start to operate by its own imperatives, not by service to any greater end. The authoritarians are the biggest utopians of all, and the most dangerous ones of all in their combination of cynicism and naivety.
In all of this I have been concerned with the rise of the term the ‘lockdown left.’ The origin of the term seems to be the old antithesis of libertarianism and authoritarianism, which are two sides of the same liberal coin. In falsely separating individuality and sociality as two essential aspects of human nature, the liberal ontology constantly swings from the libertarian pole to the authoritarian pole and then back again. The political right have their dander up at the moment in response to Covid authoritarianism, so I anticipate that a libertarian reaction is in the offing – retrenchment, small government, and personal responsibility. The nonsense of recent years is identified with the Left. This is the radical moment and the leftists have blown their big chance big time. The left have either been silent or on the side of authoritarianism. There is a need for concerted action by government in face of ‘global’ issues, and collective and supra-individual forces require collective action. So far, I am in agreement. But I have insisted over and again that collective action requires appropriate means and mechanisms, both social and psychic, fostering a sense of ownership and co-responsibility – something quite distinct from the surrogate collectivism of the abstract state. Lessons here just never get learned, with the result that the Left is yet again identified with authoritarian imposition via the state, and the Right is again identified with freedom. I have to laugh these days, lest I end up crying for the remainder of my days.
TAKING STOCK
I am reading that excess deaths are now the result of non Covid ailments. People who are in at risk categories are dying now not of Covid but of neglect. Not only am I not surprised, I could have told you. In fact, I did warn specifically on this. I would like to claim that I issued this warning through my humanitarian concern for others. That concern is there, for people who are in the same position as I am. Which is to say my warning was based on a concern for my own position, having two chronic conditions now being overlooked through the almost exclusive focus on Covid. But the concern for others was there, nevertheless. I spoke to a neighbour and old friend about how difficult I was finding it to get advice and help from my medical centre. ‘B**%*£&s,’ he said, ‘’if it’s not Covid, they don’t want to know.’ That’s a comment that could apply to all too many of those most insistent on lockdown. It’s a myopic focus, and I note it too in the realm of climate change. That exclusive focus is wrong. In its reductive nature it entirely misdiagnoses the problem to give us cures that are worse than the disease. The same with respect to those who reduce every issue to racism or sexism or any other single problem. Given the reality of interconnection, all problems are multi-layered and to be addressed in their relations. With a myopic focus, plenty that is essential comes to be missed.
There is a need to take stock of where we are. On Covid there is a need to have a reckoning. This is not a case of being wise after the event but of developing wisdom in face of future events. Mistakes may be survivable if you can learn from them and modify your behaviour accordingly.
This is an interesting philosophical and psychological question. Learning may be defined as a change in behaviour. I don’t think that what happened during lockdown was remotely transformative but it did reveal something of the true natures of human beings when placed in stressful, unsocial, unnatural conditions. Much of the spirit of pulling together was good, and I was involved in that in my local community, with people being very supportive in a common crisis and cause. But there was another, more troubling, side to that solidarity, and that was revealed in the insistence on conformity. We are all acting as one and therefore so should you. Solidarity in proximal relation was good, but collectivity at more abstract levels had a nasty and repressive edge to it. We have been left with the feeling that there is a hollowness at the heart of society, culture, and politics. So many things and people we once thought reliable, stable, and trustworthy have proven to be otherwise. People have been thrown back on their own resources, only to find that community was no longer the real and vital force it had once been. Many people found themselves without family and friends, having no one to turn to. There is a lack at the heart of contemporary society that has long been known, but undeclared and ignored, and which Covid has now laid bare. People came face to face with their own isolation once it was no longer possible to access the external band aids and sticking plasters. I had been attending anxiety classes with other people also at the end of their tether. Who do people turn to when they have nothing and no-one? God, thought Pascal. But God, frankly, lives amongst us in congregation.
We have been left to wonder whether the community of others that so many have been inclined to believe we have is no more than a memory of a past that is now long gone. In the days before national health and welfare systems, people relied on one another in close knit communities. Vestiges of that mutual aid society survived in the post-war world – I remember neighbours coming round for a drop of milk – and still exist here and there. In fact, there is a lot of the old spirit still about. I saw local shops helping people in need during Covid. But so much social solidarity has been outsourced to external bodies over the years that the communities of good habits and practices have dissolved within. The instinct is still there. Within a couple of weeks of lockdown I joined the local support group formed in the neighbourhood to help those in need. The problems come at greater levels of abstraction. The faith placed in external bodies has been severely tested. The welfare packages were generous for some but non-existent for others. The health system ceased to exist for non-Covid issues. I was finally driven to the brink before I could be examined by a doctor, being rushed to hospital by ambulance in December 2020 with symptoms of a heart attack. I had been trying to tell my medical practice for months that something wasn’t right. I got away with it, but I will bet a pound to a penny that many have not been so lucky.
Many things that we have taken for granted have been surrendered with hardly a backward glance. The faith invested in institutions and authorities reveals an aspect of the authoritarian personality at work, the greater reliance on external bodies has been accompanied by the withering of internal social self-reliance. We live in a ‘little society,’ which is something we should have known before Covid. Proximal communities have dissolved within to be reconstituted beyond geography via ICT. At the same time there has been a growth of isolation. Long before Covid struck there was a loneliness epidemic underway. The facts are horrendous.
The number of over-50s experiencing loneliness is set to reach two million by 2025/6. This compares to around 1.4 million in 2016/7 – a 49% increase in 10 years;
Half a million older people go at least five or six days a week without seeing or speaking to anyone at all;
59% of people aged 85 and over and 38% of those aged 75 to 84 live alone;
Two fifths all older people (about 3.9 million) say the television is their main company.
I don’t have a TV licence. TV is an idiot box pumping out bias and propaganda. I refuse to pay a penny for any of it.
I knew the hard social facts on loneliness long before Covid. Working door-to-door in my local community I met many lonely people. They would wait for me to have a chat and share a joke. Many people just need a pair of ears. Everyone has a story to tell. The tragedy of modern life is that many people have no one to tell their stories to. And my point is that the lonely were thrown under the bus during Covid. Why wouldn’t they be? They had been mattered before Covid, so why would they come to matter now? That’s the nature of being alone. What sticks in the craw is that there are so many people who will fixate on a cause for the greater good whilst ignoring the actual good of actual people.
Loneliness is one of the largest health concerns we face. The reasons why are not hard to understand.
Loneliness is likely to increase your risk of death by 26% (Holt-Lunstad, 2015)
Loneliness, living alone and poor social connections are as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. (Holt-Lunstad, 2010)
Loneliness is worse for you than obesity. (Holt-Lunstad, 2010)
Loneliness and social isolation are associated with an increased risk of developing coronary heart disease and stroke;
Loneliness increases the risk of high blood pressure;
Loneliness with severe depression is associated with early mortality and loneliness is a risk factor for depression in later life.
So much for my health and fitness programme. I lived alone throughout lockdown, but at least had my little distribution job in the community to keep me connected and feeling wanted in some way. But the figures make for grim reading.
45% of adults feel occasionally, sometimes or often lonely in England. This equates to twenty five million people;
In 2016 to 2017, there were 5% of adults (aged 16 years and over) in England reporting feeling lonely “often/always” – that’s 1 in 20 adults. Furthermore, 16% of adults reported feeling lonely sometimes and 24% occasionally;
Research by Sense has shown that up to 50% of disabled people will be lonely on any given day;
Characteristics of people who are more likely to experience loneliness include: those who are widowed, those with poorer health and those with long-term illness or disability. 43.45% of the group reporting bad or very bad health are often/always lonely;
Research commissioned by Eden Project initiative The Big Lunch found that disconnected communities could be costing the UK economy £32 billion every year.
https://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org/the-facts-on-loneliness/
If you can’t reach people in their hearts, then reach them in their wallets: loneliness costs money.
Rather than have their issues addressed – or even acknowledged - an awful lot of lonely people were left lonelier still during lockdown, with who knows what consequences for their mental and physical health. It should have been obvious that any Covid regime was going to have a serious impact on the vulnerable, the elderly, and the chronically ill. Undoubtedly, those making the decisions calculated the odds and decided to go with the greater good of the greater numbers, ignoring yet again the high number of lonely and vulnerable people in the world. Such people clearly count for less in the wider scheme of things. The decisions taken were justified as necessary, with the greater losses incurred by some deemed a price worth paying. People were left to go to the wall as not worth the effort of saving. It soon became apparent that the continuation of lockdown would be lethally disastrous for so many in vulnerable positions. Yet so many went on blindly accepting lockdown as a hard necessity. The Covid regime might well offer us a glimpse of the shape of things to come – all under the heel of the politics of ‘necessity’ in which some get to decide to gets to die first?
Little changed under lockdown. The divisions of society were laid bare and people’s true natures were revealed to expose a lot of uncomfortable truths and realities.
So when the reckoning comes, rather than try to settle scores with the past, it is wiser to start asking ourselves what kind of people we are and what kind of society we want to live in. And we need also examine which institutions and authorities we can trust with our health, happiness, and liberty, if any, and what we need to do to make them fit for purpose. What we don’t need is a continuation of silence, complicity, and unquestioning loyalty in the name of a solidarity that exists as little more than projection and fantasy.
Throughout the period of lockdown, there were people who warned and kept on warning that the health of social life was being unravelled by enforced social isolation and the masking of faces. Perhaps the hardest thing psychologically to bear was the relentless, incessant fear deliberately stoked and sustained by government nudge units, aggressively pumped into people’s lives day after day until you either gave in to government imperatives or simply lost the will to live. Do you really want to live in a society in which psychocrats drive policy and behaviour by fear? It’s a question for environmentalists who, long before Covid and lockdown, were catastrophizing events at extremes in an attempt to provoke action. The same anthropological and democratic pessimism that lies at the core of lockdown policies are present in climate politics. In both cases, human beings are not considered to be rational beings capable of understanding but instinctive, self-interested creatures in the grip of immediacy. The truth is that human beings can be both. Moral frameworks and social infrastructures matter, involving the creation of a habitus in which the virtues can be known, acquired, and exercised, communities of practice and appropriate modes of conduct prevail over self-interest, immediacy, and isolation and … a million more things I have covered in my writings. The truth is that politicians, activists, those demanding action ‘now!’ are not merely impatient, they are lazy and opt for short cuts over the longer transformations that are required. But environmentalists now need to learn and learn quickly that their lockdown model of climate austerity is a non-starter. And they need to stop using fear as a tool of motivation and action. It is cheap, it is lazy, it is the excuse for bad politics, it is harmful, and it is immoral.
The strategy of fear was deliberately inflicted upon people in order to ensure their compliance – and their complicity. If bad decisions were taken and things went wrong, then we would all bear a responsibility. That sense of ownership is a good thing if it is based on genuine consent that is volunteered by way of persuasion. This is not the case here. Fear and conformity are not healthy character traits, either in people or in society. A politics of fear and conformity is explicitly authoritarian. And it has costs and consequences. The vulnerable, the sick, the poor, the elderly, the young have been subject to a systematic psychic violation. That even members of these nudge units are now stating that fear has been taken too far should give some indication as to just how far fear has been pushed. Again, environmentalists employing the same tactic need to desist. It is lazy, it is counter-productive, and it is just plain wrong in its inhumanity (of course, there are those who would claim here that such inhumanity is implicit in environmentalism’s basic misanthropy – it’s hard to think much of democracy when you think so little of human beings. In which case the strategy of fear is an explicit case of retribution, and a death-wish).
There were many warnings of the inevitable damage that lockdown would do to mental and physical health, but these were ignored. The reasons for that are not hard to find. Instead of weighing and balancing different social and health imperatives, Covid was raised to a status of overriding importance. The things we were warned of came to pass. As everyone knew they would. Those who made the decisions, and those who acquiesced in the doctrine of the ‘greater good,’ knew this would happen. But rather than accept the inevitability of it all, I will continue to raise my voice in protest, lest people turn and say, when the reckoning comes, that they never knew. You were told. If you never knew then you were never interested in knowing. Convinced they were already in possession of the truth, they had no reason to listen. People had their narrative and, conformists to the core, they stuck to it and damned all contrarian voices.
The NHS in the UK is now acknowledging that it is now facing what it describes as a second pandemic, a pandemic of depression, anxiety, pyschosis, and myriad disorders with respect to eating, sleeping, addiction. Hospitals are so becoming so overwhelmed that people in need of help are being bounced back to the GPs who referred them in the first place, even people at severe risk from suicide, self-harm and malnutrition. Doctors are warning that people will die of untreated conditions.
Alarmist? I wish it were. In an age of false alarms, no one hears the real cries for help that are coming from people. The media is full of screaming teenagers telling us how scared they are of the climate catastrophe that is sure to come. Bless. The catastrophe is already here for many people and not a TV crew can be found to film them make their please.
I have had direct experience of the very thing the NHS is warning of, having been sent to hospital by ambulance by my doctor, only to spend countless hours waiting to be seen, eventually discharging myself in an attempt to hold onto what was left of my nervous system. Why was I there? Heart attack symptoms brought on by anxiety brought on by social problems without end. Do I really need a strategy of fear to motivate me? It’s a violation, pure and simple, and I loathe the people who do it.
To those who make dire predictions of the future in order to shape behaviour I say: bad things that are happening now. To pile fear on top of people already at or beyond breaking point is unconscionable. I am left to conclude, generously, that the people who do this are not so much immoral in their intentions, for all the immorality of their actions, than comfortably remote from the hard realities of social life: they know nothing of real people. It’s hard to worry too much about the quality of life decades from now when you are struggling to survive in the here and now. I shall repeat myself for the hard of understanding – climate change is not the problem, it is the physical expression of a much deeper problem within social relations and arrangements. The failure to get that relation right has involved environmentalists in a politics that goes in entirely the wrong direction, authoritarianism by way of fear and attrition. The damage wrought by Covid lockdown has shown this in clear and incontrovertible terms. That we have some environmentalists arguing for a climate lockdown modelled on Covid lockdown merely goes to prove how utterly detached from practical realities environmentalism is. But, of course, as they endlessly repeat, ‘physics trumps politics.’ That being so, it is remarkable how powerful politics is when it comes to destroying physics. It should be a piece of cake pushing politics over, shouldn’t it?
Essential connection and behaviour has been thrown away, and people thrown under the bus. Basic life experience has been denied and even destroyed. With respect to the vulnerable and the poor, Covid has been official confirmation of their previous neglect and abandonment. The hard social facts on this were clear before Covid, and Covid policies and acquiescence in them has confirmed the neglect. We have witnessed nothing less than a wholesale neglect on the part of ‘society.’ This pertains especially to the people who joined together to ‘clap for carers.’ This was ersatz, a cheap indulgence, a communal happening that cost nothing. This is all part of the conformity which characterises authoritarianism, the willingness of people to accept membership of a surrogate community in place of the real thing. There are real people in desperate trouble out there, people who are being neglected.
Then there are the liberties lost as governments accumulate power at the centre.
The things that have been lost are not necessarily regained at a later date.
So, yes, resilience is a fine character trait that should be encouraged. But the fact that people are resilient doesn’t mean that those seeking to force changes should stress test them to destruction. People were already struggling. We don’t need warnings of an existential crisis to come when that crisis is already here for many people and has been for some time. The fact that so many complicit in spreading fear either don’t know this or just don’t care explains a good part of the predicament we are in. Many people are deeply unhappy at the existential level, something which poses questions about society that are in urgent need of answering. Presuming that we are still allowed to ask questions.
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