Excellent post, but there is one aspect you are missing:
“People die every day of a thousand different things. It is good to save lives, but there is such a thing as a price which is too high. And this price is too high, at least under the terms that you’re offering” you say.
A journalist appears beside the bureaucrat. “You want people to die,” he sneers. “What a horrible person you are.”
“No, I’m just saying that government actions should pass a cost-benefit analysis. It’s a basic principle of good governance.”
The bureaucrat sighs. “I see we need to do more to combat the spread of misinformation.”
“Anti-vaxxer!” shouts the journalist. “Far-right crazy!”
“Far right?!” you exclaim. You’re getting annoyed now. “I’m a registered independent. I’m a climate change activist. And it’s incredibly unfair for the older generation to stick the younger one with another gigantic bill on top of the costs of decarbonisation. Don’t you think we should at least debate that?”
The bureaucrat shakes his head sadly. “There’s no getting through to some people. They’re just immune to facts.”
“Neo-nazi!” shrieks the journalist, his face going purple. “Science denier!” He picks up handfuls of mud and flings them at your face.
“Bah,” the time-traveling bureaucrat says. He scowls at you. “I don’t need your permission anyway.”
I realise that I’ve exaggerated the journalist in the text above. But it captures something real: those of us who think that lockdowns did more harm than good were not met with debate. We were demonised and censored. Think of the abuse heaped on the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, all of whom were professors of epidemiology or public health at highly prestigious universities. On both sides of the Atlantic, the mainstream media has caricatured anyone who is sceptical of lockdowns, or coercive measures like vaccine passports, as crazy science-denying far-right conspiracy theorists. Having gone through that experience, how can I not downgrade my faith in anything else which is automatically assumed to be true by mainstream media?
After watching governments and public health authorities making mistake after mistake, refusing to learn from the past, and accusing anyone who questions them of spreading misinformation, how am I to maintain any faith in their competence? The gross mishandling of the Covid pandemic has been a real shock to my worldview.
I deleted my previous comment on this article because this one better expresses what I wanted to say.
All the restrictions come to pass as the bureaucrat threatened. You’re angry about your lost social life and your deteriorating mental health and your friends who lost their jobs and your other friend whose cancer treatment has been delayed but there’s nothing you can do about it. You have no political power. You hardly even dare comment on the internet. Every time you try to speak out you are met with abuse or censorship. And you’re worried you might lose your job because once you used your real name when you posted a polite suggestion that maybe the world could have found a better way to handle the virus.*
Then one day you meet a man who also opposes lockdown. You’re having your first pleasant conversation for months when you realise he’s from [Country] Nationalist Party. “Um,” you say. “I thought they were far-right racists.”
Your new friend smiles at you. “That’s just media exaggeration. The woke lefties hate anyone who wants to have a grownup conversation about immigration.”
You aren’t completely happy, but you remember the journalist shrieking insults at you for views you don’t hold. You remember months of every media site and internet commenter acting like ‘lockdown-sceptic’ is a synonym for ‘anti-vaxxer’ and sneering at those terrible people. You have lost all faith that the mainstream media can accurately represent reality, and your previous impressions of the Nationalist Party were based on what you read in the media, so you give your new friend the benefit of the doubt.
You try lurking on Nationalist forums, just to see for yourself. You meet a few Nationalists in real life, thanks to your friend. It’s nice. You can vent about the stupid restrictions and no one calls you names. You can have an illicit beer with friends and it’s so much better than going insane with loneliness. Yes, one of your new friends makes politically incorrect jokes, and sometimes people on those forums have some very odd views, but so what. You don’t call your whole family crazy racists because they have that one uncle over for Christmas (back when you were allowed Christmas.) You feel happy to have found your new tribe.
To be clear, I’m absolutely not arguing for people to join the far right.** I’m warning that an environment which treats questioning the merits of lockdowns as vile heresy is going to drive a lot of otherwise inoffensive people toward the far-right. Some of those people will revert back to the mainstream after Covid. Some of them will be habituated to watching far-right media, will have formed new friendships with far-right people, and will not leave their new filter bubble. A substantial increase in support for the far-right has to have long-term consequences, most of which will be negative. Some of the damage has already been done, but left-wing and centrist institutions could reduce further damage by accepting that reasonable people can debate what is the optimum response to a relatively non-lethal pandemic.
*You will notice that I’m posting pseudonymously myself, for exactly this reason.
**Before anyone asks, I am a member of the Liberal Democrats, a centrist party, and intend to vote for them at the next election. I’m fortunate that the UK does have one small centrist party which has (weakly, quietly) opposed the worst excesses of the lockdownistas. If my only choice was to vote far-right anti-lockdown or mainstream pro-lockdown I really don’t know what I’d do.
I’m fortunate that the UK does have one small centrist party which has (weakly, quietly) opposed the worst excesses of the lockdownistas.
I’d be interested to hear more about this? I’m also a member of the lib dems, but I’m sufficiently inattentive that I couldn’t tell you any of the party’s positions on covid.
I’m not sure if the Lib Dems are keeping quiet about it or if the BBC, Guardian etc are carefully ignoring them because the Lib Dems don’t fit the narrative of lockdown-opponents being crazy right-wingers. I haven’t been fully attentive, and I think Lib Dems were on board with the 2020 lockdowns but they voted against extending the Coronavirus Act from March 2021, and they voted with the Tory rebels against vaccine passports this December. I wouldn’t say the Lib Dems have made a brave stand, or even that they’re anti-lockdown, but they do seem to be aware of some of the negative consequences, and also nervous of the government’s abuses of its powers. At the very least they’re more open to debate on the subject than Labour.
Excellent post, but there is one aspect you are missing:
“People die every day of a thousand different things. It is good to save lives, but there is such a thing as a price which is too high. And this price is too high, at least under the terms that you’re offering” you say.
A journalist appears beside the bureaucrat. “You want people to die,” he sneers. “What a horrible person you are.”
“No, I’m just saying that government actions should pass a cost-benefit analysis. It’s a basic principle of good governance.”
The bureaucrat sighs. “I see we need to do more to combat the spread of misinformation.”
“Anti-vaxxer!” shouts the journalist. “Far-right crazy!”
“Far right?!” you exclaim. You’re getting annoyed now. “I’m a registered independent. I’m a climate change activist. And it’s incredibly unfair for the older generation to stick the younger one with another gigantic bill on top of the costs of decarbonisation. Don’t you think we should at least debate that?”
The bureaucrat shakes his head sadly. “There’s no getting through to some people. They’re just immune to facts.”
“Neo-nazi!” shrieks the journalist, his face going purple. “Science denier!” He picks up handfuls of mud and flings them at your face.
“Bah,” the time-traveling bureaucrat says. He scowls at you. “I don’t need your permission anyway.”
I realise that I’ve exaggerated the journalist in the text above. But it captures something real: those of us who think that lockdowns did more harm than good were not met with debate. We were demonised and censored. Think of the abuse heaped on the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, all of whom were professors of epidemiology or public health at highly prestigious universities. On both sides of the Atlantic, the mainstream media has caricatured anyone who is sceptical of lockdowns, or coercive measures like vaccine passports, as crazy science-denying far-right conspiracy theorists. Having gone through that experience, how can I not downgrade my faith in anything else which is automatically assumed to be true by mainstream media?
After watching governments and public health authorities making mistake after mistake, refusing to learn from the past, and accusing anyone who questions them of spreading misinformation, how am I to maintain any faith in their competence? The gross mishandling of the Covid pandemic has been a real shock to my worldview.
I deleted my previous comment on this article because this one better expresses what I wanted to say.
Following on from the above:
All the restrictions come to pass as the bureaucrat threatened. You’re angry about your lost social life and your deteriorating mental health and your friends who lost their jobs and your other friend whose cancer treatment has been delayed but there’s nothing you can do about it. You have no political power. You hardly even dare comment on the internet. Every time you try to speak out you are met with abuse or censorship. And you’re worried you might lose your job because once you used your real name when you posted a polite suggestion that maybe the world could have found a better way to handle the virus.*
Then one day you meet a man who also opposes lockdown. You’re having your first pleasant conversation for months when you realise he’s from [Country] Nationalist Party. “Um,” you say. “I thought they were far-right racists.”
Your new friend smiles at you. “That’s just media exaggeration. The woke lefties hate anyone who wants to have a grownup conversation about immigration.”
You aren’t completely happy, but you remember the journalist shrieking insults at you for views you don’t hold. You remember months of every media site and internet commenter acting like ‘lockdown-sceptic’ is a synonym for ‘anti-vaxxer’ and sneering at those terrible people. You have lost all faith that the mainstream media can accurately represent reality, and your previous impressions of the Nationalist Party were based on what you read in the media, so you give your new friend the benefit of the doubt.
You try lurking on Nationalist forums, just to see for yourself. You meet a few Nationalists in real life, thanks to your friend. It’s nice. You can vent about the stupid restrictions and no one calls you names. You can have an illicit beer with friends and it’s so much better than going insane with loneliness. Yes, one of your new friends makes politically incorrect jokes, and sometimes people on those forums have some very odd views, but so what. You don’t call your whole family crazy racists because they have that one uncle over for Christmas (back when you were allowed Christmas.) You feel happy to have found your new tribe.
To be clear, I’m absolutely not arguing for people to join the far right.** I’m warning that an environment which treats questioning the merits of lockdowns as vile heresy is going to drive a lot of otherwise inoffensive people toward the far-right. Some of those people will revert back to the mainstream after Covid. Some of them will be habituated to watching far-right media, will have formed new friendships with far-right people, and will not leave their new filter bubble. A substantial increase in support for the far-right has to have long-term consequences, most of which will be negative. Some of the damage has already been done, but left-wing and centrist institutions could reduce further damage by accepting that reasonable people can debate what is the optimum response to a relatively non-lethal pandemic.
*You will notice that I’m posting pseudonymously myself, for exactly this reason.
**Before anyone asks, I am a member of the Liberal Democrats, a centrist party, and intend to vote for them at the next election. I’m fortunate that the UK does have one small centrist party which has (weakly, quietly) opposed the worst excesses of the lockdownistas. If my only choice was to vote far-right anti-lockdown or mainstream pro-lockdown I really don’t know what I’d do.
I’d be interested to hear more about this? I’m also a member of the lib dems, but I’m sufficiently inattentive that I couldn’t tell you any of the party’s positions on covid.
I’m not sure if the Lib Dems are keeping quiet about it or if the BBC, Guardian etc are carefully ignoring them because the Lib Dems don’t fit the narrative of lockdown-opponents being crazy right-wingers. I haven’t been fully attentive, and I think Lib Dems were on board with the 2020 lockdowns but they voted against extending the Coronavirus Act from March 2021, and they voted with the Tory rebels against vaccine passports this December. I wouldn’t say the Lib Dems have made a brave stand, or even that they’re anti-lockdown, but they do seem to be aware of some of the negative consequences, and also nervous of the government’s abuses of its powers. At the very least they’re more open to debate on the subject than Labour.