A critical problem with New Zealand’s (and indeed the globes) response to covid was how fear overwhelmed decision making, early in the pandemic. In most people, fear short circuits the brain. It skips logic, reason and calculation and jumps straight to “just do something”. It is a poor basis for decision making.
And it casts a very long shadow. In my experience at least, most people still believe covid was an exceptionally bad thing, rather than just another worse than average respiratory illness season. Their fear was “justified”.
At the same time, it is easy to forget that in early 2020, almost universally, the attitude to covid was “don’t worry too much, this is not going to be a big deal”.
For instance writing in the since, woefully pseudoscientific Guardian, Mark Rice-Oxley sensibly told us:
Indeed, psychotherapists might go on to say that if we are eaten up with worry, we should ask ourselves about the worrisome thoughts we are having: are they actually true? And are they helpful to us? If the answer to either is no, then worry is not serving us well.
However serious a threat coronavirus poses, it’s important to retain perspective. More people die of tuberculosis each day – and of air pollution every five hours – than have succumbed in two months of Covid-19.
At the end of January 2020 even Doctor “I am the science” Fauci said:
“It’s a very, very low risk to the United States,” Fauci said during an interview with radio show host John Catsimatidis.
“But it’s something that we as public health officials need to take very seriously… It isn’t something the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about.
Did Fauci feel public officials should be taking covid “very seriously” because he was paying for the gain of function science that created covid in a Wuhan lab, which the Free Press goes to in quite some detail here?
Either way, in the space of just a month we went from a circumspect, “let’s keep an eye on this” attitude to Toby and Siouxsie “helping” us to understand the “flatten the curve” pseudoscience that lead to lockdowns and two years of draconian nonsense that was very high cost and very low benefit. And still hasn’t flattened any curves.
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly how or why the shift happened. But it was not data driven. To me this never, at any time looked like a Spanish flu event. The revisionist crew will respond with “there was not enough data to know that”, if they aren’t still sticking their fingers in their ears and repeating whatever there favourite covidian chant is. But the obvious contention to that view is that the covidians didn’t have enough data to freak out either. Less was known at the start but enough was known to be able to argue either “this is going to be very bad” or “this is not going to be too bad”. So why did we choose “very bad”?
Fear was definitely the mechanism, the “how”. But it was not well supported by data so it can’t be the “why”, at least not on it’s own. People believed the fear even though the justification for the fear was cloudy at best.
I think the theory of best fit for the “why” has three key interrelated tenets. The first is obedience to authority. The second is our superficial view of diversity lets call it “fakeversity”. And the third is the women’s liberation movement. All three of these tenets relate to each other and at the intersection they form “the triad of over reaction”. I know, it sounds social sciency but bear with me.
This post will be about the first tenet; Obedience. I’ll look at the other two later.
In the non lizard, rational part of their minds, everyone believes they would stand up for the little guy. No one likes bullies, and when people look back at massacres, atrocities, genocides or lynchings, the thought is always “I wouldn’t have let that happen, I would have stood up for those people”. In short if you ask someone on the street, with no real threat or pressure on them, they all believe they are August Landmessers:
This clearly cannot be so, because if we were all people who spoke up then August wouldn’t be the only one not saluting would he?
If you ask people “are civil or human rights important” most people will answer yes, but only outside of an emergency. They will give this answer because it is the “right” answer, it is the answer a “good person” gives and even if they don’t really think much about civil rights they know civil rights are a “good thing” that “good people” support.
Yet when covid leaked out of a virology lab in Wuhan we saw that as soon as there is an “emergency” (real or imagined) that most people were happy to force people to get medical interventions under coercion of job loss:
or under penalty of social exclusion:
Lockdowns were loved (although the Spinoff is pants wetter central so the respondents to their surveys are likely more fearful than average) long after there was massive evidence that they were pretty ineffectual and also when we were dealing with Omicron which straight off the bat was less deadly and more infectious, to the extent it was almost a natural vaccine:
The percentages supporting full lockdown and vaccine mandates are almost identical. Interesting no? Given that they are two quite different questions……..
Even at the very start when little was known and arguments could easily be made either way, the rush to obey, completely ignoring civil rights, even finding it “remarkable” that anyone might disagree, was itself remarkable.
The problem is David old chum, that none of those “reasons” (which all stem from either made up or disputable data anyway) are reasons for removing civil rights, because there are never good reasons to remove civil rights.
The precise reason civil rights should be an unshakeable base of our legal system (more like the American one) is they exist to protect us in situations where the government says they need to take our rights away for “emergency reasons”. Support for the right to free speech, the right to travel and assemble and the right to reject a medical intervention, these rights are never tested in good times when everything is fine and a person responding to a survey can just engage the logical part of the brain, without fear or societal pressure to cloud it. When the survey question is asked during good times the respondent can think:
“I’ve been told civil rights are important, good people like civil rights, I’m a good person so I support civil rights”
Yet when there is an emergency the very same respondent may think:
“Authority says this is bad and this is what we have to do, and this is what good people do, they follow the science and the science is what the whitecoats say and the good people also let their rights be taken away because it’s an emergency and screw your rights I don’t want to die and I love my Grandma, YoU FAscCIsT”.
Or what ever they tell themselves is the truth so they can do as they are told, which is where they feel more comfortable.
It seems that we have recently arrived at a fundamental misunderstanding of how what civil rights are and how they protect us. Civil rights do not mean “I’m free to do whatever I want”. Rather civil rights are insurance against government over reach, against the corruption of humans by power, against indiscriminate steam rolling by the weight of the average. They should never be able to be taken away because if they can be taken away they are not rights they are privileges.
Most people have insurance against their house burning down. Most people will never claim on that insurance because most houses never burn down. That insurance will cost tens of thousands of dollars in premiums over a lifetime and most will not end up even close to getting back what they paid out. If you ask them if they like paying their premiums they will say “no”. If you ask them is insurance important they will say “yes” and they will have the insurance.
Civil rights mean that in a “pandemic” some people may still move around, or protest. Some may not want to get a vaccination. Some may say things that you don’t like hearing. These are the premiums on the civil right insurance policy against government tyranny and despotism. You might not like listening to people exercising their free speech or their right to travel freely just like you don’t like paying your insurance premium. But we all have to pay that premium anyway because it protects us from the inquisition, the fascists, the marxists, the communists and all the other -ists that have ravaged humanity. History is littered with truly terrible examples of what happens when people don’t have civil rights.
Consider this, what was more likely to kill a person in the last century? Were people more likely to die in a global pandemic? Or at the hands of some tyrannical leader who ignored citizens civil rights?
So is it more important that we have rights to protect us from tyrannical leaders or lockdowns to protect us from “dangerous” pathogens?
Of course these are not considerations for the obedient, at least not when fear or emergency are claimed. For the obedient, the thought almost always starts with “But authority X says”, where X is a newsreader, expert, or politician. And it is important to note that this is a condition of their personality not of their logical faculties. They aren’t stupid, intelligence was not a predictor of someone’s opinion on covid. They are also not bad or evil although they may also be these things. They are just obedient. The obedient feel uncomfortable not doing what they are told to do. It is an aversion to them, a personality based trait, that mostly serves them well but very occasionally means they will be easily convinced to do stupid things. Sometimes even cruel things. This explains why your logic and data bounced off them, why you knew people at the start who didn’t buy into this and now you can name those people in your mind, where as almost everyone else has stayed on team fear. How many of your friends or family have switched, even now, after the entire covid outbreak was clearly not much of a big deal?
To convince them to see a different side, you aren’t going to logic your way there, you would have to change a fundamental aspect of their personality. You need a psychology or behavioural science degree to change their minds not a biology or statistics degree. No amount of graphs, logic or data will do it. And most people are this way.
The Milgram experiment is a very famous psychological experiment on how everyday people respond to authority. Stanley Milgram theorised that there was some feature of the German psyche that made them more susceptible to committing the horrors of the holocaust. He wanted to test how Germans responded to authority but decided to test Americans first.
I’ll give a simple explanation (a more detailed one can be found here).
A volunteer was enrolled into the experiment. They were told they were part of an experiment, where a teacher (the authority in this case) would ask questions of a person (the learner) who the volunteer was told was connected to electro shock apparatus. For each wrong question the volunteer was instructed by the authority to give a shock to the learner, in increasing 15 volt increments. The volunteer was able to hear the “screams” of the learner as the shocks increased (the learner was in a different room). Moreover, the shock generator included verbal markings that varied from "Slight Shock" to "Danger: Severe Shock."
What Milgram unexpectedly found was that almost all of the volunteers continued to shock the learner, in spite of the learners screams of pain and begs for mercy. Some were more uncomfortable than others but regardless of the level of discomfort all were convinced to continue increasing the shocks by the authority including many going into the “Danger: Severe Shock” range.
These experiments have been tried in other groups all over the world and various other experiments have been devised to test the human propensity for obedience to authority. What you end up with is this; a majority of the population, somewhere between 70% and 90% will do whatever they are told to do, so long as the person telling them has some sort of authority. That authority can be easily gained, in the Milgram experiment it was simply a guy in a white coat, who they were told was an authority. Authority can be a politician, a person in a uniform, an “expert” in a white coat, or a person with lots of letters after their names; they say “lockdown” and the majority of the population say “how hard”.
It turns out Germans weren’t special and most people aren’t August Landmesser even though most people think they are.
Evolutionarily this is probably for the best. Most of the time we get better results working together. The team can often be more then the sum of the parts. If every time someone tried to make a decision, everyone said “screw that guy who does he think he is” then we’d still be arguing when the mammoth trampled over our heads. Often we just need to get things done.
But by the same margin, there clearly is value to having some small part of the population who do not care what the team thinks is right, or else we would all be obedient. Because the authority can often be wrong and if society keeps doing dumb things just because some person with a white coat says so this also can have a cost. Probably the 80/20 split is the near optimal place. Enough questioning of decisions to avoid many disasters; but not so much that nothing ever gets done.
So one thing becomes very clear, at the point that the decisions are made; in the war room, or the cabinet meeting, and especially emergency decisions you need some of those people who don’t automatically trust what ever expert number 16 says.
This explains what was to me, the most exasperating feature of the covid over reaction. For all the talk of being “guided by science”
it was remarkable how little was guided by any data that did not support what Wiles, Baker, Bloomfield or any of the other authorities were saying. I’m sure you have had numerous conversations with friends or family, where you have quoted legitimate studies, official governmental data, quotes from leaders in their fields showing that masking / lockdowns / covid vaccines had very little (if any) impact and yet all of those friends have quite obviously shrugged their shoulders if not literally, than certainly in their minds. If not outright mocking or attacking you.
Obedience is why. Unfortunately, this was never about data or science. This was about personality traits. The obedient majority follow the authority. They ignored anything that clashes with that authority. We can wave nice graphs from published studies until the cows come home, the obedient don’t care about your graph unless you are an authority. We ignore this at our peril.
It leaves us in the situation where people you have known and loved and respected for many years would rather listen to some mediocre, failed scientist, who knows nothing about them, whom they have never met, and likely has serious chemical contamination in her brain, someone like this creature:
So that this authority creature can say “This virus is not airborne, so we can go outside and keep 2 metre distance”
But then the same authority creature can say:
“One thing we can start with is ditching the two-metre “safe distance” bullshit and taking airborne transmission more seriously.
The authority creature can say:
when we clearly saw that New Zealand’s first lockdown definitely did not work. We know it didn’t work because the authority and her cartoonist told us about the two week “lag”
before lockdowns take effect. So that her own 2 week rule seems to imply…..nothing measurable caused the cases to fall:
Yet no one in the mainstream media, in the government, or any of the “experts” we hear from has ever offered an answer as to what actually made the cases fizzle out in our first outbreak. Has anyone questioned this remarkably obvious and easy to spot contradiction? Show that chart to most people and most of the time the lights still won’t come on. Because we are not authority.
In the end we see that it doesn’t matter that the authority was wrong again, and again and again. Because it’s not about right or wrong, charts, data, science or debate. These are just things the constructs say because those are the things “enlightened” people are meant to say. To the vast majority, all that matters is what authority says.
What to do?
Clearly, we need more people lower in obedience in positions of power. Particularly in emergencies. It would probably be helpful if parliament had the same 80/20 split we see in society. It’s got to be that way for a reason no?
We also need to get away from our very superficial view of diversity and a society that pushes that belief forward with a slavish level of stupidity. Almost as if it has nothing to do with logic.
This superficial view of diversity means we have a “diverse” parliament, full of different skin colours and genders and sexualities but this diversity is as superficial as a racists view of a person. Both are only skin deep. The key to getting benefits from diversity is getting diverse ways of thinking not diverse ways of looking. This is why so few politicians, or journalists, or experts criticised lockdowns, mask or vaccine mandates or talked to the protestors in Wellington. Because while our “most diverse parliament” might look different they all think very uniformly.
If we want benefits of diversity then we need people who think differently and it is irrelevant what they look like. Rather than people who look different but all think the same things.
We need a parliament that reflects society. We need builders and small business owners and working class and poor and chefs and courier drivers and farmers and most importantly people who have existed for some measure of time, outside of the political bubble. People who actually have real wisdom to bring to decision making rather than people who read about wisdom in a book once.
And if that’s too difficult maybe we need politicians to do personality tests to measure where our parliamentary diversity is, rather than the magical thinking that a person with a tattoo on their face being in parliament
is somehow significant and something that will somehow make our political decisions better.