One of the most obvious conclusions to be drawn from the coronavirus debacle is that the government’s police state response will never be completely reversed. The fact that it was done cannot be undone.
The state will not forget the raft of draconian powers so easily imposed and so readily accepted by a large percentage of the population. A police state is here to stay even if it fades into the background once the pandemic has subsided politically. The ability to impose lockdown and impose it nationally or area by area and even public familiarity with the word ‘lockdown’ will not be discarded.
We tend to think of these matters in terms of exaggerated fears invented by government to direct mass behaviour, but it is perhaps more useful to think in terms of carrot and stick. The stick is fear and the carrot is safety. Fear induces unpredictable escape behaviour so of the two, safety may be the more important politically. If the coronavirus has offered us a political warning, it has shown us that safety is the destination from which there is no escape, from where many do not even wish to escape.
On a similar line: something impossible to miss over the course of my scientific career has been the elevation of health and safety to organisational holy writ. Almost everyone of my age or thereabouts will have seen something similar over the decades. Take a conspicuously sacerdotal attitude to health and safety, particularly in the public sector and getting the job done is of secondary importance.
It is possible to view this obsessive concern for safety as our primary political carrot and maybe that is not too surprising. It is obvious enough that safety and survival are closely linked, so much so that we expect political systems to exaggerate and manipulate perceptions of safety within the general population. Hence the current police state complete with its network of safety-obsessed informers.
We could take this much further and dismiss all notions of political ideology, substituting political perceptions of safety instead. It may seem counterintuitive, but the ultimate in safe political systems is totalitarian. This is the political attractor round which we circulate in our feeble attempts to keep democracy alive. This is the reference point against which democracy and democratic freedoms are measured and so often found wanting when perceptions of safety are manipulated.
Social justice warriors are not concerned with social justice whatever that might be, but with promoting wildly exaggerated notions of social safety. And that means political safety. And that means totalitarian safety. Which is why attacks on Donald Trump have tried to depict him as an unsafe pair of presidential hands even though he is quite obviously no such thing. This is why the attacks have been so hysterical and so dishonest – safety is a visceral issue.
Another example - the point of climate change propaganda has been the depiction of free enterprise and anything outside official bureaucratic control as environmentally unsafe. It has no other purpose. The supposed science and the ludicrous climate mitigation policies are merely window dressing.
Anti-racism rhetoric has thrived on much the same basis. Keep alive the perception that multi-ethnic societies might be unsafe if left unmanaged and this justifies draconian restrictions on free speech, particularly criticism of government immigration policies. Many people see free speech as inherently unsafe anyway, so the anti-racism industry has been given an easy ride over recent decades. Even the most ludicrous assertions and the most damaging outcomes get a free pass. Anti-racism also paved the way for many other restrictions on free speech using much the same strategy.
As for clapping the NHS it is not easy to say if this was infantile or politically sinister. Maybe both, but in a world so obsessed with safety, dangerous political trends become less obvious. Maybe this is the most sinister effect of our obsession with safety - even the most dubious political trends are no longer obvious. In a less safe world they were obvious but in our world they are not.
On a similar line: something impossible to miss over the course of my scientific career has been the elevation of health and safety to organisational holy writ. Almost everyone of my age or thereabouts will have seen something similar over the decades. Take a conspicuously sacerdotal attitude to health and safety, particularly in the public sector and getting the job done is of secondary importance.
It is possible to view this obsessive concern for safety as our primary political carrot and maybe that is not too surprising. It is obvious enough that safety and survival are closely linked, so much so that we expect political systems to exaggerate and manipulate perceptions of safety within the general population. Hence the current police state complete with its network of safety-obsessed informers.
We could take this much further and dismiss all notions of political ideology, substituting political perceptions of safety instead. It may seem counterintuitive, but the ultimate in safe political systems is totalitarian. This is the political attractor round which we circulate in our feeble attempts to keep democracy alive. This is the reference point against which democracy and democratic freedoms are measured and so often found wanting when perceptions of safety are manipulated.
Social justice warriors are not concerned with social justice whatever that might be, but with promoting wildly exaggerated notions of social safety. And that means political safety. And that means totalitarian safety. Which is why attacks on Donald Trump have tried to depict him as an unsafe pair of presidential hands even though he is quite obviously no such thing. This is why the attacks have been so hysterical and so dishonest – safety is a visceral issue.
Another example - the point of climate change propaganda has been the depiction of free enterprise and anything outside official bureaucratic control as environmentally unsafe. It has no other purpose. The supposed science and the ludicrous climate mitigation policies are merely window dressing.
Anti-racism rhetoric has thrived on much the same basis. Keep alive the perception that multi-ethnic societies might be unsafe if left unmanaged and this justifies draconian restrictions on free speech, particularly criticism of government immigration policies. Many people see free speech as inherently unsafe anyway, so the anti-racism industry has been given an easy ride over recent decades. Even the most ludicrous assertions and the most damaging outcomes get a free pass. Anti-racism also paved the way for many other restrictions on free speech using much the same strategy.
As for clapping the NHS it is not easy to say if this was infantile or politically sinister. Maybe both, but in a world so obsessed with safety, dangerous political trends become less obvious. Maybe this is the most sinister effect of our obsession with safety - even the most dubious political trends are no longer obvious. In a less safe world they were obvious but in our world they are not.
2 comments:
Some very insightful stuff in there, AKH. I particularly like the idea of Social Justice having nothing to do with justice per se. "Justice", when I studied political philosophy last century, was essentially a Platonic conception about giving people what is due to them. Gradually (I think it started with John Rawls and his "A Theory of Justice") people started talking more and more about redistributive economics, and equality of outcome. Now, that's pretty much all it means.
My hope is that the safety and security offered by the new totalitarians will be exposed as a sham, as and when they attempt to impose their ideas. Boris has tried to make us safe, and ended up killing patients who couldn't get their normal treatments. Antifa has attempted to protect citizens from micro-aggressions, and - where it has established autonomous zones in Seattle, there have been rapes, shootings, and extortion. What we need is to draw attention to these shortcomings. That people in favour of such security are clueless loons who will kill us all if we give them absolute power. Certainly, the MSM won't be focusing on the downside of this type of "security", so ordinary people need to make a noise.
Sam - thanks and yes, ordinary people do need to make a noise and maybe we are. We visited a nearby park yesterday where lots of parents had brought their kids to run around and the cafe had a healthy queue of outdoor coffee drinkers. Good to see and maybe hindsight will have something extremely harsh to say about it all.
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