More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Most of all, this book asks you to think about the ethics of using fear to manage people.
The aim of this book is not to refute that Covid-19 is a serious disease that has killed people, most particularly the elderly and those with certain underlying health conditions, especially dementia, Alzheimer’s, obesity, diabetes and hypertensive diseases, among others.3 The aim of this book is to explore our fear response and whether it was ethical and wise for the government to deliberately frighten the population. Was the government’s response proportional? Wouldn’t people have cautiously tempered their behaviour during an epidemic in the interests of self-preservation and community
...more
It was known from the beginning to be a ‘very mild illness’4 for nearly all of us. The UK’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Patrick Vallance, stated this publicly on 13 March 2020. Experience has proven that correct; Covid was not lethal or dangerous to the vast majority. Vaccines and treatments were developed at miraculous speed to protect the vulnerable. So what are we still afraid of?
We have become afraid of our own judgement about how to manage the minutiae of our lives, from who to hug to whether to share a serving spoon. Apparently, we even need guidance about whether we can sit next to a friend on a bench. But perhaps we need to be more afraid of how easily manipulated we can be.
The average age of death with Covid is 82.3 years12 – one year more than the average life expectancy in Britain.
It is partly an issue of proportion and entirely an issue of ideology. But the numbers risk ignoring the more poignant, human costs of the use of fear. I interviewed people who were driven by fear, anxiety and isolation to develop agoraphobia, obsessive compulsive disorders, panic attacks, started self-harming and even attempted suicide. How do we weigh the potential life saved from Covid-19 with a life deliberately ended by overdose in a hotel room or a jump from a bridge? Can we justify protecting someone from physical sickness, fever and fatigue, if the methods of protection caused someone
...more
As Karl Augustus Menninger said, ‘Fears are educated into us, and can, if we wish, be educated out.’ We need to inoculate ourselves against fear.
I realised I was more frightened of authoritarianism than death, and more repulsed by manipulation than illness.
Fear is contagious and social media offers the perfect conditions for it to spread. Viruses travel fast by air, but fear travels faster – share, share, share!
They also – at least inadvertently – ‘seeded’ the idea of a very strong medical and authoritarian response. There will be more on the importance of ‘seeding’ in Chapter 7, ‘The tools of the trade’. If you don’t remember the videos, or didn’t watch them, I do urge you to view them to compare this early glimpse of ‘Stunt Covid’ with what actually transpired.
Sky News reported on 19 March 2020 that army vehicles were brought in to transport dead bodies in Bergamo. This would make you think that army trucks were needed because there were so many bodies. In fact, according to the Italian Funeral Industry Federation,10 70% of undertakers had to stop work to quarantine at the start of the outbreak, so the army was drafted in for a one-off transport of 60 coffins. The startling image of the army transporting the dead was not explained, but it appeared on Sky and other broadcasters and in newspapers here in the UK and around the world, seeding the idea
...more
In an interesting insight, Matt Hancock, the Minister for Health, revealed in an an interview11 on LBC Radio in 2021 that he had placed large orders for Covid vaccines as a result of watching the fictional film Contagion. This seems to have turned out well for our vaccine supplies, but it’s a remarkable admission about the influence of a sensationalist Hollywood film (about a fictional virus that kills 30% of people who catch it) on the Health Secretary.
Talk Radio presenter Dan Wootton’s motto in 2020 was, ‘No spin, no bias and no hysteria.’
A Press Gazette reader poll13 concurred. When it asked ‘Do you think journalists have done a good job of holding the Government to account during the daily UK Covid-19 press briefings?’ 70% said no. Weak questions fail to hold politicians to account, fail to uncover essential information which should be in the public domain, fail to provide balance (which would settle minds and emotions) and they also damage journalism itself.
Why else haven’t journalists asked more challenging questions? There is a complex relationship between the government, the media and the public. Noam Chomsky explained the ‘propaganda model of mass media’ in his book, Manufacturing Consent. One aspect of this is that the proximity of mass media to political and economic power means that the media propagate the world views of the powerful. One simple way this works is that newspapers and broadcasters have to cater to the financial motivations of their owners and investors. Proprietors have a top-down effect on the preferences and biases of the
...more
Low-quality evidence in favour of masks was all over the media, but the one decent randomised controlled trial (RCT) into mask-wearing was barely reported. It found a statistically insignificant difference in infection between mask-wearers and non-mask wearers.19 I interviewed one of the study’s authors for Chapter 13, ‘The climate of fear’. Hospital admissions made headlines, but not discharges. Deaths were reported with grim daily dedication, but not recoveries. Is it any wonder that the UK was one of the most frightened countries in the world?
That guidance could be interpreted as not permitting anyone to challenge the government’s public health policy. Scientific advice evolves, so does government advice, and inhibiting broadcasters from these discussions is dangerous.
Free speech is not just for the good times, it’s for epidemics too. In fact, it is in times of crisis that we need to hold these values even closer.
However, no such restrictions have been placed by the Government on the right to free speech. In fact, it is vital that this right should be upheld so that the Government’s decision to impose wide-ranging restrictions can be challenged by broadcasters and others. This means that any regulator charged with upholding freedom of expression – as is the case with Ofcom – should proceed to restrict that freedom only on a closely-reasoned basis. That is something Ofcom has manifestly failed to do.’23
The state broadcaster, the BBC, refused to challenge state orthodoxy, which is the sort of thing we criticise other countries for. Open debate should have been allowed, in sensible and contextual ways, to inform the public, stimulate scientific debate and acknowledge that consensus moves. There is a word for only sharing information which is biased and is used to promote a political cause: propaganda.
We had to tell her to turn the BBC off. I honestly think that because the BBC is so respected and looked to as the voice of calm and reason, it has completely let down its licence payers because it kept up a constant narrative of fear. It has ceased to do its job in giving balance and it didn’t question the government fiercely. If you just watched or listened to the BBC every day, what hope have you had? Then she came back to herself. She was brought up in the war, her family were bombed out and so she understands risk and mortality. She got to the point where she wanted the choice to exercise
...more
We would break the rules and visit her in the garden with a cup of tea. It was very important for all of us that we keep seeing each other. When I hear about people who let one of their family die alone in a care home, I am amazed that they put away the very essence of being human. How could they have been so compliant?
You have to work out the risks you want to take. We shouldn’t let fear manipulate us out of proper reasoning. I think people should be encouraged to be stoic and strong and we’ve had the exact opposite. When we are navigating life, fear is not the right compass.
Bernays created the conditions in the public and the press to reshape political reality through this cleverly crafted campaign using universities, lawyers, the media, business and government. The reason it all worked? He exploited fear and manipulated people. He believed in democracy, he just thought people were too stupid to be trusted with it and that rational argument was fruitless. He called his process the ‘engineering of consent’.
in 1957, William Sargent explained in his book, Battle for the Mind, how politicians and religious leaders use ‘brainwashing’ techniques, specifically highlighting the importance of fear in causing alteration in brain function to increase suggestibility.
Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard,
Of course, they were always going to die. But they believed they could die then, or soon, as a result of the epidemic. Mortality felt real. It could be that a modern-day death phobia, or at least our disconnect from death, has primed us for an over-reaction. If you haven’t accepted you will die one day, you are a sitting duck for policies which claim to be for your safety.
Robert Higgs, the American economic historian, said, ‘The masses can be turned around on a dime on the basis of a crisis, even a bogus crisis. The politicians will quickly come running round to exploit on a crisis.’ He has good form for predicting the effects of crisis on government. In his book Crisis and Leviathan he postulated that the First World War, Great Depression, Second World War, Johnson–Nixon years, 9/11 and the Great Recession that started in 2008 all caused the US government to expand,
‘Covid has given the world an electric shock. It’s a time when measures can be introduced and there is little bandwidth for people to oppose. The extent of the changes this year is going to affect everything about being human. The point about liberties is when you restrict them you don’t just restrict the legal aspect of liberty, you restrict life itself.
In The Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis
says that politicians will eventually have to concede that some threats are exaggerated and others have no foundation in reality, that ‘in an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power.’ Are viruses and variants to be the phantom enemy?
as the year wore on, it became clear that Covid was less lethal than feared. Globally, the average Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is 0.15%7 and the median IFR for under 70 year olds is 0.05%.8 Yet the UK government pursued lockdowns and strategies which created other impacts on mortality from other causes,
We seemed to be caught in an endless bait and switch. The virus narrative makes us enemies of each other, which is used to justify impositions on our freedoms and the manipulation of our fears.
How did we move so fast from an emergency situation to a term which seeds the idea the future will be forever different? We were supposed to lock down for three weeks to flatten the curve – why would that necessitate a ‘new normal’? A three-week intervention and a ‘new normal’ cannot logically coexist. What made governments think that Covid-19 would be different from every infectious respiratory disease the world has ever known? Respiratory diseases follow a bell curve: they come and then they go. Why would normal have to be permanently altered for this respiratory disease, and why would that
...more
We have never before quarantined the healthy and impeded so many human rights in one fell swoop. Our rights to liberty, protest, worship, education and maintaining relationships were all impacted. And these are not trifling privileges, but basic liberties: our human rights as established in law.
I experienced the curtailment of the right to protest personally, and I realised that the attitude towards protest in the UK this year has been indicative of a government that wanted to control more than infection.
The UK government has said many times that healthy people can still be infectious, therefore we can all be the ‘accursed’ to a degree. (This is despite numerous studies showing that asymptomatic transmission is not a serious risk,
Beyond choice, we should be vigilant about the danger of mandation and the more subtle, but no less powerful, threat of coercion, for example by offering a return to normal civic and social life with a ‘vaccine passport’ or ‘Covid status certificate’, or double-speak ‘freedom app’.
History reverberates with examples of deliberate attempts to dehumanise and divide people and it has never ended well. So, why do governments use fear? Simply, it encourages compliance. A meta-analysis has found that messages with fear are nearly twice as effective as messages without fear.21 At a time when there is political disengagement, fear cuts through. How do you get your population to take heed? Scare them. Fear suppresses rational thinking and they are more likely to do what they are told.
He said: ‘If something very big is going on in the world, you should always ask if it can be exploited for reasons that are entirely separate from what the primary concerns appear to be. Covid is an event of such scale that there is the potential for actors to exploit it for various agendas. Never let a good crisis go to waste, and so on. You can be open-minded about both the severity of the disease and the potential for exploitation. 9/11 is an example. That event led to 20 years of warfare which wasn’t about fighting terrorism but was enabled by the ‘war on terror’ narrative.
He was cautious, explaining that this was such a large event it would take months to research fully, but that censorship had raised a red flag: ‘Very early on it was clear that eminent scientists were questioning the approach. It’s likely the threat was being overplayed because some dissenting and credible scientists were being censored. The utility of lockdown, for example, has been extremely difficult to debate in public.
Not all persuasion is propaganda, but propaganda is manipulation and it is not democratic. The way some behavioural scientists have acted during the Covid-19 response runs the risk of unethical conduct.
In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.’ From Propaganda by Edward Bernays
Also, creating fear and appealing to fear is far more serious than other uses of behavioural psychology.
In 2010, the authors of MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy3 at the Institute of Government, a think tank, included a whole chapter on the ‘legitimacy of government involvement in behaviour change’ because they know it is ‘controversial’. Although they say that ‘public acceptability’ should not be the determining condition for going forward with behaviour change, they acknowledge that the use of behavioural science ‘has implications for consent and freedom of choice’ and offers people ‘little opportunity to opt out’. As such, the report conceded that ‘policy-makers wishing
...more
Rationally I know I ‘shouldn’t’ eat too many biscuits – or whatever public health issue you would like to insert into that metaphor – but it is my choice. And I would argue that people should be given factual information to guide choices rather than being manipulated at a subconscious level into making choices the government thinks are best for us. But locking us up is a serious measure with vast repercussions. The behavioural science framework for making the population comply with being locked down involved powerful techniques which deserve public consultation. That the consultation hasn’t
...more
There is something distinctive about using fear to get people to conform which is so distasteful and ethically unacceptable. Fear impacts on every aspect of our being.’
They told me that they are ‘stunned by the weaponisation of behavioural psychology over the last five years’ and that ‘psychology and behavioural science are feted above everything else. The psychologists didn’t seem to notice when it stopped being altruistic and became manipulative. They have too much power and it intoxicates them.’ The advisor told me that in their experience, the application of behavioural science in disaster planning used to be more about predicting how people would behave and what they would need, but became more about ‘how to make people do what we want’. Essentially, it
...more
Science was politicised rather than independent, and the German government was most certainly not ‘following’ the science but rather dictating it.
but the issues around science, health, and behavioural psychology should transcend politics. The fact is that the response to Covid became hyper-partisan, as I discuss in Chapter 13, ‘The climate of fear’, and few politicians were expressing concerns about lockdown and the behavioural science aspects as early as Baker.
