On The Use Of Fear As A Government Tactic

Perhaps a public debate on governmental lying and manipulation through the purveying of fear is about to begin. God willing, it will.

I raise this hope because of a remarkable article that appeared in the Daily Telegraph (UK). Excerpts follow. No comment seems required, except the obvious: This has been a Global phenomenon. Which means: coordinated.

Use of fear to control behaviour in Covid crisis was ‘totalitarian’, admit scientists

Members of Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour express regret about ‘unethical’ methods

Scientists on a committee that encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behaviour during the Covid pandemic have admitted its work was “unethical” and “totalitarian”.

Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) expressed regret about the tactics in a new book about the role of psychology in the Government’s Covid-19 response.

SPI-B warned in March last year that ministers needed to increase “the perceived level of personal threat” from Covid-19 because “a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened”.

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One SPI-B scientist told Ms Dodsworth: “In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian.

“The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment. Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared.”

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One warned that “people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise… We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in”.

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Another member of SPI-B said they were "stunned by the weaponisation of behavioural psychology" during the pandemic, and that “psychologists didn’t seem to notice when it stopped being altruistic and became manipulative. They have too much power and it intoxicates them”.

Oh. A bit like power and absolute power.

Steve Baker, the deputy chairman of the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs, said: “If it is true that the state took the decision to terrify the public to get compliance with rules, that raises extremely serious questions about the type of society we want to become.

“If we’re being really honest, do I fear that Government policy today is playing into the roots of totalitarianism? Yes, of course it is.”

As Basil Fawlty might say, Thanks for enunciating the bleeding obvious.