Why was our response to Covid-19 so unbelievably deranged?

On the scale of life-taking diseases that have plagued us throughout human history, Covid-19 only just scrapes into the top 20, at number 19 (appropriately). The average age of the person who succumbs to it is around the average life expectancy mark; the vast majority of these people would have died within a year anyway; the vast majority of healthy people under the age of 60 will get mild to moderate symptoms should they catch it; not a single child has died of Covid alone; around 1,600 people a day die in Britain - at the time of writing around 10 people a day die with Covid (and that’s with, not of).

So why have our rulers trashed the public finances, obliterated large swathes of business, crippled us socially (and, in many cases, emotionally), wrecked education, allowed the NHS to build up a horrifying backlog of non Covid cases, torpedoed civil liberties, suspended democracy, stamped out the hospitality industry and much more besides? I believe it’s the result of the way we’ve been going for at least 30 years or so.

The first thing is to say is that I’m going to focus mostly on Britain, in part because I live here and know more about what has gone on, and also because Britain is still influential in the world and many countries followed our lead. ‘Professor’ Neil Ferguson’s ludicrous computer modelling was noted around the globe.

The reasons we decided to commit suicide as a country are many, but most come under three umbrellas: 1. We live in an age of emotion, not reason. 2. We live in a very safe and comfortable age. 3. We like to pretend we live in an age of tolerance, whereas in fact it is quite intolerant. 

Living in an age of emotion makes it easy for hysteria to take hold. When people can get a dopamine hit for every retweet of their hyper-emotional pontification, such as accusing the government of not caring about killing thousands of people, we get into a loop of fury. The media, scrambling around for attention, echo social media as they dive headlong into their own sensationalism. The newspapers have been hit financially by blogs, the TV news by the internet, radio by podcasts - they need the attention to survive, so they all indulge in ever more shouty nonsense. They can’t afford the fact-checkers they might have once used, and they certainly pay little heed to the long-term damage they are doing to themselves as it becomes evident that they are not to be trusted.

So the media was primed for something like this. But what of the underlying conditions that meant governments around the world followed the example of one of the nastiest, most totalitarian regimes on Earth by putting their own citizens under house arrest? In an age where little really bad happens, in comparison to the entirety of the rest of human history - when something a bit bad happens, it grabs more attention. Now, it could be said that very bad things have happened in the west in the 21st century, chiefly Islamic terrorism. But because this is an affront to the liberal media’s narrative, and because the government will always play down any idea that multiculturalism has not worked, in an effort to promote social cohesion, the horrific incidents do not have the impact or long-lasting effect than if they were committed by, for example, white nationalists. Witness how the broad daylight killing of four men in Reading by a Libyan asylum seeker had a short half-life, or how the Manchester Arena killings did not live as long in the media eye as surely they should. So while there have been terrible things that have happened, they affected fewer people, and politics meant they became nearly unmentionable.

Back to the 20th century. Following two catastrophic world wars, the west continued to see a great deal of tragedy, with natural disasters generally being added to by technology going wrong. There were frequent aeroplane crashes, the death of astronauts in incidents such as the 1986 Challenger tragedy, the 1987 Zeebrugge ferry disaster (193 dead) and the 1975 Moorgate tube train smash (43 dead). Between 1953 and 1982 34 Formula One drivers were killed in crashes; in the 21st century there has been just one Grand Prix fatality, Jules Bianchi. In 1966 116 schoolchildren and 28 adults were killed when a slag heap cascaded down a mountain and engulfed their school in Aberfan, South Wales (the National Coal Board was found to be responsible). In 1987 the small town of Hungerford, Berkshire, was rocked by gunman Michael Ryan, who indiscriminately killed 16 people; in 1989 51 people drowned when the party boat they were in, the Marchioness, sunk in the Thames; serial killers like Peter Sutcliffe and Dennis Nilsen stalked the land in the 1970s and early 1980s. Death and disaster used to be more common.

I defy anyone under the age of 45 not to look at this Wikipedia page, which details the scores of IRA terror attacks on mainland Britain in the late 20th century, and not gasp in horrified amazement. It wasn't just the IRA: when I was a child, hijacking of planes and assassinations were almost stuff of the weekly news cycle.

Death is not dwelt upon so much nowadays, nor as visible as it was. A 1971 BBC sitcom, That’s Your Funeral (which was also made into a film), concerned a funeral parlour, as did ITV’s In Loving Memory (1979-1986). 1973 film Steptoe And Son Ride Again features what had been until around then a fairly common occurrence, that of a corpse in a coffin being brought into the house for the wake (except in this instance, Albert is not really dead and not actually in the coffin). Now death is taboo in the west, something out of sight and thus, temporarily, out of mind. How many people even work in abattoirs in Britain now, compared to how many used to? Are there more than a handful of miners in the entire country? In 1913, the peak of UK coal production, around a quarter of a million men and boys performed this hard, often fatal job. The number of oil rig workers and men who go to sea are a fraction of what they are used to be - it’s the same with factory workers, especially workers in factories that are dirty and dangerous. Instead we now have (or had, before the government decided its staff were a thousand times less important than state employees) a thriving service sector, with people performing jobs vastly more comfortable than their grandparents or great grandparents did. In combo, health and safety are two of the most famous words of our times.

We are soft, softer than anyone in the whole of human history, a pampered, spoilt, chubby, ignorant, malleable populace, a deck of lazy sunbathers (‘too jaded to question stagnation,’ Morrissey might continue). Witness the paroxysms of fury some people go into when they are told a plot detail of a film that occurs more than a couple of minutes into it. Universities have ‘safe spaces’ where students can escape from an opinion that might be different to their own. Any ideas or language that are ‘problematic’ may be branded ‘hate speech’ and could be investigated by a highly politicised police force. People can be ‘cancelled’ for diverging from the current liberal orthodoxy. Victim culture is rife. Terrified youngsters and millennials will recoil in horror at any discussion of race that might not be slanted in the direction that they have been told is right. We are not tolerant - no wonder we could not tolerate a virus. The cheek of the thing! We are delicate little pearl-clutchers. When Alice Eve in 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness had the temerity to briefly strip down to her underwear, the reaction from, let’s call them snowflake bedwetters, was extraordinary. 

We are healthier than we have ever been - again, the virus has been seen as an effrontery to that. There are thousands more gyms up and down the country than there were 50 years ago. People have increasingly adopted vegetarian and vegan diets (which is also a reflection of how we have become disgusted by death, in this case the death of animals), and smoking has declined propitiously. In July 2007 a smoking ban in indoor places came in throughout the UK, something that would have been unthinkable just a few years before. While this was a welcome move, it was another step towards our reaction to this virus: we are so precious now, how dare a malign substance enter our lungs?! The Great Smog of 1952 is said to have killed 4,000 people in the capital in four days; it wasn’t until 1956 when smog (smoke and fog) was finally eliminated from industrial cities like London thanks to the Clean Air Act. Cars were another mixed blessing of the 20th century, but now emissions have declined to such an extent that in the present-day a car in motion has less emissions than a parked car in the 1970s. The move towards electric cars continues this trend. 

There is yet another reason for our bizarre reaction to this virus, and that is the growth of consumer culture from the 1980s onwards, now manifested in the feedback surveys from hotels and councils and everyone else that we are asked to fill in ("how did we do?"). The elevation of the individual has created ideas of preciousness, that we’re all super special and again, the sheer effrontery of this virus to do bad things to us. The rising living standards given to us by consumer capitalism have also been a factor in our reaction to Covid, not least because it has stretched out our lifespans: just fifty years ago, the number of over-80s was nothing like the number it is today, and since they are the people most dying with this virus, we can conclude that these wild measures would not have been taken some years ago, because the people would have already been dead.

So does all of this give our rulers a free pass? Okay, Matt Hancock is a borderline fascist and the prime minister is the weakest and most witless person to have ever held that position, so should we just say, "Oh well, they all swim in a cultural soup"? No. No, we should not. A strong and wise leader would have stood up to the enervating forces, studied all details to hand forensically, assessed the collateral damage of the suggested measures and done what was right, not expedient. When 364 economists wrote to The Times in April 1981 criticising the government’s economics policy, Mrs Thatcher did not turn, she did not listen to these ‘experts’, and the British economy embarked on around 50 months of strong growth from that exact point.

We have a leader who does not lead, he follows. And because he follows a culture that has mutated into something disconnected with real life we have debilitation and desolation in our country, which will only increase in the months and years to come.