Yet there are also cracks in the campaign of fear. Young people didn’t seem frightened as they crowded into parks around the country on 29 March 2021 when restrictions eased, basking in sunshine and the sociality of groups of six. Spring worked its magic on a seasonal virus and on the soul.
Despite the best efforts of the fear machine, I have some hope. Fear is not sustainable. And, as it wears thin, it is revealed to be in an inverse relationship with the growing awareness of how it was weaponised. As fear finally melts away we will be able to confront our frailties and strengths, as citizens, scientists, journalists and politicians.
US president Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his inaugural address in 1933 that the ‘only thing we have to fear is fear itself’. He had a positive vision of a future where fear would be put in its place by a society that believed in itself. These days, politicians are far more likely to advise the public to fear everything, including fear itself. But we can ask for better: from them, the media, the unelected psychocrats and from ourselves. People do not want to live in a state of fear and they do not want to be manipulated. I think the handling of the epidemic should teach us to be wary, if not frightened, of Bernays’ ‘invisible government’ which nudges and forces behaviour change through manipulating our emotions.
It is the duty of us all to think about what type of society we want to live in, which values we treasure, the styles of governance we approve of and reject, and what constitutional protections we may wish to introduce.
It is ironic that in recent years, governments around the world have started to consider frameworks of ‘wellbeing’, yet they launched campaigns to frighten their populations to implement lockdowns. (Although one sounds friendlier than the other, be aware that both frameworks see our emotions as the province of the state.) When I spoke to Steve Baker MP in the summer of 2020 he offered some thought-provoking comments about how to envisage society: ‘I think we need a deep conversation about values and how we want to become. At the moment authoritarian collectivist values are being used. I would dearly love to see politicians of all parties learn from what has gone on during this crisis and say, let us not return to that dystopia, let us choose to be greater and commit to liberal and tolerant values. Normally everyone would say they subscribe to that.’
Gavin Morgan pragmatically told me ‘we are always being manipulated whether we are aware of it or not. Politicians try to be good at this manipulation and often have the media on their side to promote a certain narrative – this then becomes how we think and respond. It goes unchallenged – which is why ethical psychology needs to be a positive influence in society. We have a moral imperative and a responsibility to say when we know something is wrong and damage is being done. There is a responsibility for psychology to take a lead role in shaping a better future. We don’t know what this will look like, it needs to be shaped by us all. Co-constructed by the nation.’ It is hopeful that there are psychologists who want to co-construct. That is a far cry from the psychocrats who see themselves as the architects of our emotions and behaviour.
Some advisors close to government have held our emotional happiness and freedoms a little less dearly than we do ourselves. When he described the inception of the UK’s lockdown and the comparison with China, Professor Neil Ferguson said ‘It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realised we could’.5 We could ‘get away with it’ is a very revealing way to put it. Having got away with it once, is the government likely to inflict an authoritarian measure like lockdown again? And would they rely on our learned obedience, our muscle memory, or would they use fear again? Without the strongest objections from all of us, an inquiry and resistance against these tools, I think their future and repeated use inevitable.
The Covid-19 epidemic may prove to be the biggest campaign of fear the UK, and the world, has ever seen. I’m not sure we even needed it. Fear was an open door – naturally, because we were in an epidemic. The government didn’t need to so much as knock on the door. It didn’t have to open it for us, and politely say, after you. It certainly didn’t need to use a battering ram.
The almost imperceptible stripping away of rights and freedoms, as the people and their government gradually separate, is an old story repeated throughout history, but avoidable if we choose to learn from it. A German professor recounted the process, movingly, in They Thought They Were Free, by Milton Mayer:
‘To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it – please try to believe me – unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, “regretted”, that, unless one were
