Follow The Money vs Mass Formation Psychosis

The latest theory about why we accepted lockdowns and restrictions is called "Mass Formation Psychosis" (MFP). It says that when a population experiences a) lack of social bond and isolation, b) feels life as meaningless or senseless, and c) has free-floating anxiety, then they are sitting targets for someone offering up a scapegoat, and if the accompanying rhetoric takes, people will start to do things they would never otherwise thing of doing. (Don't mention Germany in the 1930's.)

I don't like theories that excuse people's behaviour by saying, in effect, that they went bonkers because their lives were a bit off, and were tipped over the edge by some crass propaganda.

Most people are not fragile. Most people do not go bonkers. (Except people who go to psychiatrists and therapists, who in turn come up with ideas like MFP.)

Most people do know a good thing when they see it.

So when the Government told us all to go home - well, except train drivers, farmers, shepherds, foresters, binmen, nurses, supermarket workers, lorry drivers, firemen, policemen, pharmacists, builders, telecoms repairmen, sewage plant workers... oh, actually, pretty much the entire working class, making up about 50% of the working population - so when the Government told everyone with a cushy laptop job to go home, they all went home.

Because they could sleep in and save a ton of money. They saved a lot in April-June 2020, and then what amounted to an average train fare / petrol costs after that. (I looked at the data. People who didn't have laptop jobs saved much less, but not many actually came out worse.) They saved money by not going on expensive foreign holidays, or buying takeaways at lunchtime. They spent some of that money doing up the house / flat. Parents who liked their children got to see more of their great kids. Couples who had been wanting to, um, "spend more time together", did so. Unscrupulous people took out emergency business loans they had no intention of repaying, and bought Porsches. Unscrupulous employers claimed furlough and kept their people at work, effectively getting a salary subsidy. Drama queens were in seventh heaven. Amazon brought things to your door, and you were in to receive them. Employees were getting furlough, self-employed people were getting subsidies. Most businesses were not paying rates and many were paying reduced rents. Banks gave out repayment holidays to anyone who asked. Builders, decorators and other tradesmen were making out like bandits.

What was not to like?(*)

But.

No-one wanted to admit they were doing well out of this.

Other People were dying. Other People were suffering from psychological problems. Other People's kids were having a hard time. Some businesses were closing.

Walking around with a big grin on your face would be... tactless? Tone-deaf?

Masks, social distancing, testing, Track-and-Trace, getting Pinged, not being able to see the In-Laws you never really liked anyway... these were small prices to pay for all the advantages absolutely essential public health measures for Other People's benefit. What self-sacrifice! What virtue!

The appearance of nationwide bonkers-ness was created by Government policies were badly-thought out, inconsistent and fragmentary, communicated and enforced by crass and crude propaganda. Of course they weren't gaslighting psychopaths, but that was how they behaved.

Add to that the special interest pushers, apoplectic wanna-be tyrants, strong-leader fetishists, policy dumb-asses, creepy careerists, corporate cost-savers, faceless bureaucrats looking for fifteen minutes of fame, airhead marketeers, get-rich-quick operators selling PPE and tests... all given free column inches and airtime by the usual bunch of mavens, journalists and commentators desperate for content.

The sense of crazy was entirely an artefact of the media.

So we don't need an elaborate and dubious psychiatric theory to explain why someone paid six figures to be smart, thinks that wearing a tissue-flimsy mask is effective against a nano-virus modified to be highly contagious(**).

We just need to follow the money.


(*) Yes. I am telling you that at least almost half the population actually mostly liked the first lockdown, and made the best of it, especially if they avoided the media. The anxiety was about when it would end, to which the answer was July. The second lockdown was nothing like as bad, and most people who wanted to be at the workplace could be and were. The other almost-half of the population went about its jobs as usual right from the start. The people who suffered were those "shielding", or in bad domestic situations, or who were vulnerable. That's not a large proportion of the population, but when the population is 63,000,000, it is still a lot of people.

(**) If masks work, it is because they make talking awkward and shouting almost uncomfortable. That reduces the amount of air you expel with force from your respiratory tract where all those nasty viruses live. But if they said that, you would feel like a naughty child every time you wore one.