Emotion words. The role they were playing in the media/political response to the COVID-19 outbreak first became apparent to me on Monday, 27th April. That was the day Boris Johnson returned to work following a period of convalescence from his COVID-19-related illness. Speaking outside No. 10, he announced that he was (as his press team no doubt suggested he put it in order to resonate with the salaried classes) “back at his desk”. His statement contained all the usual Churchillian allusions. We were thanked for our “effort and sacrifice” and our “sheer grit and guts,” particularly in relation to “collectively shielding our NHS”. Ultimately, though, strip away the rhetoric and what were we being given? A pretty bleak message. Continue staying at home, obey the lockdown and wait for the government to tell you when you can pick up whatever pieces remain of your lives, jobs, careers and companies. No sense of a timeline (however “phased”) for ending the lockdown; no sense of an ending to this period of unprecedented economic national self-harm; no sense of the certainty that our economy – and the people and businesses who make that economy tick – need in order to get back to generating the wealth and prosperity that publicly-funded institutions like “our NHS” need in order to do their job.
How should we “feel” about this? As a matter of fact, during his statement Johnson claimed already to know how we felt about it. “I ask you,” he said at one point, vamping the camera with the same type of nauseatingly faux sincerity that Tony Blair once made his calling card, “to contain your impatience.” Impatience. Did you know you were impatient? Personally, I thought I was “intensely sceptical of the government’s strategy” or “thinking about different ways to manage a pandemic”, or maybe even, in moments of self-aggrandisement, “intellectually dissenting”. Apparently not, however. Those of us who have done our best to research, read widely and think carefully about how it might be possible to, you know, defeat COVID-19 without ending up jobless, business-less and in rent or mortgage arrears, are apparently “impatient”. One wonders how much of this type of thing British people will be able to stomach. Our economy is set to shrink by 13% this year, its deepest recession in three centuries. Public borrowing is set to surge to a post-WWII high. In the April-June period alone, economic output could plunge by 35%, with the unemployment rate more than doubling to 10%. At least 21,000 more firms went under in March 2020 compared with the same month last year – a year-on-year increase of 70 per cent. Does any of this make you feel “impatient”? I’d imagine it might make you feel quite a few other things, most of them unprintable. But you will also undoubtedly be “thinking” quite a lot of things too. That’s the point from which this article jumps off.
Emotion words are dangerous things when it comes to democracy and democratic politics. The word “impatient”, for instance, suggests a tendency to be quickly irritated or provoked by something. It is, in that sense, the emotional response of the infantile and the immature (hence the common, everyday phrase, “impatient as a child”). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the neat rhetorical affordances of Boris Johnson’s phrase weren’t lost on those mainstream media types still fighting their last-ditch, tin-pot battles against Brexit or indeed any other social action that has even the slightest whiff of perceived nativism about it. Thus, in the days following Boris Johnson’s first speech, we find the Guardian (of course) citing Fionnuala O’Connor approvingly (6th May) to the effect that, “[UK] Ministers of slim talent have bumbled through daily briefings and now big-business Conservative donors are impatient to reverse a shutdown so contrary to Brexiteer dreams”. Elsewhere, the BBC’s Jenny Hill described Angela Merkel (6th May) emerging from a “stormy session with Germany’s regional leaders who were so impatient to restart their local economies that some had already announced plans to relax restrictions before the meeting even began”. Those leaders, she noted with a condescendingly elitist nudge and a wink, “got their way and many Germans will no doubt be delighted at the prospect of beer gardens and Bundesliga”. Beer gardens and Bundesliga – such a wonderfully middle-class, Islington dinner party euphemism for “the AfD-fancying great unwashed”. Meanwhile, the Guardian’s own entry into this impromptu “make lockdown critics stand in metonymically for nativists” competition (6th May) read as follows: “On Wednesday, chancellor Angela Merkel announced the latest gradual reopening of large shops, schools, nurseries, and even restaurants and bars – seemingly bowing to a growing impatience with lockdown restrictions that was manifesting itself in political pressure from the leaders of the 16 federal states, the mass tabloid Bild, and growing conspiracy theory-driven protests across major cities.” Lockdown critics: impatient, ill-educated… and also, it turns out, possibly unhinged too.
Of course, this is all to hang a lot of analytic weight off just one word. True enough. So it’s probably worth noting in passing that emotion words have proliferated elsewhere in media/political responses to COVID-19. Terrified, scared, anxious – all have recently been pressed into action within the public sphere. But here, let’s briefly consider the word “fearful”. Its implications of a purely emotional response to an external stimulus helps it perform much the same rhetorical work as “impatient”. In his 10th May speech to the nation, for example, Boris Johnson was at it again, imputing certain emotions to his audience. “There are millions of people,” he declared, “who are both fearful of this terrible disease, and at the same time also fearful of what this long period of enforced inactivity will do to their livelihoods and their mental and physical wellbeing.” Again, did you know that you are fearful? And even if you did… is that all that you are? I would say that I’m “concerned” about what happens as the lockdown is phased out; that I’m “studying” all the available epidemiological/medical/scientific evidence to the best of my (admittedly limited) ability; and that I’m also “planning” for ways in which my business can respond to what will undoubtedly be a fluid, rocky and rapidly-evolving situation. Concerned, studying, planning – these are action descriptions, not emotion words. True, they might be tinged with emotion, but fundamentally, deep down, each of these actions constitute a rational, cognitive response to an external stimulus. Indeed, they point to the type of cognitive work that individuals in any fully-functioning democracy need to undertake all the time – lockdown or no lockdown.
Does this imputation of certain types of feeling to the voters of the UK matter? I think it does. It was the American sociologist Arlie Hochschild who, in the 1980s, first argued that emotional cues may be among the most important cues in social interaction. Feelings, as we all know, are a kind of pre-script to action. That much is obvious. It is internal behaviour that we engage in that prepares us to act externally. In days gone by, you got angry (feeling) and then smashed things up (action); now, you get angry (feeling) and you engage in passive-aggressive social-media one-upmanship with your followers (action). There is, then, a clear link between how we feel and how we act. But Hochschild went on to point out that in modern societies, there is much more to feeling than just some simple kind of inner authenticity. Her research into modern labour markets made clear that the feelings of individual employees were something that companies were increasingly seeking to own, and, in owning, control. People weren’t just buying an airline ticket anymore, they were buying the simpering smile of an airline hostess; similarly, people weren’t just buying a hamburger, they were buying a friendly encounter and the server’s cheery exhortation to “have a nice day now!” Employees were being (badly) paid as much for aligning their emotion management with the needs of their employer as they were for their physical labour.
In complex mass societies, governments also tend to put a surprisingly large amount of work into ensuring not only that the actions, but also the emotions, of the population are aligned with the norms and expectations that they’ve set across multiple different settings. Some of that is right and necessary, of course – we shouldn’t “hate” foreigners, just as children shouldn’t “trust” strangers and we should all feel “disgust” when we see prejudice in action. But what we also find is that modern government increasingly involves the repositioning of issues that would once have been seen as intellectual and cognitive issues as emotional phenomenon. This matters to and for democracy. If something political like a society’s overall response to the threat of a pandemic is seen – as it should be seen – as an intellectual issue then it requires debate, argumentation, criticism and negotiation. In the end, of course, there might turn out to be arguments that are more workable, viable and plausible than others. But everything here depends on continuing debate, negotiation and compromise between equals. On the other hand, if something political starts to be seen as an emotional issue, then there’s a definite tendency for the subsequent interaction to become laden with unequal power relations: the government and its appointed representatives announce a position or perspective, and then get to position everyone’s subsequent response on an emotional spectrum from usefully “docile” and “happy” to unhelpfully “immature”, “infantile” or, of course, “impatient”. Here, then, there’s only ever one argument which is workable and plausible (the government’s argument, of course) and a series of emotional responses to that argument which are either acceptable or unacceptable. In some ways, this is weirdly akin to a doctor-patient interaction on a psychiatric ward. Whatever you say to your Doctor, your words are never taken at face value, and only ever taken as the channel to some deeper emotional malaise that you yourself can’t see.
“I ask you to contain your impatience.” “There are millions of people… who are both fearful of this terrible disease, and at the same time also fearful of what this long period of enforced inactivity will do to their livelihoods.” These might seem like small, unimportant little snippets of what are, after all, “just” speeches. Indeed, it might seem like the real action, the big important stuff, is happening somewhere else. But when the Prime Minister of the UK imputes to the voting population feelings like “impatience” or “fearfulness” over something as important as the country’s response to COVID-19 it matters in deep, politically fundamental ways. His choice of words subtly starts to establish feeling rules for what should actually be issues of intellectual debate and discussion. We move from differing forms of cognition and argumentation to “good” and “bad” types of emotional response. Happily clapping the NHS every week? Virtue-signalling one’s love for key workers on social media? Good emotion. Useful emotion. But we shouldn’t forget that it’s also politically docile emotion. In this new political economy of emotion that Boris Johnson and others seem to be proposing, however, there’s also bad emotion. Here, a lot of us – lockdown sceptics in particular – no longer need to be listened to. We need to grow up. We’re not “sceptical” about the way in which the lockdown is continuing without any clear sense of an ending in sight; we haven’t “proposed” a dissenting virological or epidemiological viewpoint; we haven’t “deconstructed” elements of the computer code used to model the outbreak’s impact on society; we aren’t “advocating” for free speech in an era of unparalleled censorship; we’re not “intellectually opposed” to the idea of state power being wielded on this scale for such a prolonged period. In each and every case, we’re “impatient”. In this way, the dissent and debate that’s necessary to a fully functioning democracy is quietly repositioned at the end of the emotional spectrum marked as “infantile” and “immature”.
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Yes but no but yes but no but yes but no but yes but no but…
Another nice piece of irrefutable data demonstrating the UK should always have followed Sweden’s lead ( until Johnson dropped a bollock ) but instead went ahead and cocked everything up in the most ruinous way possible, perfect for being studied in the context of the Covid Inquiry. Yes how will Whitty explain this uncomfortable truth I wonder..
Simple. Put up a chart referring to old data and…
No, wait… That won’t work. The old data doesn’t support the narrative either.
In an alternative universe, Boris Johnson grows a pair, holds the line, Britain stands with Sweden as an example of the huge benefits of maintaining a free society, this has much greater global repercussion – because (sorry Sweden) the UK zagging would have had much more global impact than just Sweden – and Johnson is now the most celebrated national leader in the world with huge popularity ratings.
One would hope that the man deep down came to realise this and decided to commit properly from now on to the free, liberal values he once pretended to espouse.
But I think it’s more likely that he blames his dumpster fire political career on others and in his lowest moment is recruited to be another washed up ex-leader like Blair to prostitute himself for the global oligarchy.
Sometimes a frog…………..
Johnson had no bollocks to drop. A ballless wonder, he proved to be.
If only Johnson had checked the data properly and had the courage to follow Sweden’s lead, both he and our country and many people dying or dead now would be in a much better place. To do that, he would have needed the courage to get rid of the totally incompetent Sage Committee and substitute it with a smaller group of proper scientists who actually had detailed knowledge about viruses and pandemics and could have advised him accurately.
I just hope the massively expensive enquiry into covid identifies how useless the Sage committee were, but I doubt it will. It will only be another waste of time and our money, dishing out another whitewash report submitted far too long after the terrible effects of the government’s disasterous actions have lost their news focus.
BTW, it is not looking good for these five poor people stuck and lost 2.5 miles under the sea in a tiny submersible. The time has just passed that they were estimated to run out of oxygen. It’s down to pure luck now due to the massive search area and no power on the sub. You can get live updates here;
”The British government said Thursday it has dispatched one of its senior submariners, Lt. Cmdr. Richard Kantharia, to assist with the rescue mission.
Kantharia was already embedded in the United States’ Atlantic submarine fleet and joined the rescue effort Tuesday, a spokesperson for No. 10 Downing Street said by email.
Britain is also providing a Boeing C-17 Globemaster aircraft to transport equipment involved with the search.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/live-blog/missing-titanic-submersible-live-updates-rcna90538
The epitome of misadventure…
Well it seems like all is lost and luck wasn’t on their side after all. Debris has been found. I assume by this last update that the sub imploded. But as I’m the only person who gives a f*ck, evidently, there’s no need to share the link so whatever…back to masks and jabs it is. Rinse repeat.
Sorry Mogs it is interesting to keep updated, on such matters. But not a great deal of sympathy. If I want to see a graveyard I can wander over to my local church.
They knew the risks …. or should have. I find the idea of paying £hundreds of thousands to examine the scene of a tragedy and what has officially been declared a grave-site of over 1000 people quite ghoulish.
You couldn’t have paid me to get on that submersible.
And how many of these deaths were caused by the vax?
Or Mizadolam.
Or other drugs sold by pharma….
From the BBC article:
Oh FFS! Built a database?
Perhaps they might look at the Human Mortality Database https://www.mortality.org/Data/STMF where they can find weekly mortality data for many countries.
If they like they could look at annual data. Sweden’s goes back to 1751. The UK’s only goes back to 1922 – just after the partition of Ireland. If they tried they might be able to spot some long term trends.
A couple of things to note: China’s data is not covered at all and Russia’s annual data stops in 2014 – perhaps they don’t meet quality (credibility) criteria?
The following chart shows Age-Standardised Mortality Rate (ASMR) for England and Wales (separately) based on the European Standard Population 2013. ASMR is a convenient way of comparing a country with its own history or that of other countries. However, it can also conceal changes in death rates between age groups.
If instead of years based on Jan 1 to Jan 1 we look at mid-year to mid-year years the combined England and Wales chart from 2011-2022 looks like this:
Note the huge dip in mortality in the year to mid-2019 – the so-called ‘dry tinder’. The dark blue solid line shows a made-up adjustment increasing the 2019 figure by 55 and decreasing the 2020 figure by the same amount; it just shows that the low death rate before neatly balances the high death rate during 2020.
The various coloured dotted lines are straight trend lines based on different selections of years. I find the 2011-2022 trend (ie all the data) most convincing.
In a few weeks time we should have the ONS data to end of week 26 of 2023 and I’ll be able to extend the chart by another year.
I’m already getting a sense that the wrong questions are being asked of the wrong people, and the outcome will be simply that we should have locked down sooner, harder, with more facemasks and more vax. Anything else is just not open for discussion. Then the actions for the next ‘pandemic’ are pretty much set in stone, aren’t they.? A sham, if I’m being kind.
The really insulting point about this fake inquiry is that many, many people will draw a good butty from it for many years , all off taxpayers, and for an outcome that any of us on here could write in half a day.
Absolutely sick of it already and because we know the end result I truly CGAF.
Please don’t give up. We must try to get the counter-narrative talked about.
Thanks you but this inquiry is nothing more than a P. take.
Nobody is talking about the “counter narrative” in this inquiry, and save a few diehard sceptics everybody I know believes there was a good pandemic and wants to move on.
I will continue to resist as best I can and give my views when asked, but most people are sheep who will only wake up when the wolf is taking its first bite.
Except that there will be lot of evidence on file, it we make good use of it in the future. There will be a lot of junk, but there could be one or two useful nuggets in due course.
It’s a rabbit hole.
No inquiry is required because there was no pandemic- it’s a figment of the collectively insane imagination triggered by evil people.
The only response required is “prove there was a pandemic”.
Anyway, my objections to lockdowns and all the other crap are not in the first instance practical or empirical but philosophical. I don’t believe any state should have the kind of powers that were exercised, no matter what the supposed emergency, nor do I believe that I should be responsible in any way for other people’s health.
For the MODS- there is a posting problem on the “Elites weaponised” thread.
The pandemic (that never was) ended in June 2020 – as evidenced by ONS weekly deaths. From then on, it was unscientific interventions and restrictions that increased deaths – until January 2021. Then we see the deaths mounting, year on year, due to the dreaded jab.
So we are not comparing ‘pandemic’ mortality which was only 3 months from three years. We are comparing rates of manslaughter.
“We are comparing rates of manslaughter.”
An excellent point.
Interesting that you’ve found some numbers on this issue. They don’t like them on the Beeb News! Another related comparison could be to review the US states independently, rather than cobbling it all together, as there were some States that were more in line with the Swedish attitude – e.g. Florida, and a few others. You’d need to be familiar with the variations in age profile in various US states, especially at that time of year, to make good use of the stats, but it could bolster the view that some of them panicked, like some places on this side of the pond.
The BBC: here are some facts. But we don’t want you to pay any attention to them; here’s some propaganda which we approve of.
Same applies to ALL MSM.
The BBC are a failed lying heap of crap when it comes to its news output, why are we still being effectively forced to pay for it?
What a nasty piece of work is Sridhar. Do us all a favour and go to Africa and count wild monkeys – what you might actually be qualified for.