We’re publishing an original piece tonight by Dr Sinéad Murphy, an Associate Researcher in Philosophy at Newcastle University, about why it is the public have put up so little resistance to lockdowns. She was prompted to wonder about this by recent pieces on why the Conservatives did so well in last week’s election, from Freddie Sayers’s piece in UnHerd attributing it to Stockholm Syndrome to Noah Carl’s piece in Lockdown Sceptics discussing status quo bias. Dr Murphy thinks it is something more sinister – and deeper – than that.
In an essay from 25 years ago on contemporary conditions of work, the Italian philosopher Paulo Virno identified the phenomenon of uprooting as increasingly operative in societies like his own. Not a once-off uprooting, such as moving from one job or career to another, but an unending process of uprooting, the effect of precarious employment and its continual auditing, in which workers must always be ready to move onwards or upwards and to cultivate the commensurate skills of adaptability and virtuosic sociability.
Most pertinent in Virno’s analysis is the alliance it indicated between this endless uprooting and a certain brand of gullibility. The erosion of stability gives rise to a hyperbolic and free-floating feeling of belonging, even though occasions for it are slight or implausible.
“The impossibility of securing ourselves within any durable context,” Virno wrote, “disproportionately increases our adherence to the most fragile instances of the here and now… to every present order, to all rules, to all games.”
Does the phenomenon of uprooting that Virno described apply to our situation now? Does it explain the curious adherence of so many in our society to the present Covid order and to those who dictate it, no matter how fragile it, and they, have become?
Worth reading in full.
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I’m still waiting for vaccine narrative collapse.
I don’t know about the narrative, but demand for the covid jab has definitely collapsed for two big reasons:
Whether the public can easily be scared into repeating it all with some new scary disease remains to be seen, but I’m actually not so sure.
I don’t think people are ready for another fake pandemic, but I suspect quite a few still think the jabs saved us.
The climate change narrative has been ongoing for over 30 years and despite none of the dooms predicted coming to pass, it goes from strength to strength.
So sad and so true.
To get some idea of the incredible waste and profligacy (and criminality?) of the UK Government response, the cost of the utterly useless Track and Trace system was £37 billion over 2 years.
To put that in perspective, let’s say there are roughly 10 million households in the UK with residents over the age of 65. And let’s say it costs £5 to have your shopping delivered. Allowing for deliveries twice a week, and assuming my back-of-the-envelope calculations are correct, £37 billion would have paid for home shopping delivery for all older people for 7.5 years.
Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that old people be confined to their homes for the best part of a decade, but if focused protection had been seriously considered, it would have been far, far more cost effective to provide help to older people who wanted to remain at home and exercise some control over their environment, and of course would have avoided the enormous damage to children’s education, the economy, and society.
Your calculation is too simple for these simpletons to comprehend.
Was a down-payment on digital IDs and 24/7 surveillance presented as a C19 safety measure.
I fit into the post 65 bracket, reasonably healthy and fit enough to do my own shopping and exercise outdoors. If you want to hide indoors in fear that’s fine by me, but I would prefer to enjoy what time I have left to the full. As for the lockdown, it was a perfect time and chance for a national stock take of all and everyone’s assets, and was found the public had more money to spend than the government thought. With track and trace, and the stock take, soon you will see the introduction of a digital ID, and a digital currency. The 15 min cities are a surveillance measure and more traffic cameras are going up in all areas. Lock downs were a perfect action to test the system.
Absolutely agree with you. My Dad ( fit in 80’s) decided at the very start that if he couldn’t live , why be here; pretty much just carried on. Immuno suppressed me- also did the same. If people want to ‘lock themselves down’ fine, but don’t think the rest of us do, Personal responsibility and choice comes into this. It might kill us, but hey that’s what happens in this life. It must NEVER happen again.
Absolutely, couldn’t agree more. It should always have been a choice – the government should have advised people and offered guidance and support, it should never have forced people to lock down, mask up, down tools or anything else. Covid made it absolutely clear that the government/state regards itself not as a servant of the people, but as a dictatorial ruler, enforcing its edicts on its hapless subjects.
I worked out that Track and Trace cost roughly 40% of the outlay on HS2. Think of all the houses pulled down for that, all the work that has gone into it. Who are the bastards who wrote it and pocketed all that money? I work for a major software house and it is impossible to realistically cost a mobile app at anywhere near that amount no matter what it does. It doesn’t even work and yet nobody is asking for a refund!
I have the feeling that if the government had tried to organise home delivery shopping for over 65s, they would have somehow ended up paying not £5 but £50 per delivery.
That’s what government does, they piss our money up the wall.
Focused protection. The Vulnerable™️ are vulnerable for a reason, their general health is bad and immune system compromised. There is little point protecting them from one particular pathogen, when there are any number of others and their own underlying condition waiting to finish them off.
Why don’t we have ‘focused’ protection every Winter when Colds & ‘flu are about… that’s exactly what ‘Covid’ is – a new scary name for a very old disease – nasal congestion & discharge, sneezing, coughing, headache, fever, sore throat, aches & pains, difficulty breathing, pneumonia and death.
The lives of those soon to die cannot be saved, at best their end might be delayed a little but at what cost and to whose benefit?
We all knew that the lockdown policy was arrant folly predicated upon an exaggerated portrayal of risks by the higher ups and their advisers.
I, like many others, knew Johnson was lying when he announced lockdown #1.
I, like many others, knew that the attendant harms caused by the fallout of lockdown would be far worse than any havoc the virus could wreak.
I am the proud owner of this prescient cartoon by Bob Moran used often on this very website.
This article illustrates perfectly why Gupta was so utterly useless arguing her corner in debate when she got on TV or radio. It’s all to nuanced. You need to be a delphic oracle to work out what she’s saying.
Yes I agree.
Too many weasel words.
She says some of us would have settled for keeping schools open and locking down everything else. Jog on.
We didn’t have a proper lockdown anyway- it was a fake lockdown, for theatrical purposes. To be clear I’m not saying that a lot of things were not closed/forbidden, I am saying that life in some modified form, went on. They had a proper lockdown in Wuhan because people from outside were able to come in and keep “essential” services running while the locals were literally locked in their homes.
I’m not keen on the concept of focused protection either. Give people accurate information that is designed neither to frighten nor to minimise the risks, and let them decide what to do about it. Follow established infection control protocols in settings where there is a concentration of the most frail- but you cannot stop visits to the very frail in care homes and hospitals indefinitely because they have little time left anyway and don’t want to die lonely and alone.
Disappointing that five people have disliked this post without having the courtesy to say why. That’s not the sceptic way.
I agree..it’s so calm it almost like an opioid!! And when will she EVER say that the vaccines were wrong/bad/harmful/not required? You KNOW that she knows this?
I don’t know..I’m getting more mad and more frustrated by the day with the people who should be really cursing the blighters who did all of this to us….but don’t….!!
I do hope Sunetra Gupta is correct.
From my perspective as a member of the public I still see amongst friends, family, colleagues and others this clinging to the idea, that it was ‘kind’ however there is a slight shift in their confidences with what was imposed and their own compliance. BUT they will not admit it! They betray it by sighing, shuffling on their seats and taking more time to explain away the ridiculous.
This morning at the Surgerey there is a notice in red letters; “ If you have a fever, cough, or cold. Please wear a mask to protect our staff. Thank you” only one doctor with the ‘Chinese’ mask but no patients complied.
So you see the authoritarians are still pushing this damaging nonsense or doubling down due to their guilt.
One sad impact is that at my SEN school some students still wear masks all day long due to anxiety that remains with them.
Whilst the fatuous rules remain for example, to get into the Covid Inquiry you need to have a test even if you did attend a forbidden killer party?people will still lap it up.
LOCK DOWN was extremely good for business, some made absolute killings. Made millionaires. County lines dealers; dial a deal’ ; traffickers;illegal immigration; Pimps; groomers; certain “coffee/barber shops” , Peadophiles. Child abusers had a field day. Government, supported by SAGE et al- encouraged this with wild abandon as they told Plod to go out and arrest people for not wearing a mask.
I guess I’m in the wrong job
What a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive…
I have long believed we entered a period of Societal Collapse quite some years ago. It first became blindingly apparent when Blair decided to murder people in Iraq. When leaders, those we look to for wisdom and honest endeavour in leading us, decide to lie, society will, eventually, collapse.
In 2020 we were faced with the inarguably insane decisions of Governments all around the world, in lockstep, doing the same things. It remains today and is a form of mass insanity. How did any of the lies they used against the people of the world have any justification? The only way any of it makes sense is if they deliberately set out to collapse society.
People are, very slowly for the majority, waking up to the fact they were deliberately and knowingly lied to. They lost their lives as they once knew them, every single one of them. Once they are awake they will not go back to sleep and society will collapse.
I read a book some years back about the fall of societies and it explained that in every great society, the same thing happened. The leaders, in every case, made decisions that, at best, seemed insane. From the Incas to the Romans and beyond all falls of society were pre-empted by a form of insanity in the leadership.
How can our society survive, let alone thrive, when it is impossible to trust any of the institutions that form our societies? The NHS falsified figures, Government openly lied, all levels of “experts” lied. We can no longer trust anyone and when the trust goes the Society falls.
Absolutely correct. The fall of Empires, is what I think it is known as. Egyptian, Romans, etc. Question is who’s Empire is at risk now. I’d go for Joe 90 and the post war ‘consensus’
The narrative collapsed from the start, for those of us who hadn’t gone mad.
I think most people now realise it was nonsense but they have moved on- among people I know there is zero interest in understanding what happened and why, how to prevent it. Nobody ever mentions it to me, nobody has mentioned the inquiry. Nobody has apologised to me for calling me a conspiracy theorist, comparing me to Hitler, implying I was a cruel granny killer. Nobody has apologised to my wife for excluding her from various activities she did because she was not vaccinated.
In our lifetimes we will not see a general recognition of how bad it was, nor will those responsible be held to account.
‘We Are Finally Entering a Phase of Covid ‘Narrative Collapse’, Says Oxford Epidemiologist’
When do The Hague trials begin?
I won’t believe it until that happens; then the Net Zero genocide trials.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/education-education-indoctrination/
“Sadly, our schools and universities operate (instead) as factories of indoctrination, apparently attempting to mould our children into compliant puppets, ripe for a life of obedience. The episode at Rye College fills me with hope that the factories are failing. Common sense must prevail.”
It doesn’t matter because the yearning to be controlled isn’t just present it is growing. You can look at tintellectual activity over the last thirty years. The sad fact is that most people would rather shit down than face reality. And if most peope are like this it forces us into difficult areas. Which is as it should be. The time that we are living in isn’t one of choosing a lazy option. It is completely ferocious with everything up in the air. Either you find the spiritual energy to join the fray or you don’t.