Former President Ronald Reagan famously said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help”. His point was that Government “help” often leads to worse outcomes for its supposed beneficiaries. Not only have many governments been incredibly inefficient in achieving claimed objectives of helping citizens, but they have often proved to be malicious in intent: the “help” offered has been a cover to stay in power.
Liberal democracies have a limited repertoire of state-sanctioned carrots and sticks, and none of these allow governments to easily trample citizens’ rights enshrined in law such as habeas corpus or the right to trial in a court of law. There are certain norms that apply to government action in modern liberal democracies, and these cannot easily be over-ridden. We call these norms civilised.
Nonetheless, we have witnessed in our lifetimes a new mode of practical politics observed by the great essayist H. L. Mencken. He said, in so many words, that our governments manufacture imaginary hobgoblins – creatures of the mind that can be mischievous, frightening and even dangerous – and then wait for citizens to clamour for safety.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary
In serving those needs for safety, governments are more likely to get re-elected. Government by hysteria in other words, where fear and alarm are cultivated, then weaponised, for political ends.
Yet exploiting hysteria to govern, with dramatic displays of outrage or emotion, is not without challenges. Hobgoblins cannot bamboozle everyone all the time. Fear and alarm wear out, and truth matters in justifying policies that impact the livelihoods of people.
The Climate Hobgoblins
Climate hobgoblins have been long in the making. Maurice Strong, a Canadian environmentalist and principal architect of the 1972 Stockholm conference – the first global summit to make the environment the central issue – proclaimed that “If we don’t change, our species will not survive. … Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilisation to collapse.” For mere hobgoblins, this was big stuff. These ones endangered mankind itself.
The threatening features of this genre of hobgoblins went through several permutations. It started with Paul Ehrlich’s famine and war through over-population and the Club of Rome’s prediction of inevitable resource scarcity. It then morphed into global cooling during the 1970s, before finally settling for global warming (now called ‘climate change’) due to effects of greenhouse gases. The focus is on the trace gas carbon dioxide mainly emitted by humans combusting fuels for industry, cooking, heating, cooling and transport.
The story is that the CO2 hobgoblins are the control knob of climate and, by extension, our cataclysmic future, a theory spread via the panic of a Swedish school drop-out who deleted her predictive tweet about the end of the world by 2023. Along with the Swede Greta Thunberg (now a campaigner for Palestinian rights) are the assorted ‘climate scientists’ who have conjured up the climate hobgoblins with their global warming ‘hockey stick’ charts and their pseudoscientific climate models duly adopted by the UN’s IPCC.
Lionel Shriver captures the climate hobgoblins’ mischievousness well:
They take temperature readings at Heathrow airport. They refuse to cite less distressing satellite readings. They attribute single weather events to climate change without supporting data. They play on the fact that up close, all natural disasters seem like the worst ever. They suppress good news, such as the recovery of the Great Barrier Reef and the fact that hurricanes have not grown more frequent – only reporting the ’hottest July on record’ without noting when the ‘record’ goes back only to 1940.
The work of the climate hobgoblins has stoked up the climate hysteria which is amplified by the mass media on almost daily basis. The deluge of catastrophic predictions regarding climate change and its consequences has reached everyone on the planet. One has only to cite the frequent hyperbolic pronouncements by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who never tires of reminding his global audience of the “climate emergency”: it is “a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable”; the “era of global boiling has arrived”, and so on ad nauseam.
John Clauser, a 2022 Nobel prize laureate in physics, finds climate alarmism “a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people”. He continues:
Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, agencies and environmentalists.
The COVID-19 Hobgoblins
If the climate hobgoblins were long in the making, the Covid variety were anything but. The first reports of COVID-19 emerged in late December 2019, when an outbreak of an unidentified form of pneumonia was reported in Wuhan, China. The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began reporting on the outbreak in January 2020 with individual cases reported in Thailand and elsewhere.
By March 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) had declared COVID-19 a global health emergency and named the virus “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2”. It was also in March that WHO officially declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. In the early stages of the spread in infection, countries around the world took different approaches to manage COVID-19 and reduce the spread of the virus. Most countries adopted more or less strict lockdowns (encompassing stay-at-home orders, curfews, quarantines, cordons sanitaires and similar societal restrictions) with the significant exception of Sweden which undertook limited targeted measures such as protecting the elderly and the infirm. Strict lockdowns were precluded by insufficient state capacity in the poorer countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The British Prime Minister Boris Johnson spoke of common sense, ‘herd immunity’ and protecting the vulnerable. He initially rejected banning mass gatherings or imposing social distancing rules. Then, an unpublished alarmist March 16th report by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London warned of 510,000 deaths in the country if the country did not immediately adopt a suppression strategy. On March 23rd, the UK Government reversed course and imposed one of Europe’s strictest lockdowns. For the US, the professor had predicted 2.2 million deaths absent similar government controls, and there too, Ferguson’s fearful predictions of mass deaths helped move the US federal government into lockdown mode.
Unlike climate change models that predict outcomes over a period of decades, however, it takes only days and weeks for epidemiological model forecasts to be falsified by data. Furthermore, by including all extreme weather (whether heavy snowfalls or heatwaves, droughts or floods) as results of an all-encompassing ‘climate change’, nothing could be disproven.
But the COVID-19 hobgoblins could not provide cover for Professor Ferguson’s hysterical conjectures. Thus, by March 25th, Ferguson’s predicted half a million fatalities in the UK was adjusted downward to “unlikely to exceed 20,000”, a reduction by a factor of 25. This drastic reduction could not be credibly explained by UK’s lockdown measures which had been imposed only two days previously, before any such measures could possibly have had enough time to work.
The Corruption of Science
While the climate and COVID-19 hobgoblins may be of different genres, they share much in common. They share striking parallels in the corruption of science, with the use of models whether they be of a bogus global warming hockey-stick or runaway epidemiological fatality predictions. This inordinate dependence on speculative, not-fit-for-purpose models betray the lack of transparency and groupthink, which involves the suppression of sceptics who question the imaginary hobgoblins.
A recent victim of the groupthink censorship is the highly eminent public health specialist Dr Jay Bhattacharya who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration which criticised the wholesale adoption of rigid lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nominated by President Trump as the next head of the National Institutes of Health, he has undergone four years of censorship, blacklisting and vilification. Dr John Clauser, who disputes the ‘climate crisis’ narrative, was similarly cancelled. He was disinvited by the IMF from a talk he was supposed to deliver and was subject to hit pieces in the mainstream media.
In the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption denounced the country’s “hysterical slide into a police state. … An irrational overreaction driven by fear”. He went on to masterfully describe the role of hysteria in politics:
The real problem is that when human societies lose their freedom, it’s not usually because tyrants have taken it away. It’s usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection against some external threat. And the threat is usually a real threat but usually exaggerated. That’s what I fear we are seeing now. The pressure on politicians has come from the public. They want action. They don’t pause to ask whether the action will work. They don’t ask themselves whether the cost will be worth paying. They want action anyway. And anyone who has studied history will recognise here the classic symptoms of collective hysteria. Hysteria is infectious. We are working ourselves up into a lather in which we exaggerate the threat and stop asking ourselves whether the cure may be worse than the disease.
Hobgoblins Fade, People Wake Up
Much as people want protection from imaginary hobgoblins and their perceived threats, when governments turn tyrannical and pursue policies which cost far more than they benefit, people eventually undergo a process of disillusionment with a yearning for meaningful change. Regimes in power in turn double down on hysteria and panic-driven policies to keep the hobgoblins at bay. This causes even further impoverishment and alienation among larger sections of the population.
Rather than allocating resources and efforts towards protecting the vulnerable from COVID-19 while allowing the rest of the population to carry on with their livelihoods with individuals taking responsibility for safe socialising, most governments imposed top-down, economy-crushing lockdowns followed by mandates and exhortations to wear masks and take vaccinations and endless booster shots. And rather than mitigating real environmental threats such as ensuring water reservoirs are filled and forests are managed to safeguard against fires in California for example, the climate change establishment advocates further ‘decarbonisation’ (read deindustrialisation) to save us from extreme scenarios of global warming.
The triumphant return of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the US was the culmination of that process of disillusionment. The hobgoblins of COVID-19 and climate no longer seemed to hold sway. Rather, more people than not preferred to believe in, and vote for, a leader that dismissed the ‘climate crisis’ as a hoax and who was willing to give succour to those that refused COVID-19 vaccinations despite being threatened with the loss of jobs and ordinary freedoms.
On the first day of his administration, President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders which promise to end hysteria over fearful narratives. In the areas of energy, environment and the so-called ‘climate crisis’, President Trump has instructed his administration to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, reopen Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration, temporarily withdraw all areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from offshore wind leasing, review the federal Government’s leasing and permitting practices for wind projects, declare a national energy emergency, stop radical environmentalism by “putting people over fish” to provide water to southern California; and put ‘America First’ in international environmental agreements.
With respect to issues related to COVID-19 and public health, the most consequential move Mr. Trump made in his election campaign was to unite forces with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who initially ran as an independent, and to nominate him as his next Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. On his first day, he issued an executive order to withdraw from the World Health Organisation. He also promised to “reinstate any service members who were unjustly expelled from our military for objecting to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate with full back pay”.
At his 1933 Presidential Inauguration, Franklin D. Roosevelt asserted his firm belief that “the only thing we have to fear is… fear itself”. Imaginary hobgoblins, threatening as they are, do fade away as people realise the truth.
Dr. Tilak K. Doshi is an economist, a former contributor to Forbes, and a member of the CO2 Coalition.
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I wonder what the Californian weather stations have recorded recently. I assume the LA data will be fed into the record and anytime soon the BBC will produce the data to show it was warming after all that started the fires – just look at the weather station figures moments before combustion.
It seems liberal democracies do not respect the tradition of elections. The elite’s subversion of the Brexit vote was a disgrace, and the cancellation of council elections is shocking, with Labour and Conservatives conspiring to make it happen. In case any readers are not up to speed, the local authority areas are to be changed to create new, larger units. No specific boundaries have yet been published and we can only guess what statutory powers they will have. Despite that, no elections will be held until the new units are in place (anticipating Parliamentary approval) in about two years time.
We will get no say on these new councils, which will be a stitch up between existing Councillors and the Government.
No doubt the they’ll quote temps from the ground based stations that were burned. Highest ever temperature of 950°F ‘proves’ deniers wrong.
In “O” level social and economic history over 50 years ago, we were taught that not for nothing did the might of King Coal supersede capricious wind to kick start the world’s first industrial revolution in Britain some three hundred years ago.
I also vaguely recollect our physics teacher taught us the superiority of hydrocarbons over windmills and waterwheels is reflective of energy density, gradient and continuity of provision.
Seems over the last 50 years green goonery and windbaggery has somehow prevailed over the facts of energy life well understood by the industrial pioneers of the past.
Go figure, Minister of Energy Insecurity. Net Zero isn’t about saving the planet, it’s about control by a flawed centralist view of the way the world operates.
Either we’re stuffed or they’re stuffed, but we have physics on our side and all they have is wishful thinking. No contest. Just a matter of when.
A very good summary of two nonexistent problems conjured out of nowhere to make us all afraid. Radical action needed! Climate change demands you lose your job and forego consumption! The deadly virus means you must curtail your freedom!
But what happens when there is a real, genuine emergency? The only example I can think of is Autumn 1940 when Nazis could conceivably have invaded. What are the instructions then?
”Keep calm and carry on.”
Excellent point.
I think it also means we can tell when it’s a real emergency. If the advice is not ‘keep calm and carry on’ then it’s just whipped up hysteria.
Yes I don’t think Nudge Units were necessary in 1939 for people to be weary of a Nazi invasion. All the old tank traps like the ones at Story Arms were erected in haste with people who knew what they were defending.
9-Minute clip of physicist Denis Rancourt, nowadays researching independently under auspice of Ontario Civil Liberties Association, declaring, “There was no pandemic, it was the State that killed granny”:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-denis-rancourt-there-was-no-pandemic-it-was-the-state-that-killed-granny/5876206
Trump should watch this video. As Rancourt says:
“This was a mega-campaign, … it was planned by the CIA, the military, it was executed, they were going to do it no matter what, and it killed people by how they treated people, and then the vaccines themselves are toxic.
“So the experiment’s been done globally, we know this now, we know that death [from the ‘vaccines’] increases exponentially with age, many elderly people died, it’s hard to complain because they were elderly but, still, they died.
“So just to give you one quantitative figure to leave you with, in most countries, [for] people over 80, the risk of dying per injection is one death in between 5 and 20 injections, depending on the country. That’s the level of toxicity of the vaccines for elderly people. And this is not to mention all the serious harms that are done to young people and young adults, including myocarditis, heart conditions, you name it.”
Indeed and who has been and are still behind, so many of these Hobgoblins….Schwab, Soros and Gates, aided by their far too willing dupes.
Intertwined with various deep states. NATO was one of the culprits as a Danish MP admitted recently.
Could David Shipley of The Spectator please reason this article. He could learn from it.
It does seem that society is hysterical at certain periods in time. Perhaps we are emerging from its latest manifestation and will only succumb to it again in the not too distant future. Such is life!
A great example of mass hysteria is Tulipmania, it’s well worth looking up on YouTube for those who are unaware of how devastating it can be.
My daughter practically accused me of wanting her to die, when I refused to have the covid vaccine (in case I passed covid onto her). My view was that if she’s vaccinated, what does it matter if I am not. In the end, I gave way to pressure, and had two Astra Zeneca shots. But I refused point blank to have any boosters.
Hysteria is a powerful force.
It’s mad. I had the two shots but only because I was due to leave the country and it was mandated in my destination country. I didn’t have the booster either.
ironically I’m in a high risk group because of a lung complaint and we were in the early batch of people who contracted Covid. I suffered the least and was the first to recover.
Fortunately I’m in an ex commie country so there seems to be less hysteria at the moment. They are catching up fast, it seems that as their wealth increases, hysteria accelerates at what seems to be an equal rate. This is not condoning any political doctrine.
People were able to travel without the shots, eg Leo Biddle, Dolores Cahill, etc (look them up), plus an American cousin of mine. You just needed to be firm, know your facts, etc.
it seems that as their wealth increases, hysteria accelerates at what seems to be an equal rate
Interesting observation Bill. We humans are funny creatures.
” claimed objectives of helping citizens, but they have often proved to be malicious in intent: the “help” offered has been a cover to stay in power.”
yup and also to justify its existence. A prime example of a Trojan Horse by government is the Online “Safety” Bill. Censorship be the back door because the buggers don’t like it up them!
If we hire lots of bureaucrats, naturally they’ll do what bureaucrats do, which is to create and sustain ever larger bureaucracies, therefore the simple answer should be to reduce the number, just below the threshold of how many you need to manage the necessary work (such as defence, tax, healthcare, social care etc) – at this level, in theory, they won’t have any spare capacity to get involved in anything else. Keep them out of trouble in other words…
And it would also help if Civil Servants didn’t come straight out of Common purpose.
The conclusion A particular mechanism for selecting governments we’re wedded doesn’t work very well => government is per se bad makes no sense. Government by permanent hysteria is – in effect – nothing but a pretty successful method to get the necessary short-term acclamation from the otherwise disenfranchised electorate. People in government using well-known behavioural tricks to stay in government is obviously a travesty of the so-called democratic process as we have it. The solution to this is not abolish the evil government but fix the dysfunctional process to keep the evil people out if it.
Easier said than done, scum always floats to the surface – who vets them?
An easy and obvious suggestion would be ban the use of commercial marketing methods by governments to generate support for their own policies. Ban their use during election campaigns as well. Most politics are – in reality – rather dull stuff and it could help to force them to be presented as dull as they are. Eg, force Miliband to state that this goal is to have X% energy generation capacity via windmills by year …. because of $reason instead of spouting absurd phrases like clean enegry superpower while hiding what this will mean in practice.
A more radical idea would to split executive and legislature again. Prohibit party members, especially, party members who are also MPs from taking up governments posts until some years after they have stopped being MPs/ party members. Turn the king¹ from a nominal head of government back into an actual head of government² who appoints ministers and other government officials as he sees fit with the goal of having a government which stands above party strife which has to come to terms with a parliament representing the people (with all their factionalism) on a case-by-case basis.
NB: These are obviously just two ideas out of my head which might not actually be particularly wise choices. But they should at least serve to demonstrate that other options exist and have been employed successfully in the past.
¹ The Germanic concept of monarchy ultimately rests on the notion that the gods like some people better than other people and are thus more likely to grant luck do them and that this trait generally runs in the family, with reigning families being replaced with other families if their streak of god-granted luck has obviously run out. That’s obviously a bit of an archaic concept but IMHO, that’s as good a method for selecting a head of government than any other, especially if combined with a suitable tradition and education for future heads of government.
² AFAIK, the office of prime minister came into being because the English of one Hanover kings was so poor that he couldn’t effectively preside over cabinet meetings and didn’t particularly want to do that, either. This king should have been declared unfit to govern and a more suitable candidate selected as king instead.
Climate Change Derangement Syndrome. COVID Pandemic Derangement Syndrome. Trump Derangement Syndrome. Perhaps even Farage Derangement Syndrome.
I detect a theme.
former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption denounced the country’s “hysterical slide into a police state. … An irrational overreaction driven by fear”
Sumption is a formidable advocate. I’ve been impressed with quite a lot of what he has said and written over the past few years.
Caught an interview with the reform Chairman yesterday on GBN…..All well and good stopping the boats etc, but then he goes on to say…..Replace the ECHR with a modern Bill of Rights. Has he not heard of the 1689 Charter of rights, an upgrade to the Great charter against King John. It is not up to politicians to decide what “rights” we have, they were carved up in blood.
10 out of 10
I think common sense should be a prerequisite for anyone in public office or influence over the lives of the public at large.
if a Q&A was given to all these lemmings you would find common sense is not that common!
Plus they should set up a Department for the Law of Unintended Consequences – that should reduce nonsensical declarations of “world leading” [insert whichever insane idea comes to mind first].
If only Ed and his band of brothers would read this. But maybe they would all need to go back to school first.
Ed has the right education to understand it. But his towering ego, his jealousy of his brother, the bacon sarnie episode, the Edstone episode, and many other behavioural ‘issues’ hold sway in his life. He can never be wrong…and we are paying the price for that. He will have to be removed….. Would we prefer further mass government stupidity and hysteria, followed by a coup and Reform, or a gradual toning down of the zealotry and incompetence under the adenoidal liar lawyer? The Brit’s are not good at rebellion….
I don’t think Donald Trump is going to be the dragon (or should I say hobgoblin?) slayer people seem to hope he’ll be. He seems to want to abolish the First Amendment and he’s unlikely to be able to achieve any meaningful peace in Russia/Ukraine or the Middle East!
Much of the populace is, indeed, alarmed – but I, for one, am not looking to Labour to lead us to safety.
Excellent article as ever but CO2 is not mainly emitted by humans, it is mainly (by a vast majority) emitted by natural processes and called the carbon cycle by anyone who did o level biology.
I have no strong opinions either way, so I should not have stated that uncritically. Thank you for pointing out natural processes contributing to CO2 emissions. Here is one reference: https://co2coalition.org/publications/human-contribution-to-atmospheric-co2-how-human-emissions-are-restoring-vital-atmospheric-co2/
It’s not just Sweden that was an exception to the COVID hysteria. Even Sweden had limited mostly voluntary anti COVID measures.
Belarus, despite massive international pressure, did literally nothing. And yet life expectancy there seems to have been completely unaffected.
https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/belarus-demographics/#life-exp
But we’re not allowed to talk about Belarus, because it is an “evil lackey of Putin” or something.
Good article only one problem my family with few exceptions are still well ensconced into the climate nonsense and I suspect many families of Sceptics here are in the same boat. As for the scamdemic I again suspect many would baton down the hatches if and when told especially with the new hobgoblin of bird flu they’re trying to foist upon us. Sad but true.
“Fool me once shame on me, fool me twice shame on you”
A very well written article. The sad thing is that there are none so blind that those who will not see and choose the mainstream media and government advisors over their own eyes and research