A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic - Laura Dodsworth (the first e reader .txt) 📗

the Ministry of Choice and have decided to do the deciding for everyone else. In David Halpern’s book, Inside the Nudge Unit, when he considers the ethics of this he says you don’t ask children if they want to learn to read and write, you just teach them to do it. I think it shows he thinks of the population as being like children.’

I asked Fagan if he thought the government were relying on fear when other forms of persuasion were possible. He agreed that ‘there are many ways to nudge. You can appeal to duty. You can use reciprocity – the older generation did this for you, you can do something in return. And fear has been overplayed. But emotion is the steam in the engine that drives behaviour and fear is the oldest and strongest emotion.’

How is fear confected? How exactly have our minds been nudged to influence our behaviour? Here are some examples from the myriad UK government mind-control campaigns.

FRIGHT NIGHT

The behavioural psychologists advised that the sense of personal threat had to be ramped up at the end of March. The prime minister’s doomsday speech was scripted to do just that, by inducing fear and evoking war and authoritarianism. Chapter 1, ‘Fright night’, details this. From that point onwards, the risk of death was energetically amplified, particularly during the 6pm and 10pm news broadcasts and on newspaper front pages. The Downing Street briefings were characterised by authority figures in suits on raised podiums and yellow and black chevroned signage warning danger, danger, danger.

While the number of deaths in the UK to date is sobering, the British people have vastly over-estimated the risk to themselves from Covid-19, the country has been locked down or under restrictions one way or another for most of a year, and it was Boris Johnson’s speech that first set the framework for that miscalculation.

HEROES, COVIDIOTS AND SLOGANS

The media resounded with a dialectical theme of ‘heroes’ and ‘covidiots’ during the epidemic. ‘Heroes’ was used repeatedly to praise people following the rules, inspiring community activists, and frontline workers. Praising heroes is laudable, but what is determined to be heroism is key, and heroism consisted mainly of following the rules and following a nascent creed of safetyism and collectivism. A BBC film on 25 December celebrated ‘London’s 2020 pandemic heroes’.11

Slogans on government and NHS advertising appealed to heroic altruism:

‘Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives’

‘Protect your loved ones’

‘I wash my hands to protect my Nan’

‘I wash my hands to protect my family’

‘I wear a face covering to protect my mates’

‘I make space to protect you’

Heroism and altruism appeal to ‘norms’, as we all want to be in the right crowd. ‘Ego’ is affected as the terms and framing equate compliance with virtue. The slogans themselves work through ‘salience’ as they are simple and catchy. We’re hardwired to notice what is distinctive. Roadside signs commanded us to ‘Stay Alert’. This was distinctive for a while. To start with I noticed my local illuminated ‘Stay Alert’ sign each time I drove past it, although I’m sure I wasn’t alone in wondering what I was supposed to be alert to exactly while driving my car. After a couple of months I felt irritated by the relentlessly glowing ‘Stay Alert’ signage. After another couple of months it was no more than roadside wallpaper. It had lost salience.

Instructional slogans also came in triadic structures, because of the ‘power of three’. Rhyme and repetition are proven to increase believability. They ‘afford statements an enhancement in processing fluency that can be misattributed to heightened conviction about their truthfulness’.12

The term ‘covidiot’ emerged early on to describe people behaving ‘stupidly’ or irresponsibly. Or you can swap ‘covidiot’ for ‘selfish moron’, or ‘granny killer’. The Urban Dictionary website has a selection of definitions, including this dour piety: ‘an individual who in the face of dire circumstances for all, acts selfishly toward others instead of in solidarity and with generosity.’ Through ‘affect’ people will not want to be in the disliked deviant group. The negative labelling ensures that the altruistic majority who are openly conforming with the rules will blame any subsequent increase in coronavirus cases or deaths on those who didn’t comply, while themselves taking the credit for any positive change in the statistics. The covidiots and ‘lockdown sceptics’ become responsible for the virus being a hard-to-control virus, or the ineffectiveness of unproven non-pharmaceutical interventions. Scapegoating is ‘convenient’.

As I explained in Chapter 4, ‘Fear is a page of the government playbook’, the use of ‘othering’ and dehumanising language can go on to have tragic consequences. Patrick Fagan told me that in an analysis of the Rwandan genocide, one of the first linguistic predictors was the tendency to look backwards, to blame, and to focus on past wrongs and injustices, and he had noticed similar precursors in the language of blame during the Covid epidemic. This sounds extreme, but it’s important to at least be aware of these linguistic signposts – they have always led us down the ugliest roads in human history.

When pubs reopened in the summer, 4 July 2020 was characterised as ‘Independence Day’, implying an entitlement to excess and conveying disapproval. Pubgoers were derided in the media as wanton and selfish – the classic covidiots. Even if no rules had been broken, the sight of people enjoying a convivial drink was heavily criticised by pious ‘lockdown zealots’.

It’s worth noting that when we are influenced by ‘norms’ and coalesce into a group – a herd – we are easier to govern. It isn’t a stated aim of the behavioural psychologists but it’s an undeniable effect. And it makes spotting the dissenters all the easier.

Scary slogans also used the effects of ‘incentives’ and ‘affect’ to deter rule-breaking:

‘If you go out you can spread it. People will die’

‘Don’t kill granny’

‘Coronavirus. Anyone can get it. Anyone can spread it’

‘Don’t let a coffee cost lives’

I felt a whiplash of shock when I first saw the ‘Don’t kill granny’ campaign. It was simultaneously insensitive to the youngsters who have lost