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

felt really uncomfortable leaving the house and my village. I found it very peculiar. So to be honest, I am looking forward to the next four weeks.

Even though the journey time is only half an hour by car I didn’t enjoy the commute and found it difficult. I feel like I have lost driving and navigating skills, and I felt very tired when I got there. I’d arrive and wonder why I was there. The sanitised environment of the workplace, the smell of bleach, wearing masks in the corridors, it all felt so unnatural. Being inside my village and especially inside the house feels more normal, welcoming and calming than being outside.

I have genuinely wondered if I am developing agoraphobia. On the few occasions when I have been to the supermarket, I have not enjoyed being around other people. I find being around masked people really odd. You can’t smile at people any more so I’d rather not go out.

I’m most worried now about social cohesion. The regionalised lockdowns have almost been finger-pointing at the people of Leicester or Manchester. I think we could end up in a position where the mask-wearers and the non-mask-wearers and the lockdowners and the anti-lockdowners feel very different to each other. On a smaller level I have seen it in my village. On our village Facebook group some people have said they won’t do this lockdown, and they don’t see why our pub has to close.

I don’t like not being aware of society, not meeting people, not really knowing how people are feeling. I haven’t met anybody in the last six months who I didn’t already know. I am becoming more introverted.

It’s a paradox that I am developing agoraphobia, but I am also frightened of being cut off from the world.

13. THE CLIMATE OF FEAR

‘Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious powers behind it. You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat’s back and drove it out, and the city was cleansed. It worked because everyone knew how to read the ritual, including the gods. Then the gods died, and all of a sudden you had to cleanse the city without divine help. Real actions were demanded instead of symbolism. The censor was born, in the Roman sense. Watchfulness became the watchword: the watchfulness of all over all. Purgation was replaced by the purge.’

From Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

The scapegoat is an ancient religious and ritualistic practice and, these days, a metaphor for social exclusion. In the Bible, the scapegoat was one of two kid goats. One would be sacrificed, and the living one, the ‘scapegoat’, was sent into the wilderness, symbolically carrying sins and impurities with it. Scapegoating is not just to be found in the Bible though; it is one of the enduring human archetypes found across cultures and times.

The ancient Greeks practised scapegoating rituals during ‘extraordinary circumstances such as famine, drought, or plague’1 in order to save the whole community. While the Israelites and the Hittites used animals, the ancient Greeks used humans. Being ‘civilised’ does not necessarily mean being more humane.

Death was not essential, but expulsion from the community was key, one way or another. The scapegoat might be banished, or stoned or burned to death – there is a comparison with the hysterical ‘burning times’, during the centuries when witches were tried and executed, accused of all the ‘sins’ and troubles of their communities.

Who is scapegoated in the time of Covid and who are the high priests and inquisitors? We might like to believe we are above such superstitious and archaic behaviour, but where is the evidence that human beings have changed? In fact, can we observe the early warning behavioural signs and symbols of a nascent religion?

It looks like the NHS co-opted the rainbow from the Pride movement, but it’s also an ancient religious symbol, integral to the Bible’s flood story and in Graeco-Roman mythology it was a path between earth and heaven. Fans of the Avengers films will remember the rainbow Bifrost, which links Midgard and Asgard. Rainbows in windows ostensibly honour the NHS and its workers but, because they represent our health service, perhaps at an unconscious level they also serve a talismanic role in warding away disease and bad luck, just like other amulets and home adornments such as the Hamsa, the Green Man, the Nazar, a lucky horseshoe or the Romans’ flying pottery penises. There is mixed evidence that community mask-wearing protects us from viruses, but we wear masks anyway, as the vestiture of the faithful and the obedient. Hand-sanitising baptises us daily into the new religion of health and safetyism. As valued government advisors, the priest caste has been replaced by a scientist caste. Churches closed their doors at the behest of modellers and behavioural scientists with scarcely a murmur of resistance. Vaccines are modern medical miracles, but they also evoke a modern biosecurity incarnation of transubstantiation – especially when delivered in cathedrals with organ music playing, in an intersection of the old religion and the new religion. In this new creed, what is to be done with the impious and the heretics? As always, they are scapegoated.

As Coetzee wrote in Disgrace, in modern times scapegoating has transmogrified into censorship. There is a discernible blend of scapegoating and censorship among the self-appointed keepers-of-truth during the Covid epidemic. These days, no one is to be burnt at the stake or ritually sacrificed, just metaphorically cast into a desert, professionally shamed, no-platformed, unpublished, removed from the modern-day public fora of Twitter and YouTube. Silenced and banished. In this way the scapegoat can take on the sins of society, as well as serve as a warning to other potential dissenters. Speak up, and you are next. The media, Big Tech social media giants, politicians, scientists and perhaps all of us, the ‘mob’, have enforced a climate of fear through scapegoating.

MP Neil O’Brien appointed himself inquisitor of ‘covid sceptics’. Alongside other volunteers, he created a fact-checking website as well as