What benefit do you think the government gets out of lockdowns? (other than the obvious one of stopping the spread of the pandemic).
(1) Identification of potential dissidents. Those who violate lockdowns or mask orders are most likely to resist state control.
(2) Normalizing control over common activities. It takes four weeks to normalize a new habit. "Two weeks to stop the spread" has been going on since March (that's thirty-two weeks and counting). Americans are now habituated to state-controlled social behaviors.
(3) Destruction of in-person social channels outside the sphere of state electronic surveillance.
(4) Normalizing fear of non-conformists ("you're killing grandpa").
(5) Destruction of non-sanctioned economies. Global companies have effectively been part of the state for decades, and can easily weather the storm. Smaller businesses can not, which dries up cashflow outside of state-approved channels.
Beautiful list though and well said. I've been trying to think of a succinct way to summarize some of those concepts and I think you've broken them up well.
The feeling is that people want to get back to normal, but understand that most of the regulations were necessary given the seriousness of the pandemic. I feel absolutely no sense that people are more willing to submit to Government control now or anything like that, and it's the same even talking to people down in Victoria that had a big second wave and way longer lockdown than we did. Their willingness to comply was to stop the spread of the virus so they could get out of lockdown, and it worked, and now the restrictions are being rolled back.
It's frustrating to hear people in the media here crowing on about 'authoritarianism' and 'government control' over this, especially because the State Governments that are in charge of pandemic restrictions have demonstrated little desire to maintain restrictions longer than was sensible given the virus. But at the same time, these conservative commentators who are aligned with our right-wing Federal Government happily ignore actual authoritarian, draconian laws that the Feds are passing to give police and intelligence services unprecedented powers for warrantless mass surveillance etc. over the last decade...
I'd even go as far as saying that the pandemic would actually be a really bad time for a Government to try and 'normalise' increased government control, because there's no legitimate or logical reason to maintain it once the pandemic is over (if we get a vaccine for instance). The desire to throw off all the restrictions once the virus is gone is just too strong.
> The feeling is that people want to get back to normal, but understand that most of the regulations were necessary given the seriousness of the pandemic.
It is highly debatable that lockdowns ever were, or currently are, either necessary or effective.
> State Governments that are in charge of pandemic restrictions have demonstrated little desire to maintain restrictions longer than was sensible given the virus.
The US is in the thirty-second week of "two weeks to stop the spread".
Credibility went right out the window when the powers-that-be decreed weddings and funerals as too risky, but protests and riots as totally fine.
Not to mention the long list of politicians whose personal lives seem to be an exception from the rules they have imposed on others.
> There's no legitimate or logical reason to maintain it once the pandemic is over.
I remember airports before 9/11. Hell, I remember the US before 9/11.
The ironically-named Patriot Act represented a massive seizure of power and a wholesale trampling of American civil rights. None of the airport security measures introduced were necessary or effective, and yet they continue to this day.
Since 9/11, the United States has been at war in the Middle East for twenty years, squandering trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of innocent lives to achieve... nothing.
This was neither legitimate nor logical. But it did make a bunch of politicians and their friends very powerful and very wealthy.
I also remember, at the time, the moral frenzy that enveloped the nation after the fall of the twin towers.
Things now feel the same from where I sit.
Sounds insane?
So did the patriot act in the 90s.
Yet here we are 20 years later still doing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid
One guy later was the underwear bomber. Thank God that didn't take.
Sweden managed to just ask their citizens to behave properly and it worked.