Lockdown and The Lives of Others

Many Britons would fit right into the dreariness of life in former East Germany. Millions want curfews, masks, social distancing, and quarantines to remain for good.

The Absinthe Drinker — Viktor Oliva (1901)

I loathe almost half the nation. Perhaps that sounds misanthropic. But is it misanthropic to loathe the misanthropic? Perhaps it cancels itself out. Like a vaccine, an insensate dose of misanthropy inoculates the mind against the mad and misanthropic.

It’s never nice to learn that a terrifying percentage of your neighbours, friends, acquaintances, even those roguish characters who peddle knockoff ribeye in the pub, would slot right into the dreariness of life in late East Germany.

According to YouGov, what I assumed was an absolute no-chance in a free society like Great Britain is crushingly, depressingly majority opinion—vaccine passports are not even a fifty-fifty issue. Indeed, despite the dreaded ‘cases’ falling for the seventh day in a row, and as the tail end of the pandemic nears into sight, most Britons would rather impose their pathologies upon the rest of us.

To considerable and justifiable contempt, Boris announced recently that nightclub goers would in September have to prove they’d had two jabs before being ushered through the door. Similar plans are mooted for university students to attend lectures. Indeed, a swathe of Britons would desire vaccine passports a requisite for daily life. The fact that the vaccines have blunted Covid’s ability to hospitalise and kill seems irrelevant. The fact we in May vaccinated all of our vulnerable population is ignored.

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I assumed a majority of Britons would, like me, rather contract Ebola than visit a British nightclub, but also held the good sense that vaccine passports were more China, than Great Britain.

Forty-eight percent of the British public thinks ‘strongly’ that clubgoers should prove they’ve been double-jabbed before they’re allowed to drain away their money on diluted cocktails and endure brackish strangers bursting vowels into their eardrums. Worse yet, a higher percentage of my fellow conservatives are more supportive of such passports than our Woke Labour friends. Fifty-seven percent of conservative voters strongly support the move. Just under half of Labourites agree.

When combined with the ‘somewhat support’ tribe, seventy-one percent of the British public backs Boris Johnson’s unthinkable plan for vaccine passports, along with supermajorities of Conservatives and Labour voters, Remainers and Leavers. Just twelve percent of the population are we who strongly oppose, backed somewhat pitifully by seven percent who ‘somewhat oppose’ what amounts to medical apartheid. Cheers.

When Boris announced the measure, on ‘Freedom Day’ no less, the townspeople of Twitter sharpened their digital pitchforks. ‘This is an affront to a free society!’ Literal tyranny!’ For once, People on Twitter are not entirely wrong. Yet, Twitter is not the real world. Perhaps we need vaccination against Twitter and its tendency to dement our culture. After all, Twitter is to culture what lead piping is to water.

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Perhaps we shouldn’t feign surprise. A good one-third of people in any society harbour latent authoritarian tendencies. All they need is a little nudge and wink. Over the last eighteen months, we’ve given them plenty of both.  We’ve sacralised Crab Mentality—the depressingly human tendency to pull down others rather than risk them succeed. For many, this pandemic has been the highlight of their existence. They slave over the ever-shifting Rules and pretend Sweden doesn’t exist. They recant their religious nonsenses: ‘We should have locked down earlier!’ Don’t mention that Peru did that, and still suffered one of the worst death rates on earth. Don’t mention that countries with higher obesity rates have suffered vastly more deaths.

The strains of a once-in-a-century pandemic have valorised previously negative personality traits. Back in the Old Normal, high neuroticism combined with high agreeableness usually held one back. Such a psychic soup meant you’d spend your days scouring Twitter for offence to take and blaming the incessant rain on ‘Zionists’. Now, the traits of scolds and puritans are the traits of winners and champions. No wonder they don’t want to let this pandemic go.

That Economist poll said it all: Forty percent want masks to remain; a quarter want nightclubs and casinos shuttered; a third desire socially-distanced theatres, pubs, and stadiums; a sizeable number want a 10 p.m. curfew, and one-third want the post-holiday ten-day quarantine to remain. Oh, and they want this permanently, regardless of covid-19.

It seems the more that measures lift, the more that normal life returns, the more Britons want them reimposed. It’s for the ‘common good,’ by that they mean a set of rules of which the Clever People can impose on them, the Surplus People.

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In essence, between a fifth and over a third of people don’t like people very much, they don’t like people they don’t know doing things they don’t like doing, and they’ll rue the day, if it ever arrives, that we go back to normal.

Think about that. One-third think a trip to Barcelona should be so cumbersome, nonsensical, and expensive that few would bother ever leaving this spiky little island.

Millions of people would rather meet nobody at all. And if forced, they’d prefer to forever keep their distance, and that your face remained covered. A little misanthropic, no?

Perhaps there would be advantages to this perma-pandemic so many pine for. One could keep mouthing beneath one’s mask something rhyming with ‘duck’ and ‘cough’ when a stranger at the cigarette counter whips out seven lottery tickets for the cashier’s profitless inspection. But that is what life would be reduced to: pathetic little grievances, and pitiful little gripes. The face, in all its moveable beauty, covered over like a sewer drain, the implication obvious.  
Yet, such strong support for such a sad shapeless existence should be shocking.

But is it, really? We tend to forget that the free society is not the default state. It’s a fragile one. Our default state is safety over security, suspicion over sanguinity. The free society is an aberration. That’s something we tend to forget.