Climbing out of the Lobster Pot
It concludes...
The other day Johan Giesecke of WHO responded to a journalist on Sky Australia asking what that country and New Zealand are going to do about their lockdowns by asking: “What will you do for the next thirty years?’9
That was a piercing question to which there is, as yet, no answer. We will never undo some of the damage caused by the lockdown. The lockdown was founded on guesswork and ignorance, and fuelled by the propaganda of fear. Now the only possible course of action is to end it – unless we want the living death of staying inside our lobster pots.
Bertrand Russell once said “those who fear life are already three parts dead”.10 At least the UK government is starting to understand that.
On May 17th, Andrew Marr challenged Michael Gove with the proposition that it was impossible to guarantee teachers would not catch the virus. In his reply, Gove homed in on the essential problem that cuts right to the heart of the flawed notion of the lockdown, which Ferguson20 alluded to but failed to understand the true logical implications of. Gove said:None of us can guarantee that anyone will be entirely free [from a threat of catching the virus] unless they are perpetually imprisoned in their own home.
Michael Gove, Andrew Marr, May 17th 2020.
In that once sentence Gove hit the mark. It applies to almost every risk we face every day, exposing the lockdown ultimately as a futile and illogical device to deal with a disease in any sustainable way. Yet, incredibly, within in a few weeks a large proportion of the UK population seem to have come to believe that indefinite imprisonment is a better prospect than accepting that life involves any risk at all.
With their lockdowns, the governments of the UK and many other countries have created far bigger problems than the one they were trying to solve. These are psychological, practical, social and economic problems, each with potentially devastating consequences that have the power to make the virus look like a passing inconvenience by comparison. Let’s hope they and their advisers work those problems and don’t make things worse than they already have by doing any more guessing or listening to people guessing on their behalf.
Because if they fail in that endeavour then we’ll really know what a crisis looks like. At least we’ve learned one lesson: we can never, ever do anything like this again because our entire way of life could not withstand the shock.
