I’ll preface my response by saying I’ve leaned libertarian/Laissez-faire for much of my (now lengthy) adult life, and I’ve liked plenty of what I’ve seen you write on HN before (I recognize your handle as we met personally at YC many years ago). I say that to point out that I don’t think we’re coming at this with strongly opposing ideological priors.
To your response:
- I myself was concerned by some of the measures and the risk of overreach and permanence of the measures - I said so in my original comment.
- Yes people protested, which was understandable and healthy, and allowed by governments/police.
- Yes sometimes police were heavy handed in enforcing the laws - where it went too far it was widely shared on social and mainstream media and condemned by pretty much everyone. But these cases were isolated.
- The measures taken in the NT to quarantine cases were done because that territory is home to some of the most vulnerable people on earth in terms of pre-existing health conditions, education/language and access to medical care and information; in short, it was done to protect the most vulnerable members of the indigenous population from severe illness and premature death. You couldn’t possibly think of anything more opposite to Nazism if you tried.
The thing about being an adult is that you learn that government policies/measures shouldn’t be measured against some idealistic, imagined alternate reality, but against the realistic next-worst scenario. That’s the whole reason I outgrew my belief in simplistic socialist policies in my late 20s, which most people do, of course.
To me one of the greatest revelations of the pandemic is that libertarians are just as liable to succumb to idealistic fantasies as socialists have historically been.
The standard refrain has been that governments should “protect the vulnerable” while letting everyone else live totally freely - but without suggesting a workable plan for how this actually could be achieved, particularly when it’s not obvious in advance, who is/isn’t vulnerable.
Let’s be clear: your phrase “societal-level adoption of coercive actions and narratives in the name of serving the greater good” is a high-minded way of saying that the virus should have just been allowed to spread, regardless of the cost in human lives, and that to do otherwise is essentially the same as Nazism.
If I’ve misrepresented you, please explain how.
If not, please be less euphemistic in how you’re conveying the kind of outcome you’d prefer to see of the pandemic in Australia, given that the ultimate actual outcome has been a remarkably low fatality rate by world standards (1/7 per-capita even of the much vaunted Sweden), and a social/political order now largely back to what it was beforehand.
Good to know where you're coming from and, yes, I remember you well. Nice to chat again.
>Let’s be clear: your phrase “societal-level adoption of coercive actions and narratives in the name of serving the greater good” is a high-minded way of saying that the virus should have just been allowed to spread, regardless of the cost in human lives, and that to do otherwise is essentially the same as Nazism.
> If I've misrepresented you, please explain how.
Yes, this is a misrepresentation (though I know you don't do it maliciously), and I'll be happy to explain. The original article posted here beautifully illustrates this process as well. The article also notes that the gas-lighting and trivialization of objections to this process as "alarmist" is a present feature.
The process that a society undergoes in order to eventually commit atrocities against some scapegoated people is well-known and it is dependent on the people within a nation being willing to subvert their ordinary moral compass to outcome-based management which focuses on a single-minded definition of success. This single-metric management is a finely-tuned technique that is favored by officials acting against the best interests of the people as a whole to erode and impede basic human rights. In this process, the ends always justify the means.
The only way this process is successful is if the despots in question are able to manipulate enough of the people via their base instincts and the most useful of instincts in propaganda is fear. Fear of the other, fear of loss, fear of sickness or death, fear of economic collapse, there are many ways to exploit the human mind using fear. Girard described this entire process perfectly (as does OP's original article).
We saw this same process occur in the US after 9/11, where the fear and anger in response to those attacks led our country into a 20 year military campaign of the most irrational nature and one which ended in total failure. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed, trillions of dollars were wasted, and thousands of people were imprisoned and tortured with no regard to human rights or due process of law. I watched with dismay as people who described themselves as patriots and "strong Constitutionalists" threw any notion of rights and due process out the window in the name of "getting those terrorists." Even the definition of terrorist became quite vague ("he looked like one"), and the long-term societal effects in America and around the world remain with us to this day and they will likely never go away.
So am I saying that those "patriots" were Nazis or that the post-9/11 response in America is the same as Nazism? No, it's not about the characteristics of an ideology rooted in a specific milieu. I'm saying that Nazism itself was of the same Category / Type of all collectivist and coercive behavior and it is entirely dependent on the lizard brain, emotions over reason, and a focus on single-metric management. You lose the forest for the trees and a whole bunch of civilizational progress toward human freedom along the way.
I probably have a few years even on you and, as such, am well acquainted with the real world. The older I get, the more I can see that if we abandon high-minded ideals and indulge our base passions we are left only with lizard brains and that this process of totalitarian control is designed with that exact outcome in mind.
My original statement in response to the parent of this thread / context was simply an opportunity for self-reflection.
How did we all respond to people on the outside of the establishment narrative, who had differing beliefs? Did we support their freedom of choice and basic human rights or did we look the other way when they lost their jobs or businesses, support forced vaccinations (violence), gloss over the abuses of law enforcement, etc. It's not a personal accusation, it's a simple question and one that we have to answer both as individuals and as a society. The ideology, the regime, the government officials, etc. are ultimately irrelevant because all of that depends on the cooperation of the ordinary people, including you and me. But those same choices then were the same choices faced by the Germans in WWII, regardless of the specifics of the ideology in question.
The transformation of the people that I witnessed in two short years was disturbing to say the least.
I understand the position, and please trust that I've wrestled with these issues daily since the pandemic measures began, and tried very hard to examine all perspectives, both philosophically and practically, as thoroughly and dispassionately as possible.
And please also trust that in my own family and community I've been in the (often lonely) position of questioning and critiquing the measures.
But where I'm pushing back here is on the proportionality of the condemnation and the aptness of the historical analogies. Given enough differences in the circumstances, such analogies cease to be appropriate or helpful, and certainly not persuasive to those with different (albeit thoughtful and legitimate) views.
The key points of my perspective in response to yours are:
- Re "... it is dependent on the people within a nation being willing to subvert their ordinary moral compass ..." – sure, but unlike the two analogies you give, which are all about attacking/imprisoning/killing people due to their racial/national/religious identities, the pandemic measures were about saving significant numbers of a society's own people from severe illness and death, which is _not_ a subversion of people's ordinary moral compass; a healthy, moral society protects its fellow citizens from illness and death as far as reasonably possible, regardless of how old or sick they are.
- Re. "Fear of the other, fear of loss, fear of sickness or death, fear of economic collapse, there are many ways to exploit the human mind using fear." and "it is entirely dependent on the lizard brain, emotions over reason, and a focus on single-metric management..." – (1) The fears, whilst sometimes exaggerated, were not imagined or hypothetical; the deaths really did happen, and are still happening (though thankfully in diminishing numbers), and happened not only to the elderly and frail, but to plenty of people with many years ahead of them in which to bring companionship and contribution to their families and societies. It's not a subversion of morality for people to care deeply about this, and it's neither excessively emotional nor excessively rational; it matters both from emotional and rational perspectives; (2) I pay a lot of attention to the decision-making that goes on in government about these things, and it was certainly not "single-metric management"; the fatality count was one factor, as was the load on hospitals/effect on hospital workers with regard both to covid patients and other patients, but also the flow-on effects to the rest of the economy/society. The effect on people's businesses/jobs was real (and for what it's worth, substantial moral and tangible support was offered to people whose jobs/businesses were affected), but given the complex nature of a pandemic, there were always going to be harms to people's jobs/businesses; this couldn't be avoided any more than illness/fatalities could, the issue was/is how to balance and minimise the harms overall; (3) To put it all down to "lizard brain" dominance; sure I see plenty of this, but I personally come to it having spent countless hours over many years doing emotional healing/development work to get out of lizard-brain thinking, and I have the most gratifying conversations on the topic with others who have been similarly dedicated to this kind of work. I equally see plenty of lizard brain dominance from those who cry "Nazi", "fascist", "globalists", etc in response to every/any government measure to manage the pandemic.
- I've done plenty of thinking and reading about how the pandemic response fits in with classical liberal philosophies, and have paid much attention to the likes of Taleb and Norman [1] from the Real World Risk Institute (who, incidentally, are now bitterly opposed to one another on the matter of vaccinations, but that is a healthy dynamic I think), and I'm persuaded by the idea that there is plenty of compatibility between Hayekian philosophy and the pandemic measures; this paper discusses it well [2].
I understand that much of the commentary about this is influenced by the significant differences in the way Americans vs Australians regard their governments, and real differences in the way the respective governments have operated, particularly in recent decades. Australians tend not to have such a hostile and adversarial relationship with their government, and I don't think this is altogether unhealthy; it's a much smaller country, with a much smaller role in the world, and plenty of mechanisms to limit/diffuse power, and so politicians here just don't have the scope to amass much power or wealth. It just doesn't hold that we're at significant risk of sliding down a slippery slope to despotic tyranny.
Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but I don't see any signs of it yet, and if I do I'll be sure to write many words about it :)
I'm glad to hear that you were willing to question a lot of the things that were happening, especially in an environment where it was very difficult to do so. That, coupled with the fact that you're even having this conversation with me shows a far more open mind and willingness to see things from another perspective than I am used to encountering when this topic comes up.
Regarding your two points of contention, I understand where you're coming from.
In order to answer, I'll clarify again that I'm not talking about government policy in this specific thread (although I did feel that it was equally problematic across the board in most countries) but, rather, the behavior of the people. This is my sticking point and the reason that do believe the comparison is apt, even if we didn't escalate (thankfully) in most countries to the point that things did in Germany before and during WWII (thanks, in this case, to the people, enough people on the other side of this to make a difference). It is ultimately the same types of behaviors involved in scapegoating and desensitization to persecution and oppression.
If our pattern-matching for totalitarian behavior is confined to images of psychotic Germans clad in Hugo Boss and runes as they hunt their victims, we're going to miss a whole lot of equally bad behaviors, even if they aren't (yet) as overtly shocking.
The German people themselves didn't just wake up one day and decide to start exterminating minorities, it was a long process of mass propaganda and brainwashing which gradually led to that conclusion. And the people let it happen. It is our duty as human beings, I believe, to identify and block this process as early as possible in every case in order to prevent it from ever happening again.
What specific behaviors am I talking about (during COVID)?
- Snitching / video recording / screaming at / attacking people who didn't "comply" with mandates
- People fantasizing online about murdering people who didn't want the vaccine
- Schoolteachers taping masks to their elementary school students, forcing them to sit outside in the cold, mocking them, and more
- Corporations firing employees who refused the vaccine (and often in very underhanded ways so they didn't have to pay severance)
- And many more that I'm frankly not comfortable with mentioning here
While I'm sure there is a "whataboutist" response to each of the points above, the fact remains that all of the above behavior happened in conjunction with and was generally not condemned by anyone in the establishment (e.g., with real power).
Governments are always going to try to increase their level of control over society but it only works if the people participate. That was just as true during COVID as it was during the Third Reich. While I know that it stings to hear it, I believe it to be the truth, or else I wouldn't say it.
My other objection to your main point (your point that the intentions were good, which is why these actions were acceptable (please let me know if I am mis-characterizing)) is that this rationalization sets a very low bar for both governments and the people to excuse behaviors that should never be present in free societies. You can basically find a way to rationalize anything to the people if this is the standard we set, given enough time and propaganda.
We may or may not disagree on that point but that is where I am coming from. I don't believe, at the end of the day, that the ends justify the means in this situation. There are many other externalities (and, yes, deaths caused by these restrictions and behaviors) that must be taken in to consideration. Not only did I not see anyone aligned with the establishment asking these questions, any attempt to do so from the outside was shut down, censored, gaslit, and more. We probably won't end up agreeing on this but I do appreciate your thoughts and thoughtfulness in talking about it. Sucks that we have to have this conversation in text, which is a poor / cold medium for these types of conversations but it is what it is.
I'll read the papers you sent and definitely agree that there is always a lot of self-reflection and work we all have to do ourselves in order to get out of and stay out of lizard-brain mentalities.
To your response:
- I myself was concerned by some of the measures and the risk of overreach and permanence of the measures - I said so in my original comment.
- Yes people protested, which was understandable and healthy, and allowed by governments/police.
- Yes sometimes police were heavy handed in enforcing the laws - where it went too far it was widely shared on social and mainstream media and condemned by pretty much everyone. But these cases were isolated.
- The measures taken in the NT to quarantine cases were done because that territory is home to some of the most vulnerable people on earth in terms of pre-existing health conditions, education/language and access to medical care and information; in short, it was done to protect the most vulnerable members of the indigenous population from severe illness and premature death. You couldn’t possibly think of anything more opposite to Nazism if you tried.
The thing about being an adult is that you learn that government policies/measures shouldn’t be measured against some idealistic, imagined alternate reality, but against the realistic next-worst scenario. That’s the whole reason I outgrew my belief in simplistic socialist policies in my late 20s, which most people do, of course.
To me one of the greatest revelations of the pandemic is that libertarians are just as liable to succumb to idealistic fantasies as socialists have historically been.
The standard refrain has been that governments should “protect the vulnerable” while letting everyone else live totally freely - but without suggesting a workable plan for how this actually could be achieved, particularly when it’s not obvious in advance, who is/isn’t vulnerable.
Let’s be clear: your phrase “societal-level adoption of coercive actions and narratives in the name of serving the greater good” is a high-minded way of saying that the virus should have just been allowed to spread, regardless of the cost in human lives, and that to do otherwise is essentially the same as Nazism.
If I’ve misrepresented you, please explain how.
If not, please be less euphemistic in how you’re conveying the kind of outcome you’d prefer to see of the pandemic in Australia, given that the ultimate actual outcome has been a remarkably low fatality rate by world standards (1/7 per-capita even of the much vaunted Sweden), and a social/political order now largely back to what it was beforehand.