Escape Velocity
What we’re watching is the development of a template.
In her book State of Fear, the journalist Laura Dodsworth described the efforts of the British government’s SPI-B — the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours. A team of social psychologists and other behavioral scientists assembled to advise officials on the question of “how to make people adhere to the rules,” the SPI-B liked masks. They liked them a lot. While they doubted the efficacy of masks as a barricade against the transmission of a virus, what the government’s advisers on behavioral science liked about masks was the symbol, and the degree to which the symbol couldn’t be avoided — given its ubiquity and its centrality, as a thing worn at face-level on every human body that can carry the rhetorical device in a public setting. Masks signal: solidarity, collectivity, fear. They send a constant, unavoidable message. As a system for turning people into billboards, reminders of danger and crisis, they work. They produce anxiety, and are intended to do so.
We will see this again. Though the tools of propaganda are not even a little bit new, the moment is nevertheless significant: a team of government advisers has discussed with authorities a way to use human bodies in public space to signal crisis and compliance. That tool will not be discarded. The tactical processes, the sitting around the table with psychologists to find good social control signals, is fully embedded in the administrative state. (Personal confession: In grad school, I found Michel Foucault irritating. Disciplinary systems using the language of science to produce “docile bodies” — such a silly argument! I may be revisiting some discarded books soon.)
Other tools, having been brought into use, will continue in use. Cf. “Authorities considering New Delhi lockdown to cut dangerous air pollution levels.” But don’t worry, though, ‘cause Media Matters says that climate lockdowns are a “bonkers Fox News conspiracy theory,” just like vaccine passports were a bonkers right-wing conspiracy theory.
Speaking of templates, the Victorian parliament continues to debate a pandemic powers bill that would allow Premier Dan Andrews and his health minister to “make any order…that the minister believes is reasonably necessary to protect public health.”
Any order.
And this part won’t be subject to any abuse at all: “The powers will also allow the minister to issue pandemic orders to specific classifications of people, such as by where they live, an event they attended, their age, vaccination status, job or living arrangements.”
So the executive authority of government is limited by checks and balances, unless it isn’t. If there’s an emergency, the leader can make any order, and do whatever he believes he needs to do. It’s Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, which worked so well the first time.
Put it all together: With newly developed practices of psychological warfare, empowered by advice from social scientists on the manipulation of fear and anxiety, governments work to remove limits on the personal power of leaders.
Should work well. No problems in sight.