https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/1hxlbhp/we_should_not_be_made_to_forget_about_lockdown/

We Should Not Be Made to Forget About Lockdown
Sensationalism and stupidity reshaped the world. We should remember.
Matt Whiteley
Jan 09, 2025

A friend of mine’s wife is a paediatric nurse who works in a ward that
is, like most NHS hospitals at the moment, completely overrun. She
happened to mention that the nurses refer to the current raft of sick
children as “lockdown babies,” in other words, those who were incubated
from accumulating immunity to germs because they were shut in their
houses for the best part of two years.

We’ve forgotten about that now, haven’t we? At the time, those who
objected to the idea of government’s rationing the public’s daily walks
or interaction with their friends, made the point that the danger of
such an act was the sacrifice of the future for the present, the payment
of huge and diffuse consequences in exchange for the capitulation to
sensationalism.

So it is not beholden to the media that were clamouring for lockdowns
and promulgating said sensationalism to now pay attention to the fact
that you can see the scars of lockdown almost everywhere in society,
from health and mental health to culture, politics, in our relationship
to technology, and to one another.

Even in the most absurd places, even in a generation’s relationship to
sex. Recently there has been outcry across media outlets at the
popularity of OnlyFans girls such as Bonnie Blue staging mass orgies
with “barely legal” young boys and Lily Phillip’s sleeping with 101 men
in a day and ending up being filmed in floods of tears because of the
emotional exhaustion.

When and why do you think these people and the many others they
represent started to say “f*ck it” and began doing this? Yeah, lockdown.
Lockdown when all social accountability was stifled, when the seemingly
endless, plan-less, indefinite state of lockdown felt like there was no
reason to think normality would ever return, when politicians were
talking about us accepting that this dystopian reality is the “new
normal,” selling sexual content to people you will never see for easy
money seems like an obvious and perfectly reasonable outcome. At the
other end is a generation of young men doing what young men are
obviously going to do when locked in their houses with nothing to do
except flick on their computer screens.

In fact we have not noticed the way in which the subtle features of
dystopia that lockdown induced have never really left us. Lockdown
convinced us that atomisation is somehow acceptable and survivable,
propelled us into Elon Musk’s world where social media is the new media,
it’s truth is the truth and our silos are where we shall remain.
Countless public figures have gone down the conspiracy theory or
political rabbit holes never to return, where the mildest suspicion
about whether coerced mass vaccination was a legitimate idea led
gradually to the unravelling of institutional trust altogether, and with
it not freedom from the tyranny of a controlled narrative but credulity
to any narrative selling the opposite.

Then there is the generation of children not properly socialised during
crucial periods — periods that we know if socialisation does not happen
there are lifelong effects. The generations of missed education, of
addiction to screens, lack of exposure to the world, of the collapsing
of social accountability.

Then there is the fact that the last four years in the UK have seen the
highest rates of alcohol related deaths ever recorded, that 2020 was the
first time in two decades when the rates of decline of smoking slowed
considerably, which continued throughout the pandemic. An illness that
affected mostly those with co-morbidities, many of them related to
lifestyle, saw health messaging that led to most people waiting it out
with a takeaway and a bottle of wine. What else would you do?

Then there is the warped sensationalism that justified lockdown in the
first place. The BBC reports today that because of the current scale of
Flu cases patients in A&E in Liverpool are facing up to 50 hour waits.
Two days. Which is to say that emergency departments are essentially not
operational. This is nothing short of a medical crisis, an absolute
catastrophe, a horrific, dire situation, a situation arguably worse than
the covid pandemic. In fact, the NHS has today declared the pressure to
be as bad as the “height of the pandemic.”

But it barely even breaks the front pages of the news. Why not? Why
shouldn’t the entire country be on crisis footing, shouldn’t we be
banning person to person contact to ease the burden and “flatten the
curve?” Ambulance waiting times, A&E times, woeful cancer treatment
times, all these things are actually costing lives, and we don’t care
because it can’t be translated into the same kind of sensationalism that
covid could during lockdown.

But besides rehashing old complaints and arguments about lockdowns, it
is more important to consider how it happened, why media and governments
became so simplistic minded and short sighted, and what it actually means.

Misinformation, Misinformation
If you cast your mind back to the murky, parallel universe days of the
pandemic, you would remember the obsession with the word misinformation.
Everyone from the then social media overlords, to the news outlets, to
governments made themselves concerned with the “spread of
misinformation,” probably expressed by the then prime minister of New
Zealand Jacinda Ardern announcing that the government “will continue to
be your single source of truth, unless you hear it from us, it is not
the truth.” With this came a million news stories from the BBC obsessed
with correcting “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation.”

Yet the irony is that the entire of the lockdown movement depended on
the public believing things that weren’t true, and on a perception of
the situation built on sensationalism and the opposite kind of
misinformation that the most part of the news was concerned with.

I remember the very first confirmed cases of covid in the UK. I remember
then it feeling like a science fiction movie, how the news reported
every case with a kind of looming terror. One imagined them strapped to
ventilators fighting for their lives, a belief confirmed by images
circulating on social media of people collapsing in China and being
dragged away screaming by men in hazmat suits.

Of course, looking back, this seems comical. Most of those early covid
“victims” were probably sitting in an isolation room reading a magazine
wondering when they could go home. As Jeremy Clarkson tweeted after
reports of him “battling” covid in 2021: “Dear the newspapers. I didn’t
“battle” Covid. I lay on my bed reading a book till it went away.” Yet
If you’d gone door to door in March 2020 as we were plunged into
lockdown and asked the public the average age of death of covid, most
people would have not said “80.” I’d guess they’d have said 40 or 50.

On a daily basis the BBC was filled with stories they’d found of young
healthy people being struck down. This reporting, at a time such as
lockdown when people were drip fed the news as their entire way of
trying to understand what the f*ck was going on, meant that a mistruth
was smuggled under the door. People simply believed for some time that
covid was catastrophically worse than it was.

Not to say it wasn’t serious enough, it was, and for some people it was
tragic. Healthy people really were struck down. But so is flu today,
right now, so are 50 hour waits in A&E, and if they BBC wanted to they
could find the same kinds of cases right now, because sadly that is
reality. The problem was that this reporting was filtered through a
newly created dynamic in which anyone not saying that covid was
basically winged ebola was a “conspiracy theorist” spreading
“misinformation.”

So you weren’t allowed to ask how the decision was made that the
response to a bad winter respiratory virus was meant to be the rationing
of daily dog walks, the interruption of education, the banning of social
contact, the ruin of businesses, the wrecking of mental health, in
short: the suffocation of the orientation points of human meaning and
connection.

Or indeed, where it came from. The fact that by March 2020 cases in
Wuhan seemed to be receding seemed to be justification enough that
copying the policy of a country that literally welded doors shut to keep
people in quarantine was somehow a morally legitimate idea for
democratic Western countries. No one ever pointed out that no
epidemiologist before 2020 had ever even heard of the idea of lockdown,
yet almost overnight they all appeared on out televisions as if they
were experts on it. ‘Pandemic’ and ‘lockdown’ became synonymous in the
news, when the BBC wrote about schools, for example, it wasn’t the
‘effect of lockdowns’ it was the ‘effect of the pandemic.’ Because all
pandemics mean lockdown now.

The irony, then, is that news and governments were content with this
“misinformation” because it served the agenda of compliance with
restrictions. By misinformation they meant anything not in line with
“covid-bad-restrictions-good” and resulting in obedience. Sadly, some
leaders actually liked it. There is no question that during the Canadian
truckers protest, when even struggling single parents who donated 10
dollars to the protest found their bank accounts frozen, that the absurd
abuse of power on the part of Trudeau was a corollary of the dynamic of
lockdown. Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth.

The snapping point for a lot of people was when this same dynamic was
applied to vaccination. A six month old vaccine was virtually mandated,
in some countries literally mandated, and anyone who observed that given
that the FDA expects most vaccines to be tested for five years before
they are considered safe, calling a six month old vaccine “safe and
thoroughly tested” wasn’t just fast and loose with the truth but a
transparent lie, was suddenly an “antivaxxer.” It’s unsurprising then
how many people were flung down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. If
people are popping up on social media telling you the government is
lying to you, when the government is literally lying to you, why not
believe them?

If you are Elon Musk, you now believe free speech on social media is the
solution. His catchphrase has become “you are the media now,” a
representation of the belief that X provides an unfiltered access to
facts and a freedom from the tyranny of the mainstream media narrative.

The problem though is that social media was half the cause in the first
place. Social media algorithms siloed people into entrenched and
absolute positions and ran events through the inevitable catastrophising
of the attention economy. Consider, for example, how every time anything
to do with Russia and Ukraine is in the news, immediately “nuclear” and
“world war three” start trending. In a time where clarity instead of
sensationalism is what is needed to make sense of a situation, social
media projects the maddest and the worst of a situation: it is
absolutely useless. It was social media that in part created the bough
wave of mad sensationalism that made lockdown possible in the first
place; the images of hazmat suits and screaming covid patients were
around the world before the facts about covid had got their pants on and
made it out of Wuhan.

Maybe I’m pessimistic, but I actually don’t think we can recover from
it. I think the blown trust in establishment media is so damaging its
consequences are too enormous to track, I think our new dependence on
social media is terrible for the possibility of any decent political
discourse, and I think almost every public crisis since has leant upon
the same idiotic dynamics. The world is reshaping itself politically,
culturally and technologically because of the effects of the maddest few
years in a long time in our history.

But we can begin to look at the causes of the madness, and we can bring
ourselves into some fresh air. We can recognise that real human
perspective is vital, that representing disagreement as an extreme to be
shunned as conspiratorial and sinister is a disingenuous and appalling
way to deal with people’s legitimate concerns. We can remember precisely
what makes liberal democracies so precious and valuable, before they are
sold down the river to populism or tyranny. We can have better dialogue.
It is the strangest of times, and in many ways it still feels like we
are wandering around in the dream world we were cast into in 2020. But
we can wake up. We can be us again.

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