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 :)
[1] https://necsi.edu/systemic-risk-of-pandemic-via-novel-pathog...