Stockholm Syndrome:
A condition in which hostages develop a psychological alliance with their captors during captivity.
Lockdown Stockholm Syndrome:
A psychological state of mind that causes its sufferers to come to love seeing their economies and liberties being destroyed, whilst simultaneously being incapable of accepting that Sweden kept its society going without resorting to such measures.
I continue to be baffled by those who cannot bring themselves to admit that Sweden has carried out a relatively sensible policy on Covid-19, whilst the response of so many other countries has been authoritarian and frankly unhinged.
The idea of quarantining millions of perfectly healthy people and stopping them from doing normal, healthy things is something that has apparently never occurred to any national leaders in the past, or at least if it did, they presumably never enacted it for fear of revolt.No such fear today. It is simply staggering to see how so many people have not only come to
accept the inevitable destruction of the economy and curtailment of civil liberties as a price worth paying to deal with an illness which is killing numbers on roughly the same levels as a bad flu season, but have actually become
cheerleaders for the giant social experiment being done to them. It reminds me of the chilling and dispiriting line at the end of
1984: "He loved Big Brother." Today, for reasons that are not at all clear to me, many appear to "Love Lockdown" —
that is, they appear to be absolutely fine with having their liberties taken away from them; absolutely fine with having the right to do lawful work taken from them; and absolutely fine with having the right to do normal, healthy things taken away from them. If anyone has an explanation, do be sure to let me know.But it gets worse. Not only do they seem to be perfectly willing to go along with these things, but they are appear to be utterly oblivious and even apathetic to the economic train wreck headed their way because of the policy they support. Why? What will shake them out of that apathy and complacency? Will it be when they hear about the Great Depression-era unemployment levels coming on us? No! Even that doesn't do it. The chart below is one of the most genuinely frightening I've ever seen, showing as it does US unemployment rising by over 30,000,000 in just seven weeks to levels not seen since the 1930s. And yet when I show it, many just airily dismiss it with a shrug of the shoulders as if it's irrelevant. Perhaps it will only be if they lose their own jobs and can't pay the rent or can't get stuff in the shops like they used to that it'll hit home! Who knows?
Comment: The day after Macron's May Day address announcing the 'easing' of the lockdown, another followed instead extending the lockdown for a further 2 months.