Recently, nothing has amused or entertained me as much as watching the total and almost overnight disappearance of SARS-CoV-2 from the media/government narrative and the public as a whole. It seems impossible to overstate this phenomenon. One moment the media classes were busy wondering out loud how best to punish the unvaccinated as government ministers gave them cover* to hide their authoritarianism behind; the next, all is forgotten in the rush for the new, glorious war breaking out in Eastern Europe. The existential struggle against the world’s deadliest virus, the only known cure for which is the total subjugation of all individual soverign rights was, apparently, over.
And now, when one walks into a shop or place of business and chats with the proprietors or fellow customers, the discussion is no longer the latest R rate or the insane, out-by-several-orders-of-magnitude model predictions for the next swathe of deaths. No. Of course not. That is so last week. The new mantra of the time is no longer the infuriatingly infantilising “stay safe!”, it’s the perfectly psychotic “WHY AREN’T WE DOING MORE WAR!”.
In the lead up to this incredible switcheroo, however, we caught a glimmer of what I previously speculated might never be possible. During the news media’s faux-outrage over Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s violation of lockdown rules, a moment of introspection briefly passed over the nation. It wasn’t so much out of an honest intention to question the two years of insanity the country had slipped into; rather it was necessary for the media and opposition to establish the “sacrifices” the public had made in order to draw contrast against Alexander’s partying and get the outrage machine going.
Personally, I was not outraged by the hypocrisy. It was crass, yes, and I found watching Downing street staff laughing about their transgressions like school children whose teacher had left the classroom just depressing (are there any adults left, anywhere?). What angered me was the tacit admission that this simply wasn’t the end-of-the-world plague that they were scaring the public with. If they were convinced that covid was such a threat that it warranted actions like nuking the economy, obliterating healthcare or taking years of education from children (to name the greatest hits), no-one would have gone to a party. In fact, if that really were the reality, you wouldn’t need to mandate restrictions or vaccines because people would willingly curtail their freedoms/take a rapidly produced vaccine with no long term safety testing, driven purely by self preservation.
But what poured forth from the public’s confessional spasm ranged from the regretful to the downright abhorrent. Some were angered because they had gone “above and beyond” the rules dictated from on high and had completely isolated themselves for two years (not even taking their generously granted one hour of exercist time during the opening weeks back in 2020). Others were furious because they had refused to see elderly relatives that Christmas in case they killed them, only for the elderly relative to die alone a few weeks later. But the worst came from the likes of “nurse Jenny” whose story of “sacrifice” was promoted by the UK Labour Party via their social media channels. In case you missed it:
“I remember 20 May 202 vividly, I spent hours on the phone to a man who was in the hospital car park, utterly desperate to see his wife.
He begged, wept, shouted to be let in, but we said no – for the greater good of everyone else. She died unexpectedly and alone, as the Government had a party.”
– Jenny, NHS nurse
Promoted on the Labour Party Twitter account
What I find truly shocking here is that nurse Jenny has not only done something truly terrible, she’s publically admitted to it and what’s more, she’s trying to convince the public (and probably herself) that it was justified because of “the greater good”.
So much of the damage wraught upon society can be observed in action here. The absolute obedience to “the rules” for their own sake. The husband who is seen as nothing more than a disease vector by the ever-caring NHS. The wife whose rights apparently ceased to exist the moment she submitted to a bureaucracy which cared only for “the greater good”.
But what nurse Jenny and all the others shouting their stories of personal “sacrifice” in outrage fail to recognise is this; they did it. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson didn’t personally call at their house and kick their nan out on Christmas day. They did it. Johnson didn’t physically block a man from seeing his wife before she died. Jenny did. There is no virtuous exemption from their actions because they were just following the rules. These actions (particularly nurse Jenny’s) come at a spiritual cost that the perpertrator must bear.
The horrifying realisation of this cost was just dawning on the public consciousness before the new crisis arrived and I believe the real motive behind the public outrage was guilt, not righteous anger at the hypocrisy. Because guilt like Jenny’s must be soul-rending and dissociation from one’s actions in an attempt to offload it must be difficult to resist. Even more so when vast numbers of people up and down the country were engaged in a similar spiritual-purge into the torrent of outrage flowing over the Downing Street hypocrisy.
Perhaps one day we will return to these issues and work through exactly what has been done to us as a society and what some of us did to each other during the past two years. But I am doubtful. We have a new, glorious war to get behind and the tribes have already segmented into their perfect dichotomies. Just be careful what you sign up to under the banner of “for the greater good”.
*N.B. The numbers Health Secretary Sajid Javid cited in that interview are highly misleading, as was reported at the time but received very little attention from the news media.
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