A Psychological and Social Autopsy of COVID

... Let us conduct a genuine psychological autopsy of what happened during COVID.

Not a political one. Not a medical one. A psychological one because until we understand what drove human behaviour during those years at the deepest level, we are condemned to watch it happen again...

If you study Nazi Germany, if you read Hannah Arendt on the banality of evil, if you sit with the Milgram data, if you study the actual psychological profiles of the men who administered the Holocaust what you find is not a population of uniquely evil individuals.

You find clerks. Teachers. Fathers. Men who loved their children and fed their dogs and went to church on Sundays... they were just like you...

The compliant individual is not, in most cases, malicious. They are frightened. And beneath the fear is something deeper, a fragile relationship with their own authority. A lifelong pattern of looking outward for validation, for safety, for the definition of what is real and what is acceptable...

When the authority spoke, they felt relief... Relief from the anxiety of having to decide for themselves...

And then something more sinister activated.

Because the compliant individual cannot afford for the non-compliant to exist. The person who refuses to comply is not simply making a different choice they are, by their existence, forcing the compliant person to confront the possibility that their compliance was not necessary...

And so the compliant individual does not merely comply. They enforce. They shame. They report. They demand that everyone around them validate the choice they have made by making the same choice...

The people who did not comply were not, as the narrative insisted, ignorant or selfish or reckless.

Psychologically, they share a profile that is well documented in the literature on moral courage and dissent. A secure internal locus of control, the capacity to evaluate reality based on their own perception and reasoning rather than external consensus...

Someone put a diagram together and it deserves to be read slowly.

Three of the most disturbing psychological experiments in modern history, placed in a Venn diagram with COVID policy sitting precisely at their intersection.

They were not wrong...

Which is that what happened was not primarily political or institutional in the ordinary sense.

It was psychological. It was a demonstration of what human beings do under specific conditions. Conditions that were not accidental...

Milgram: Obedience to Authority...

Asch: Conformity Over Perception...

Stanford: The Cruelty That the Role Permits...

... ordinary people, under the right institutional conditions, will produce cruelty without being cruel people. That the structure is sufficient...

COVID was the moment this architecture showed itself completely. The psychological compliance technologies developed through Milgram and Asch and Stanford...

Most people still think it was about a virus...

What happened to families, friendships, and communities during COVID was not an unfortunate side effect of a public health crisis.

It was the predictable and in some cases deliberately engineered, outcome of a communication strategy that required an enemy...

During COVID that target was the non-compliant...

They want us to be divided and against each other, so instead of fighting and fueling the fire. Use that energy towards those who initiated it...

Human beings are tribal animals.

The deepest evolutionary programming we carry is oriented toward two things, belonging to the group and identifying threats to the group...

When fear is sufficiently activated and the COVID communication strategy was designed to maximise fear, the social brain begins sorting. Safe and dangerous. Us and them. Compliant and threatening...

Once the sorting has occurred, once someone has placed a family member or friend in the category of threat, reversing that placement is psychologically costly. It requires admitting that the fear was manipulated...

The government did not need to keep the divide active. It had been internalised...

... truth, when it arrives in a world organised around comfortable lies, necessarily separates those who are willing to see from those who are not. It separates those who will pay the cost of honesty from those who will pay any cost to avoid it...

The deeper line was between those willing to look honestly at what was happening and those who needed not to look. Between those who could tolerate the discomfort of an inconvenient truth and those for whom that discomfort was genuinely intolerable...

Courage is not available on demand. It is cultivated over years of small choices to tell the truth when lying would be easier. To stand apart when belonging feels essential. To sit with discomfort rather than immediately seeking its relief.

The compliant, the enforcers, the people who cut off their families for asking questions. they were not villains. They were people who had never been asked to develop the inner resources that the moment required...