Category: covid-19

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 21: Kafkaesque Much?

One of the happy accidents of my life is that I’ve worked in a variety of jobs in a variety of organisational types. I’ve worked in retail, government, agriculture, hospitality, call centres, small manufacturing, large manufacturing, volunteer organisations, university, legal offices, startups and large corporates. I’ve done all kinds of work from backbreaking manual labour to production line box stacking to cushy office jobs. So, it’s from some depth of experience that I can say that the worst job I ever had was in a government bureaucracy.

I accidentally found myself inside the belly of the beast when the consultancy I was working at started chasing the sweet smell of government money. The project we were working on was completely pointless. I know this for a fact because, not only did it appear to be completely pointless to anybody with two functioning brain cells, but I got to meet the people who were going to use it and they told me straight up that it was completely pointless. That was the first problem. But not only was it pointless, we were building according to a specification that some other company had written. Like all specifications, this specification was wrong but we didn’t have the power to change it. Nobody did. So, although everybody more or less agreed it was wrong, we had to build the software according to the documents. The result was going to be pointless and wrong but government employees were going to be forced into using it. That’s the way things work in government bureaucracies.

To be made to follow rules that you know to be absurd causes a peculiar kind of existential angst. It took me all of two weeks to start looking for a new job and, fortunately, I was able to find one pretty quickly so my stay was short-lived. Years later I ran into a couple of government employees at a random social event. They told me they were both on extended mental health leave and apparently that’s common in their line of work. Doesn’t surprise me much after having seen what goes on there. If there is a hell, it probably looks like a government bureaucracy.

Since that time, I’ve had experience in different kinds of bureaucratic organisations. Based on this experience, I define three types of bureaucracy according to the type of market they are in and the corresponding culture which arises from the interaction of the bureaucratic structure and the market type. Government bureaucracies are the most pure type whilst others differ in interesting ways. Here are the three types:-

Type	Market	Culture	Primary Type of Employee
1	Government monopoly	Strict adherence to rules	Lobotomised Rule Nazis
2	Private monopoly	Follow the rules because you can’t change them. Heroes save the day	Heroes
3	Oligopoly	Freedom at technical level but not the mission level	Autonomous technicians

My thesis here is that a pure bureaucracy can really only happen in a government monopoly and the further you get from that context the less a nominal bureaucracy functions as one. The reason government is the purest form of bureaucracy is precisely because it has no competition and therefore has no real need to respond to the real world beyond the vague signals that come from political manoeuverings. The primary type of employee in a pure bureaucracy is the Lobotomised Rule Nazi. The characterisation of the Lobotomised Rule Nazi is Kafka’s great addition to our literature. I had read Kafka prior to working in government but I had no idea that such a person could exist in real life. They do and they are among the strangest people you can hope to meet. The Lobotomised Rule Nazi follows the rules no matter what. When you try to point out that a rule is nonsense, illogical or actively harmful, the Lobotomised Rule Nazi looks at you with big, blank eyes and simply doesn’t understand the question. A rule is a rule. It must be followed. No correspondence shall be entered into. Have a nice day.

In a private corporation that has a monopoly, things work differently. Such companies still need to be relatively responsive to their customers because, unlike with government, their customers usually have the option not to use the service. This minimal need to satisfy the customer changes the internal structure and culture of the bureaucracy. There are still rules and regulations in place and people are not free to question them. However, the need to get the product to the customer at a reasonable standard creates the need to get around the rules. This is done through heroics and so the Hero is the primary type of employee in Type 2 bureaucracy. These are people who work long hours and pull all-nighters to get projects over the line. They do this because the rules of the bureaucracy hinder effective work. The sociologist Max Weber once said bureaucracy was the most efficient form of organisation. I’m not sure what he was smoking because bureaucracies are hopelessly inefficient. For all but the most simplified activities, following the rules doesn’t work. Trying to explicate and then follow rules is like a centipede counting its feet. The Hero overcomes the crushing inefficiency of following the rules by simply working harder. The Hero doesn’t attempt to question or change the rules, they just persevere in the face of them. In Type 2 organisations, a hero culture arises which rewards that perseverance.

This brings us to the third market type: the oligopoly. In these markets a bureaucracy has at least one competitor to deal with and even this modicum of competition substantially increases the need to be responsive to market signals. The hero culture of a Type 2 bureaucracy can work in these environments as long as your competitor is also Type 2. But if your competitor discovers that productivity gains can be had by hiring skilled people and giving them the autonomy and responsibility of managing the technical demands of their work rather than imposing rules on them, they will beat you. This dynamic creates a third type of bureaucracy which has the basic bureaucratic structure but which does not impose unnecessary rules on its workers. Such companies attract skilled technicians who are able to think strategically. They are system builders, not heroes. Within the technical sphere of the business, they are given significant freedom but this freedom is bounded and does not extend to questioning the mission, the project goals or the business strategy. This leads to problems which are captured beautifully by the SNAFU Principle. Without honest feedback from the lower levels of the organisation or customers, the upper levels cannot respond to problems with the direction of a project. Thus, even Type 3 bureaucracies, although technically competent, never produce anything innovative and rarely much of any value beyond their core offering. They are structurally incapable of questioning the product direction and responding to feedback in a meaningful way. Like every bureaucracy, they cannot learn.

Although Lobotomised Rule Nazis, Heroes and Autonomous Technicians are the driving forces within each bureaucratic type, they are not the majority. Rather, they are the most important type within each organisation because they define the culture that is needed for that organisation to survive. Accordingly, the types are not transferable between the three bureaucracies. Lobotomised Rule Nazis can only survive in a government bureaucracy. In a Type 2 organisation they would stop things getting done and in a Type 3 they would remove the autonomy of the technicians. Heroes do not work in Type 3 bureaucracies because the emphasis there is on fixing the system not working harder to perpetuate it. For the opposite reason, Autonomous Technicians cannot work in Type 2 organisations where they will be endlessly frustrated that the system cannot be fixed. And neither the autonomy of the Technician nor the drive of the Hero can find a home in the bloodless, robotic environment of a pure bureaucracy.

What about all the other people who work in a bureaucracy? The ones who are not, by psychological predisposition, Lobotomised Rule Nazis, Heroes or Autonomous Technicians? Well, they are people who just follow along with the prevailing culture. They might be happier elsewhere, but for whatever personal or circumstantial reasons, they simply learn to fit in. Dostoevsky once said that the human is the animal which can get used to anything. This is, of course, true in an evolutionary sense. We humans have been able to survive in almost every natural environment on the planet. It’s also true in a social sense. As the Stanford Prison Experiment showed, people can learn to fit in to any role. We also don’t like to rock the boat. In another famous psychological experiment, the researchers set up a room full of actors and a screen. On the screen in the room were shown three lines: A, B and C. Line A was clearly longer than line B which was clearly longer than line C. The test subjects were brought into the room one at a time and the experimenter asked each person to say out loud which was the shortest line. Each of the nineteen actors answered B. Then came the test subject, the last person to answer. The test subject must have known that line C was the shortest but to say so would be to publicly contradict the nineteen people who came before them. In the overwhelming majority of cases (I think from memory it was about 80%), the test subject also answered B. That’s the psychology of man as herd animal. We prefer not to stand out from the crowd and, all else being equal, we will sacrifice the truth to do so. It’s this psychological fact which allows the cultures of the different bureaucratic types to work. Margaret Mead once said that the only thing that has ever changed the world is a passionate minority. That’s true but it’s also the passionate minority that continues to drive the culture while the majority just follow along.

Taking all this together, you have bureaucracies in economic or political niches which attract certain personality types who have what it takes for the organisation to survive in those niches. Because the survival of the organisation requires these types of people, they are celebrated within the organisation and determine the prevailing culture. The historical rise of the bureaucratic organisational type brought the Lobotomised Rule Nazis out of the dungeons and into the light where they found a niche for themselves running government agencies. The Hero psychological type and the Autonomous Technician also gravitate to where they fit in best and where their natural disposition is rewarded most.

Despite their differences, what all bureaucracies have in common is the removal of personal autonomy and the replacement with rules. It is this which most explicitly separates bureaucratic work from, say, small business or self-employment. Let me give a quick concrete example from my experience.

When I was backpacking in Europe, I got a job working for a bank in Glasgow, Scotland. The bank was a Type 2 corporate: a private enterprise with no meaningful competition run according to a strict bureaucratic model. My job was to call small business customers and try and sell them new credit card machines. This is what is known in the call centre world as ‘warm calling’. You’re not just calling somebody trying to sell them a random thing that you have no idea that they want. Rather, you’re calling existing customers and selling them a related product. All in all, it wasn’t a bad job. For most of the people I was speaking to, the product was going to save them money and therefore they were grateful to get the call.

From the customer’s point of view, getting a call from somebody at their bank is the perfect opportunity to raise whatever other problems they might have been having with the bank’s services. People I spoke to would often ask for help with such problems and, as I got to know the people who worked in the bank better, I was usually able to solve the problems for customers quite quickly. One day, my manager heard me solving somebody’s problem on the phone. You might think he would have been happy at the initiative I had shown. Not at all. When the call was finished, he told me that I was no longer to ‘waste time’ with such things. I was to sell the credit card machine to the customer and that was all. If they asked about other problems, I was to refer them to the bank’s customer service department. The small window of autonomy I thought I had was slammed shut. In a small business, you are incentivised to solve customer’s problems because good will is good for business. In a bureaucracy, you are incentivised by whatever rule or metric somebody has come up with. It’s the same mindset that leads bureaucracies to block people from browsing certain websites, or installing software on their computer or even taking “excessive” bathroom breaks.

Given that lightning overview of types of bureaucracy, the environmental conditions they exist in and the culture that results from the tension between the organisational structure and that environment, we can now tie this analysis in with our present circumstances.

With the corona event, we have all been sucked into a Type 1 bureaucracy. This makes perfect sense given that it is government bureaucrats who have been running the show. All of the Type 1 elements are there. Removal of personal initiative and autonomy? Check. Follow the rules or else? Check. Contradictory rules and rules that violate common sense? Check. No way to question the rules or get an explanation for the reasoning behind them? Check. Be treated like a cog in a machine instead of a fully fledged human being? Check. Complete change in mission without any explanation why (“2 weeks to flatten the curve”)? Check. The list could go on. As the events of 2020 unfolded, it was like I had been taken back to my time working for the government but, unlike with a crappy job, there was no way to quit.

We are all now living in a Type 1 bureaucracy because that’s what government is. Thus, we are all now indelibly sucked into the Kafkaesque world of a pure bureaucracy where we are nothing more than potential carriers of a virus to be lumped into groups based on a test result or a vaccination status. The Lobotomised Rule Nazis are in charge now. The Queensland Chief Health Officer gave what I consider to be one of the perfect examples of that mentality late last year. Tom Hanks and his entourage had been allowed into Queensland to shoot a movie. This happened at exactly the same time that news came out about grieving relatives who weren’t allowed to cross the border to attend a funeral and another family unable to visit a dying family member in hospital. The CHO was asked how it was fair that a Hollywood movie star was allowed in while Australian citizens were not. With a straight face, she stated that Tom Hanks brought in millions of dollars for the economy. That’s the kind of bloodless response that only a career bureaucrat can give.

For those of us horrified to now be caught up in this Kafkaseque nightmare, the good news is that Type 1 bureaucracies are hopelessly incompetent so none of these schemes is going to work. More specifically, the one thing a bureaucracy can do arguably better than other organisational types is move objects around; shipping things from Point A to Point B. For that reason, a bureaucracy is exactly the type of organisation that can handle a vaccine rollout. During the wars, when bureaucracies came into their own organising supply lines, the soldiers were subject to numerous vaccines. We know bureaucracies can handle that and can expect that part to get done reasonably well. But I would expect the vaccine passports and assorted other pipe dreams are going to flop spectacularly, not just in their implementation but in the second order effects they cause. That’s also the bad news because politicians need things to appear to have ‘worked’ so they can get out of this mess intact. They will continue to allow the Lobotomised Rule Nazis to run things until it’s politically safe to stop. When will it be safe to stop? That’s a question that nobody knows but one thing to bear in mind is that all the problems that will be caused by these ridiculous bureaucratic schemes will at some point become a political fact and will give politicians the incentive to stop.

There is one other glimmer of hope. Government bureaucracies are used to having no competition. They get away with incompetence because their customers cannot go anywhere else. But, at least in the USA, the different states have already started to go their own way. Florida governor DeSantis came out explicitly against vaccine passports this week just like he has eschewed the rest of the accepted ‘wisdom’ in the last six months. A number of other states in the US have followed suit. Just like with Sweden in Europe and, to a lesser extent, NSW in Australia, there is now a point of difference and the ability to compare outcomes. There is also potentially freedom of choice. Don’t want to live somewhere where you need a piece of paper to go about your life? You might be able to move somewhere where you can. Will that state of affairs hold? Will it deliver us into a Type 3 situation where the competition forces government to allow us to retain some of our autonomy? Only time will tell.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 20: The Neverending Story

In my previous post in this series I noted that the corona event has a lot of parallels with the world wars and in particular WW1. War and pandemic are two of the oldest stories known to man. Just like the plague story, the war story has a fixed structure that everybody knows at some level. War ends when one side wins and this is almost always done when the other side surrenders. However, even this requires agreement by the parties involved. In WW1, Germany surrendered and so the war ended in the ‘correct’ fashion. However, many of the troops on the German side believed that the surrender was an act of betrayal from their leaders. They wanted to keep fighting and it was that desire which in large part drove WW2. Arguably, WW1 didn’t really end until 1945 and so the Armistice of 1918 was a false ending.

If WW1 is an example at the nation state level of not ending the story properly, there’s a fascinating equivalent tale at the level of the individual from WW2. It’s the case of Hiroo Onada.

Onoda was a Japanese soldier sent to fight in the Philippines in 1944. He was a guerrilla fighter on the island of Lubang and spent most of his time in the jungle separated from direct chain of command. He was in a unit of about four soldiers whose job was to pick off civilians and generally demoralise the enemy in the usual guerrilla strategy. Because of his status as a guerrilla fighter in the jungle, when the war ended, Onoda received no formal communication from his superiors. He and his fellow soldiers continued to shoot and kill local civilians and then retreat back to the jungle where they survived largely on coconuts and bananas. The locals left notes for Onoda and his fellow soldiers to tell them the war was over but the soldiers didn’t believe the notes. Over time, the other soldiers died but Onoda kept on doing his job. Amazingly, he kept on doing his job for the next 29 years until a Japanese traveller heard of the crazy Japanese soldier in the jungle in Lubang and decided to visit to try and convince him the war was over. The traveller met with Onoda who said he would only give up if his commanding officer ordered him to do so. The Japanese traveller returned to Japan and tracked down the officer, Major Taniguchi, who had since become a bookseller. Taniguchi went to the Philippines and met with Onoda who, eventually, accepted that the war was over and surrendered. The President of the Philippines pardoned Onada on the basis that he really did believe he was fighting a war and therefore his killing of local civilians was justified.

Onada’s story is incredible for many reasons but what is relevant to this series of posts is that it reveals the power of stories. Onoda was still living the war story 29 years after everybody else agreed that the story was over.

Sometimes, stories don’t end because of weird situations like with Onada. Sometimes they don’t end because they were never started properly in the first place or because circumstances don’t allow it. The Vietnam War is one war story that didn’t end properly but there’s another that I think is more relevant to the corona event and that’s the second Iraq War. Some might remember George W Bush appearing on the aircraft carrier with the big banner “Mission Accomplished” behind him. Although Bush would later deny it, that was an attempt to bring the war story to an end and claim victory in the usual fashion. But, of course, the war was not over. Most of the casualties in Iraq came after Bush made his premature declaration and US troops are still in Iraq to this day (under the guise of NATO). In the meantime, there was the whole business with ISIS. A similar story has played out with the war in Afghanistan. Even if President Biden follows through on Trump’s decision to remove all US troops, it certainly won’t be a standard end to a war story. It won’t be a ‘victory’. It won’t be “Mission Accomplished” because who even knows why the troops are there any more?

I would argue that both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were unwinnable wars because they were violations of the war story right from the start. This is most obvious in the case of Iraq where the US made a big song and dance about WMDs held by Saddam and used that as the pretext for war. Of course, there were no WMDs and so the story fell apart from there. War stories imply a way to ‘win’ but if you can’t win then you set up a dynamic where the story cannot end and that is exactly what has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Can the corona event be brought to an end or will it drag on interminably like the Afghanistan and Iraq wars? In order to answer that, we need to revisit my analysis from part 10 of this series and see how the plague story itself has undergone change since WW2.

Once upon a time, the plague story ended all by itself. Without fancy scientific tests to know who was and wasn’t infected, the general public went via the old fashioned method of seeing who was sick. In the case of really bad plagues, this also involved dead bodies in the streets. The plague ended when the number of sick and dead went down. Once this started to happen, there was jubilation and partying often before the ‘real’ end of the plague. Daniel Defoe noted in Journal of the Plague Year that the celebrations began while quite a number of people were still dying. He also noted how quickly life returned to normal shortly thereafter. That’s what happens when a pandemic is allowed to run its course naturally.

In the new plague story as told by Hollywood, the plague story ends when the experts save the day. This is the story we have been telling ourselves since almost the start of the corona event and it’s crucial to note that the corona event is the first time in history where this version of the story has been the official public story of what is going on. Never before have we expected to be rescued by experts. We are now into the vaccine part of that story. In the movies, the experts come up with a cure, the public takes it and everybody lives happily ever after. That is what many people expect to happen now. That is how the plague story that is corona is supposed to end. The question is: will it?

There were some developments this week that cast doubt on the matter. In Australia, the Federal Health Minister ended up in hospital just two days after receiving the vaccine for what we were told was an ‘unrelated infection’. Meanwhile, several European countries halted the Astra Zeneca vaccine rollout on fears of blood clots. In the USA, the living ex-Presidents – with the notable exception of a certain man called Trump – were preparing to do a public service announcement encouraging people to get the vaccine (presumably because they expect take up rates to be a lot lower than they want). None of these things is a slam dunk event that will break the plague story. Rather, they are just little things that nibble away at the narrative. In the real world (but not in the movies), cures and vaccines have side effects and some people die. In the normal course of events, news of these events doesn’t reach the public but in the age of social media and with the most high profile vaccine program in history, they will. The same dynamic of instantaneous information sharing via the internet that led to the initial corona hysteria will also play out with the vaccine. It won’t reach the level of a hysteria itself because it will not have the support of the media and government, but it will lead some people to disbelieve the narrative and decide not to take the vaccine. How low will vaccination rates be? is going to be a big question going forward. The vaccine is supposed to end the story. But if not enough people take the vaccine, has the story really ended?

Then there is the awkward fact that case numbers are dropping like a rock globally but especially in the US. We look to be well on the other side of the curve now but the vaccine rollout is not far enough advanced to be able to take the credit for ending the pandemic. That’s even in rich Western countries. If the pandemic ends before other countries even start the vaccine rollout then the story will really break down.

At the beginning of the corona event we had a choice between the plague story and the flu story. The plague story won but the problem right from the start was that the story was invalid. It was invalid as a plague story in the same way the second Iraq War was invalid as a war story. Just like the US fabricated data about the WMDs, Western governments deliberately exaggerated the threat of corona. This was revealed most clearly in Germany where internal government documents were leaked showing communications where it was explicitly discussed about how the government must, for example, talk about hospitals being overwhelmed and people suffocating at home because suffocation is a primal fear etc etc. Here in Victoria, our Premier stated you could either have human rights or wind up on a ventilator. There are countless other examples. Of course, this is business as usual in politics where a decision is made and then propaganda is crafted to justify it. But propaganda is a story and you need to be able to get out of the story.

When you get into a story that doesn’t match reality, reality is not going to help you end the story. You can declare Mission Accomplished all you like but that won’t change facts on the ground. For that reason, the corona story is almost certainly not going to end ‘properly’. If that’s true, we can ask how will it end? I suspect we may see a variation of Mission Accomplished at some point. It would probably be the WHO making an announcement that the pandemic is over. But by then I doubt anybody will be listening. After all, the WHO came out last year and said lockdowns were not a good idea and then a bunch of western governments promptly went back into lockdown. Corona started as a quasi-global story led by the WHO but quickly devolved into a myriad of different stories as each nation went its own way. What the people in China or India will tell themselves about corona is going to be radically different to what western nations tell themselves. This fracturing of the story is itself a big problem. Perhaps we will see a situation where individual national leaders announce ‘victory’ when their vaccination program is finished. But, that’s unlikely to provide closure especially if various geopolitical cans of worms like vaccine passports get opened. All this assumes the vaccination program itself doesn’t cause a massive problem such as has been warned about in relation to risks like antibody dependent enhancement and ‘leaky’ vaccines. If any of those turn into reality the story will blow wide open.

In conclusion, I don’t see how corona can be ended in the form in which the public expects. The ending of the modern plague story is make believe and has no basis in historical reality. That was always the main problem with it. We overturned our society based on something without precedent. So, it’s not going to be a clean end; a ‘proper’ end. I predict that, much like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the corona story will drag on for a while then simply be abandoned. The only question now is how long that process will take. There was more than thirty years between the start of WW1 and the end of WW2. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are almost twenty years old. Let’s hope the corona event doesn’t take a similar amount of time before the story ends.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

Way back in the very first post in this series I stated that my position right from the start of the corona event has been that it is a mass hysteria on a global scale facilitated by the internet. I was not the only one to make this analysis. Several psychologists also came out with the same conclusion. They noted, and this is something to bear in mind for those wondering when all this is going to come to an end, that a mass hysteria would take years to sort itself out. Certainly 2021 looks like a write-off. Whether corona will extend beyond that is anybody’s guess.

This week I came across a very interesting scholarly article which examines the notion that corona is a mass hysteria but with a focus on how the actions of governments contributed to it. It’s one of the best articles I’ve read on corona and backs up a number of my guesses about what’s going on with scholarly references. It also ties in with an idea I’ve been thinking about recently which is that, politically and psychologically, the corona event is a lot more like war than pandemic in the sense that most western governments (with the exception of Sweden) have been egging the population on rather than trying to calm them. It seems to me that the closest event in recent western history to the corona event is not previous pandemics like Asian Flu or Hong Kong Flu (both comparable as public health problems) but rather World War One. The correspondences are there. Remember “two weeks to flatten the curve”? Those kind of promises happened at the start of World War One too. Kaiser Wilhelm told his troops they would be home by the end of autumn. In Britain, it was assumed victory would be had by Christmas at the latest. Of course, it was four years and millions of deaths later before it all finally came to an end.

The bill for the corona event is going to be similar to that for the wars. Australia already has $1.5 trillion of national debt baked into the cake but that’s only the start. I would guess it will be many trillions by the time all gets counted. Like with war debt this will create massive inflation and we have already started to see that in soaring property prices and ridiculous stock market valuations.

Then there is the mass hysteria part. In a mass hysteria, people do things that look crazy in normal times. In WW1 this involved telling young men to jump out of trenches and run into machine guns. The corona event can’t compare to that for sheer madness but things have happened in the last year in western societies that nobody would have believed possible prior. This week here in Melbourne we saw Australian citizens wearing garbage bags being hauled out of quarantine hotels. We have seen pregnant women handcuffed in front of their children over social media posts. We have seen grandmothers pushed down the aisles of the Queen Victoria Market by baton-wielding stormtroopers (errr, police). State borders have been closed at days or even hours notice while governments welcomed in Hollywood movie stars and sports players. In the middle of all that, the Prime Minister decided to change a line in the national anthem to read “we are one and free”. Really? We have never been less ‘one’ or ‘free’ since the Federation of the country. Probably not the most appropriate time for that change, mate.

In many states in the US, it looks like children and teenagers will go two years and maybe more without in-person schooling while many elderly people in nursing homes may also go years without being allowed to see their loved ones in person. The list could go on and the whole thing is not over yet. Who knows what else will come especially the biggest unknown which is the long term effects of a mass vaccination program.

Like the events of WW1, our response has been radically disproportionate to the initial problem. Also like war, there is a big geopolitical element to corona. Once governments went with the plague story interpretation they needed a vaccine to end the story. But that has big implications for international travel and commerce. Any country which decided to break ranks and deny the importance of corona would set its citizens up to be excluded from other countries on the basis of vaccination status. How exactly all that gets sorted out is going to be something to watch carefully. Presumably countries will have to recognise each other’s vaccines as valid so that, for example, Chinese citizens can take a Chinese vaccine to travel elsewhere and vice versa. Will that actually happen or will countries make foreign citizens take ‘their vaccine’ to enter?

The idea among some that we can take the crisis and use it renew our society also harks back to the post WW2 era. A nice little Marshall Plan (Great Reset) to rebuild shattered economies this time with a green energy agenda. Sounds nice in theory (actually, it sounds horrible in theory as anybody who has read about the Great Reset would know). But the future that awaits us is almost certainly much more like the post-WW1 era: political instability (already there in the USA and Europe), inflation (already here), massive debts that can’t be repaid perhaps leading to currency collapse (Germany had a hyperinflation and reset its currency in the 1920s/1930s). Oh yeah, and the great depression.

Most importantly, if both government action and the internet have contributed to this mass hysteria, there is no reason why other hysterias will not break out. We have the WHO there to identify ‘new’ viruses. The technology is there to create PCR tests and distribute them instantly. Big Pharma is there waiting to make billions from vaccines and testing. In short, there is nothing stopping this whole thing from happening again unless governments put some safeguards in place. Safeguards like defunding the WHO. But we know what happened with that idea. If, as the authors of the paper cited above note, bigger government makes mass hysterias more likely and mass hysterias create big government (by shrinking and curtailing civil society) then we have a positive feedback loop. Just like WW1 made WW2 more likely (some might say inevitable). Another reason to bunker down and buckle up.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

I’ve referred several times in this series of posts to the cybernetics/systems thinking movement of the 20^th century. The other day I came across this interview with the daughter of two of the greats that movement – Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. In the article, Mary Catherine Bateson laments how systems thinking got hijacked by the technology industry. This struck a chord with me because it’s through my work in the IT that I was introduced to those ideas. I think she probably overestimates the degree to which the concepts of systems thinking are actually used in IT but she’s right on the whole that this is where the attention has gone towards while moving away from systems thinking as a way to think about the world. What gets called systems thinking in the academic world these days seems to be driven by the idea that it’s a way to do better science which is ironic because systems thinking was, among other things, a sharp critique of the naïve scientific thinking of the late 19^th and early 20^th century. It set out to define clearly the limitations of science so that hubris did not take over. The corona event represents the reappearance of that hubris in our culture. For that reason, our response to corona can be sharply critiqued from the perspective of systems thinking. Let’s just have a look at one important concept from systems thinking to get an idea of what that critique might look like. It’s one raised by Mary Catherine Bateson in the article above: side effects.

From the point of view of the universe (does the universe have a point of view?), there is no such thing as a side effect. Effects are just effects. The phrase side effect is about intention. I act with an intended effect and that is the thing that I care about. Side effects are the other effects which follow from my action; the ones I didn’t intend. But we can be more specific because side effects are normally the effects I didn’t intend but which also come to my attention usually because they are negative effects. There are a whole host of other effects that never come to my attention. They exist but I don’t give them the name side effects because I am unaware of them.

Effects and side effects are information. Gregory Bateson defined information as “a difference that makes a difference”. In the case of an effect, it must make a difference that we notice. Otherwise, we don’t call it an effect. This is a very important point because it makes explicit the role of the observer. An action may have all kinds of effects that an observer does not notice because they do not get above the threshold of awareness of the observer. For example, there are sound waves floating around all the time that we do not perceive because they do not get above the noise floor that is partly hard wired in our hearing apparatus and partly a function of our attention. There was a ‘difference’ but it did not make a ‘difference’ to us. We must be attuned to perceive the effect.

So, there are effects which we are looking for and are able to notice, side effects which we were not looking for but which came to our attention anyway and then all the effects we were not looking for and didn’t come to our attention. There is one other kind of effect worth mention which is a perceived effect which is not related to the action or cause. An example of this is optical illusions which relate to edge cases around our perceptual apparatus. In more complex domains, we can fool ourselves into perceiving effects which were not really there. Let me give my favourite personal example of this.

Just over ten years ago I started to get into audio engineering in a big way. I have always been an enthusiastic amateur musician and, with the advent of cheap home recording technology, it seemed like a good thing to get into recording music if for no other reason than as a practice tool. Learning how to mix and master recorded music is fiendishly difficult. To do it well requires you not so much to master the tools (although you must eventually do that) but how to rewire your aural perception. You must learn to hear when a difference makes a difference. Newbie audio engineers will fiddle around with the various settings on reverbs and compressors but they aren’t really hearing the difference. They haven’t learned how to listen properly. It’s not until you have learned how to listen that you can make real progress. In the meantime, you’re swimming around in a world where nothing seems to make any difference.

I was swimming in that world on the morning in question. I was working on a song that was sounding like shit. I was frustrated. Nothing I did seemed to make any difference. I added reverb, it still sounded shit. I took the reverb away. Still shit. Then I made a big but very tempting mistake: I went to the internet and typed “why does my mix sound like shit.” There are five bazillion answers to this question but the one that came up first was compression. That’s the thing that makes the difference between pro recordings and amateurs. So said the internet. I followed a thread where there was a link to a new compressor that somebody said would fix all my problems. I eagerly downloaded it. This was gonna be great. I would install this thing and be on a way one ticket to recording superstardom. I inserted the plugin into the mix, took a deep breath and then switched it on.

The effect was instantaneous. The track burst to life. The guitars were clearer, the drums bigger, the vocals cut through with the clarity of a spring morning and the mellifluousness of a choir of angels. I sat back and took it all in marvelling at how wonderful this new compressor was. Once the euphoria had died down, I opened my eyes and decided to check the settings that I was using so I wouldn’t forget them. I looked down at the compressor plugin on the computer screen and to my horror, to my sheer disbelief, realised the compressor was not even turned on. I had clicked the wrong button. To be sure of my mistake, I turned it on for real. The mix of my song changed but not in any significant way. It still sounded like shit. My mixes continued to sound like shit for about another year till I finally learned that it didn’t really matter what compressor you used so much as how you used it.

In this case I had convinced myself that I heard an effect that wasn’t really there. Why? Because I really wanted it to work. If intention and will are required to perceive an effect it’s also true that emotions and imagination can create an effect where one does not exist. Then you have fooled yourself. Most of the time it’s hard to know whether you are fooling yourself or not. There’s usually no on/off button which can give definitive feedback. A big part of science is learning how to test things in a way that gives definitive feedback. That’s why not fooling yourself was one of the main rules of science outlined by the great Richard Feynman but it holds in life in general. Learning to be objective is largely learning to be able to put aside emotions and see something for what it is even when you really, really, don’t want it to be the case. It’s also about knowing when you haven’t set up your testing in such a way as to give a clear answer about what is happening. That is why blind testing and randomised control trials are so important in science. They exclude the researcher’s emotions from the equation. Even scientists allow their emotions to get in the way and to see and effect where there isn’t one.

The point to be made here is that just perceiving an effect is often very difficult. In complex domains like sound engineering and science, it takes a lot of practice and it’s easy to fool yourself. What about side effects? These are normally not so hard to ascertain as they usually force their way into our attention whether we like it or not. The challenge is not to see them but to simply admit their existence and deal with the inevitable frustration or disappointment they cause. Let me give an example of such a side effect from my personal experience.

I decided to set up some raised wicking beds in my backyard. The summers in Melbourne are typically hot and dry. There is definitely not enough rain to grow vegetables without extra watering. Wicking beds are an excellent way to irrigate vegetables as there is almost no evaporative loss of moisture and you can fill them up about once a week and then forget about them for the rest of the week which makes maintenance very easy. The effect I was looking for out my wicking beds was to grow vegetables with the least amount of work and watering possible. That was the happy path. Of course, any gardener knows gardens rarely deliver the happy path, at least not straight away. Gardens are complex systems and side effects pop up regularly.

In constructing my wicking beds, I decided to make them look nice by re-using some weatherboards I had lying around as cladding. It worked and the beds looked attractive enough. In the process, however, I had inadvertently created the perfect habitat for snails. In between the weatherboards and the container that was holding the soil was a nice dark, damp place that was about an inch wide and protected from the outside world. It was also right next door to a food supply: the seedlings for my vegetables. My wicking beds were like a five star snail hotel with an all-you-can eat breakfast buffet thrown in. One day I went outside to check on my seedlings and they were gone with the tell-tale trail of slime indicating clearly who the culprits were.

Systems theory says that any system you build will produce effects that you did not foresee. This includes side effects that will barge their way into your consciousness whether you like it or not and a whole host of other effects that you will never know about because you are not looking for them. Sometimes those affects are small and localised like my snail problem. But with large systems you can get very big negative effects such as major environmental damage or loss of life. Side effects are information and, used correctly, that information will allow you build a better system. I could have removed the weatherboards from my wicking beds to solve the snail problem. However, once I learned where the snails were, it was a trivial matter to pick them off the boards and feed them to my chickens. In so doing, I was able to turn a negative side effect into a positive one. This is known as adaptation, which is another important concept in systems thinking.

We’ve seen that effects can be hard to determine and that side effects are always present. Knowing all this we can make some general statements about systems. The newer a system, the more side effects there will be and most of these will be negative. (I can state the truth of this as my job is to test newly built IT systems. There are always more bugs at the start than at the end). When building a system you should be sure to set up information channels for side effects to be dealt with so you can learn and correct. It is never a good idea to roll out a big new system at scale without first prototyping and testing at a smaller scale. To do so invites collateral damage from negative side effects on a large scale.

Which brings us to the corona event and I’m sure the reader can see where I’m going with this. Never before attempted lockdowns on a global scale, all kinds of governments measures that have never been tried or tested and now as the fitting finale to the whole show a never before tried vaccine rolled out on mass after being rushed through testing. From a systems point of view, all this is guaranteed to cause large scale side effects. We have already begun to see these in the mass unemployment, closure of small businesses, massive new government debt and all the rest. But with corona it’s not even clear any more what main effect we are aiming towards. Originally, it was ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’ but that has changed to, well, who knows? The newly elected President Biden admitted as much a week or so ago when he said there was nothing much that could be done about corona (after promising during the election campaign that he had a plan, of course). We have no idea what we are doing. It all reminds me of my early days of audio engineering, desperately flailing away trying anything to find something that works. That’s not a good look for politicians who are supposed to be leading our society.

In relation to the vaccine, the media, as the modern propaganda machine that it is, is reassuring the public that side effects are ‘normal’ for vaccines. That may be true, but what about the side effects of the new vaccine that we don’t know about yet. Those are the ones that are going to be game changers if they do happen. I’m thinking of autoimmune disease and antibody dependent enhancement. Then there are the social and political side effects. One of these, at least in the US, looks certain to be a growing loss of faith in the government, although that has been building for decades. We have seen in the past few weeks quite ridiculous things like Biden admitting he has no plan for corona, Fauci recommending two masks or even three, Cuomo and Newsom suddenly realising the economy matters. We have the same ridiculousness here in Australia with WA recently mandating masks for people exercising outdoors in the middle of summer in one of the least densely populated cities in the world (Perth).

For now, the public here seems to support it. Will they continue to support it if the vaccines don’t make corona ‘go away’ and once the budget deficit hits several trillion? Who knows? Budget deficits don’t seem to matter anymore. Does anything matter anymore? We live at a time where it’s quite impossible to know what is going to happen next. That outcome was already baked into the cake as soon as we went into lockdown. The main reason not to lockdown was because it would lead us into a situation just like this. The corona event demonstrates that we still haven’t learned the lessons from cybernetics and systems thinking. Rather, we have reverted back to that old hubris and over confidence in ‘science’.

Will we still believe in ‘science’ when all this is over or will one of the side effects of our new system be a cynicism not just of science but our whole society? Time will tell. For now, buckle up and keep your eye out for any side effects that come flying in your direction.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona