There Is Nothing Safe about the Narrative of Keeping Others Safe

My local supermarket plays a recorded announcement every 10 minutes or so which literally begins with “Our number one priority is keeping the community safe” (or very similar words to that effect). Call me old-fashioned but I thought the number one priority of a supermarket was to sell a range of food and other products that people wish to buy.

I think that this recorded announcement is emblematic of a very widespread phenomenon that has played a significant role in the public health debacle of the past 2 years. I’m referring to both the “keep others safe” narrative as well as the way people have responded to that narrative.

In my opinion, this particular idea is a key part of the whole Covid-19 response narrative – if not the central part. Even after the rest of the narrative has been etched away by inconvenient scientific facts, the need to “keep others safe” seems to be the idea that people fall back on as justification – and it will almost certainly be the justification given for past behaviour and policies long after this is all over.

The supermarket example may seem relatively harmless but let’s consider some others. Big tech companies such as Facebook and Google use community safety as an excuse to censor content that does not align with their particular view of what is true or credible. This behaviour has likely had many bad consequences, one being the public vilification of highly regarded effective treatments for Covid-19, such as ivermectin. This vilification has likely cost a great many lives.

Scientific papers have been rejected for publication because the journal editors have decided that the information concerned would cause some kind of harm to the community. Worse still, scientists have injected their personal opinions regarding community safety into the conclusions of their work [1]. Consequently, scientific findings that ought to have been part of the public debate did not even make it to the table – very probably with deadly consequences. At the community level, people have been persuaded by this narrative to treat others in ways that would ordinarily be unthinkable.

Pilots are taught that in an emergency situation – whatever else they do – their number one priority is to “fly the plane”. Modern society is a complex machine consisting of interconnected parts spanning a multitude of functions, including healthcare – and one could argue that in an emergency situation the number one priority is to keep that machine running. This is one reason the idea of forcing “non-essential” businesses to close (which happened during the many lockdowns in New Zealand and elsewhere) was so deeply misguided. Restaurants may seem like a luxury that we can do without for a while, but the ripple effects of closing even this one sector of the economy will inevitably flow through the rest of the economy and ultimately cost lives.

So given that people are an essential part of the functioning of society, it could be argued that the number one priority in an emergency is for the majority of people to continue doing what they do. Given the extent to which roles in society are finely tuned and highly interconnected, suddenly making changes to a broad range of roles across society is likely to have significant unintended consequences – ultimately it is likely to destabilise society, and I believe we are now witnessing the effects of exactly that.

This is a difficult issue – because of course when society faces some kind of threat then we do want people and organisations to take the threat seriously and play their part. But the crucial question here is the question of what part people should play – while ensuring that the part that they normally play in the functioning of society is not disrupted.

The Covid-19 pandemic narrative was broadcast so loudly from the start that most people mobilised around it early on. A cynical view would say they were largely driven by self-interest and fear, and no doubt fear did play a role. But I think for many there would have been a significant component of good intention and genuine concern for others – particularly for family and friends but also to the community at large. We are taught from a young age that helping others is virtuous. In this case, the narrative to “keep our community safe” and “keep others safe” was loud and relentless, so why wouldn’t most people embrace that narrative?

Coincidentally there was a cultural trend that I suggest laid important groundwork for the behaviour that we have seen. The concept of harm was already front and centre in public policy and institutions, and in popular culture. The community guidelines of big tech organisations were already in place with vaguely worded rules which were purpose-built to allow virtually anything to be deemed harmful. I am not suggesting there was any master plan here – but if you wanted to deploy a “keep others safe” narrative to drive the behaviour of the population then establishing a culture of extreme sensitivity to harm would be the perfect preparation.

The fear narrative also plays an important role in relation to the “keep others safe” narrative. People will cross their usual boundaries if they feel the situation is sufficiently dire. The media did it without any qualms. Even academic journal editors – and some scientists themselves – all of whom should hold to the highest standards of focus and discipline, took on the mantle of protecting the community from opinions or information which they believed may be harmful. And so on it went across a wide variety of institutions and organisations. Ironically, those who fully sign up to “keep others safe” are oblivious to the multitude of other harms that arise from such a single-minded focus on just one particular harm.

The “keep others safe” narrative wasn’t simply a one-way message – from health authorities to the public – it also influenced the people and organisations responsible for generating or broadcasting the narrative itself, with the obvious result that we get a positive feedback loop. This at least in part explains why the narrative has been so loud and relentless.

The perceived seriousness of the situation coupled with the broadening of the concept of harm leads to a purification of the narrative. Most notably scientific views which do not align with the dominant narrative are deemed harmful and pushed out of the mainstream. Consequently, the majority are not exposed to these dissenting views – which fuels another positive feedback loop. While the mainstream narrative becomes more purified, alternative views are forced out into the wilderness of alternative media, and stereotypes about alternative media help to further marginalise dissenters.

It has always seemed obvious to me that the narrative would affect not just the general population, but also those in power and in various key roles. Judges, police, medical authorities, local GPs, and of course politicians – whatever their level of education and professional responsibilities they still swim in the same water as the rest of us. A daily barrage of fear and the dominant narrative in the morning news would take a near super-human effort to resist, particularly if the person concerned is not in the habit of paying attention to alternative media sources. No doubt there is a class aspect to this also – it is respectable to listen to the BBC, The New York Times, or TVNZ. Admitting to listening to a Joe Rogan podcast isn’t a smart move if you work and socialise in those circles.

The “keep others safe” narrative is also a problem because, like many simple slogans that we see appearing in popular culture, it is only one aspect of a deeper philosophical discussion – the question of how we should balance one’s own interests against the interests of others.

This is a question that requires careful thought and nuance – it is arguably one of the most difficult questions for us as autonomous conscious beings to answer. It is also a question that we are rarely in a position to adequately discuss within ordinary life – especially when we consider the question at a societal rather than personal level.

Of course, we first need to determine what our own interests and the interests of others actually are. Determining our own interests is far from easy, and determining the interests of others raises even more problems. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that we can.

One thing which seems clear is that the answer does not lay at either extreme. At one extreme we would have no regard whatsoever for others. In other words, every one of us acts at all times only to serve our self-interest. At some level, our behaviour as animals may be more strongly rooted in self-interest than we care to admit, but I think most people would agree that a world of unfettered self-interest would be a very unpleasant world – potentially society could not even function.

At the other extreme, we would have no purpose other than to serve the interest of others. This would be a very peculiar world. This would be a world where you place no weight on your own interests yet your interests are being served by all those around you (while you do nothing but serve the interests of others). I find it difficult to picture such a world as anything other than a giant machine in which we are each mindless cogs. Some people might find this idea appealing but to me, it seems to rule out any kind of existence as an individual.

So it seems reasonable to assume that the balance between self-interest and the interest of others lies somewhere in between the two extremes I have outlined above. Like all the great questions in philosophy, the answer is far from obvious, if there even is one. Questions like these are rivers in the history of philosophy that run for decades or centuries.

It isn’t necessary for Jacinda Ardern and her government to know the answer to this difficult philosophical problem, or even the question, to turn it into a tactic. Like a naughty child out to get her sibling into trouble, she only needs to know that the idea can be used to manipulate people. But if she does have a wider understanding – and I may be giving her far too much credit here, there is something particularly nasty and dishonest about using just one side of a complex philosophical question in this way.

They are exploiting people’s better nature. They are exploiting the fact that most people don’t reflect deeply on such ideas and that the opportunity rarely exists to give the question the balanced attention it deserves. They are exploiting the fact that most people do not expect their government to be using such tactics of manipulation.

Whatever is going on (or not going on) in the minds of Jacinda Ardern and her government, the “keep others safe” idea is particularly dangerous – because it can be used to motivate just about any kind of behaviour without any consideration to the harm it does.

In the past, most people would never have dreamed of sacrificing the well-being of their children for the sake of older generations. But large numbers of people seem to have been convinced about the need to keep others safe at all costs – to the point of covering the faces and airways of their own children for long periods, separating them from their peers for long periods, and injecting them with a vaccine which is very new and which uses a very new technology (not to mention the steadily growing safety concerns within the scientific community).

Like the other behaviours which have been shaped by the Covid-19 narrative, it is difficult to see how the fixation on keeping others safe at all costs – both at the institutional level and in the general population – can be easily steered in a more balanced direction. It also seems likely that now the precedent has been established, the potent “keep others safe” narrative can easily be deployed again. Even if our governments appear to walk back their authoritarian measures, this sword of Damocles now hangs over our heads.

[1] Hillsdale College. SARS2 Pandemic & Censorship | Scott W. Atlas, Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya https://youtu.be/FlwqqgYAyZs