Save Christmas, save Easter, save Ibiza: panem et circenses

As the long as the dopamine river keeps flowing, the regime can rule the water. The regime’s control is omnipotent and menacing; with the flick of a finger, it can relax, restrict, tighten, and enhance the supply of bread and circuses to the population.

It was the American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin who is credited with the famous phrase ‘those who give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.’ A saying frequently deployed as a warning against the accumulation of emergency powers by political leaders (who secretly haven’t got the stomach to relinquish them).

For safety to occur, liberty is first to be in the crosshairs, as the maternalistic state which believes in tyranny for the people’s good is well aware that freedom is not without risk and personal injury. This is why the infantilised West is more than welcoming of this regime of micromanagement and state mandated bubble-wrap: the concept of freedom has been mutilated into a dangerous disease spreader that deliberately murders at random without warning.

But there is another side of the coin. The appeal to safety is based on intimidation, but this particular method of cajoling is a bribe. It is what ancient Rome coined as ‘panem et circenses’ (bread and circuses).

Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, modified Franklin’s statement to suggest that a population will rip apart its liberty and independence as if they were a pack of hyenas ravaging its prey, solely if its rulers granted them an infinite supply of bread and circuses in return. The tyranny equation can be updated to include safety plus entertainment and sustenance minus liberty.

Both in Huxley’s and much of our own, everyday life is fuelled by the quick fix of dopamine. Modern day streaming services, such as Netflix, provide a near endless supply of sitcoms and thrillers which can be subjected to an overnight or afternoon binge. We have time for this overdose of entertainment because our survival is ascertained through supermarket meal deals and central heating, rendering modern man lethargic and dependant.

But there is a more sinister side to this borderline nihilism. As the long as the dopamine river keeps flowing, the regime can rule the water. The regime’s control is omnipotent and menacing; with the flick of a finger, it can relax, restrict, tighten, and enhance the supply of bread and circuses to the population. Reliant on dopamine, the people are hopelessly addicted, with the regime playing the role of both a drug dealer and a pimp.

As in Brave New World, the populace has no communal or national ties, or loyalty to any purpose greater than selfish individualistic consumption, with the bread and circuses becoming the only reasonable (though shallow, hopeless, and depressing) means of living until perspiring.

Therefore, any threat to the supply of bread and circuses is akin to oxygen deprivation, and the population at large will do anything they can to avoid it. Recently, the regime played a game of cat and mouse, threatening the removal of bread and circuses through vaccine passports.

Statistics are hard to come by, so I ponder how many vaccine recipients stood in line at their local vaccination centre just so they could slip inside a nightclub? How many took ‘a shot in the arm’ for a football game? How many rushed to get both jabs so they could flock to Ibiza to flood their liver with overpriced tequila shots?

Too many lockdown sceptics assume that fear is the only tool of manufactured support for lockdown. Far from it. Some of the pro-lockdown and vaccine fetishization rhetoric revolves around preventing the occurrence of further barriers on social entertainment (‘we need to lockdown now/vaccinate everyone so we can return to normal’), manoeuvring around the taboo topic of personal freedom.

This is the predicament we are stuck in: enact the most draconian restrictions and human rights violations in peacetime history under the guise of preventing death at all costs – a highly materialistic aim – and you will have too much support to be overthrown if every household still has electricity, Wi-Fi, and Uber Eats.

Cut out the bread and circuses, and you will have rebellion.