The Covidian socialist state
Laws on equality, “hate speech”, internet communication and COVID safety are so dense, vague and contradictory we are all guilty all the time, just by leading normal lives.
Any reader of reportage of the Eastern Bloc will have come across reports of the ills of socialism. Alongside other failures of enforced equality, rampant laziness and heedless – actually wilful – incompetence were not the least. Western journalists brought back tales of railway-freight managers meeting quotas by endlessly shuttling goods between destinations without unloading wagons. They wrote of factories meeting targets by manufacturing shoddy items just so that targets were met. They wrote of officials who did not know or care about their work, employees who could not do their jobs but were never fired and systems that ran only to provide bribes to operatives and meet political commitments. Inefficiency was rampant because – unless there was someone senior prepared to endorse force – no one faced consequences.
Socialism means lack of personal responsibility. For the worker, it means not caring if a job is well done. For an official, it means being able to diffuse responsibility for suboptimal decisions. For the teacher, it means teaching to the test and not inculcating a lively inquiring spirit. For the student, it means learning empty cant and learning that empty cant is a perquisite for everyday life. For the statesman, it means keeping a dysfunctional system dysfunctional enough to maintain his job but not so dysfunctional that the state collapses. This abnegation of personal agency is an extension of the leftist belief that problems arise from social conditions (contra the right’s view that human beings have inherent ineradicable flaws).
The advent of Covidian authoritarianism saw imposition of socialism by decree. Large parts of the world’s fifth largest economy were closed by the government because of the outbreak of an unremarkable respiratory virus that posed no danger to the majority of the population. Once the government announced that it would furlough workers it had made idle, it became clear that the government no longer functioned in an economy that was even ostensibly capitalist. Money would be printed, damn the inflation. Trampling over our freedoms with its clown shoes, the socialist Conservative government vowed to act as protector as well as bully.
As the government has adopted socialism, so have the population taken advantage of the new working culture. NHS-tracking-app hits and reporting of cohabitor-positive-COVID tests are being deliberately used by civil servants, teachers, care-workers and medical staff to take time off, with pay. Shortages in public-sector employment are due to staff using ridiculous rules regarding self-isolation to gain leisure and family time. They are gaming the system as benefits claimants do. (Having been both a public-sector worker and a benefits claimant in my time, I understand both cultures from the inside.) It is not a matter of ethical abuse because ethics are set from above, by employers and ministers. Rules are set up to allow staff to shirk responsibility, diffuse blame, reduce labour and take maximum private advantage of the public system. This is the UK public-sector today, mirroring communist states of old.
Covidian micro-management of social interaction in public situations also mimics socialism. Rules permitting restaurant customers not to wear masks while seated but forcing them to wear masks while standing are as exquisitely stupid and degrading as anything one could have found in Albania or Moscow in 1960. Ministers decree which food types constitute “substantial meals”, which decides if a pub can trade. The purpose of these rules is not to guard or guide; it is to be arbitrary and degrading. Everyone knows they do not work, but they still comply. Public lying is the standard. British newspapers and broadcasters lie to the population like those of ramshackle communist states did.
As Theodore Dalrymple notes: “In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”
As the socialist citizen took up the unlimited opportunities for laziness, corruption, incompetence, selfishness and all manner of weakness, so he was trapped in a moral mire. One could not in good conscience criticise leaders (in the Party store, in the ministry limousine, in the high-class apartment) for corruption when corruption was the national lifeblood. Today, we cannot properly condemn Matt Hancock or Dominic Cummings for bending social-distancing rules when none of us has followed the rules either. Of course. Rules are so absurd, arbitrary and contradictory that it is impossible for anyone to follow them, even if they understood them. As in the police state, everyone is guilty of rule infraction, one is just awaiting arrest. (Like Kafka’s Josef K.) Laws on equality, “hate speech”, internet communication and COVID safety are so dense, vague and contradictory we are all guilty all the time, just by leading normal lives. Every one of us is guilty because in a totalitarian state everyone must be.
Enjoy your paid quarantine but remember your complicity, citizen. Welcome to the Covidian socialist state.
