Con and Confidence

You fool them, they fool you

“One can fool some men, or fool all men in some places and times, but one cannot fool all men in all places and ages.”

Traité de la Vérité de la Religion Chrétienne (1684) Jacques Abbadie

Opinion poll data depends on a fundamental assumption: that those polled are actually expressing their true opinion.

The assumptions is usually well-placed. People tend not to have a strong reason to dissemble about their holiday habits or political affiliations. Indeed, pride in one’s choices often pushes polling data in an unreliably positive direction.

The pollsters have developed sampling and statistical tools to counter these mild problematics in the data.

It’s different now. In March 2020, Govt UK decided to employ threat messages, with the absolute intent to terrorise and divide the nation. Coronaphobia is not an accident of irrationality. Coronaphobia is not an unintended consequences of Govt UK action. The deliberate creation of Coronaphobia became Govt UK policy. Indeed, it became the only policy.

Making threats, and seeing response, is addictive. It simplifies. No long tortuous arguments. No shades of opinion. No cacophony of voices pressing to be heard. Do as we say or you die. Messaging does not get simpler than that.

But then Govt UK tries to backtrack on its own message: from Stay Home to Don’t Stay Home. In a catatonically Coronaphobic population, the result is deep distress and ambivalence.

What we are seeing all around us is Coronaphobic Stockholm Syndrome:

Stockholm syndrome is commonly linked to high profile kidnappings and hostage situations. Aside from famous crime cases, regular people may also develop this psychological condition in response to various types of trauma. syndrome is a psychological response. It occurs when hostages or abuse victims bond with their captors or abusers. This psychological connection develops over the course of the days, weeks, months, or even years of captivity or abuse.

With this syndrome, hostages or abuse victims may come to sympathize with their captives. This is the opposite of the fear, terror, and disdain that might be expected from the victims in these situations.

Over the course of time, some victims do come to develop positive feelings toward their captors. They may even begin to feel as if they share common goals and causes. The victim may begin to develop negative feelings toward the police or authorities. They may resent anyone who may be trying to help them escape from the dangerous situation they’re in.

This paradox does not happen with every hostage or victim, and it’s unclear why it occurs when it does.

Many psychologists and medical professionals consider Stockholm syndrome a coping mechanism, or a way to help victims handle the trauma of a terrifying situation. Indeed, the history of the syndrome may help explain why that is.

https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/stockholm-syndrome#definition

This is why you see perfectly rational people falling over themselves to endorse ideas which, in another frame, they would find silly or even repulsive.

Now, whilst Stockholm Syndrome is a useful paradigm for the cognitive behavioural reconfiguration which has warped Britain since 23 March 2020, it is only a stepping stone.

In the captor/captive frame, the captor exerts constant stress on the captive. The captive learns to accommodate to that stress, as the price of (hopefully) staying alive. That frame has an internal logic which can satisfy, as the captor possesses the ultimate power.

What has moved us beyond that frame, is the extraordinary abdication of power of Govt UK. More authoritarian force has been exerted on the people of Britain than Euro-historical men in uniforms with stripes up their trousers ever dreamed of.

Yet simultaneously, Govt UK abdicated power to the “invisible killer” virus (to quote abdicator-in-chief Johnson’s speech of 10 May 2020).

It’s like the Stockholm captors locking their captives in a room, then announcing that they are leaving: and if the captives try to leave then something terrible will happen to them.

You can immediately see what happens in that situation. The captives turn on each other. We have an intrinsic need to project, onto some human agency, our feelings both high and low. Examples are: how romantic love and governmental power work.

When we are left subsumed in threat with no one but our fellow captives, that intrinsic need drives us to divide. We project negative feelings onto some of our fellows and positive feelings onto others.

We want someone to assume responsibility for our emotional well-being. Because our own sense of power in responsibility was taken away from us by the captor.

Captivity denudes the self of reliant responsibility. It is this foundation which allows us to hold and express opinions.

The door upon and the captor says, with sudden mildness, that it’s not so bad out there after all. The invisible killer is still out there, but it’s OK, kind of, really. A bit. Then his blonde bob disappears round the door frame and is seen not again.

Do you expect there to be a mad rush for the door? Of course you don’t. What you expect to see is a confused crowd of captives, huddling in divided groups, and shouting over each other.

Then a polite person pops in with a clipboard and asks each captive what they really think about the situation.

However, you are not polling individuals with a self-sense of reliant responsibility. You are polling captives.  Their statements of satisfaction and intent are completely unreliable.

This became obvious a few weeks ago when parks and beaches were being crammed with covid care-less, yet opinion polls were still stating lockdown support at 80%. The statements of satisfaction and intent, were completely inconsistent with mass behaviour observation. The cognitive and the behavioural had become separated.

The Laurel and Hardy act of Johnson and Cummings got into this fine mess, due to panic expressed in focus group opinions. That was reliable then. It isn’t now.

That’s why Johnson and the whole of Govt UK and their acolytes now find it so hard to take a consistent public position: save for the embrace of extraordinary cognitive dissonance, expressed in mind-bendingly contradictory pseudo-policies.

The captives just can’t hear their captor anymore. It is not a matter of belief: it is way past that. The frame has moved beyond Stockholm and into hyper-reality.