A chilling totalitarian impulse is now subverting free societies from within

It is alarming how many people, even now, want to irrationally keep unnatural restrictions on our lives

Have you begun to suspect that at least some of the people who have been responsible for seeing us through, or reporting on, the Covid crisis are unwilling to let it go? Not the virus itself, of course. It would be quite wicked to suggest that anyone in a position of power or influence wanted the illness to continue as a real threat.

So no, it is not the existence of Covid as a disease that is begging to be prolonged but the state of emergency that accompanied it. And it is not just those actually in charge of the policy who seem to be touched by this reluctance to accept its end: the sense that public discipline and social control were being imposed on justifiable grounds had an appeal not only to those who were doing the enforcing but, it is now clear, to an alarmingly large percentage of the population.

Leave aside those people who benefited materially from the various levels of lockdown and restricted movement – the comfortable professionals who saved a fortune in commuting costs by working from home, the businesses able to reduce their rented office space and the public sector unions who were allowed to party like it was 1979.

The motives of those self-interested lobbies who would love to prolong these indulgences are perfectly rational. They are not the people who should worry us. Nor are the actual engineers of these restrictions who may (or may not) always have acted in good conscience, seeking to impose and maintain whatever limitations on normal behaviour they could plausibly defend as necessary to reduce the risk. Presumably they would say that so many of those restrictions we now understand to have been pointless, contradictory and even absurd could be defended on the grounds that they helped create an atmosphere of fear and anxiety which was conducive to compliance with the rules that actually did have some point.

This is the heart of the matter, the truth which must not be allowed to slip away in the moment of euphoria that comes with the return of our liberties. Fear and anxiety were deliberately induced in order to create what amounted to a national neurosis. (Or something worse – many of the habits we were forced to adopt in avoiding personal contact or physical proximity were nothing less than a simulacrum of psychosis.)

What is becoming alarmingly clear is how many people welcomed this assumption of unprecedented state power. This might have been understandable at the most extreme point of the epidemic, especially before the arrival of a clutch of effective vaccines. But why, as the risk has demonstrably declined to a level that is comparable with commonplace respiratory diseases, is there still a significant section of the population longing to keep such unnatural limits and restrictions on their own – and everybody else’s – lives?

The inescapable conclusion is that there is, at the deepest level of human consciousness, a totalitarian impulse which is beyond the reach of rational argument or moral conscience. The desire to be taken care of, to have decisions taken out of one’s hands, to be relieved of the responsibility for making choices is an ineradicable feature of our condition that has been exploited by every dictatorship in history.

In its milder authoritarian forms it simply applies moral pressure and social coercion to create an atmosphere in which obedience can be achieved without legal force. But quite remarkably for a country that created the historic model for civil liberty, Britain went the whole way during this memorable period by criminalising activities that had once been thought way beyond the proper reach of the law.

Even more shockingly, to an extent that took government officials and their advisors by surprise, the country accepted this not just meekly but enthusiastically. The events of the past two years will need to be examined in future with dispassionate scrutiny, but I am sure that they will be seen in retrospect as bizarre and disturbing.

For the moment, what can be said? That there is a constant struggle within every community – perhaps within every individual – between the desire to be free and personally fulfilled, and the need to feel protected and guided through the dangers that life inevitably presents. Maybe this need for trust in a parental figure, whom we believe has our best interests at heart, is pleasurable. This makes the idea of a crisis (pandemic, climate change) strangely attractive: a pretext for falling into dependence on a controlling, comforting authority.

Freudians would probably argue that this is one form of the basic battle within the individual psyche – the struggle between the id with its primitive, brutal impulses and the super-ego, which attempts to suppress raw instinct and make it socially acceptable. When people say they want the Government to continue to restrict even the most personal aspects of their lives, or to maintain the rule for covering faces (which is highly symbolic because it hinders silent communication), perhaps they are expressing a longing for some external force to protect them from their own inclinations. Or maybe this is too fanciful.

Could there be a more immediate political explanation? Since the collapse of the great 20th-century dictatorships, have we simply become less vigilant about threats to freedom and individual autonomy? The absence of an enemy determined to undermine the idea of liberal democracy may have left us complacent about our own values. Dictatorships may be malign or corrupt (even when they pretend to be idealistic), but an elected government cannot be a systemic threat to our way of life, can it? If it takes on dictatorial powers for what is assumed to be a limited time in special circumstances, surely that cannot be sinister – even if misjudgments are made along the way.

Even if all that is true, what is worrying is not that there might have been evil machinations behind the introduction of these unprecedented powers but that so many free people seem to become fearful when they are removed.

There is a constant struggle within every community between the desire to be free and personally fulfilled, and the need to feel protected