The Great Covid Panic by Frijters, Foster, and Baker
Janes, James, and Jasmines
Published in September 2021, The Great Covid Panic - What Happened, Why, and What to do Next by Frijters, Foster, and Baker is, most fundamentally, a book about the insanity and danger of crowds. Specifically, crowds in the political sense and particularly national or super-national crowds in times of hysteria. The Great Covid Panic frames the global reaction to Covid-19 in 2020-2021 as one such period of hysteria - a panic - which marshaled in with it a suspension of rationality, a cruel neglect of true human well-being, and an expansion of totalitarian controls on society the world over.
Through the lens of three personality types: Janes (fearful, dutiful, compliant), Jameses (political, opportunistic, grifting), and Jasmines (questioning, disagreeable, resistant) and three psychosocial periods “The Great Fear” (Jan-Mar 2020), “The Illusion of Control” (Apr-Dec 2020) and “The End Games” (Jan 2021 onwards), The Great Covid Panic chronicles the world’s journey through covid mania in lucid and biting detail.
With the key players (humanizing anecdotes on Janes, Jameses, and Jasmines are interspersed throughout the text, adding engaging color commentary and relatability) and key periods defined, the real meat of the book is a modern consideration of national crowds. Or in Twitter parlance (I refuse to call it “X”), mass formation psychosis. Specifically, the rapid, socio-political process whereby the majority of individuals in a society effectively loose their minds to a collective obsession.
Return of the Crowd
The authors present 3 defining features of crowds - 1) a shared obsession, 2) a constant and self-justifed shifting / suspension of truth and morality, and 3) the sanctification, through the collective, of behaviors considered otherwise unacceptable at the individual level. And once coalesced, the authors note, crowds behave as social organisms seeking to feed and expand and willing to make endless contortions in pursuit of their own continuance.
Having defined crowds and their core psychological features, the authors show how the emergence of Covid initiated a period of national and even supranational crowd formation at a heretofore unseen and previously unimaginable speed, scale, and intensity. Further, they are able to demonstrate why, these covid crowds - covid cults as they are termed in the book - being crowds of irrational fear, where all but assured to demand “solutions” that could have never been more than equally irrational, highly ineffective, and outright destructive.
This stems from the sacrifice heuristic, which is presented early in the book as useful psychological framing, “fearful people automatically presume that if they give up something important to them, then this action will help to reduce or remove the peril. For this this reason, throughout human history, people have sacrificed the things most dear to them in order to avert a perceived threat.”
So in the case of covid, fear - carried and accelerated by the infinite jest of social media - went viral in such as way that it made it almost impossible for the facts to catch up or dampen hallucinatory panic later on. And what resulted was a global hysteria, not so much because any real risks of covid but because to the most human minds “perception of the importance of the threat is directly related to the number of incoming messages about it […] fear comes in social waves, like fashion trends.”
Freefall
But of course, simple fear and frenzied social panic is not the end of the story in the slightest - the authors go on to chronicle, in truly fantastic detail - the dizzying, free-fall collapse of institutions than should have otherwise served as breakers for global hysteria. Followed by the rapid capture and corruption of the very same institutions, twisting them into eager and long-armed enforcers of anti-scientific and anti-human covid insanity.
The authors fully reject that masking, social distancing, or lockdowns were ever justified or effective, and take pains to show that these “solutions” were instead far more destructive in human terms than covid ever could have been.
They, rightfully, point out that covid was never an extremely dangerous virus - death statistics in the early days over-indexed specifically to those sick enough to seek hospital treatment (this group being highly cross-sections to those already feeble of old age or otherwise deeply co-morbid). The 1-3% covid death rate that nevertheless wound up being trumpeted endlessly by the media, was never realistic for the whole of society, where the truth would be expected to be something like 0.1% or even far lower.
Bolstering this points even further, they introduce readers to the the “WELLBY” (well-being year), which is a quantified unit of qualitative human well-being (measured on a 0-10 scale) that is included in all major surveys from the UK Office of National Statistics. The authors present compelling logic that in an advanced economy like the UK, a single month of lockdown policy incured a human well-being cost 2.5x higher than if, say, 0.3% of the UK population (~202K individuals) died of covid outright. This 0.3% is, incidentally, roughly the same as the total number of UK covid deaths as of February 2024 (232K individuals). In short, the authors’ WELLBY argument suggests that the UK’s 11 months of national lockdown in 2020-21 was *27 TIMES *more destructive than the UK’s total covid death toll 4 YEARS AFTER the initial virus outbreak.
But Institutionalism Dies Hard
The book is not without its criticisms however. My biggest qualm with the book is in its treatment of potential, forward looking “solutions” to buttress society against the next great panic. The problem that arises is that while the authors can clearly sense the bottomless depths of present-day institutional corruption, they cannot imagine any solution that might require, or be necessitated by, the total unraveling of these institutions, or any solution that simply does not require institutional “management” at societal scale.
In thinking about how society can protect itself from the next crisis of fear and overreaction, the authors propose the following:
- The status quo academic-scientific monoculture actively subsidizing heterodox schools of through across all disciplines (an idea they authors free admit would immediately yield to the monculture’s own perverse incentives).
- Imposition of the Nuremberg Code upon the political and public health perpetrators of destructive covid policies for crimes against humanity (an idea the authors free admit is rank fantasy).
- Establishment and/or strengthening of independent public health authorities (an idea that the authors freely admit would immediately fall to political capture almost everywhere).
- Appointment of key unelected officials by citizen juries rather than elected officials anchored to the idea that even without the particular field “expertise,” “citizens do not want their country run led by buffoons, careerists, or destructive mavericks” (an idea that the authors recognize as their strongest but still note that the institutional machinery required to organize citizens juries would by no means by immune from corruption).
- A World Anti-Hysteria Organization (WAHO), that might alert governments that a panic is building so that they could take actions such as temporarily shutting down social media to stem the tide of panic-driving information (an institution that the authors freely admit could just as easily start a panic - and, rather unironically, that they seem to ignore could be abused to surpress information or political dissent).
- Pursuit of a divine artificial intelligence to usurp and perfect away the flaws of imperfect human leadership (an idea that the authors freely admit is probably a terrible one).
Conclusion
Where documentation of the absurd grotesqueries of global covid hysteria is concerned, the book is both blisteringly and superb. Yet in its consideration of solutions, the book's authors offer very little that would not fall prey to same institutional pitfalls that gave the world the Great Covid Panics.
It is obvious that the authors fashion themselves as free-thinking Jasmines - and in a certain sense they definitely are - but from what can be sensed from their proposed solutions, they are at their core Ivy Tower institutionalists. As such, they can be utterly stunned and horrified by the spectre of institutional decay that they uncover, yet can never envision that these overpowered national and transnational institutions are the problem themselves. With a rigor mortis vice grip they still cling to the institutionalist worldview that had defined their success and prestige prior to being labeled conspiracy theorists and covid pariahs. In this, they simply cannot help themselves - they hope dearly to save a thing that may already be dead, they yearn desperately to reform a thing that may ultimately need to be destroyed.
That said, it is clear that authors’ experiences and revelations during the global covid panic has, at least, deeply shaken them in their well-appointed and much credentialed cages. From this, I think there is hope that can be taken, as this book is evidence of a deeply broken system finally turning in upon itself in a spirit of righteous intellectual dissent, even if perhaps only on the margins. (Rating 3.8/5🦠)