"In the Hobbesian formula, the Leviathan relies upon fear to suppress pride. It is pride that makes men difficult to govern."

"It may be illuminating to view our Covid moment through this lens and consider how small moments of humiliation may be put in the service of a long-standing political project, or find their meaning and normative force in it. Specifically, to play one’s part in Covid theatre, as in security theatre at the airport, is to suffer the unique humiliation of a rational being who submits to moments of social control that he knows to be founded upon untruths. That these are expressed in the language of science is especially grating. We need to consider the good faith intellectual positions that greased the skids for our slide into an illiberal form of governance. For, in addition to the political opportunism surrounding Covid, there were also well-meaning efforts to control the pandemic by altering people’s behaviour. The question is: what were the means employed for doing this, and what was the view of human beings that made such means attractive? What we got, in the end, without anyone really intending it, may fairly be called a propaganda state that seeks to manipulate without persuading...."

"The new public health despotism/Draconian rules are suppressing our humanity" by Matthew B. Crawford. There's much more at the link, but let me give you a little more below the fold:

The Nineties saw the rise of new currents in the social sciences that emphasised the cognitive incompetence of human beings. The “rational actor” model of human behaviour (a simplistic premise that had underwritten the party of the market for the previous half century) was deposed by the more psychologically informed school of behavioural economics, which teaches that our actions are largely guided by pre-reflective cognitive biases and heuristics...

The developments in psychology that gave rise to behavioural economics provided a necessary revision to our under­standing of the human person, in the direction of realism....

In their book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein point out that individual choices... are often sculpted by a “choice architecture” that may be more or less deliberate in its design, but generally operates beneath the threshold of awareness.... Why not exploit the power of choice architecture for the public good...?... It is a non-coercive way to improve people’s behaviour without having to persuade them of anything....  

One example that Thaler and Sunstein call attention to, in their advice to administrators, is the “emerging norm” bias... [I]f you tell people that some new norm is emerging, they are more likely to identify with it.... The hygiene state propagandises a “new normal” of social distancing and face covering. Here is an outlandish medical morality of social atomisation, presented as something inevitable....

The political theorists of my generation did this under a rubric they called “deliberative democracy.”... [I]f you could just establish the right framing conditions for deliberation, the demos would arrive at acceptably liberal positions....

As it turns out, the best way to secure the discursive conditions for “deliberative democracy”, and install a proper choice architecture that will nudge the demos in the right direction, is to curate information.... Of all the platform firms, Google is singular.... Hundreds of people switched jobs back and forth [between Google and the Obama White House]... an unprecedented alignment of corporate power and the executive branch....

[E]arly in the pandemic we were told masks don’t work, because the priority was to preserve a scarce supply of masks for health workers. More recently, the relative risks of the virus versus the vaccine for different demographics has been dismissed as irrelevant, for the sake of combatting vaccine hesitancy. But such deceptions, however well-intended, can succeed only if you have control over the flow of information. So once you go down this road of departing from the truth, you’re committed to censorship and rigorous narrative enforcement, which is very difficult to do in the Internet era....