Grapelander
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Government plans for control through a ‘Never Normal’ policy see page 10:
Disrupting and reshaping society is at the heart of new research from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) member Professor Susan Michie, just published by the British Psychological Society.
Risk aversion is becoming a universal mindset. Fear generated among the public is increasingly a projection of specters that plague the official mind. The popular theory of outcomes management is driving politicians and otherwise ‘adult’ officials to a Hegelian hysteria.
Governments are planning for Never Normal. Psychologists are working out how to ‘embed’ population control measures over the long term. The plan is to establish ‘new identities’ and to motivate a broad change in behavior that will create a new culture. The proposals were revealed in a report by Prof Michie on August 31. She was widely quoted in a June television interview as saying face coverings and social distancing should become permanent. Now we have proof of the plan.
Interventions are graded as normal, easy, attractive, and routine (NEAR), driven by an array of public and private sector organizations rather than a series of separate interventions. Compliance will be monitored to achieve long-term behavior change. Reading between the lines, this suggests that stakeholders - in practice the investors (the military industrial complex, banks, pharma, big tech) rather than the people - will observe, routinely collect organizational metrics, and monitor and research individuals. Citizens will be subject to randomized trials, natural experiments and time series studies - perhaps like the pilot program in South Australia that calls people randomly and demands they supply facial recognition, proof of location and vaccination.
Michie’s latest proposals include Covid-safe schools, offices and public places while creating the “motivation needed to underpin those behaviors”. Embedding these into everyday routines will require “education, regulation, communications and social marketing”.
The report says motivations and ‘nudges’ should come at people from multiple directions and sources, and be coordinated and sustained.
“A potentially powerful way of embedding representations of new phenomena is through objectification (Devine-Wright & Devine-Wright, 2009). This involves using a concrete, easily understood metaphor (Wagner, Elejabarrieta & Lahnsteiner, 1995). For instance, the process of aerosol spread can be likened to inhaling someone else’s cigarette smoke and hence generate understanding of the contexts where this is likely and the measures necessary to avoid it.” Superficial because the measure is not important. Like mandating a mask, it is designed to nudge an outcome. The desire to prompt behavior necessitates a simplistic, easily digestible pretext.
Mitigation comes up time and again in the Michie report. Public policy, from education to the workplace, is increasingly concerned with risk avoidance:
Some time in the past decade, German schools celebrated a year in which not a single pupil had drowned. Did they teach them all to swim, a heroic achievement?
No. Schools had taught children that water was dangerous: keep away.
The same mindset pervades covid policy. One gets the impression that if there was no deadly virus it would be necessary to invent one.
Disrupting and reshaping society is at the heart of new research from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) member Professor Susan Michie, just published by the British Psychological Society.
Risk aversion is becoming a universal mindset. Fear generated among the public is increasingly a projection of specters that plague the official mind. The popular theory of outcomes management is driving politicians and otherwise ‘adult’ officials to a Hegelian hysteria.
Governments are planning for Never Normal. Psychologists are working out how to ‘embed’ population control measures over the long term. The plan is to establish ‘new identities’ and to motivate a broad change in behavior that will create a new culture. The proposals were revealed in a report by Prof Michie on August 31. She was widely quoted in a June television interview as saying face coverings and social distancing should become permanent. Now we have proof of the plan.
Interventions are graded as normal, easy, attractive, and routine (NEAR), driven by an array of public and private sector organizations rather than a series of separate interventions. Compliance will be monitored to achieve long-term behavior change. Reading between the lines, this suggests that stakeholders - in practice the investors (the military industrial complex, banks, pharma, big tech) rather than the people - will observe, routinely collect organizational metrics, and monitor and research individuals. Citizens will be subject to randomized trials, natural experiments and time series studies - perhaps like the pilot program in South Australia that calls people randomly and demands they supply facial recognition, proof of location and vaccination.
Michie’s latest proposals include Covid-safe schools, offices and public places while creating the “motivation needed to underpin those behaviors”. Embedding these into everyday routines will require “education, regulation, communications and social marketing”.
The report says motivations and ‘nudges’ should come at people from multiple directions and sources, and be coordinated and sustained.
“A potentially powerful way of embedding representations of new phenomena is through objectification (Devine-Wright & Devine-Wright, 2009). This involves using a concrete, easily understood metaphor (Wagner, Elejabarrieta & Lahnsteiner, 1995). For instance, the process of aerosol spread can be likened to inhaling someone else’s cigarette smoke and hence generate understanding of the contexts where this is likely and the measures necessary to avoid it.” Superficial because the measure is not important. Like mandating a mask, it is designed to nudge an outcome. The desire to prompt behavior necessitates a simplistic, easily digestible pretext.
Mitigation comes up time and again in the Michie report. Public policy, from education to the workplace, is increasingly concerned with risk avoidance:
Some time in the past decade, German schools celebrated a year in which not a single pupil had drowned. Did they teach them all to swim, a heroic achievement?
No. Schools had taught children that water was dangerous: keep away.
The same mindset pervades covid policy. One gets the impression that if there was no deadly virus it would be necessary to invent one.
