Have you seen the mounting evidence that suicide attempts by young people are up… WAY up… during the pandemic lockdowns? And it’s not just teenagers trying to kill themselves… it’s also kids as young as eight-years-old.
Eight…
What is causing this? and who is responsible?
The answer to the former is “the increasingly onerous and unecessary COVID lockdowns”… the answer to the latter is, well, a bit more complicated.
Almost everyone who has taken even just one introductory level collegiate psychology course probably remembers the basics of the Milgram Experiment, because its methods and results were (and remain) so shocking.
Designed to study the effects of authority on people’s willingness to follow orders, the experiment involved putting a subject in a room with a device that would deliver increasingly powerful electric shocks to an unseen person (who was in on the experiment) in a different room. As the shocks increased in power, the “victim” in the other room would scream in pain. The “authority figure” overseeing the experiment would order the test subject to continue administering shocks even after the subject in the other room went silent and was, presumably, unconscious or dead. 65% of participants continued to obey the Authority Figure’s orders all the way to the bitter end.
I believe that for the last year we have been living a real-life version of the Milgram Experiment, in the form of a year-long lockdown, ostensibly to stop the spread of the Wuhan Virus. In our real world experiment, the entire Governmental apparatus that forced the lockdowns on us, from Governors like Cuomo, Newsom, Inslee and Whitmer to lockdown absolutists like Dr. Fauci and almost every major figure in the American Press were the “Authority Figures”, while the fear-driven Karens and Kyles, the footsoldiers who rushed to social media to angrily scream “STAY THE FUCK HOME!” at their friends and family, were the unwitting subjects of the experiment.
Over the last year we watched as businesses failed and videos of small business owners crying as they closed up shop or as Government shock troops stormed into their businesses and forcibly shut them down scrolled across our screens. We saw the stories of City Governments turning off the water and power to scofflaw businesses trying to remain open so they could pay their employees and feed their families. We watched as the opiod crisis worsened (Eric Bolling describes it as “a fully loaded 747 crashing every single day”). And then, finally, we absorbed the hard evidence that record numbers of teenagers were attemtpting to kill themselves because of lockdown-induced despair. And all the while, those Karens and Kyles kept obeying the orders from their masters in Government and kept on administering those electric shocks. In the end, the loudest screams of pain and terror came from suicidal kids like Kooper Davis, and still the “good Germans” of the experiment kept turning that dial and increasing the voltage. The difference, in our real life experiment, was that the dead children and destroyed lives on the other side of the electrical cord were all too real.
Government crisis management is almost never a trade-off between a good outcome and a bad one. Rather it is usually a balancing act between a series of outcomes that range from bad to awful to catastrophic. The only way a President (or a Governor) can effectively manage a crisis is to get input from experts across the entire spectrum of civic behavior and activity, weigh the risk and benefits, and act in a measured and judicious way that mitigates harm across all of society and not just in one part of society or one single demographic. To listen to only one expert on one particular aspect of a crisis is to court disaster. A leader must understand that there are tradeoffs in crisis management and that to protect one group of people often means putting other groups at risk. The COVID lockdowns, as we have learned to our eternal sorrow, were not a simple trade-off between some minor economic pain and the lives of of vulnerable elderly people, as we were told… it was a trade-off that sacrificed untold and unknowable numbers of lives and livelihoods in the name of a cure that wound up being worse than the disease.
That’s why it was such a colossal mistake for Trump to allow Fauci to stand alone at his bully pulpit and decree from on high what we all must do to “save lives”… even when, especially when, Fauci wasn’t doing much more than giving us his best professional guess about what might work to stop the spread of the Bat Soup Flu. Fauci should have been forced to share every stage with experts in a variety of fields from small business economics, to education policy, addiction, anxiety, depression and child psychology, at a minimum. Trump did not do that, and so he lost control of the virus response to Fauci and the lockdown crazies. Ultimately, it cost him the Presidency.
But this isn’t about Trump… it’s about all of us, and the moral culpability we all share for the the economic and human devastation unleashed by these lockdowns, which ultimately provided little to no benefit for all that they cost us.
Part of the reason why the horror of the Milgram result stays with us, I think, is that at the heart of the experiment is a question that is not a psychological question, but a moral one… “what would I do under those same circumstances? Would I stand up to Authority and refuse an immoral order?” I think all of us would like to believe that we would have the courage to refuse any order that resulted in the deaths of innocents, but the Milgram Experiment suggests that this just isn’t true… that most of us lack the intestinal fortitude to defy anyone we perceive as an Authority Figure. And I believe the last year of socially enforced, neighbor-reporting-neighbor, lockdown compliance proved Milgram’s result conclusively.
The Lockdown Karens and Kyles who swallowed every government decree as if it were a law handed down from God on high, and then went out into the broader society to ruthlessly enforce it, share the greatest measure of culpability for the broad economic and educational devastation that followed, as well as for the individual deaths of young people like Kooper Davis. In a just world, they would spend the rest of their lives living with the horror of that guilt.
But they won’t, because if we’ve learned anything else over these last twelve months, it’s that we do not live in a just world.
UPDATE: See, this is the kind of evil crap I’m talking about. More kids are going to die because of this bullshit… and not from COVID.