Police State

“When someone is honestly 55% right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God. But what’s to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he’s 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.” An Old Jew of Galicia, quoted by Czeslaw Milosz in The Captive Mind (1953)

Perhaps the most putrid specialty in a profession that has more than its fair share of stinkers is public health medicine. A natural bunker for malfunctioning medical Mussolinis and failed physician Pinochets, public health medicine has evolved an alien and grandiose medical culture in which they who practice it are above mere patients. Instead, they have populations. Just as Mussolini engineered a society in which the trains ran on time, so public health physicians would have it that the population abstains from fags fizz and fornication, downs its five fruit and veg a day, and, armed with a faecal occult blood testing kit in its hands, opens its bowels on time. Their vision, like their ideological forebears, the Stalinists and the Nazis, is one of the nation state as a boot camp for health, a vast breeding ground for a pure population free of disease, infirmity and disability, all watched over by health marshals wearing caps emblazoned with the rallying yet blinding cry, Health for All, and All for Health! What could possibly go wrong?

One of the things that has intrigued Dr No with increasing trigue during the covid pandemic has been the mechanics of how a state becomes at first authoritarian, and then totalitarian. He is not after some waffling account of putative prose impenetrable by man on ethno-hegemonic constructs pertaining to a pandemic dialectric, but rather a sort of physical mechanics, an e = mc², or rather t = mc², where, for instance, t = totalitarianism, m = the mob and c = something that is squared to get the answer. What he is particularly interested in is the tipping point, the point at which the gradient on the slippery slope becomes sufficient for gravity to take over, and nudges are no longer required; or, in quantum terms, the point at which we are sucked unwittingly through a putative quantum key hole all too penetrable by man into Schrödinger’s covid cage, where Geiger’s dissident counter crackles over a vial of totalitarian poison.

Dr No first came across Stanley Milgram’s now infamous but fascinating obedience to authority experiments as a disobedient undergraduate keen to understand why so many of his fellow students seemed willing to toe the line to authority, even when authority had got things wrong. The Great Secret, it turned out, was for authority to dress things up as being for the greater good, add some cuckoo science, and ideally put the public facing authoritarians in uniform. Faced with this diabolic trident, ‘normal’ — Dr No uses quotes because one of the criticism’s of Milgram’s work was that his sample was small and in no way representative — Americans would, despite most showing evident anguish, and even great distress, and occasionally infantile giggling, administer what they believed to be dangerous electric shocks to fellow citizens, because they wanted to do the right thing.

How do Western democracies become authoritarian, and then totalitarian states? For an answer, we need look no further than Germany in the 1930s. The Germans are a fine people, advanced in their scientific and artistic achievements, with strings of world class composers, philosophers, writers and others to their credit. Einstein, Handel, Marx, Robert Koch and Herman Hesse were all born in Germany. Wikipedia lists well over a thousand individuals on its notable Germans page. It is difficult to conceive of a more civilised country, and yet, smarting in the ignominity of defeat in the Great War, it managed the most diabolical convulsion into at first an authoritarian police state, and then in short order one of the most foul evil regimes that has ever besmirched the face of the earth.