Who’s afraid of Ayn Rand?

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) is seen by some as a dangerous influence: an amoral wolf disguised as a philosophic chain-smoking grandmother, whose melodramatic pulp fiction draws in generations of young, naïve little Red Reading Hoods who wonder at what big premises she has. By others she is seen as the High Priestess of individual liberty who rose, Venus-like, fully formed out of the revolutionary swamps of Russia and whose writing soars inspirationally above the cesspit of collectivism, Marxism and religious dogma. Both extremes are wrong in my view. Read on for what I hope is a balanced introduction to some of Rand’s ideas and why you should read her.

“Look into my eyes!”

On Rand the philosopher

In my view it is a mistake to see Ayn Rand as a philosopher first who wrote books to illustrate her ideas; I believe she should be seen primarily as a novelist and secondarily as a thinker who worked hard to define the values that informed the fictional universes she created. Her philosophical system, Objectivism, was after all only really developed after the publication of her breakthrough novel The Fountainhead (1943) and never went through the usual cut and thrust of academic work through which knowledge is usually forged, as Jonathan Rauch argues in The Constitution of Knowledge (reviewed here), because Rand for the most part chose to stand aloof from her contemporary professional philosophers.

One reason she gave for not wanting to engage with contemporary academic philosophy was that she believed their fundamental premises, their axioms and basic assumptions about the reality of existence, the nature of reality and of knowledge (metaphysics, ontology and epistemology), meant they had very little meaningful to contribute to the discussion of right and wrong (ethics). As a 17-year old she had been introduced to Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra and was deeply influenced by his criticism of Christian altruistic morals (Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the world she made, p. 42), although later she became critical of what she saw as Nietzsche’s approval of subjective whim: the “superman” has no more right to sacrifice others to himself than they, the masses, have to sacrifice him to their, she came to believe (Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, (1961).

In her biography of Rand, Goddess of the Market (2009), historian Jennifer Burns discusses correspondence between Rand and Isabel Paterson, a conservative novelist and thinker who was an important influence early on in Rand’s writing career. Although Rand had studied philosophy at St. Petersburg, Paterson was concerned that Rand’s foray into philosophy did not have a strong enough foundation in knowledge of what had gone before her. But Rand “…rejected Paterson’s comparison of her to other philosophers, insisting, ‘I have not adopted any philosophy. I have created my own. I do not care to be tagged with anyone else’s labels.'” (P. 127).

Isabel Paterson – a critical friend of Rand

She had some interaction with academic philosophers – not least the great classically liberal thinkers Ludwig Mises and Friedrich Hayek, but rejected the latter for his willingness to contemplate limited government programmes and the former for his acceptance of altruism, which she saw as spiritual cannibalism (Burns 105-106); the thin end of the moral wedge with which collectivists prise open one concession to big government after another.

In the spring of 1960 she struck up a friendship with a college professor of philosophy, John Hospers (Ayn Rand and the World She Made, Anne C. Heller, p. 129). They had long and deep discussions, and Hospers, who went on to become the first presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party in 1972, said she had helped him clarify his thinking on politics and capitalism. But as Heller writes,

“He wasn’t always able to make clear to her how her ideas fit in a historical context or introduce her to new concepts. At that period, ‘she read almost no philosophy at all,‘ he said […]” (Heller, page 330).

Spurred on by her interaction with Hospers, Rand also had discussions with other professional philosophers, such as Martin Lean, a Wittgenstein expert and chair of the Philosophy Department at Brooklyn College. After a reportedly rowdy debate with him he wrote to her saying, “‘For my part I cannot recall having argued with anyone as intellectually dynamic, challenging, and skilled as you since my … Fullbright year at Oxford’ […] ‘It is academic philosophy’s loss that you did not choose this as the field of your concentration‘.” (Burns, pages 186-187).

But these interactions were short-lived, and due to her lack of engagement and reading of other thinkers, Rand’s value as a critic of other philosophers and philosophies is somewhat limited. This, however, does not mean that her contributions in other areas are not valuable, in particular her insistence on the importance of metaphysics and the possibility, indeed necessity, of objective reality and therefore objective truth, as well as her ethical theory.

Moreover, her literary achievement, creating a moral universe based on her own vision, is a massive one – whether one agrees with it or not.

Objective Reality

Apart from the content of her thinking and writing, the fact that she has kindled in thousands of people an interest in philosophy, or at least a philosophical approach to the big (and small) issues of life, is also one of Rand’s great achievements. Her criticism of the tendency within her contemporary culture and philosophy to reject objective reality, something she traced back to Kant’s work, not least his notion of the difference between the thing as it is in itself and the thing as it appears to me (more about that here), is all the more relevant today, as we see not only sandal-clad obscure academics but even celebrities and others talk of “my truth” rather than “the truth”; we see the objective reality of biological sex being undermined by subjective notions of “gender identity”; and we see free speech, textbooks, literature as well as historical figures and much else besides, routinely assessed in terms of how they make certain people feel (especially feeling unsafe or some emotional “harm”, often meaning being made to feel uncomfortable, as discussed in The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff).

In the essay “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-made“, Rand writes, “The primacy of existence (of reality) is the axiom that existence exists, i.e., that the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness), that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity. The epistemological corollary is the axiom that consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists—and that man gains knowledge of reality by looking outward.” (Published in the essay collection Philosophy; Who Needs It, 1984).

From this line of thinking follows what she says in another essay in the same collection, Philosophical Detection, dealing with the popular catch-phrase It may be true for you, but it’s not true for me (made extra relevant these days after Megan, duchess of Sussex, talked about “my truth” in an interview on an American talk-show):

“Truth is the recognition of reality. (This is known as the correspondence theory of truth.) The same thing cannot be true and untrue at the same time and in the same respect. That catch phrase, therefore, means: a. that the Law of Identity is invalid; b. that there is no objectively perceivable reality, only some indeterminate flux which is nothing in particular, i.e., that there is no reality (in which case, there can be no such thing as truth); or c. that the two debaters perceive two different universes (in which case, no debate is possible). (The purpose of the catch phrase is the destruction of objectivity.)“

There may be technical criticisms to make from the point of view of an academic philosopher, which I am not qualified to make, but I do think that Rand throws down the gauntlet to our own present time: if there is no objective truth, if we cannot perceive reality accurately, if there are only “truths” and “histories” rather than Truth and History, if subjective notions of identity and the perception of the world can be asserted merely on the basis of feeling, and if all language is primarily what some Post-Modern thinkers described as “power-relations”, rather than linguistic expressions of concepts that can be logically deduced and agreed upon, then do we even have the basis for thinking about our world and communicating with each other about it? Is debate even possible? As Steven Pinker says: “Each of us has a motive to prefer our truth, but together we’ve better off with the truth.” (Rationality (2021), p. 315).

Rand’s notion of selfishness (AKA rational self-interest)

This drawing by Edward Sorel perfectly illustrates Sorel’s ignorance of Rand’s philosophy

Rand’s advocacy of “selfishness” as virtue and “altruism” as evil is perhaps the best known and most wilfully misunderstood of her philosophical positions. What did she mean by it?

The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, in his article Altruism and Selfishness, writes about how Rand in many ways redefines “selfish” to mean also those benevolent things you do to others because you love them, but then criticises this usage of language, saying, “Learning to love your neighbour as yourself is learning to take pleasure in the things that please him, as a mother takes pleasure in the pleasures of her child. To call this “selfishness” is to abuse the language…”

Scruton is right to point out that to redefine a word (selfish) that is deeply engrained in our culture and language as meaning that which is bad and immoral, to meaning something which is good and virtuous, is very problematic; indeed it is in part the source of the lazy assumption that Rand saw as defensible those actions that we tend to call “selfish”. She did not necessarily do so. Rand was alive to this. In her working notes to The Fountainhead (so before she had systematised her philosophy) she wrote:

“I. The first purpose of the book is a defence of egoism in its real meaning, egoism as a new faith. Therefore – a new definition of egoism and its living example.” (Journals of Ayn Rand, p. 77).

Also, in the introduction to the essay collection The Virtue of Selfishness (1961), she writes, “The title of this book may evoke the kind of question that I hear once in a while: ‘Why do you use the word “selfishness” to denote virtuous qualities of character, when that word antagonizes so many people to whom it does not mean the things you mean?’ To those who ask, my answer is: ‘For the reason that makes you afraid of it.'” (page vii).

She goes on to explain that the popular usage of the term is wrong because it equates looking after one’s own interest with evil and looking after someone else’s interest with good, i.e. that the nature of the beneficiary is the criterion; the self: bad, others: good. But, as she goes on to explain: “The evil of the robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues is own interest, but in what he regards as his own interest, not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value […]” (p. ix – my bolding).

It is also worth noting that “ethical egoism” is a term that exists in moral philosophy independent of Ayn Rand’s contribution to ethical theory. The key thing to understand from this theory is the difference between ethical egoism: that it is right to act in one’s own interest, and on the other hand empirical egoism: that people do in fact act according to their self-interest, whatever their professed beliefs or principles may be. Rand’s theory of ethics belong in the first category.

In the essay The Objectivist Ethics, Rand explains:

“The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness – which means: the values required for man’s survival qua man – which means: the values required for human survival […].“

By “human survival” Rand means life as rational (or thinking) creatures, i.e. with the freedom and need to think, speak and act, and not just for the preservation of biological existence, but also the enjoyment of art and beauty – it is important to stress that Rand did not see a rational person as a humanoid calculation machine, but rather one whose emotional responses to people and things would spring from his values, and that those values would have been carefully chosen or at least filtered. In Rationality Steven Pinker makes a similar point to Rand. He writes, “Rational choice is not a psychological theory of how human beings choose, or a normative theory of what they ought to choose, but a theory of what makes choices consistent with the chooser’s values and each other.” (P. 175).

And what are values? Rand explains that only a living – mortal and vulnerable – creature can have values, “[…] try to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed. Such an entity would not be able to have any values; it would have nothing to gain or to lose […].” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 16). Just as Steven Pinker argues, Rand says that values are determined by goals: “‘Value’ is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept ‘value’ is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.”

And that is one reason why the use of force (including government force) is not only immoral but literally inhumane according to Rand: it removes the presence of alternatives that make values possible for a mortal creature – funnily, for someone as anti-religion as Rand was, this is what some Christian theologians argue was the reason why there was in Eden the possibility of sin: man’s obedience to God is worthless if it’s not a real choice.

So to be rationally self-interested, according to Rand, is not about being an unfeeling, Spock-like person who doesn’t care about others, but one who cares based on his defined values. In the essay The Ethics of Emergencies, Rand writes, “Love and friendship are profoundly personal, selfish values: love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one’s own values in the person of another“.

How do you arrive at what exactly you should value? Inspired, no doubt, by the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, Rand suggests that man’s happiness is his moral goal – which can sound like a licence to follow whatever whim that makes you happy, even if it hurts others. But two important qualifiers need to be taken into account here: 1. Rand condemns the indulging in whims: this is irrational and something that will lead to your destruction sooner or later, and 2. You are not to use other people as means to your happiness.

So if, for example, a great advantage for your business can be had by your tolerating unreasonably high risk levels for the general public (and you can get away with it), is that fine? After all, they are all strangers to you whereas your business may be your life’s work and what makes you happy. Can you sacrifice these strangers’ interest in favour of your own benefit? The answer to this lies in what Rand says in the The Objectivist Ethics:

“The basic social principle of Objectivist ethics is that just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others – and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.”

The key passage here is, “an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others“, a point echoing what Immanuel Kant said, namely that we should never act in such a way that we treat humanity, whether in ourselves or in others, as a means only but always as an end in itself. This means that you do not need to justify your existence in terms of how useful you are to others or to “society” (note the common defence for businesses and successful individuals: “we pay our taxes”); you are not merely a tool for other people’s happiness but also that you should not use others merely as means for your welfare or happiness – the respect for the integrity of the individual cuts both ways.

Those with a cartoonish (mis-)understanding of Rand tend to think that she is favouring Nietzschean supermen trampling all over the weak and worthless common people. Although, as mentioned above, she did study Nietzsche and found his criticism of the Christian “slave morality” compelling, she also rejected his conclusion that the superman can trample over the “common man”. This is well presented in the story of The Fountainhead where ordinary working people who with pride and integrity go as far as their abilities take them, are portrayed in just as positive a light as the brilliant genius Howard Roark.

Right or wrong?

Rand’s stance on the objectivity of reality, the supremacy of reason and the morality of a value-driven self-interest, are every bit as relevant today as it was when she was alive. The usefulness of any theory is usually judged by its ability to tell us something about phenomena in the world, including the ability to make accurate predictions.

She was wrong to suggest that the only difference between the welfare states of Europe and Soviet Russia was time. But she was surely right to point out that technological advancement would be hampered by authoritarian rule, she was prescient in her warnings against the rise of the religious right in America (Burns, p. 191), and her extremely radical views in favour of a woman’s right to abortion has received new currency with the potential re-evaluation of the Roe vs. Wade ruling.

I also believe that she stressed the utter, almost atomised, independence of the individual too much. The father of British Conservatism, Edmund Burke (1729–1797), said in a criticism of the classically Liberal notion of a societal contract between the individual and the state, that it was more useful and true to look at society, not as a contract between those now living and the current state, but between those who went before us, those living now and those yet to be born. In other words: we who live now benefit from what has been handed down to us from our forefathers, and we in turn have the responsibility to hand it on the the next generation in at least as good a condition as we were given it. This is a perspective that speaks to many current issues, including the tearing down of statues and institutions in the name of “social justice”, and the environmental debate – our forefathers gave us this world, we need to pass it on to the younger generations without having messed it up too much.

Unfortunately, many young (and not so young) people today in the “social justice” movement think they have all the answers; they reject traditions and those that have gone before on the grounds of their imperfect views or lives, and they think they alone have the insight and wisdom to rebuild the world anew. This is in certain ways similar to some of Ayn Rand’s followers, who also believe they have all the answers, or at least in Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, the key to unlock all the answers. They also often don’t value tradition or the collective achievements of institutions, just as the left-wing revolutionaries.

The power of Burke’s formula is that it reflects more perfectly the real world experience of all of us: we benefit (unless we are unlucky) from what our parents gave us and in turn try to help our children. Scientists, in Newton’s famous image, stand on the shoulders of the giants that went before them, and established institutions contain within them the collective memory and wisdom of thousands of individuals and countless generations. We simply are not unmoored individuals floating about in a relationless universe. (Note that Howard Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead, is the only main character with no back story, no family, no history of friends, relations or dependants).

I think Rand as a person truly did not understand or see the value of established traditions and their importance in the maintenance of individual rights in England and the former English colony USA, where English Common Law was adopted. And the Common Law is the formalisation of tradition: as Hayek explains in his seminal work on justice, Law, Legislation and Liberty, a Common Law ruling is about discovering law, not inventing it; i.e. when looking at this specific situation before us, what is the most just solution based on what has gone before, established rights and duties, claims and counter-claims, similar rulings, etc. Law, Hayek argues, is older than legislation.

The Common Law tradition made English society stable, and gave stable property rights, something that many historians, not least Joyce Appelby, believe was crucial in England becoming the wealthiest and most powerful country in earth; the country now holding that position, the USA, has a version of the same legal system.

But all that is not to say that Rand’s individualism is without value, far from it. In a world where the state has the means to become extremely and terrifyingly powerful, as we saw in the inhumane Covid-lockdowns instituted after the model of the Communist regime of China, we need to constantly ask what is the purpose of the state, and what is the proper relationship between the individual and the collective. One does not need to agree with Rand to see that her principled approach, always arguing from first principles, always asking “what are your premises?”, still makes so much of her philosophical writing fresh, interesting and relevant, even decades after she penned them.

Rand’s Fiction Literature

I said at the start that Rand should be seen as a novelist first and philosopher second, and then went on to discuss her philosophy first. Well, that was for a reason: I wanted to dispel a couple of myths, firstly that it is impossible to be a critical friend of Rand; that one must either worship her or denounce her; instead I believe it is possible to find her interesting and to be inspired by the challenging and interesting questions her writing poses without necessarily swallowing whole all the answers she gave. Secondly I also wanted to clear up a common misunderstanding, namely that her defence of “selfishness” meant a defence of what is commonly understood as bad behaviour, which it didn’t and doesn’t.

But it is literature that is my area of competence and as I champion the view that Rand was a novelist first and foremost, I should mention the reasons why one should read her fictional works, and the order in which one should ideally read them:

1. We The Living – Rand’s first novel is a semi-autobiographical story set in post-revolution Russia. The main character is Kira, an independent-minded girl in her late teens who wants to study engineering against the wishes of her parents, but soon finds herself in difficulties due to her lack of party membership or interest in any form of politics. She falls in love with the mysterious Leo, and as they struggle to survive as non-party members, the book lays bare bare the soul-crushing dullness of life under Communism and the struggle of ordinary people to survive, sometimes heroic, sometimes pathetic.

WHY read it? It is a very different story in many ways to her later, more famous works, although some of the themes shine through on the pages. It is well-written, in that almost film-script like style that she would go on to perfect – the characters are interesting and some of them, like Kira’s once heroic uncle, whose great spirit we see slowly ground under the iron heel of Communism, is deeply moving. So is her portrayal of Andrej, the ardent Communist Party member that Kira befriends. His character is sympathetically drawn, it’s rounded in a way Rand’s characters seldom are, and Andrej’s development is one of the most profound of the entire book.

It makes sense to start with this because it gives a better understanding of what and where Rand came from: like her fictional heroine Kira, Rand was born and grew up in St. Petersburg (her given name was Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum), and her father had his business confiscated by the Communists. Rand said about the novel that it was her most autobiographical work and it is notable that the tone of the novel carries a sense of vulnerability that her later works do not.

2. Anthem – this is a short story, or novella, that she wrote as she was taking a break from writing The Fountainhead. WHY read it? After laying the foundation with We The Living, this is a nice aperitif to her more philosophically based writing. The story is clearly inspired by Yevgeni Zamyatin’s We (read a comparison here), and is set in a future world that is entirely collectivist. What is interestingly different from this story from almost any other futuristic dystopia, is that this society is not depicted as technologically advanced, quite the contrary: since the global revolution science has gone into reverse, and electricity as well as the use of the personal perpendicular pronoun, “I”, have been lost to humanity. The main character, known only by his number, rediscovers electricity and slowly but surely starts to rediscover his sense of self.

A rather too old Cary Grant as Howard Roark in the film version from 1949

3. The Fountainhead – Rand’s breakthrough novel about the architect Howard Roark, whose fierce independence sees him struggle to be employed as an architect because he refuses to build as his customers wish, unless they give him full creative freedom. He is also undermined by the villainous Ellsworth Toohey, who sees in Roark’s work an unwillingness to conform to a collectivist (low) standard, and therefore a threat to the power of people such as Toohey.

WHY read it? Well, for one it is – whatever one thinks of it – a modern classic. It is also the novel that perhaps best exemplify Rand’s philosophy in the characters and actions of the story. I once heard a philosopher who suggested that Rand was inconsistent because Roark did not follow the demands of the market and Rand was in favour of the market. He had clearly missed the point completely: what Roark exemplifies is both how the ideal person acts, namely guided by his values, not merely material expediency, even if this puts him at odds with society and the market place. Rand is in favour of the market precisely because you may withhold your labour if you don’t consent. Another person, Peter Keating, exemplifies the type who does conform to society’s expectations and the demands of the market whatever he himself may think or feel; he has material success doing this, but he also loses his soul in the process.

Then there is the wonderfully awful Dominique Francon, a dreadful woman who destroys museum pieces so the common man cannot defile them with his uncomprehending eyes. She decides to give Roark the same treatment – she wants do destroy him because she loves him. Keating and Francon represent two different takes on being overly concerned with other people’s opinions. Next is the wonderfully portrayed newspaper magnate Gail Wynand, apparently inspired by William Randolph Hearst and his use of “yellow journalism”, Wynand has many great qualities but his big character flaw is to be too concerned with the masses: he wants to control them, but in the process ends up being controlled by them.

The arch-villain of the book is the highly intelligent and utterly amoral Ellsworth Toohey, partly inspired by the British economist and political scientist Harold Laski. He believes that in order to exert control over the masses, one must undermine their belief in individual greatness and achievement, and Roark’s stubborn independence stands in the way of this project. It is all going very well according to Toohey’s plan, when an unforeseen thing happens: a couple of swindlers wanting a holiday-home property project to fail, hire Roark, believing based on what Toohey has written about him in Wynand’s newspaper, that he is a rotten architect and will create such ugly holiday homes that no-one will want to buy them.

On the pages of The Fountainhead Rand show-cases the script-writing skills she had developed whilst working in Hollywood for Cecil B. DeMille: the characters are larger than life, the surroundings brought to life through carefully scripted mise-en-scene, the dialogue is snappy, often with more than a hint of Bogartesque film-noir. If you only wanted to read one book by Ayn Rand this would have to be the one I would recommend: it sums up her philosophy – not least in the great court-room scene – and it is a cracking read

4. Atlas Shrugged – This is the big one that many quote as a decisive influence on their lives, on par almost with the Bible. It is around 1100 pages, depending on edition, and contains the famous, or infamous, speech that goes on for 60 pages. It was Rand’s final work of fiction and she saw it as her magnum opus, her full and complete statement containing all the main points of her by then developed philosophy, Objectivism.

WHY read it? Whether despite of or because of its philosophical inspiration and great length, the book is a very enjoyable and entertaining read. The basic premise of the story is that collectivism has taken so strongly hold in the USA that some of the greatest minds and talents have decided to withdraw their cooperation as they don’t wish to be under the thumb of lesser men who have wangled positions of power in the government – power that they are very happy to use. As these great minds are on strike, the US slowly descends into decay and chaos.

But not all able-minded people are on-board with the strike. Dagny Taggart, a woman every bit as independent-minded as Dominique Francon, but far more likeable as a character, tries to run her family-owned railway company together with her less able brother to the best of her abilities. This leads her to Hank Rearden, a genius industrialist who is still operating and who has invented a new type of metal that he calls Rearden metal: it is lighter and stronger than any other metal alloy, and Taggart wants to use it for her railway. Hank’s and Dagny’s storylines in the book are truly riveting (no pun intended) as they entwine on their route to the realisation of the evil of contributing to make the current system work.

Apart from the fascination of a story where the great industrialists and business executives are not seen as “robber barons” but creative geniuses who are the drivers and upholders of wealth creation in a free society, the novel is filmatic in its epic scope – in the storytelling Rand seems to have blazed a trail for a form of storytelling that is common these days in series on streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon: multiple characters and storylines woven together by a common thread that only reveals itself gradually as the story is unpacked episode by episode over sometimes several series often containing 15–25 episodes per series. Atlas Shrugged is made up three parts, the three series if you will, each containing ten chapters, or episodes, through which the various heroic characters, such as Francisco d’Anconia, Ragnar Danneskjöld and the mysterious John Galt emerge from the shadows against the backdrop of corruption and degeneration.

R.J. Bidinotto, in his article Atlas Shrugged as Literature, quotes Ayn Rand as saying, “My characters are never symbols, they are merely men in sharper focus than the audience can see with unaided sight […]” It is not only the men and women who are in sharper focus in Rand’s literature, but also the values that she saw as essential for our survival as rational humans beings – not just biological survival, but spiritual survival. The themes she lifts up to our attention are as universal and eternal as human civilization itself – they transcend grubby politics and have relevance whatever your philosophical outlook may be, or especially if you never thought much about it.

An interesting difference to note between The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, is that whereas the former is concerned with how one ought to live in the world and society as it is, the latter is concerned with how society ought to be. Both takes are interesting, but one could say the The Fountainhead has more of a practical value in showing what Rand’s values mean to those who live by them in the world as it is.

In a world where social media make us at once instantly connected and utterly isolated, where collectivism guides the expansion of the state to solve financial, health and environmental problems as well as dealing with the Coronavirus outbreak, and at the same time a form of barren individualism emerges in the online world, where people create their own little “realities” making debate in a shared reality almost impossible, we need Ayn Rand’s insistence on adherence to the Aristotelian notion that A=A: a shared reality exists; we have it in common and logic is the path to knowledge about it, as well as her assertion of the Kantian principle that you are not merely a means to other people’s (or the state’s) end, a cog in the societal machine, but neither should you use others as mere tools to your ends.

There is no reason to be afraid of Ayn Rand, unless you are afraid of thinking.

A State of Fear – How the Government Frightened You Into Compliance

As we have started to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, eyes blinking, adjusting to the bright sunlight of the “new normal” (whatever that is), it is crucial to take a critical look at what the hell happened. The investigative journalist and documentary film maker Laura Dodsworth has done just that in her hot off the press book, A State of Fear – How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic.

The Ethics of Using Fear

The first thing to say is that this is not a book about the pros and cons of lockdown (although this is also discussed); it is a book about the ethics of deliberately using fear to achieve compliance with government policies. Those who supported lockdown as a public health measure can read this book with just as great interest – if not even greater interest – as those who were less keen on that unprecedented method, not least because so much of the justification for the removal of our liberties was based on fear: the fear of overloading the NHS, the fear of “long Covid”, the fear of dying or suffering severely from Covid, the fear of passing it on to a vulnerable person, etc., etc.

_{Hey! Matt Hancock, she’s looking at you!}

Fear Works

People in this country have been overwhelmingly supportive of lockdown, and this book suggests that the reason for the high level of support is that people were frightened. Sometimes fear is a perfectly rational response to a threat, but the book asks whether the levels of fear in this country have been proportional to the threat represented by the Coronavirus.

Dodsworth points out in the chapter called The Metrics of Fear that “The British public thought 6–8% of people had died from coronavirus – around 100 times the actual death rate based on official figures.” Indeed, Britons had become the most scared people in the world, according to an international study carried out by a team from the University of Cambridge. Was this wrongful and inflated sense of fear intentionally engineered by the government to get the sheep (you and me) to do as we were told?

Interestingly, in the article referenced by the book there is the following line: “Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, the head of the University of Cambridge’s Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication which carried out the study, has expressed his concern that the UK has become “over anxious” and called for a campaign to get people “to start living again“.” 

Low risk for most people

It is worth noting that Dr. Spiegelhalter is one of the leading statistical experts in Britain and the world. And on 21st March 2020, he published an article that enabled me to face the pandemic without undue fear and with a sense of proportion.

In an article called How Much ‘Normal’ Risk Does Covid Represent?, Dr. Spiegelhalter used the then known data to demonstrate that the risk of dying from Covid if you catch it, follows almost exactly the risk you have of dying normally (later, in July that year, on BBC Radio 4’s More or Less, he said that if anything, those figures could be adjusted down for the younger, saying, “[…] everybody under the age of 35 has been more likely to die in a road accident this year than die from Covid”, (ca. 27 mins. into the programme).

^{According to Dr. David Spiegelhalter’s graph, people under 35 were more at risk of dying in traffic than from Covid – hence the lockdown: to reduce traffic.}

In the article he explains, “It’s important to note that all the risks quoted are the average (mean) risks for people of the relevant age, but are not the risks of the average person! This is because, both for COVID and in normal circumstances, much of the risk is held by people who are already chronically ill. So for the large majority of healthy people, their risks of either dying from COVID, or dying of something else, are much lower than those quoted here.”

If the government had presented this to the nation, my guess is that we would not have been the most scared country in the world. So, did the government selectively present data in such a way as to engender maximum fear as a conscious and intended policy aim? According to this book: yes.

Dodgy data

My only doubt about that central claim is that the government at the start of the pandemic seemed to want to downplay the threat to some degree. There were many ordinary people expressing their already existing fears on social media, long before I noticed any systematic attempt by the government to ramp it up. But, as Dodsworth points out, there was a shift in approach in March 2020, which led to the decision to instigate what was supposed to be a 3 week curfew, or “lockdown”, to “squash the sombrero”, in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s colourful phrase. Since then the government has done its best to prove the Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman right, when he said: “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program”.

To justify the continued lockdown(s), the book points out how we were treated to a daily “horror show” of death figures from Covid without any context: i.e. we were not told how many had died in total from all causes (on average 1600 people die every day), we were not told the age profile (average age of those who died with Covid is 82, above the average mortality age), and crucially we were not told how many recovered after having been infected (approx. 97.6% of confirmed cases – obviously there are countless unconfirmed cases, so the real recovery figure is much higher). The book does not suggest an evil conspiracy to hide the figures – they were available on the website of the Office of National Statistics (ONS) – but rather that the government wilfully presented figures selectively to support a certain narrative – one that maximised fear.

Not only did the government hold back any information that could be regarded as reassuring or vaguely “good news”, but the book also highlights various subtle ways in which the government presented data misleadingly. We often hear, for instance, that so and so many people have been “admitted to hospital with Covid.” However, the category “…’patients admitted’ actually includes ‘people admitted to hospital who tested positive for COVID-19 in the 14 days prior to admission, and those who tested positive in hospital after admission […]’“. [My bolding]. This is the government’s own definition, and it means that people who are admitted to hospitals for other reasons, but happen to test positive after admission, or become infected in hospital, are included in the figures presented.

^{Laura Dodsworth – not afraid to tell it as it is}

Why is this important? It has become well-known that around 20–30% of Covid cases in hospitals caught the virus whilst in hospital. In a study by four senior academics, published in The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, the problem is laid bare: “In England, South Tees Hospital Trust has had seven separate outbreaks of Covid-19. An inquiry was launched in Tameside as in a small district hospital more than a third of all coronavirus deaths among inpatients in England occurred in a week. It has been found that 150 patients caught coronavirus in hospitals operated by University Hospitals Bristol and Weston Foundation Trust, of which a third died. This itself makes up almost a third of the total of 154 deaths in this trust over the course of the entire pandemic so far.“

In March 2021 the Guardian published an article showing that 20–25% of Covid patients in hospitals caught it whilst being an in-patient. What neither of these two publications mentions, however, is what Dodsworth points out: that the way the government presented the figures, the impression was given that all those in hospital with Covid were infected in the community and then went on to become hospitalised due to the severity of the illness; this is not true, and the difference should have been pointed out to avoid the figures being misleading.

Not that I wish to trivialise infections caught in hospital. As the Guardian article goes on to state, “[…]experts in hospital-acquired infection pointed out that many of those being admitted for other reasons – such as an operation or after a fall or flare-up of an existing medical problem – are frail and vulnerable and have underlying poor health, so would be more likely to die if they did get Covid.”

But that is an issue of poor protection of the vulnerable (where have we heard that before?). Blurring the distinction between hospital-acquired and community-acquired infection is an issue of wilfully presenting data in a misleading way.

_{The Nightingale Covid Hospital in London – remained the most efficiently run hospital in England, according to Sir Humphrey Appleby. Patients just mess things up.}

We are also familiar with the overcounting of deaths, vividly illustrated in the book with the example of a care home resident who died well into her 80s, who “…tested positive for Covid at the end of March 2020, when she had mild symptoms. She recovered, but went on to die in August. A covering doctor who had never met the resident, or seen the body, insisted that Covid must have been a cause of death.” According to the ONS about 50% of all Covid registered deaths are people above the age of 85, so we can only guess how many of these are similar to the case above. The counting method was tidied up eventually, but still includes anyone who dies 28 days after testing positive, even if they die of other causes.

Even the data used to justify the first lockdown, such as the models of professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, have been shown to be inaccurate, according to Dodsworth. Professor Ferguson’s model “…assumed no existing immunity to Covid. Since then, six studies have shown T-cell reactivity (which gives protection) from previous coronaviruses in 20% to 50% of people with no known exposure to Covid.” In Ferguson’s defence it could be said that this was not necessarily known at the time. However, Dodsworth also interviews Dr. Knut Wittkowski, former Head of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design at Rockefeller University, who said to Dodsworth that “...’among scientists, Neil Ferguson does not have any credibility because his predictions are always wrong.‘”

Rather than learn from this, the book points out that the government doubled down on its use of dodgy data. To justify the second lockdown, Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty and Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patric Vallance presented a false scenario based on outdated figures that suggested 50,000 cases and 4,000 deaths a day. The use of inaccurate data was criticised by the UK Statistical Authority at the time, and I remember the aforementioned Dr. David Spiegelhalter excoriating Whitty and Vallance over their sloppy use of data. But was it sloppiness or what former Prime Minister Theresa May described as making the figures fit the policy rather than the policy the figures? I think the book makes a strong case for the former.

^{Not Gilbert & George but Whitty and Vallance – criticised by the UK Statistical Authority for using out of date data to justify lockdown II}

Fear as policy

SPI-B is an acronym that stands for Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (who makes up these names?) and along with a couple of other similar groups that advise on other topics, it feeds advice to the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) on how to engender compliant behaviour. Dodsworth was able to interview four members of this group, so central to the management of messaging around behaviour (remember “stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives”?).

Some members of SPI-B would only speak to Dodsworth under promise of anonymity. One of them told her: “There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. […] The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable.” The member went on to say that he or she felt “…we have lost the balance between protecting people from a virus and protecting what makes us human.”

Dodsworth asked all of them “[…] if they had been commissioned to think about helping people manage their fear and the ending of lockdown. A SPI-B paper put forward the idea of elevating fear, so I assumed that they would have considered the exit plan. […] They all seemed surprised to be asked. The idea was obviously not on the table yet.”

As with lockdown itself, it seems that the government went headlong into creating fear to engender compliance, but had no exit strategy. No wonder people are still terrified every time there is a mention of an increase in “cases”, which actually means positive tests (including completely asymptomatic and false positive cases).

The compliant media

Dodsworth is not just casting a critical eye on how the government used fear as a policy. She also discusses how the media in most cases seemed to go along with the government’s narrative almost uncritically at times – with much of the criticism from main-stream media and the official opposition being that the government ought to have locked down sooner and harder and more and longer.

She also points to the fact that many media companies have a reward structure – such as bonuses for number of clicks – that rewards sensationalism and scary headlines that are often not supported by the facts when looked at more closely.

To some degree we expect this from the tabloids and commercial media, which is why the BBC was particularly disappointing for many during the pandemic. “I talked to former BBC journalist Sue Cook. She told me she had been surprised and disappointed by the BBC’s once-sided coverage of Covid, and the lack of vigorous questioning.” The book references the BBC’s Charter, which includes guidelines on how to use language during “...times of terror, war and disaster. One promise is that ‘care is required in the use of language that carries value judgements‘”. Dodsworth goes on to demonstrate that this charter was clearly more honoured in its breach than its observance by the BBC’s editorial teams. This can still be observed – in the last few days I have heard on BBC radio and read on their website that the number of cases (positive tests) are “surging”. This is not a neutral word. “Increasing” would have been reporting in a neutral and objective way, “surging” is dramatizing the news and adding a value judgement that serves to engender an emotional response.

Social media – arbiters of truth?

Social media have also played a role. Thankfully, Dodsworth does not dive too deeply into what can sometimes be a cesspit of unending nonsense, with certainly a lot of misinformation spread on all sorts of issues. But in order to combat this, some social media companies have clearly gone too far in the other direction, and arbitrarily added “fact check” notices on reputable articles, and: “As Silkie Carlo of Big Brother Watch said to me, ‘I have to pinch myself sometimes that doctors have been removed from YouTube for talking about their medical experience of treating patients.‘”

The above mentioned Dr. Knut Wittkowski had his video removed from YouTube after being seen nearly 1.5 million times. In the video Wittkowski expresses his lockdown critical views, but YouTube claimed it “violated” community standards. “Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, warned that the platform would remove any information about the virus it regarded as ‘problematic’.”

It is strange that the considered opinions of one epidemiologist are considered “problematic” but not those of another. Is this really about controlling the narrative?

Dr. Wittkowski goes on to say that he thought “[…] ‘politicians and media are spreading fear. It goes far beyond what the situation would justify […] like in 1984, it is fear which keeps people in a state where they follow the government. It’s not Oceania and Eurasia anymore, it’s Covid’.”

The government’s new Covid slogan?

#MeToo

Here I can add my own personal experience. On 4th July 2021, as newspapers were reporting on the potential dropping of the mandated wearing of face coverings, I wanted to re-share an article published last year in one of the oldest and most respected magazines in the world, The Spectator. The article is called Landmark Danish study finds no significant effect for facemask wearers, and is written by Carl Heneghan, a professor of evidence-based medicine at the University of Oxford and director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, and Tom Jefferson, a senior associate tutor and honorary research fellow at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, University of Oxford. Not exactly QAnon conspiracy theorists.

The article presents a study conducted by more than 20 Danish academics, using 6000 volunteers, of which 4862 completed the study. Not exactly cranks spewing out unverified opinions. Yet when the article was first published, Facebook presumed to put a “fact check” warning over the post, and when I tried to share it as part of the above mentioned discussion on removing restrictions, Facebook proceeded to block my permission to share links altogether for 24 hours!

Facebook knows best…or not

The reason? Who knows? They don’t give reasons. I can only see two likely explanations: 1. There was an error in the algorithms, or 2. The conclusion of the study, as reported in the article, was not in line with Facebook’s desired narrative: “In the end, there was no statistically significant difference between those who wore masks and those who did not when it came to being infected by Covid-19.“

Dodsworth also interviews one of the leading scientists behind this study, Dr. Henrik Ullum, who since the study has been made Director of Statens Serum Institut (the Danish equivalent of Public Health England). Although he is careful to point out that he has no wish to rock the boat of global pandemic management, he also says “[…[…] ‘we haven’t managed the fear well enough. There has been too much fear. This is a serious epidemic, and we need to do the right things, but it’s not an apocalypse.’“

My experience bears out what the book reveals about how the government either directly used social media (such as through the 77th Brigade, part of the 6th Division of the Army and “[…] specialising in ‘non-lethal forms of psychological warfare“, who is allegedly behind the “trolling” of Twitter users who did not toe the government approved line) or were indirectly supported by “group-think” within big tech companies and mainstream media, most of whom for example deemed the theory of the Coronavirus having escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan as a “conspiracy theory”, until suddenly, when the explanation became increasingly likely and impossible to rule out, as pointed out in this article on the BBC website from May 2021, it wasn’t.

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink

One school of thought that has been very popular within public policy for the last decade or so, the so-called nudge theory, also comes in for criticism, in what I found a less convincing, if still interesting part of the book. Nudge theory became popular precisely because it doesn’t use compulsion, but instead other subtle means to engender the desired outcomes. It is fair to ask, as Dodsworth does, by what right these technocrats and politicians claim to know better what is good for you and for me than we do for ourselves. This is an interesting debate, but in terms of the pandemic, the real question as I see it is whether nudge went out the window in favour of a firm push behind the shoulder blades. If we were nudged during this pandemic, it was with a very sharp bayonet, not a juicy carrot or the painting of flies in urinals to improve men’s aim.

Is the future wearing a face mask?

But it is easy to see the sinister side of nudge as applied during the pandemic: in supermarkets they have marked the floors with big, round dots or circles and lines to mark distance. Whether these measures have any effect in lowering transmission is impossible to measure, but they are visible reminders that keep the paranoia alive. The same thinking is behind the mandating of face coverings, according to Dodsworth:

“[Masks] have turned the UK population into walking billboards that announce we are in a deadly epidemic. […] The unintended consequence of the masks is that they keep the fear alive and modify our behaviour […].“

^{The doctor will see you now: face masks have been proven to make the wearers feel morally superior to those who don’t wear them}

Dodsworth relates a headline on Bloomsberg: “‘We must start planning for a permanent pandemic […] we may never go back to normal.'” Whilst this may sound particularly hysterical, we should remember that almost everybody thought it was inconceivable that people would go along with being locked up in their own homes like prisoners without a fair trial (the above mentioned professor Ferguson – who earned himself the nickname Professor Pantsdown after he himself broke the lockdown rules he recommended to meet up with his married mistress – used the phrase “We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought” and Dodsworth points out that this is a revealing way to put it). Yet people did go along with it and the government did get away with it.

In one of the appendixes Dodsworth quotes from a report by the Centre for Political Studies in Denmark, that stated that “‘Studies […] find that, on average, mandated behavioural changes accounts for only 9% (median 0%) of the total effect on the growth of the pandemic stemming from behavioural changes. The remaining 91% (median 100%) of the effect was due to voluntary behavioural changes.'[…]”.

But don’t people change their behaviour voluntarily because they are afraid?

Is fear a necessary evil?

The question that the book does not answer is whether voluntary measures would work if people did not feel the same level of fear. Dodsworth appears to slightly undermine her own message by telling the story of her friends who invited friends over, but only two at a time and only for drinks, as if the virus had the good sense not to infect people who were merely having a gin & tonic of an evening. They were clearly not overly worried, then. She also refers to the young people who “[…] crowded into parks around the country on 29 March 2021 when restrictions eased[…]”. She frames this in terms of “Fear is not sustainable.” She may be right about that, but another element that enabled people to support lockdown with such enthusiasm was the furlough scheme, through which people were being paid by the government to sit at home – remove the furlough, and the fear might have gone out the window before you could say ‘next pay cheque’. This is an aspect the book fails to take into account or discuss at all.

In my own immediate circle, I observed changes in behaviour among my daughter’s friends, as the urgency of friendship and being together took on greater importance than any worries they might have had about the virus. However, I can also tell stories of teenagers being deeply anxious and of those who were threatened by their own parents that if they don’t follow the rules to the extent of not meeting friends outdoors, their grandparents’ blood will be on their hands. The evil of saying such a thing to your own child is almost beyond comprehension for me as a parent, but it stems directly from the campaigns of fear, telling us that by doing normal things we might “kill granny” or that a cup of coffee could “cost lives”.

There is no treatment of the Hancock affair in this first edition, but it is worth noting that when we see the now, thankfully, former Health Secretary Matt Hancock – one of the main drivers behind the fear propaganda and lockdowns – not taking it terribly seriously himself, it is fairly safe to assume that many people will start to question whether the government really believed its own hype and whether it really was all worth it (spoiler alert: no, it wasn’t).

_{A bit of a cock-up: former Health Secretary Matt Hancock practising hands, face, space, but not necessarily in that order.}

In conclusion then…

My own feeling is that if people did not feel a degree of fear (and were paid by the government to indulge this fear), they would not have taken the guidelines as seriously as they did take the enforced lockdown and other measures. But as I see it, this does not matter. If people are presented with the objective facts, and have the freedom to make their own risk assessment, and having done so choose to take very few precautions, that should be their right – as long as they don’t do anything that knowingly exposes a vulnerable person to undue risk (for example a care home worker who, aware that she has the virus, still goes in to work. I have also discussed the libertarian case for mandating vaccines in another blogpost – although I do not think the current circumstances fulfil the criteria I outlined). If this leads to an overwhelming of the Health Service, then we need to look at how the Health Service is organised and emergency care provided. The Health Service is there to serve the people, not the people the Health Service.

The message of the book is that the overt use of fear was unethical, which I think the book makes a strong case for. But then it also says that nudge is problematic, and that enforced measures do not work anyway. This seems to me to be a little inconsistent and contradictory. The government in this pandemic threw everything and the kitchen sink at the problem, and that was quite possibly an overreaction, not least since Sweden, who took a more measured approach, have seen far fewer excess deaths %-wise than Britain and other countries with very strict lockdowns, and less damage to its economy, children’s education, etc., but Dodsworth appears to want neither nudge nor force nor fear, so what then? Nothing at all? Perhaps not a bad idea, but she doesn’t make this quite explicit, if that is what she means.

To be fair, the book is an excellent presentation of certain problematic aspects of the management of the pandemic, seen from a different point of view than the “should-have-locked-down-sooner & harder“-perspective, which I think is a very necessary and valuable contribution to the post-pandemic conversation that we need to have. I don’t think the book provides all the answers, but then again, that was perhaps not the author’s intention.

All in all: 8/10 sunflowers, and certainly recommended for those who wish to have an informed opinion about the biggest issue for a very long time in politics and society, and one that I think will haunt us for decades to come.

Interview with author here: Uncancelled

^{Fearfully good on the questions, if not all the answers}

Prayer to a modern god (idol)

Our NHS which art on Earth,

Hallowed be Thy Name.

Thy pingdom come,

Thy will be done,

in the wards, as it is in

Whitehall.

Give us today our daily cure.

And forgive us our lifestyles,

as we get into debt for Thee.

And lead us not into

privatisation,

but deliver us from

Tories:

For Thine is the budget,

the lockdown and the clap,

for ever and ever.

Amen.

The Coronavirus crusade and the worship of “Our NHS”

The Colchester Gazette printed a shorter version of this article on November 19th, here is the full and improved (I hope) text with links to sources.

GETTY IMAGES – Happy-clappy worshippers of Our NHS

Back in March 2020, the battle cry went up: stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives. Occasionally, the stern men and women who stood at the lectern and read us our daily sermon stumbled in their words and said “protect lives, save the NHS”, before correcting themselves. They were letting the face mask slip, so to speak, and revealed the true reason behind the lockdown: not to protect the vulnerable from the virus, not even to save lives, but to protect the NHS from the public. They were the High Priests, preparing the congregation for the ultimate sacrifice to pacify the gods: the lives of the young.

Through a combination of propaganda and misinformation, irrational fear of the virus was stoked, as it might have been for the Devil of old. Sentimentality was inflated on behalf of the faithful servants of the god, the “doctors and nurses” – who for want of PPE surplices were given a little badge of glory – so it was easy to get the congregation of worshippers to stand outside their homes to pay homage to this secular deity by the collective clapping of hands, banging of pots and pans or even (in my neighbourhood) the sending up of fireworks; acts that the sociologist Emile Durkheim would have described as “collective effervescence” according to religion expert professor Linda Woodhead.

The “rebel” Banksy made a mural to praise this 70 year old institution, and books were published, much like the Victorian collections of sermons, such as Dear NHS – A Collection of Stories to Say Thank You. (It’s remarkable that thanks should be addressed to an administrative model, as if to a person, rather than to the actual persons working within it or the people paying for it, the taxpayers). The audio-book version has various celebrities reading the lessons, paying their homage to the idol of our age. And no politician seems able to refer to the health system as the NHS anymore; it is now Our NHS, having replaced Our Father.

You may think it hyperbole to say that we were preparing to sacrifice the nation’s young. But look at what is happening to students: denied the normal life of a young person, defrauded of the full value of an expensive education, denied the building of friendships, of relationships, parties, sex and all the things that make life worth living, not to mention job opportunities, as coffee shops, pubs and restaurants close their doors, many forever. All the while, at the time of writing, about 655 people under the age of 45 have died with Covid 19 on their death certificate, according to the ONS. 90% of the dead are above 65 and 54% are above the age of 85. The average age of mortality is about 82. According to professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University, the mortality risk for most people ranges from 0.006% (up to age 19) to 0.15% (up to 49) and 0.6% (up to 59) and a recent report (published 29th October) from Imperial College, says: “…a recent analysis using pooled data from national serological surveys to estimate age-specific IFRs [infection mortality rates] found that the IFR rose steeply with age, ranging from <0.01% in those aged under 30 to 7.3% in the 80 and older age group, broadly consistent with previous estimates.“

PA MEDIA – Students were put in home arrest for the crime of being young.

With this in mind, let’s consider also the point made by Philip Thomas, professor of risk management at the University of Bristol, writing in the Spectator: that the reduction in the economy due to the lockdown restrictions is likely to cause the loss of 650,000 average lives (calculated according to expected life span). He went on to say that even in a worst-case Covid-scenario, “If 250,000 people die — who have a mean age of 79 and who have two or more existing serious medical conditions — then this would be equivalent to 45,000 average lives being lost. There is no doubt that this would be a very bad outcome. However, it is less than 10 per cent of the loss of life the nation will incur by subjecting itself to a prolonged lockdown of the sort currently envisaged by the government.”

This completely blows the argument of “lives vs. the economy” out of the water. The economy is lives, and we are currently causing ten times more lives (measured by average life spans) to be lost through the lockdown measures than the virus would have killed, even in the unlikely scenario of letting it run wild, (which nobody is proposing).

Even by the normal standards of a cost/benefit analysis, lockdown is not worth it. Usually, the NHS, through NICE, approves a treatment if the cost is between £20,000 to £30,000 per quality-adjusted life-year saved. A conservative estimate put the cost of the first lockdown at £180,000 per life-year saved. The cost is currently going up very steeply indeed. David Miles, Professor of Financial Economics, Imperial College Business School, writes in a recent analysis that if we use the same “yardstick” for covid 19 as we do for other conditions, “it would seem as though the benefits of continuing with the lockdown are lower than its costs.” 

Lockdowns do more harm than good: socially, mentally, economically, but also crucially, in terms of lives saved.

You may remember that at the start of the first wave of infections, patients were moved out from NHS wards into care homes without being tested for the virus. As these were mostly elderly, and therefore vulnerable to the virus, this was at best desperately incompetent, at worst a callous act of calculation; in either case it was driven by the blinkered panic that Our NHS had to be saved, come what may.

AFP – Through a glass very darkly – protect the NHS against the people it is supposed to serve

We were supposed to have a short lockdown in order to slow the spread of infections and “flatten the sombrero”, as the Prime Minister so vividly explained it, enabling the NHS to get ready and to cope with the influx of cases. But here’s the rub: if the NHS is not able to cope with a viral outbreak, then the solution is not to imprison the citizens to save this failed model, but rather to reform it so that it does work. 

Perhaps we could have just about accepted the first lockdown if it was used to start reforming the NHS to cope with the real world, but the government has wasted time building a flawed testing system, and in November the government was again imposing a general lockdown, even though we now know that this will cause more harm than good. Why? Again, the justification was presented to us (with outdated statistics) in terms of how the spread of the dreaded lurgy would affect the NHS, whilst no information was given us on how a lockdown would affect the rest of society, as pointed out by Dr Alberto Giubilini, a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford: 

“…the intended solution to the problem has become part of the problem. Lockdown undermines people’s health and it threatens lives, as surely as Covid. Unlike the virus, however, lockdown inflicts its agony across the whole population (especially on young generations) instead of on a well-defined portion of the population who could be protected with shielding measures.”

It is a strange state of affairs when an administrative model, the National Health Service in its current form, has taken on such importance that people’s liberties, livelihoods and even lives have to be sacrificed in order to preserve it at, literally, any cost. 

We know that the virus affects different groups very differently. It would therefore seem more rational to target protection at those groups, as the scientists, economists and public health experts behind the Great Barrington Declaration have recently made clear.

We have had news lately that an effective vaccine may now actually be ready to roll out. This could again buy Our NHS a new expensive lease of life. But is it not time to at least have a debate on whether the current model of the NHS is fit for purpose or not? As Dr. Kristian Niemietz points out in his book Universal Healthcare without the NHS: Towards a Patient-Centred Health System:

“In terms of outcomes, quality and efficiency, social health insurance systems are consistently ahead of the NHS on almost every available measure. They combine the universality of a public system with the consumer sovereignty, the pluralism, the competitiveness and the innovativeness of a market system.”

Dr. Niemietz also points out that what the NHS lacks is old-age reserves, meaning that healthcare is a constant transfer of wealth from those who are currently working and paying taxes, the young, to those on whom most of the healthcare budget is spent, the old. The immoral sacrifice of the young for the old is, in other words, woven into the very fabric of how the NHS works, and the current pandemic only brought this out in neon-light flashing starkness of relief.

At the start of the pandemic we sacrificed the nation’s elderly to Our NHS, then we went on to sacrifice the young. The Prime Minister should be careful. In ancient Greek civilizations, the ultimate sacrifice to the gods was a male representative of the queen. But if they come for him, Mr. Johnson can take solace from the fact that he is being sacrificed for Our NHS. At least he will know it’s worth it.

Is there a libertarian case for mandating the coronavirus vaccine?

Many people who are opposed to the enforced general lockdowns that we have seen and are seeing in many countries (I am presently writing from the green and pleasant locked down land of England) are also concerned about the new, much anticipated vaccine against the coronavirus, even if this may be our best way out of lockdown. Is there a classically liberal argument for mandating this vaccine?

Some of those who are sceptical of the coronavirus vaccine say they are not against vaccines as such (careful not to portray themselves as so-called anti-vaxxers), but they are against enforcing a vaccine that seems at best to have been rushed through, at worst to be essentially experimental.

I think such concerns are perfectly reasonable and rational to have. And as long as these concerns are about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, they can be addressed by openness on the part of the pharmaceutical companies as well as honest and credible information by governments and health authorities, and by not hiding or suppressing information that may be negative for the pro-vaccine argument, as Joanna Williams argues in her article Don’t silence the anti-vaxxers in The Spectator Magazine.

I cannot say anything scientific about the vaccine – I am an Arts graduate, and write this post as a “concerned citizen” trying to take a reasoned stance based on liberal-conservative values. Perhaps it is useful for you too to follow my reasoning.

Since I am not a scientist, I will assume for the sake of argument that the coronavirus vaccine is as safe as is reasonable to expect, and as efficacious as they claim it to be (around 90%). Can it in such a scenario be justified to force or mandate people to take the vaccine?

The statists – left- and right-wing believers in the big state and intervention – will, I suspect, quickly rush to click on the “yes” button – this is a purely pragmatic question about saving lives, of course we must mandate the vaccine, just as we had to mandate an enforced general lockdown.

Those of a more libertarian, or even anarchistic, bent, again both left and right – those suspicious of big government and/or big pharma – will, I equally suspect, rush to press the “No” button – this is about government control vs. individual agency, and the big companies are in bed with government to feather their own nests.

They both have a point, but I also think they are both wrong: this is not purely a pragmatic question but neither is it about government control. The question of mandated vaccination is about the proper boundaries of liberty when living in society with other individuals. To consider where this boundary goes, I find it is useful to go back to the philosophical source of liberalism (incl. libertarianism).

John Locke wrote The Second Treatise of Government in the 1660s (published in 1689) after the dramatic English civil war, to establish the theoretical principles for proper government and the boundaries of its authority and power.

The principle Locke establishes can perhaps most succinctly be expressed by a line in chapter XI, where he discusses the extent of legislative power: “For nobody can transfer to another more power than he has in himself“

John Locke, great ideas – bad hair. Image: Godfrey Kneller, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

He goes on to explain how the ruler, let’s stick to calling it “the government”, can not be given, by voters, more power than each individual citizen has as an individual. In other words, a citizen has, Locke says, the right to defend his own life, liberty and property against assault, including the right to revenge himself, and this right he can transfer, or delegate, to the government, including the process of seeking redress for grievances, so that instead of the nightmare-scenario of everyone’s fight against everyone that Hobbes feared, the government can keep the peace, protect citizens’ lives, liberty and property on behalf of the citizens, but not be itself allowed to do more than this: government is itself limited by the law. A principle still seen as fundamental to this day.

What the government cannot do, in this view, is to take citizens’ money away from them in order to pay for another man’s education or health care. No citizen has the right to go to his neighbour and demand to get money for education or health care, and therefore he cannot delegate this power to the government. I mention these to show how far we have strayed from the original principle of liberalism, under which philosophy there can be no welfare state, no regulation of behaviour that hasn’t got a direct bearing upon another, and no taxation that is not directly related to upholding the peace as outlined above. (And any Americans reading this, take note that your “liberalism” is NOT liberalism, hence the need for the neologism “libertarianism”, which I don’t like, but use to avoid confusion).

But can the government under this principle force people to take a vaccine?

I believe yes, it can, in certain circumstances. Let’s take a scenario where we are living in a society organized purely according to Locke’s principle. You come to a man’s house or place of business and you wish to enter. He responds that in order to enter you need to wear a purple tie. You can at this point either walk away, or choose to accede to his demand. But what if his demand was that you show a vaccination certificate for a particular set of illnesses? Your choice would be exactly the same: get the vaccines and come back with the certificates in order to be let in, or give up your attempt to enter. I hope you accept that it is the other man’s total right to make this demand, because you are about to enter into HIS property, and you have no right to enter his property except by his permission.

But now we get to the difficult part: what if a city says: you cannot enter this city without a certificate of vaccination? In this case it is the government of that city making the demand. Well, if we agreed that a citizen can demand of you that you have a certain vaccine in order to enter his home, then this is a power he can delegate to the government. The city is the collective home of all the inhabitants therein, the sum of private property (there would of course not be any public property in this libertarian scenario), and so if a majority of citizens are in favour of demanding visitors to be vaccinated before being granted entry, then that is perfectly justifiable on the liberal principle.

Even today, if you wish to travel to certain countries, where diseases are still present that have been eradicated in Western countries because of vaccination, a certificate of vaccination must be shown before you are granted entry. So the point is not a far-fetched one.

What about the citizens already living in the city? (And to make it more analogous to our present situation, let’s assume they cannot easily relocate). Here it is useful to go back to Locke. He explains, continuing from the quote above, that men can subject themselves to the authority of government “[…] only so much as the law of nature gave him for the preservation of himself and the rest of mankind“. And then, “Their power in the utmost bounds of it, is limited to the public good of the society. It is a power that hath no other end but preservation and therefore can never have a right to destroy, enslave, or designedly to impoverish the subjects.“

The term “public good” has been rather extended over the centuries, but Locke defines it here as merely the preservation of those people who live in the given society. Now, if by vaccination we preserve or save lives that would otherwise have been destroyed, not taking it is akin to wilfully destroying lives, as Roald Dalh, the Norwegian-British author so powerfully argued in a pamphlet written after his daughter died of measles:

“In my opinion parents who now refuse to have their children immunised are putting the lives of those children at risk. In America, where measles immunisation is compulsory, measles like smallpox, has been virtually wiped out. Here in Britain, because so many parents refuse, either out of obstinacy or ignorance or fear, to allow their children to be immunised, we still have a hundred thousand cases of measles every year. Out of those, more than 10,000 will suffer side effects of one kind or another. At least 10,000 will develop ear or chest infections. About 20 will die.“

The citizens of the city have each of them a right to preserve their own lives and those of their children, and they therefore have the right to delegate this power to the governor of the city to demand that all those who venture out of their own private dwelling, must be able to prove vaccination. Note, that as long as you stay within your own four walls I cannot see that the governor of the city has the right to demand your vaccination.

Now, take this principle and write it large for our present day society. We have, as mentioned, ventured far from the pure liberal principle that Locke put forward 360 years ago. But for those among us who see themselves as libertarians (or liberal-conservatives in my case), Locke’s principle should be a guide to thinking through whether the government has, in principle, the philosophical right to mandate vaccination. I think I have shown that according to Locke’s principles it has, if a vaccine protects against a known harm and not taking it represents knowingly submitting other people to imposed harm and the risk of taking the vaccine is lower than the risk of not taking it.

Should government force you to take it?

(For a fuller discussion of the moral duty of people to vaccinate, see the article Victims, vectors and villains: are those who opt out of vaccination morally responsible for the deaths of others? by Euzebiusz Jamrozik, Toby Handfield and Michael J Selgelid, published in The Journal of Medical Ethics. The American philosopher Jason Brennan has also argued in A libertarian case for mandatory vaccination, behind a paywall, unfortunately, a case for mandated vaccination based on the “clean hands” principle; that no individual should be allowed to participate in collective behaviour that is harmful to individuals).

Whether the Lockean principle that I discuss applies to the specific coronavirus vaccine, is of course another question. Polio, measles, chickenpox, mumps, hooping cough, etc. can all cause suffering and death in children and adults, and they have all been largely eradicated by vaccination. It would be folly in the utmost to say that we should only administer these to people above the age of 18 after having had these individuals’ explicit consent, in order to further the cause of liberty, when in fact it would offend against the principle of liberty that dictates that legislation should aim to extend self-preservation from imposed harm.

The coronavirus is of course not necessarily as deadly or damaging as the diseases mentioned or others like them. In England and Wales, as I write this, only around 600 people under the age of 45 have succumbed to the virus, thankfully only 6 children. Furthermore, 90% of those who have died are above age 65, with 42% being above 85, according to figures from the Office of National Statistics (see Deaths registered by age group).

The risk-profile is therefore very different with Covid-19 than with the other diseases referenced above, even if a small percentage of those who get it badly and recover do have some longer term symptoms (long Covid), but much is yet unknown about this phenomenon, so it is difficult to factor it in to a significant degree. A recent study from Imperial College found that average mortality is about 1%, but the actual risk varies greatly based on age: “Age-specific IFRs increased from 0.1% and below for individuals under 40 years to greater than 5% among individuals over 80 years.”

The authors call this risk “high”, but they don’t provide a threshold to judge it against other risks, so it is a bit difficult to know if this assessment is reasonably objective or just their subjective opinion.

In a Nature article Leslie Roberts claims that for measles, “Estimates are uncertain, but the death rate in developing countries hovers around 3–6%, and it can spike as high as 30% in the worst outbreaks, according to the WHO“. 30% seems high to me. 1% does not. On the other hand, chickenpox apparently has a mortality rate of 0.0016%, so that is a lot lower, and yet we vaccinate against it. Smallpox can have from 1%-30% mortality, depending on type, according to the WHO.

Of course, for children the regular flu is deadlier than Covid. According to the ONS, 14 children from 0-14 died from the flu in 2018, but thankfully only 6 children have died with Covid so far in England and Wales, and they had severe underlying health conditions (as have 95% of all who die with Covid). This would suggest an argument for mandating the flu vaccine rather than the Covid vaccine. But whereas the mortality risk of the flu goes down, before increasing again in old age, the mortality of Covid roughly doubles every 8 years of increased age.

I had to look up and read about these various other diseases, because they are no longer a part of our lives as they once were – and thank goodness, or rather thank vaccines, for that. But based on these facts I would say that the coronavirus is not particularly deadly on average, but it is quite deadly to some, and deadly enough, I think, to justify mandating vaccines, if they are safe, meaning the risk of taking it for the non-vulnerable is so low as to justify the reduction in risk to the vulnerable.

The question is whether people trust the information given to them by the government, the mainstream media and the pharmaceutical companies about the safety of the vaccine.

Do you trust the people in the building on the left?

When people get the feeling that “the system” is conspiring against their best interest, they stop trusting in what those say who they deem to be part of this “system”. This is not helped by the government using outdated statistics to justify the second lockdown. If people feel there is another, hidden, agenda behind the lockdown, and that the big pharmaceutical companies have their own hidden agenda (making money – not that hidden, after all), and that these various people are in cahoots to make ordinary people toe the line and do as they’re told, then this of course will make it very difficult to convince them.

If this difficulty in terms of trust then leads to the authorities wanting to silence by law any voice of dissent they deem cranky or peddling “misinformation”, as Labour recently advocated, this only feeds the conspiracy beast (“told you so!”). Misinformation is dangerous, but distrust is infinitely more dangerous. If people trust those worthy of trust, misinformation is water off the proverbial duck’s back.

In conclusion then, I think:

• If possible, the coronavirus vaccine should be taken voluntarily; if enough people take it, it may not be necessary that everyone takes it, but if people trust it, most will;
• There is a liberal (or libertarian, if you prefer) case for mandating the taking of a vaccine, if, and only if, it can definitely save lives and it is safe for those who take it;
• Anti-vaccination attitudes are in part driven by distrust of “the system”. It is therefore crucial that open and honest information is given, and that the government does everything it possibly can to re-earn the trust of the people.

Colchester, 15th November 2020

Update 17th July 2021: As we now have a few months of experience with the various vaccines, I wish to add that I do NOT think my above criteria are met, because there is a certain risk to people, especially the younger, that could outweigh the benefits of taking the vaccines. As long as adults take the vaccines voluntarily after considering the information given, I do not see a problem with it, but mandating it is wrong in current circumstances. It is also wrong to force people to take it for certain jobs, as is currently being pushed through Parliament in Britain, as workers can easily take a lateral flow test to see if they are positive before coming in to work and we know that vaccinated people can still carry and pass on the virus, so the principle of not doing harm to others do not apply.

Masking the real issue – we do not need enforced face masks now

My local newspaper published a rather brutally edited version, so for those who are interested in the issue of whether the government should enforce the use of face coverings in shops, here is the original text:

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The latest official figures estimate that 0.04% of the population are carrying the coronavirus. That means nationally you need to meet 2,300 people before you meet one with the virus. But in Colchester, as the Gazette reported a few days ago, the infection rate is 1 per 100,000. I know it can get busy at the Tollgate Sainsburys, but not that busy.

And even if you did manage the feat of meeting this one person carrying the virus, it is far from certain you would catch the virus. And if you did? Well, Dr. David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University estimated the mortality of Covid at the start of the outbreak, and his figures have been borne out: up to the age of 49 average mortality risk is 0.14% and up to age 59 it is 0.6%. As a motorcyclist the mortality rate is 1.7%.

The current average infection rate is 0.7-0.9 and at the start of the month the total number of registered deaths were 0.5% below the five year average.

In light of this, it is quite absurd to introduce a law forcing people to cover their faces in shops all over the country, like the one that came into force this Friday 24th July. Why?

 

1. Risk management: Protecting yourself and others whilst out and about is about managing the risk level. As this is already so low, especially in Colchester, what difference will it make now to cover your face? At the height of the pandemic, perhaps it would have made a difference in some parts of the country, but now? Sweet F.A.

 

2. Arbitrary:You pop into your local grocer for a pint of milk, you have to cover your face, although you’re in and out of there in five minutes flat. Then you go and sit down at the pub with several other people indoors for a couple of hours. No covering required. Same in schools and offices. In most shops it is not difficult to keep six feet away from people, not least as crowd control is practised these days anyway. You are in shops for a short period of time, and they tend to have fairly good ventilation. In addition, the people who are in shops for longer periods, the staff, are not required to wear face coverings, although they are shielded behind plastic screens (to make sure you cannot hear what they are saying). The law is arbitrary and illogical

 

3. Efficacy: The government guidelines do not require you to wear a medical grade mask. It is quite enough to tie a bandana or old hankie around your nose and mouth, like a highwayman (I seem to remember Boris Johnson had something to say about people looking like bank robbers a little while back). These flimsy pieces of fabric have been likened to wearing a chain link to stop a hail of bullets. The virus apparently hovers with the mist from our breathing in the air for a while. Unless you wear a medical grade mask you will not stop these microbes from intermixing with your breath. So you might as well wear a wreath of garlic (at least that will help with social distancing).

 

4. How long? If you introduce masks now that the infection level and R-number are so low, when on earth do you lift this requirement? The government is backing itself into a very tight corner: the corner where depriving citizens of their liberties is the new normal, rather than a short-term emergency measure.

 

5. The message:If the government told us to wear lucky heathers, the same purpose would have been fulfilled as this law seeks to fulfil: make people feel it is safe to go shopping so that they will spend, spend, spend, and repair the damage from the government’s overly strict and far too long lasting lock-down. But I fear the effect may be the opposite: some people (like myself) will resent being forced to wear a mask, and so will stay away from local shops in Colchester and all over the county, and instead order online. For others, seeing people walk around with masks, as if we’re all extras in an apocalyptic horror film, will induce fear. They will think, ‘well, if we have to wear masks in public, it must be bad’. Just as local shops need our support, and just as it is safe to go to them, this will make many people stay away.

The role of government is to protect our liberties. To do this we accept that the state has the monopoly on the use of violence. We accept that this fearsome power must sometimes be used to limit our absolute liberty in the public interest. We accepted the lock-down, although it was a monstrous imposition on our freedoms, as the Prime Minister admitted, because it was an effective way to stop the spread. It worked, the virus is under control. To use the power of the state now to force people to wear a flimsy face covering on pain of a £100 fine, can simply not be justified – it is a draconian and disproportionate measure.

Think also of the pressure it puts on staff – I wouldn’t want to challenge a six foot builder with tattoos not wearing a mask! Sainsburys has already declared that their staff will be told not to challenge non-wearers; they will assume they have a good reason for not doing so. The police have said they can’t be running around arresting non-wearers. So that gives us point no. 6: it is unenforceable. Laws that are unenforceable contribute to erode people’s respect for The Law in general.

I am not a rebel. If I absolutely have to go to the shops in the next few weeks, I will wear a face covering. I have a pair of old underpants customized for the purpose.