Thread by @jjcharlesworth_

[Adam Curtis voice:] Politicians, who had never faced a major civil emergency before, panicked. But then they discovered that the state, which had been broken up and hollowed out by the same neoliberal policies they themselves had supported, no longer worked.

So the politicians tried to get back control by seizing power over every aspect of society, by making emergency laws. But this caused things to go more out of control.

Since politicians were unused to taking responsibility for the system they led, they became incapable of making decisions which balanced the risks to people's lives, with the risks to society as a whole.

So the politicians did what the technocratic state, which they had created, had taught them to do. They outsourced their authority, to experts, because the experts would tell them what to do, and how to do it.

But then the experts also didn't want to take responsibility for the catastrophic effects their lockdowns were having on society. So they passed this responsibility back to the politicians. Soon, nobody knew who was in charge.

With no-one taking responsibility, and with other politicians also afraid to take responsibility by criticising the goverment, something strange began to happen.

The government kept saying to people that it would end its controls. But each time it came to lifting the restrictions, it would find more reasons not to, and began to invent even more complex controls to allow the ending of controls, which never came.

Some people began to think that this was a conspiracy, by the global elite, to seize power. But the reality was far stranger. Because nobody wanted to take responsibility for the consequences of decisions whose outcomes could not be predicted,

even the slightest indication of new risks caused the politicians to become paralysed. And their only response was to impose even more rules and schemes.

Politicians began to live in a dream-world, in which they believed they were trying to control a virus, which could never be defeated. But in reality they were just trying to control their own sense of not being in control,and projected that anxiety by making a new kind of state.

In this new state, everything would be run by rules, but nobody would take responsibility for anything, because all the rules were 'necessary', and dictated by experts.

And because politicians no longer believed in anything, except staying in power, they preferred a system which meant they no longer had to take responsibility for anything.

While this was happening, society began to fall apart. But this didn't matter to the politicians, who pretended they weren't responsible for this, because it was all the fault of the virus.