At no time in recent history has a central planning entity successfully organized an entire society based on coercion. Even in the case of socialist China, the compliant nature of the population has been largely driven by a unifying narrative, rather than anything approaching compulsion - a factor not truly appreciated in the West.
In a democracy, intimidatory tactics and bullying are likely to be even less effective. There are four demonstrable reasons for this:
- Over several decades, citizens in democracies have been invited to relish the ethos and benefits of individualism as expressed in personal freedom. When highly valued individual "rights" are at risk the paramount instinct is overt dissent. This can result in needless problems for any government.
- In order to deal with the diversity of issues the world throws up, any planning authority would need access to a repertoire of responses that is (at least) as nuanced as the problems they face. The instruments of government - including the apparatus of law enforcement - can never achieve the diversity embedded within the whole society.
- The information needed to control and administer a large society in this manner is too dynamically complex - personal, prejudiced, inventive, distributed, and therefore mostly implicit - to be useful in any practical sense for conventional planning. Even taking into account today's biometric and AI capabilities, it would simply be too overwhelming.
- Conventional planning becomes redundant where conditions of uncertainty and volatility prevail, and where continuous unforeseen disruption is commonplace. In those situations the capacity to navigate, making decisions informed in real-time by reliable information feedbacks, becomes the most critical literacy.
In exposing what should be avoided in shaping collective behaviours, these four factors also indicate what will work. So it should be obvious that mandatory rules, including curfews, imposed segregation, strict border controls and restricted access to public transport, sporting venues and concert halls, for example, tend to generate anxiety and fear. Eventually this can lead to dissent, in some form or other, which can contribute to a potential collapse in social cohesion. Handing responsibility to individuals for the choices they make, from a range of recommendations, based on transparency and full disclosure of information, tends to strengthen group cohesion.
This knowledge should (and could) have been applied to the containment of COVID-19. It will come as no surprise that those countries which bore the brunt of the SARS epidemic of 2003, and learned how to deal with that crisis, have demonstrated to the rest of the world how effective their precisely targeted measures for containment are. By treating their citizens as responsible adults, capable of making their own informed decisions under conditions of extreme uncertainty, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and, to some extent Thailand, have all managed to avoid the heavy-handed use of massive mandatory quarantine we see being applied elsewhere.
Full disclosure of validated information, together with transparent, measured communication, allow people to take sufficient measures to protect themselves. If governments are able to provide options and recommendations that citizens can choose to adopt voluntarily, but are not imposed coercively, everyone benefits. Most importantly businesses have time to prepare, economic activity is not drastically curtailed, while education is hardly disrupted.
Those countries mentioned here were able to control the spread of the infection with flexible policies, allowing space for individuals to take responsibility for making their own decisions, while adopting the most appropriate measures for their own unique circumstances. Likewise, early and open communication generated a widespread awareness, giving every citizen time to take all necessary precautions by putting into immediate effect any changes required in order to avoid infection.
Authoritarian directives are a trap. I am strongly of the opinion that the diligence and respect for individual common sense these governments exercised will have resulted in them being able to avoid many of the problems we are likely to see emerging elsewhere.
There is one very significant lesson here. Individual restraint, in conjunction with appropriate actions, rather than mandatory massive shutdowns, are essential to suppressing any future pandemic. This is what we need to learn at this time.
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