What “Lockdown” Means

“Lockdown” appears to be a strange term to stop viral contagion. We “lock” things against threats. In panic we hope to lock out coronavirus and death.

“Lockdown” suggests government authority, especially imprisonment. More particularly, the term suggests a reaction to a prison riot in which the prisoners are locked in their cells. The idea is that individual prisoners are unlikely to act out panic or rage, whereas a crowd loosens inhibitions and paradoxically magnifies the illusion of personal power even as identity dissolves in the group. The fear is that the crowd may turn into an out-of-control mob.

Lockdown also suggests that we are prisoners in our everyday lives. We are trapped by habits, for example, which threaten to force us to recognize that though we may daydream of heroic exploits, all lives are ultimately trivial and faulty. And so, like prisoners in denial, we prefer to scapegoat others rather than take responsibility, as global leaders blame one another for the virus.

The term reaches into the central nervous system’s “fight or flight” reactions. Liberals tend to be anxious or even panicky about the viral threat. If you are locked up or invisible, the deadly virus cannot touch you.

By contrast, rightwing thinking combats fear by protesting against the group’s—Government’s—lock up. Rightwingers imagine that aggressive action can defeat the dominance of the group and also the threat of the virus. Hence the call to “open up” or “liberate” society.

The belief in fight shows up when extreme rightwingers invaded the Michigan State house brandishing military weapons. They were handling fear by advertising their ability to kill other people. In effect, they were behaving like the coronavirus, as if the virus was a human enemy that could be defeated by intimidation. The weapons made the protesters seem bigger and more powerful, like threat displays in other animals such as baring teeth.

The ultimate lockdown is death. A pandemic exposes the limits of culture to protect us. Religions, racial superiority, the economy, and science, for example, threaten to turn into fictions. We dream of being rescued by first-responders or super-medicines advertised on TV. Liberation is not merely “going back to work” or to “normalcy,” but our ability to be realistic.

The Authoritarian Virus and Denial

Check this out: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/opinion/coronavirus-trump-authoritarianism.html
The URL above takes you to Thomas Edsall’s op Ed in the New York Times that reminds us that an emergency such as the Covid virus keeping us “locked down” usually generates an authoritarian reaction.

You do see some signs all authoritarianism these days. For example, Mr. Trump proclaims that the virus makes him a “wartime president.” With flimsy evidence, he would blame the threat on the Chinese, as politicians all over the world, including the Chinese, are doing.

What’s missing is the concept of denial.

Edsall’s intelligent argument (above), not to mention his academic sources, never touches on the problem of death-anxiety.  Edsall quotes Eric Kaufmann, author of the book Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities, who takes “a more optimistic take on the likely political consequences of the pandemic, among other reasons, because pandemic “compels faith in experts, making it riskier to entrust ‘burn it all down.’”

As I have argued in the Psychology of Abandon and plenty of evidence supports (alas), the terror of losing oneself to death or social death often creates panic. Panic, in turn, may take the form of flight or fight as the nervous system is overloaded. Humans look to authoritarian hero-worship to be rescued from death.

Is Edsall points out, Nazis came to power in Germany partly because all of the 1919 flu pandemic and the global Great Depression. The “burn it all down” global war 2 expressed the terror of all the participants, especially the megalomaniac fantasy of immortality that Nazi ideology propagated.

The term “lockdown” expresses the authoritarian motivation that lurks in death anxiety. If anybody doubts this, think all of the protest against lockdown in Michigan that involved invasion of the Statehouse by “protesters” armed with military weapons. The threat of guns expressed the need all of the protesters not simply to stand up to Government, but also the need to feel superior to mere mortals. Insofar as the small invasion got global media exposure, the symbolic action resonated with the death-anxiety of viewers around the world.