“Scientists on a committee that encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behaviour during the Covid pandemic have admitted its work was ‘unethical’ and ‘totalitarian.’ Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) expressed regret about the tactics ... SPI-B warned in March last year that ministers needed to increase ‘the perceived level of personal threat’ from Covid-19 because ‘a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened’ ... ‘Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government. By nature I am an optimistic person, but all this has given me a more pessimistic view of people’ ... Ministers have faced repeated accusations that they ramped up the threat from the pandemic to justify lockdowns and coerce the public into abiding by them – a claim that will be examined by the forthcoming public inquiry into the pandemic response ... ‘In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian’ ... ‘You could call psychology mind control. That’s what we do’ ... ‘people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise’ ... ‘We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in’ ... As well as overt warnings about the danger of the virus, the Government has been accused of feeding the public a non-stop diet of bad news, such as deaths and hospitalisations, without ever putting the figures in context with news of how many people have recovered, or whether daily death tolls are above or below seasonal averages ... ‘If we’re being really honest, do I fear that Government policy today is playing into the roots of totalitarianism? Yes, of course it is.’”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...tarian-use-fear-control-behaviour-covid/

Relevant learnings of history:
“The totalitarian potentate, in order to break down the minds of men, first needs widespread mental chaos and verbal confusion, because both paralyze his opposition and cause the morale of the enemy to deteriorate unless his adversaries are aware of the dictator’s real aim. From then on he can start to build up his system of conformity ... The enemy knows that, far below the surface, human life is built up of inner contradictions. He uses this knowledge to defeat and confuse the brainwashee ... The core of the strategy of menticide is the taking away of all hope, all anticipation, all belief in a future. It destroys the very elements which keep the mind alive. The victim is utterly alone ... Pavlov formulated his findings into a general rule in which the speed of learning is positively correlated with quiet and isolation. The totalitarians have followed this rule. They know that they can condition their political victims most quickly if they are kept in isolation”
-"Rape of the Mind", by psychologist and Nazi torture survivor Dr. Joost Meerloo, (1956)
http://whale.to/c/rape_of_the_mind.html