The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship invited me to address the topic “Can Institutions be Reformed?” at its annual forum in London last month. ARC, founded by Baroness Philippa Stroud and psychologist Jordan Peterson, is a conference that focuses on the West’s failure to cultivate its traditional values, which provided the world with history’s most successful societies.
I asked the audience: Why, at this moment in history, are we asking how institutions should be reformed, or if they even can be? For decades we have been aware that institutions were failing—incompetent, wasteful and corrupt governments; biased and dishonest journalism; agenda-driven schools and universities.
My answer is Covid. The mismanagement of the pandemic hit us personally and exposed a massive, across-the-board institutional failure. It was the most tragic breakdown of leadership and ethics that free societies have seen in our lifetimes.
Yet, oddly, the topic remained almost invisible at the weeklong conference, unmentioned by dozens of speakers. It was the elephant in the room, just as lockdowns and mandates are missing from almost all of America’s discussion of postelection plans.
To understand why the pandemic finally forced us to address institutional failure, we must acknowledge the facts. The virus didn’t cause lockdowns. Human beings decided to impose lockdowns, which failed to stop the deaths and the spread. Lockdowns inflicted massive damage on children and literally killed people. A review of 34 countries with available data found that through July 2023 “the US alone would have had 1.6 million fewer deaths if it had the performance of Sweden.” A January 2023 paper in the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control estimates that over the next 15 to 20 years, unemployment alone will cause 900,000 to 1.2 million additional American deaths—from the lockdown, not the virus.
More than massive incompetence by bureaucrats, more than a lack of critical thinking, we saw a failure of society’s moral and ethical compass so pervasive that we have lost trust in most institutions and leaders—trust that is essential to the function of any free and diverse society.
Especially in the U.S.—where the Declaration of Independence proclaims that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”—it is stunning that liberty fell so quickly and thoroughly by government decree and with public assent.
Why did free people accept Draconian and illogical lockdowns? The answer reveals the reason for the silence on the pandemic. Censorship and propaganda are part of the explanation, tools of control that convinced the public of two lies—that there was a consensus of experts in favor of lockdowns, and that dissent from that false consensus was dangerous.
Yet that alone doesn’t explain today’s silence about that extraordinary collapse. It is also that so many smart and influential people were complicit. They bought into and even advocated irrational measures that defied data, biology and common sense. That acquiescence—frankly, cowardice—and the failure to grasp reality are inconvenient truths that, understandably, no one wants to revisit.
Disruption is needed, and many are basking in the victory of history’s most disruptive politician, Donald Trump. His win is a repudiation of failed leftist policies, as well as their cultural perversions contrary to common sense. It was also a rejection of media propaganda, cancel culture and censorship.
I am concerned that most people demanding disruptive institutional changes are eager to “turn the page” on the human-rights violations, the true constitutional crisis. What about setting the record straight, officially recognizing the truth, demanding accountability? The ultimate disrupter won, and his appointees are now in charge—so all is well?
Turning the page on modern history’s worst societal failure would be extraordinarily harmful. Failure to demand and issue official statements of truth about the pandemic management after the devastation endured by millions would eliminate all accountability. And accountability is just what we need to restore trust in institutions and among fellow citizens.
No doubt, new versions of institutions need to emerge, and old versions of old institutions need to re-emerge, especially when it comes to fostering debate and the robust exchange of ideas. But most solutions come from individuals, not government, and ultimately individuals, not institutions, will save or destroy freedom.
There is a disastrous lack of courage in our society. To quote C.S. Lewis, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” We can’t have a peaceful, free society if it is filled with people who lack the courage to speak and act with certainty on Hannah Arendt’s “elementary questions of morality.” That’s why we must reckon with the madness of our Covid response.
Dr. Scott Atlas is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He served as a Covid adviser to President Trump in 2020.
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