This is why vaccine passports will destroy liberal democracy as we know it. They will be like Cambridge Analytica on crack. I should know: I used to be the Lead Psychologist there, and yet vaccine passports’ ramifications for data privacy and psychological manipulation are so concerning that even I have a problem with them.
(AND)....The key to such massive social change is what the Behavioural Insights Team call “radical incrementalism”. Consider it like compound interest, or “boiling a frog”: tiny changes meet little resistance but make a huge difference over time. This is how the government has operated under COVID-19. Whether it’s lockdowns, face masks, or vaccine passports, politicians have followed the same three-stepped approach: deny, then debate, then demand. The initial denial puts people’s fears at bay, while seeding the idea so that it is more palatable in the future; then, once the foot is in the door, the dial is slowly turned up. Just a few months ago, the government denied that vaccine passports would happen; today, they are introducing them, while denying that they would be used in supermarkets.
The government will say anything to get people to accept vaccine passports in principle today — including that they will be temporary and will only apply to certain venues. Once the vaccine passports are accepted, politicians will be able to move the goalposts with the minimum of resistance. In reality, the passports are likely to be only for nightclubs in the same way that the lockdowns were to be only for a few weeks.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn elucidates on this “foot-in-the-door” technique: “At what point, then, should one resist? When one’s belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one’s home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about one of them individually… and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest.”
As the global powers are trying to get their foot in the door with vaccine passports, it is critical that we slam that door shut now, and bolt it permanently. Pandemics, as awful as they are, come and go in relatively short spans of time. Periods of oppression can last for centuries.