The Security Junkie Syndrome How Pausing the World Leads to Catastrophe

hi

my name is david eberhardt i am a

psychiatrist

and i work as a senior consultant and i

am the head of staff at prima maria

addiction care clinic in stockholm

i have been working with psychiatry

since 1986

and for the last 13 years i i was based

at stockholm county psychiatric

emergency board the last five years of

that

as head of staff to summarize it you

could say that i have spent my entire

adult life

in a psychiatric emergency room and if

you do that you will meet

people who have been traumatized beyond

comprehension

you will meet people who have lost all

the children who have been raped

assaulted tortured if you work with

psychiatric emergency care

you have seen everything or almost

everything

we tend to think that life events we

have been through is the cause for a lot

of our later problems

but this is only partially true if you

work in a psychiatric emergency award

you will find that a lot of people are

seeking help

for trivial traumas such as feelings of

envy towards their brother or sister

that may have got nicer christmas gifts

in their childhood

and they may very well feel much worse

than the tortured guy

in the next room this

is when you come to think of it not

strange at all because

the reasons why we become the persons we

are are complex

it has to do with both genetics and

environmental factors

and most of the environmental factors

have nothing whatsoever to do with

nurturing

and parenting or external traumas

most of them are purely coincidental but

how we manage our lives and how we react

to hazards and obstacles in life

has to do with our expectations on life

and these expectations are affected of

the culture we live in

for the last four or five decades it has

been

exceptionally safe to live in the

western world you don’t even have to go

back a hundred years in time

to understand that people throughout

history had a really hard time

they lived short unsafe and unfair lives

their whole existence were a consequence

of the grim rationale

leading to the survival of the fittest

they fought a grotesque

meaningless struggle against nature

historically the best evolutionary

strategy of our ancestors

have always been to try to stay as safe

as possible

and seek as much security as possible

in 2006 i wrote the book in the land of

the security junkies

i had in my clinical work noticed that a

generation

starting with the millennials in many

ways had lost touch with nature

which led them to seek psychiatric help

for things that

previous generations thought were

natural parts of life

i also found that this behavior to a

large extent could explain how the

society

in itself reacted you could see it in

how institutions

institutions were functioning and in

late legislation

even though the society had become safer

and safer

everybody everywhere still try to

protect themselves against

everything even things that no previous

generation would have considered harmful

if you live in a place that is secure

enough you will have

time enough to consider the fact that

everything

is potentially dangerous in such a world

it will not matter that objectively the

world

has never been safer and that life

expectancy rate is getting closer and

closer to 100

regardless of how we live our lives you

can never be too

careful the more safety you get the more

safety you seek

if you live in an artificial environment

everything you read about

everything you hear about may harm you

the list of things that are potentially

dangerous

is infinitive because life itself

is dangerous

this is an effect of people no longer

being a part of nature

we all know that the mortality rate is

100

the measures we try to take in order to

prevent anything

to happen can never be too many we have

to ask ourselves in an oversecure

society

what would be the perfect way to die

i have been thinking a lot about that

and i think i have the solution to the

question

in the oversecure society the perfect

way to die

would be that you are 95 years of age

your children have become so old that

they have caught dementia and forgotten

all about you

and then you wither away in the home for

the elderly

because there is no other acceptable way

to die

everything else would be to die in vain

there are two different reasons for us

being too risk-avert in the modern

western world

one is the precautionary principle which

tells us that everything that isn’t

absolutely

100 safe is best treated as being

dangerous

but there are problems with this

strategy at least if you carry it too

far

the precautionary principle in it in it

in its extreme

leads to stagnation the precautionary

principle

may lead to new unexpected dangers

and it is extremely expensive which in

itself

in itself also may lead to the first two

effects

the other reason for us being risk avert

is that we react to events instead of

reacting to rational risk factors

in risk analysis you see that people

tend to overreact on two kinds of risk

factors

we overestimate the risk if the expected

outcome

if happening will lead to a certain

death

and we overestimate the risk if we

cannot control the situation

typically we overestimate the risk of

being part of a plane crash

if the plane will crash you will

probably die

and since you normally don’t fly the

plane you have no control over the

situation

but it’s more than 1000 times more

dangerous to take the car

to the airport and that’s pretty pretty

safe too

i come from the global leading country

in the world when it comes to the

precautionary principle

sweden but what happened 2020

sweden was initially acting with a

laissez-faire approach to cobit

while the rest of the world was

competing in totalitarian lockdown

strategies

leading to a global pause that we

haven’t seen before in history and

absolutely haven’t seen the full effects

of yet

it has been as if the whole world has

caught a full-scale

epidemic global panic disorder

and one year after all the rest of the

world also

sweden became infected with fear the

cool

initial response unfortunately seemed to

have

nothing to do with a more evidence-based

approach

instead it seemed to be a way to making

a necessity

of the fact that it would have been

impossible to have a lockdown

since no part of the municipality had

been preparing for any catastrophe for

decades

this in fact a symptom of an advanced

form of what i call the security junkie

syndrome

the reason for not taking action seemed

to have more to do

with lack of responsibility and less to

do with rational thinking

the government could not even think that

anything really harmful could happen

so they did nothing a form of security

paradox

so you could argue that the rest of the

world were acting totally logic and only

sweden did everything wrong

you can’t accuse most countries of being

passive

isn’t the normal reaction on a lethal

threat to prepare yourself

if the society is threatened it would

seem relevant to take quick action

so wasn’t the global lockdown strategy

relevant

wasn’t it necessary for the world to

take a pulse

i would say no

since the pandemic started there have

been several studies trying to estimate

the mortality rate of kovid

according to the majority of them among

others a report from who written by john

john johnidis johannidis professor

in epidemiology at stanford university

the mortality rate of covert is between

0.15 and 0.25

for people under the age of 70 the

mortality rate is between

0.03 to 0.04 percent

compared to the spanish flu which had a

mortality rate of 2.5 percent

and the spanish flu was affecting mostly

children and young adults

the mean age of people dying from kovit

is 84 years

and the life expectancy rate in sweden

is

82 years so it isn’t it is

relevant to ask the question whether you

die from covid

or with cobit especially since a huge

proportion of the elderly that died

suffered from several

other life-threatening conditions

also lockdown strategies seems to have

no

or very small effect on case growth and

no effect on death rates

the only factors besides age that have

been

shown to have significant effect on the

number of deaths

on a national level of bmi in the

population

and the country’s gdp the higher the

more deaths

this indicating that the relevant risk

factors are

obesity and age since high gdp

probably is correlated to both

instead of using excess mortality which

is the only

relevant measure media for over a year

have been reporting cases of death

maybe not so strange that people start

to think that

if they get the disease they will most

certainly die

but people die all the time it has to do

with the fact

that humans are mortal but normally we

don’t see it on prime

time television on a daily basis

the feeling in the population will be

that

everything is out of control which will

lead them to overestimate the risks

they see the plane crash crash coming

and

act accordingly if you provide numbers

of deaths

each day it will create panic and this

is exactly

what has happened the whole world

reacted to events

instead of doing a relevant risk

analysis

governments all over the world issued

total lockdowns and curfews

the world took an involuntary power

pause

and the longer the pandemic have lasted

the more draconic measures governments

have been taking

and in a bizarre competition where they

have been trying to show strength they

have imposed more and more totalitarian

legislation

actions that have made them look alert

and powerful

considering the data it’s tempting to

attribute a lot of the actions taken by

different governments to the

dunning-kruger effect

the dunning-kruger effect is a cognitive

bias explaining how

ignorant people overestimate their own

competence

and therefore make huge mistakes

but i would argue that this can’t be the

only explanation

since a lot of very well educated people

also epidemiolog epidemiologists

epidemiologists that obviously knows a

lot about

epidemiology have been contributing to

the panic

instead the phenomenon makes me think of

the essay the basic

laws of stupid people from 1976

written by the italian economic

historian carlo chipola

in this little perl chipola describes

five laws about stupid people

that explains a lot of the problems of

society

he begins to state that the amount of

stupid people are not correlated either

to education level

or intelligence as defined by iq

he finds stupid people everywhere even

among nobel prize laureates

what defines stupid people is that their

actions lead to bad

outcome as well for themselves as for

other people

and overestimating the dangers of an

infection with a mortality rate of

around

0.2 percent and at the same time

ignoring the massive negative effects of

their actions

cannot be described in a better way

we have seen a whole generation of

children not going to school for over a

year

we have seen massive negative economic

effects on businesses

with the following of unemployment and

bankruptcies

and we haven’t even started to see the

full extent of the mental side effects

that this has on the population

in the book in the land of the security

junkies i defined a syndrome i called

the national panic syndrome in order

for a country to suffer from the

condition it needs to have symptoms of

panic

and avoidance behavior the more symptoms

the more severely affected it is

the syndrome is caused by and in a

vicious circle

also leads to people being too scared to

die

at the same time it makes the population

less ready

and capable of handling real danger

people living in countries suffering

from the national panic syndrome

can easily develop the security junkie

syndrome

the security junkie syndrome is

characterized by you seeking more and

more safety since you feel more and more

insecure

even though you live under the safest

circumstances in history

and the safer you get the more things

seem frightening

since the real dangers are well taken

care of for every real danger you get

rid of

there will be at least 10 nearly

dangerous things

that will be upgraded to become real

dangers

so the effect is that there will be more

and more things to be afraid of

therefore you will get afraid

and probably you also will become

lazy and most certainly

you will act like a coward but most

importantly

if you are afraid you will be

very easy to control which is what we

have seen during the pandemic

the national panic syndrome has

developed into a global

self-harming behavior but remember

it’s all in your head in order for

society to get well

we all need to stop acting risk-averse

and instead in a rational way start to

challenge

our fears remember that life expectancy

rate in the western world is far over 80

years

the probability that you die of an

infection that has a mortality rate of

around 0.2

percent is neglectable at least if you

don’t belong to any risk group

if not if you don’t do that the risk is

even lower

and whatever you do remember that life

is not about

living the longest but the best if you

live in fear and isolation there is no

point in living

don’t lock yourself in and don’t let

others do it to you

try to live a good life the relatively

short time you have because

as a wise man once said life is hard

then you die don’t make it harder

you