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