Social Engineering Experiments Have an Appalling Track Record
I do not doubt that many of the individuals responsible for implementing vaccine apartheid, firing healthcare personnel for making the “wrong” health choices, shuttering schools for months on end, sending police to shut down church services and house parties, confining citizens to their homes, and discouraging people from seeing their doctors, thought they were doing the right thing. Indeed, they might have even thought they were doing their duty.
“They meant well” does not get them off the hook
But as we watch the consequences of these “do-good” policies unfold, from entrenched distrust of public authorities and educational deficits to ruined businesses, rampant depression, and a new health under-class, it just seems a little trite to say that the architects of these policies “meant well.”
After all, anyone with an ounce of common sense could have realised, with a little reflection, that the aggressive measures used to contain the harms of Covid-19 constituted the sort of treacherous social and medical experiment that should not ever be undertaken without a careful cost-benefit assessment. The failure to undertake such an assessment was no less reckless than charging into war without evaluating potential collateral harms.
Social engineering’s dubious track record
Those who control the vast economic, police, and regulatory powers of the modern State must temper their reforming ambitions with an awareness of the limits of top-down, technocratic social interventions. Failing to do so may produce disastrous results, as history amply attests.