[quote Chessie678]@DrSbaitso
The point about the electric shock experiment is presumably just that some people will follow rules however damaging they are because most people naturally defer to authority. There's a whole school of psychology which is less extreme than that experiment but says that most people are natural rule followers and that for those people following the rules is more important than what the rules are.
But I think how valid you find the comparison with this particular experiment depends on your experience of lockdown. I know plenty of people who would have preferred to have been electrocuted than go through another year like we have just had and that's not an exaggeration. I know someone who was previously completely mentally healthy who had a mental breakdown due to the isolation of living alone during the first lockdown, lost his business and is still having psychiatric treatment and unable to work. He isn't an unusual example. The lockdown rules basically wrecked his life for the foreseeable future and anyone who supports them is accepting that people like him will be collateral damage. Of course if your only experience of lockdown is that it has been a convenient excuse not to see your MIL your perspective will be different.
Personally, I don't think we should ever have made it illegal for people to see their families. I think that is a human rights abuse and a gross overreach of the criminal law. There are and have throughout history been plenty of bad laws and people who naturally follow rules have tended to defend them. I have seen close family throughout the last year and, in the unlikely event I was caught and fined, would refuse a fixed penalty and appeal right up to the highest court I could get to on a human rights based argument.
I don't personally agree that it is more moral to follow lockdown rules than not to either. It depends on your perspective but personally I think that my first moral responsibility is to my family and, in particular, my child and it is in my child's best interest to build relationships with close family. The risk posed to wider society by me seeing my sister or parents is minuscule. Added to that, most countries have not had our extreme no household mixing rules for such a long duration (in many countries these would be unconstitutional) and are in no worse a position re covid as a result.[/quote]
Yep, this is the point I'm trying to make.
In the past 12 months, I have seen countless threads of posters being torn a new arsehole for completely risk free outings such as go to the off-licence for a bar of chocolate because it's not "absolutely necessary".
I saw a thread not too long ago, a mum took her toddler (in a pram mind, so hardly spitting everywhere), to a garden centre for a walk around, to get out of the house for a bit. She didn't even buy anything .
Reading the replies, you'd have thought she had publicly executed 15 puppies, because again according to the indoctrinated it's not absolutely necessary.
I followed the rules last year, and after Xmas when it started getting hairy, but when infection levels are this low? No.
All because some blonde oaf and his band of merry men have decided that 17th May is some magical Covid cut-off point. Think about it.