Government messaging

[OliveTree75]

Hello,
Been thinking recently how in years to come the Covid pandemic will most likely be studied in education all over the world.
What do you think the views on the government messaging will be in the future?
Looking back now, I find some of them hard to look at. We have been subjected to so much fear and whilst I agree we had to take action, I can’t help but wonder if some of these posters were a step too far.

The evidence that younger people have loved the curbs on freedom, as claimed upthread, is clearly not there though. If they do have a greater tendency towards authoritarianism than older people on the whole, this is evidently not showing up in attitudes to covid restrictions.

Maybe. I'm not so sure TBH.

I certainly have seen plenty of teens who have no interest in obeying the rules.

But if I think about the social groups I belong to where there are a lot of different age groups, it seems to be the university student class or those that are slightly older that are among the most authoritarian about things like mandates. There is a young woman I work with, for example, of about 20, who is quite sure that mandates are a necessary tool - not in order to keep unvaccinated people out of certain places, but in order to force people into "choosing" vaccination. She also tends to be for things like rules about speech and so forth.

It may be there are a few sub-groups represented among young people, but I certainly think there is a cohort which is quite naive about the perils of forced social engineering.

I guess that "young people" like all other people are not simply a homogenous group.

I was rather disturbed about DP's daughter and her friends and their lack of risk evaluation. I saw what their first two years of student life were like, and it clearly caused them untold distress and upheaval, yet through that first summer in 2020, she refused to hug her boyfriend, she wouldn't set foot inside my house, she wouldn't do anything she perceived as slightly risky. Whether it was because she was genuinely fearful or she was just scared of the results of rule breaking I don't know - possibly it was the latter because students were treated so appallingly. And I do know she didn't want to put her 74 year old gran at risk (happy to report Gran sailed through Covid, is strong as an ox and still working). So I think it was a mixture of genuine fear and not wanting to be seen to break any rules.

One day I will chat to her properly about what she was actually truly scared of, but it's too soon at the moment I think. And I hope I did my bit to help her relax a bit and analyse the actual genuine risk.

@MangyInseam

The evidence that younger people have loved the curbs on freedom, as claimed upthread, is clearly not there though. If they do have a greater tendency towards authoritarianism than older people on the whole, this is evidently not showing up in attitudes to covid restrictions.

Maybe. I'm not so sure TBH.

I certainly have seen plenty of teens who have no interest in obeying the rules.

But if I think about the social groups I belong to where there are a lot of different age groups, it seems to be the university student class or those that are slightly older that are among the most authoritarian about things like mandates. There is a young woman I work with, for example, of about 20, who is quite sure that mandates are a necessary tool - not in order to keep unvaccinated people out of certain places, but in order to force people into "choosing" vaccination. She also tends to be for things like rules about speech and so forth.

It may be there are a few sub-groups represented among young people, but I certainly think there is a cohort which is quite naive about the perils of forced social engineering.

As I say, the recent polling and data on breach rates is pretty clear. I didnt see any age related breakdowns on restriction views from earlier in the pandemic, so attitudes may have looked different in 2020. But as things stand, no. If there is a wider liking of authoritarianism generally in that cohort, then views on covid are an exception to it.

None of which is to say there won't be people or subgroups who buck trends. There always are.