This is related to a lot of other things I’ve been pondering over the last few years, but the obvious reason we reach for lockdowns first — and adopt something so readily from an authoritarian country — is that we have all gone authoritarian over the last few decades. It’s just who we are now. You can see it in our software, in our systems, in the design of our everyday environments. Authoritarianism is all we understand and it is the terrible thing we’ve become.

We are all little Mussolinis now, strutting around imperiously, convinced we know best and that everyone else is too childlike to make their own decisions.