The Security Junkie Syndrome; How Pausing the World Leads to Catastrophe | David Eberhard | TEDxSSE

Hello, my name is David Eberhardt, I am a psychiatrist, I work as a senior consultant and I am the chief of staff at the Prima Maria addiction care clinic in Stockholm. I have worked in psychiatry since 1986 and for the last 13 years I was on the stockholm county psychiatric emergency board the last five years as chief of staff to sum it up you could say 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 your understanding. 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 it all or almost everything. We tend to think that the life events we have gone through are the cause of many of our later problems. but this is only partially true, if you work in a psychiatric emergency hospital, you will find that many people seek help for trivial traumas, such as feelings of envy towards their brother or sister, who perhaps received better Christmas gifts in their childhood and is he may very well feel much worse than the tortured guy in the next room. Now is when you think about it, it's not strange at all because the reasons we become the people we are are complex and have to do with both genetic and environmental factors and most environmental factors have nothing to do with upbringing. and parenthood or with external traumas, most of them are pure coincidence, but the way we manage our lives and how we react to dangers and obstacles in life has to do with our expectations about life and these expectations.

We are affected by 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 to understand that throughout history people had really tough times. For a long time they lived short, insecure and unfair lives. Their entire existence was a consequence of the grim logic that led to the survival of the fittest. They fought a grotesque and senseless struggle against nature. Historically, our ancestors' best evolutionary strategy has always been to try to stay as safe as possible. possible and seek as much

security

as possible in 2006 I wrote the book in the land of

security

addicts.

In my clinical work I realized that a generation starting with millennials had in many ways lost contact with nature, which led them to seek psychiatric care. help for things that previous generations thought were natural parts of life. I also discovered that this behavior could largely explain how society itself reacted. You could see in how institutions worked and in late legislation, even though society had become increasingly safer, everyone everywhere still tried to protect themselves against everything, even things that no previous generation would have considered harmful. If you live somewhere that is safe enough, you will have enough time to consider the fact that everything is potentially dangerous in such a

world

.

It won't matter that objectively the world has never been safer and that the 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 security you have, the more security you will seek if do you live. in an artificial environment everything you read about everything you hear can harm you the list of things that are potentially dangerous is infinite because life itself is dangerous this is an effect of people no longer being part of nature we all know that the mortality rate There are 100 measures we try to take to prevent something from happening.

There can never be too many. We have to ask ourselves in an over-safe society what would be the perfect way to die. I've been thinking about that a lot and I think so. the solution to the question in the hyper secure society the perfect way to die would be that you are 95 years old, your children have grown so old that they have contracted dementia and have completely forgotten about you and then you wither away in the nursing home. Because there is no other acceptable way to die, anything else would be dying in vain. There are two different reasons why we avoid risks too much: In the modern Western world, one is the precautionary principle which tells us that everything that is not is absolutely 100% safe.

It's best to treat safe as dangerous, but there are problems with this strategy, at least if taken too far. The precautionary principle at its extreme

leads

to stagnation. The precautionary principle can lead to new, unexpected dangers and is extremely costly. In itself it can also lead to the first two effects. The other reason we avoid risk is that we react to events instead of reacting to rational risk factors. In risk analysis it is seen that people tend to overreact. faced with two types of risk factors we overestimate the risk if the expected outcome will lead to certain death and we overestimate the risk if we cannot control the situation we normally overestimate the risk of being part of a plane crash if the plane crashes you will probably die and given You don't normally fly on a plane, you have no control over the situation, but it is more than 1000 times more dangerous to take the car to the airport and that is also quite safe.

I come from the world's leading country when it comes to the precautionary principle Sweden, but what happened in 2020 Sweden initially acted with a laissez-faire approach to cobit while the rest of the world competed in totalitarian lockdown strategies that led to a pause global that we had not seen before in history and that we had never seen before. However, we have seen all the effects, it has been as if the entire world had contracted a large scale global panic epidemic and a year later, the rest of the world also Sweden became infected with fear, the initial cold response unfortunately seemed to have no effect. nothing to see.

Rather, with a more evidence-based approach, it seemed to be a way to make 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. symptom of an advanced form of what I call security addict

syndrome

the reason for not taking action seemed to have more to do with a lack of responsibility and less to do with rational thinking the government couldn't even think that something truly harmful could happen so it didn't do anything, it's a form of security paradox, so you could argue that the rest of the world was acting totally logically and only Sweden did everything wrong.

Most countries cannot be accused of being passive. It is not the normal reaction to a lethal threat. Get ready. If 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 the pulse? I would say no, since the pandemic began there have been several studies trying to estimate the mortality rate of kovid according to most of them, among others, a report by who written by john john johnidis johannidis professor of epidemiology at the university of stanford the covert mortality rate is between 0.15 and 0.25 for people under the age of 70 the mortality rate is between 0.03 and 0.04 percent compared to the Spanish flu which had a rate of mortality of 2.5 percent and the Spanish flu mainly affected children and young adults.

The average age of people who die from Kovit is 84 years and the life expectancy rate in Sweden is 82 years. Therefore, it is not relevant to ask whether you die from covid or cobit, especially since a large proportion of the elderly who died suffered from other life-threatening conditions and lockdown strategies appear to have very little or no effect on case growth and no effect on mortality rates, the only factors other than age that have been shown to have a significant effect on the number of deaths at the national level, the BMI in the population and the GDP of the country, the higher the number of deaths, this indicates That the relevant risk factors are obesity and age, as high GDP is likely correlated with both rather than using excess mortality which is the only relevant measure.

The media has been reporting death cases for over a year, perhaps it is not so strange that people are starting to think that if they contract the disease. they will surely die but people die all the time it has to do with the fact that humans are mortal but we don't normally see it on prime time television every day, the feeling in the population will be that everything is out of place. control that will lead them to overestimate the risks they see the plane crash coming and act accordingly if you provide the number of deaths each day it will create panic and this is exactly what has happened, the entire world reacted to the events instead of taking a relevant risk .

Analysis of governments around the world imposing total lockdowns and curfews, the world took an involuntary power pause and the longer the pandemic has gone on, the more draconian measures governments have been taking and in a strange competition they have been in trying to show strength, they have imposed more and more totalitarian legislative actions that have made them appear alert and powerful Considering the data, it is tempting to attribute many of the actions taken by different governments to the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that explains how ignorant people overestimate their own competence and therefore make big mistakes, but I would say that this cannot be the only explanation since many very well-educated people also epidemiologists epidemiologists epidemiologists who they obviously know a lot about epidemiology have been contributing to the panic, instead the phenomenon makes me feel think about the 1976 essay The Basic Laws of Stupids written by Italian economic historian Carlo Chipola in this little perl Chipola describes five laws about stupid people who explain many of society's problems and begin to claim that the number of stupid people is not correlated with either the level of education or intelligence defined by IQ.

He finds stupid people everywhere, even among Nobel laureates. What defines stupid people is that their actions lead to bad outcomes for themselves and other people and they overestimate the dangers of infection. With a mortality rate of around 0.2 percent and at the same time ignoring the enormous negative effects of their actions it cannot be better described we have seen an entire generation of children out of school for over a year We have seen huge negative economic effects on businesses with the following of unemployment and bankruptcies and we have not even begun to see the full extent of the mental side effects this has on the population in the book In the Land of Security Junkies that I defined a

syndrome

that I called national panic syndrome For a country to suffer from the condition it needs it must have symptoms of panic and avoidance behavior, the more symptoms it has, the more severely affected the syndrome will be and, in a vicious circle, it also

leads

to People being too afraid to die at the same time makes the population less prepared and less able to handle real dangers.

People living in countries suffering from national panic syndrome can easily develop security addict syndrome. Security addict syndrome is characterized by seeking more and more security as you feel more and more insecure even though you live in the safest circumstances in history and the safer you are, the more things seem scary, as the Real dangers are well taken care of. For every real danger you get rid of, there will be at least 10 almost dangerous things. that will be updated to become real dangers, so the effect is that there will be more and more things to fear, therefore you will be afraid and you will probably also become lazy and you will most certainly act like a coward, but The most important thing is that if you are afraid that you are very easy to control, which is what we have seen during the pandemic.

National panic syndrome has become a global self-destructive behavior, but remember that it is all in your head for society to recover. We must all stop. Act risk averse and instead rationally begin to challenge our fears. Remember that life expectancy in the Western world is well over 80 years. The probability of dying from an infection that has a mortality rate of around 0.2 percent is at least negligible. If you do not belong to any risk group yes no if you do not the risk is even lower and whatever you do remember that life is not about living longer but the best if you live in fear and isolation there is no sense of life don't lock yourself away and don't let others do it to you try to live a good life timerelatively short you have because, as a wise man once said, life is hard, so you die, don't make it harder. you