sleep walking into dystopia

Estimated 4 minutes read: Narratives, Weaponized Words, and the Shifting Ground Beneath Our Feet in 2020

The government wants you to believe the stories it tells are neutral, factual, only concerned with the ‘public good.’ Maybe sometimes that’s true, if ‘sometimes’ means ‘theoretically possible.’ But you don’t need to be a behavioral linguist to see it—the way the official narratives are shaped and sharpened, like a scalpel or a cudgel, depending on what’s needed. The information around Covid-19 didn’t escape this. Not even close.

Even naming it: “Covid-19,” “CoronaVirus.” Already, those words, just by existing in the body of an article, are like tripwires for the content police of the internet. Algorithms digest them, chew up the context, and quietly push the piece down, down, down in search results. Try posting about it, and the networks, invisible and humming, will make sure fewer people see it. Information is filtered, debate is trimmed away, the story’s boundaries are set like the walls of a newly raised cellblock. If you’re paying attention, you feel it.

Listen to the UK government, listen to any government, really, and let the language roll over you like a fog. There’s what they say, and what they don’t say, and what they never quite say but is obvious in the gaps between words. In those first days, the scripts were almost universal. “Flu-like symptoms.” “Died with underlying health conditions.” Repeated like they were disclaimers on a drug commercial.

Neither statement was fully true. Everyone knows it now. The rational argument—that they just didn’t know, that it was new, we were all learning together. Maybe so. But if you’d been reading the dispatches from Wuhan at the very beginning, you’d have known doctors were describing something closer to pneumonia than the sniffles, and plenty of healthy people—not just the frail or the sickly, but everyday men and women with only the mildest conditions or none at all—were dying.

The easier answer is that those phrases were chosen, workshopped and carved until they did exactly what needed to be done: soothe the public, smooth the edges off fear, head off panic before it began. But an anesthetic always leaves a trace. People noticed. The trust between public and government stretched, thinned. When the officials slipped up, caught under pressure and admitting they’d softened the truth ‘so as not to cause a panic,’ you could almost hear the collective mental click: If they lied to us about this, what else are they hiding, or worse, outright lying about?

And then the metaphors changed. Suddenly, the air itself was thick with war-talk. “Fight.” “War.” Health workers “on the front line.” The word choices were not accidental. This is how you get people ready. First, you set the context: this is a war. Invisible enemies, battle lines, the city as a battlefield. Then, you can introduce soldiers in the streets, patrols, curfews, the suspension of rights that used to be untouchable. In that new landscape, nothing feels out of place—not even the language of force. If you want to see where this goes, look up Tim Hawkins 2016 piece on political language and the “normalizing” of militarization. A blueprint, ready for repurposing.

Language as weapon; words as wedges. When the laws change during emergencies, when rights are clipped ‘just for now,’ they rarely grow back. The justifications are always the same: for your protection, for the common good, for the safety of the many. Temporary, they say, but the ink never fades. It happened after 9/11, and it happened again during Covid-19. Privacy and freedom become conditional, traded away for surveillance, for tracking, for knowing who belongs to which group, who says what—even, with the right bio-tools, who feels what and when.

The “invisible enemy” narrative: it made the lockdowns seem like strategic retreats, not forced confinements. Free movement became a luxury, not a given, and the police gained teeth to enforce new rules. Contact-tracing apps appeared, collecting data without so much as a proper debate about what, exactly, was being signed away. Privacy, recast as a relic of a less ‘dangerous’ age.

It’s not just what you do—it’s what you get used to. New technologies float in: facial recognition, health monitoring, psychological tracking. Maybe it sounds paranoid, but this is not science fiction. Already operational, right now, in China and parts of the Middle East. Devices that can read your body temperature, your pulse, cross-reference it with where you are, who you’re with. Reasoning backwards, they could probably guess your emotional reaction to a Prime Minister’s speech. Whether you cheer, or feel sick, or want to march in the streets. Imagine a future where dissent is mapped by heartbeats and outrage is flagged by a spike in your blood pressure. Maybe you think, Not here. Not in the West. But memory isn’t that short. The surveillance state after 9/11 is still alive, still collecting. And power, once acquired, never just dissolves.

The weaponization of language, the normalization of militarized thinking, the slow, steady trade of civil rights for a sense of safety—it’s not a new game. But when you add in the movement restrictions, then simmer it together with riots and protests, you can feel the world pivoting toward a new normal—a recalibration that tastes a little like ash. And once changed, how easy is it to change again?

Maybe the idea of eternal digital surveillance doesn’t worry you. Fine. But at least pay attention to the words themselves. Repetition is a narcotic. The brain accepts the mantras: fighting the virus, saving lives, protecting the NHS. But under the slogans, the actual policy drifts, the boundaries slip. Not a conspiracy, exactly, but a sequence of moves, each justified by the last. The only real defense is critical thinking, behavioral analysis, metacognition. Take the words apart, look at how they fit together, refuse to swallow the story whole. That’s not cynicism. It’s survival.

Governments know this, and the daily briefings are the most reliable stage in town—a mix of emergency bulletin and party-political broadcast. In the US, Trump turned it into a campaign rally, sometimes literally. In the UK, the packaging was more refined, depending on who was at the lectern, but the message was always polished, always a little too complimentary about the ruling party, always sharpening the brand.

This is important: if you let it, the daily repetition seeps in. You internalize the story, you start to feel for the guy at the podium, even if you swore you never would. Maybe you remember him from TV, from back when politics was a punchline, not a power play. He seems less like a threat, more like someone muddling through. The harsh words, the ugly rumors, the cuts to the NHS—all of it blurs. The performance is almost relaxing.

Don’t let the lullaby work. The true power of language is how it shapes the way you see the world, how it becomes the water you swim in. Words change how you think and feel, and feelings change your brain chemistry. If you want to stay sane, you have to see the strings.

That’s it, really. The only way through is to train your ability to think about thinking—to keep your edge sharp, accept the data, but always question the wrapper it comes in. That’s the truest peace available in times like these. Stay awake. Don’t just accept the script they hand you.