Over Memorial Day weekend, I watched the new Lord of the Flies on Netflix and found myself thinking back to high school, when I first read William Golding's novel. Like many readers, I was struck then by its brutal insight: beneath the surface of civilization lies a darker human instinct that can emerge quickly when fear, isolation, and group pressure take hold. As an adult who lived through COVID-19, I now read it as a cautionary tale about exactly what happened.
That is the lesson COVID-19 should have taught us. Instead, much of the governing class concluded that an emergency was not a condition to manage but a power to retain. Public officials, public-health elites, and their media allies spoke the language of caution and concern. The effect was often something closer to coercion. Skepticism became selfishness. Dissent became danger. Obedience was dressed up as civic virtue.
I've coached youth football and rugby for years, and I've testified as an expert witness in federal and state courts on fiduciary duty. Both roles demand the same thing: accurate information, honest judgment, and the willingness to say what's true rather than what's comfortable. The lockdown years were a masterclass in the opposite. Dissenting doctors and scientists were labeled anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, their medical licenses were investigated and their peer-reviewed papers were retracted. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn actively suppressed views that challenged the prevailing orthodoxy, not because the evidence was wrong, but because it was inconvenient.
Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, has written repeatedly about what happens when government enlists private platforms to do its censorship for it. The Supreme Court's Murthy v. Missouri decision in 2024 disposed of the case on standing grounds alone, declining to reach the First Amendment merits — which means the underlying question remains live and unresolved. When government officials pressure social media companies to suppress speech, whose ox is being gored? The answer, as usual, is the public.
Thomas Sowell has spent a career documenting how concentrated power corrupts institutions, and Covid handed those institutions a stress test they failed. Overreach rarely arrives in jackboots. More often, it arrives wrapped in paternalism. Authorities tell citizens they're acting "for your own good" while insisting ordinary people are too reckless, too emotional, or too ignorant to be trusted with their own judgment. The implication isn't merely that the public should comply. It's that the public should be grateful.
The damage wasn't limited to policy errors, though there were plenty of those. It was cultural, moral, and measurable. One billion children missed a year of in-person schooling. Research consistently shows students lost roughly a third of a school year’s worth of learning, with the worst outcomes concentrated among the most disadvantaged kids. The proportion of youth experiencing a major depressive episode rose from 9.1 percent in 2019 to 18.3 percent in 2023. My own kids were in school during those years. I watched what isolation, remote learning, and constant ambient dread did to teenagers who had done nothing wrong except to be born at an inconvenient moment in history.
Golding understood that crowds can become moral solvents. Under the right conditions, people who would never see themselves as cruel will shame, isolate, and punish those who fail to conform. That dynamic was everywhere during the lockdown years. Neighbors monitored neighbors. Media outlets stoked anxiety. Anyone who questioned the orthodoxy on closures, mandates, or prolonged restrictions risked being branded not as a dissenter but as a menace. The word "superspreader" was weaponized to describe both a viral event and a political opinion.
The media bears its share of responsibility. Fear is a powerful instrument, and the loudest voices are often the most willing to use it. They didn't merely report public panic; they amplified it, sharpened it, and monetized it. That made it easier for officials to justify heavy-handed measures and harder for citizens to hear reason when it mattered most. The same outlets that spent years insisting the lab-leak hypothesis was a fringe conspiracy theory had to issue quiet corrections when both the FBI and the Department of Energy assessed a Wuhan lab incident as the most likely origin of the virus, the FBI at moderate confidence, the DOE at low confidence. No apologies. No accountability. Just a slow pivot to the next panic cycle.
Once a society learns that fear justifies suppression, it becomes easier to normalize the suppression itself. The habit of deference grows. Institutions become less accountable. Leaders discover that a crisis is useful precisely because it lets them expand their reach while claiming they're merely protecting the public from itself. That's the quiet corruption Golding captures so well. It doesn't announce itself as cruelty. It arrives as benevolence. It speaks the language of concern while consolidating authority. It tells citizens that disagreement is dangerous and that the highest form of patriotism is compliance.
Burke described civilization as a partnership "not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." That obligation requires active maintenance in every generation. What COVID-19 revealed is that the fight doesn't always happen on a battlefield. Sometimes it happens in a school board meeting, a press conference, or a social media moderation queue. A free people should be wary whenever rulers claim exclusive ownership of safety and demand silence from anyone who asks hard questions. The line between order and chaos isn't secured by good intentions alone. It's secured by limits on power, respect for dissent, and the refusal to let fear become policy.
Golding got there first. The island was fictional. The lesson isn't.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
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