There are surveys that do provide some insight and amongst their more surprising findings is that instrumental considerations - that is, personal fear of the virus or of coercion by the State - may have been relatively unimportant in driving compliance with the lockdown rules.
If Buchanan's diagnosis is correct, we may have accepted the lockdowns because they fit with a long-standing pattern of expectation that we have of the State.
If lockdowns were made possible by popular parentalistic expectations, then legal reform, though obviously welcome, may prove insufficient and powerless against the very real threat of 'voluntary' lockdowns, whereby a population complies with a stay-at-home request without needing it to be made a legal requirement.
Britain has been drilled to comply with lockdown under a future pandemic, the chief executive of the 'nudge unit' has said.
Speaking on the Lockdown Files podcast, the government adviser Prof Halpern predicted that the country would comply with another 'stay at home' order because they "Kind of know what the drill is."
The threat of voluntary lockdowns should lead lockdown sceptics to cast their net beyond the institutions of the State and bring them to confront the harder-to-limn, bottom-up drivers of lockdown like parental socialism.
Critics of lockdown need to go beyond criticising the public institutions and individuals who designed COVID-19 policy, and to start attacking the popular mindset that made them thinkable and practicable in the first place.
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