Reflections on Corona times

 

It doesn’t matter what you think, might think, should think about the Corona crisis.

 

It doesn’t matter, if you prefer to follow catastrophic or over-optimistic studies. It doesn’t matter, if you trust more the good heart of some magnates or the desperation of the mob. It really doesn’t matter where you stand, in this crisis. It’s not a football match or a reality show, where you have to choose a side according to the color of the t-shirts or sympathy. It really doesn’t matter.

If you think that you still live in a – representative and mutilated – full democracy; if you think that nothing changed since 2019, since before the start of the crisis, think again. You are in denial, because as soon as you start with your explanations “the pandemic requires that” and such, you are admitting that it is in fact not as it used to be. If it were, you would not need any justifications.
It’s not even purely a matter of basic rights. Theoretically, there could be highly democratic governments with less basic rights, and in fact they did exist.
I know that many are affected by the one century long propaganda of the USA, where democracy means good and good means democracy, but the reality is that “democracy” is just word that describes one of many forms of government that have taken place on the planet in thousands of years. Citizens of the Roman Empire had basic rights, for sure different and more limited, but they did. Basic rights, historically speaking, are not an achievement of democracies. Democracy doesn’t necessarily mean the presence of numerous and significant basic rights. Democracy means the rule of the people, direct or indirect. That’s it.
That said, we could also agree with Churchill, when he said that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.”

Recently, I read a very accurate and brief description of what is happening with our basic rights, if we talk about them. “Die Grundrechte wurden pervertiert zum „Angebot“ an die Bürger, wenn sie „brav“ sind.”¹ Freely translated: “The basic rights have been perverted into offers to the citizens, if and when they behave.” If we talk about democracy, the Economist titles: “Global democracy has a very bad year, the pandemic caused an unprecedented rollback of democratic freedoms in 2020.”²

Even if we could admit that the results of these authoritarian measures, meant for the containment of the pandemic, were better than the ones that a less oligarchical government would have implemented, for example with a less drastic use of moral and civil police, army, propaganda and censorship; even if we admit that everything has been done with the best intentions, without any conflicts of interest, in the best possible way, this is not how democracy works.

Millions of people have been locked up, kept away from working, interacting, traveling, while restricted groups kept living as they used to. Propaganda, manipulation of words and their significance. Polarization and confrontation in the society have been encouraged and fomented. Free speech has been blamed and punished with censorship. Important measures have been implemented without a large consultation. Scientific opinions have been asked just to few complaint individuals, and not to a diverse plurality of equally qualified professionals. Poor people became poorer, rich became richer. Few categories have been protected, while others have been completely left alone to poverty and desperation.

If you’d prefer a different form of government, one could even talk about that, eventually. History provides a long list of already tested examples. We even have manuals for them, if some would bother to open a book. Empires, monarchies, absolute monarchies, enlightened, hereditary or not, theocracies of different kinds, dictatorships, oligarchies, republics, direct democracies, even small signs of matriarchy. Anything, really. Choose whatever you want. Put it to a vote, make a revolution, cut off the king’s head, as a long-lived European tradition wants. Ask a foreign power to help you out with it, we have a couple of possible candidates.

Whatever you think of the Corona crisis, if you think that on a sociopolitical level everything is, all considered, as it used to be, stop and think again.

“… yet until that day there had never been a trial for poisoning in Rome.

Their act was regarded as a prodigy, and suggested madness rather than felonious intent.”

(Titus Livius, 8.18.11)

 

The word “conspiracy” is an additional example of a word losing its meaning, due to sloganeering and propaganda. Its loss of significance happens especially these days, when the word became one of the most googled ones, as well as used on social media. Whether there is a connection between these two facts would also be a good question. I will use the word conspiracy in a neutral way, as it should.

 

What does the word “conspiracy” mean?

The word itself is Latin-derived, conspiratio, and it etymologically means “breathing together”. The most famous conspiracy in Roman history is the one of Catilina, trying to overthrow the government. Another similar word used by one of its protagonist and narrators, Cicero, was coniura, which has no English literal correspondent, and it means “taking an oath together”. As you can see, there is a component of ‘secret togetherness’. The difference between the two words is not relevant for our purpose.

In ancient sources you can find countless examples of conspiracies, even centuries earlier than Cicero and Catilina. Conspiracies were mostly against the governments and not executed by them, as the ones we are mostly familiar with. I apologize for the anachronistic use of the word “government”. One of the reasons is, and here I will require a brutal generalization, that governments, with not many exceptions, did not need any conspiracy to push their plans and policies on their people. Conspiracies require unacceptability: if an act, because of moral or legal reasons, is not admissible, a conspiracy helps bypass the problem. Not even in such a remote past, governments could literally do whatever they wanted without needing an excuse, and the few protests and revolts always involved mass killings in a more or less brutal and symbolic way, enslaving, imprisonment et similia.

This process of changing the significance of “conspiracy”, started already some time ago, knew a rapid acceleration during the last year. It is de facto becoming exclusively an empty defamatory slogan. There is little doubt that, since the Corona crisis started, an efficient way to defame an antagonist (in politics, science, on social media) is to call them “conspiracy theorist”. My observations are, of course, limited to the so-called Western World, but this does not mean that they are not valid even elsewhere.

Conspiracy theorists are the new MacCarthian communists. Never before the word “conspiracy” had such a negative connotation. Nowadays, being a conspiracy theorist is as immoral as being a conspirator could be, and with the addition of being also stupid and uneducated. “Conspiracy”, from having a neutral meaning, describing “a secret plan on the part of a group to influence events partly by covert action” (more or less, the definition that philosopher Charles Pigden gives), became in the common imaginary “any crazy idea made up by tinfoil hat wearers”. Once anything gets labeled as conspiracy, it magically becomes idiotic, ends up in the big cauldron of absurdities together with e.g. the flat earth theory and negationism (the ‘real’ one, i.e. Holocaust denial), and should deserve no attention.

 

A reason why this is happening now

This process is particularly evident now because of the extraordinary nature of the situation we live in. With the extreme pressure that it puts on us, as individuals and as society, the Corona crisis is a global one, in a more than ever globalized world. Nothing on a comparable scale has ever occurred before and interested the world as a whole. No war, no pandemic. Nothing.

One of the main historical events of the XXI century will help clarify this by opposition. “Conspiracy”, as everyone knows, is a word strictly connected with the events of the 11th September 2001. They have been brutal and scary, also created polarization and gave space to speculation like the Corona crisis did, but they did not affect the world as a whole, not directly. 9/11 did not personally touch everyone, not even in the Western World, whereas the Corona crisis and its consequences did. We all experienced and still experience it directly: who got sick, who died, who lost family or friends, who lost their job, money and mental health due to the restrictions. Who, sadly, earned money with it.

At this point, it is useful to remember that the 9/11 events have been the result of a conspiracy, and this fact does not make them less real. You might think that it was an inside job or Al-Qaeda. No matter what you think about it, you believe a conspiracy theory, therefore you are a conspiracy theorist, according to the present standards. Because, being a conspiracy theorist, these days, does not only mean to have proposed a conspiracy theory, but also to believe that a conspiracy happened or is happening. This is the kind of nonsense that sloganeering and propaganda spread.

 

How this is happening

There is, at least in the so-called Western World of the present, a fairly widespread certainty that a government could never allow, let alone cause, intentionally or unintentionally, any harm to its people. It is inconceivable that our government were involved in something illegal or against human rights. This is especially valid, of course, when Western World citizens talk of themselves. If they talk about ‘the others’, whoever these others are, everything starts to quickly look different. The examples are numerous: all Arab countries are terrorist, Russia poisons journalists, China spreads viruses, and so on. It can also be about other countries of the same Western World, e.g. the criticism against Sweden’s Corona crisis strategy. It does not matter, if these facts are true or not, partially or entirely, and it is somehow in human nature to expect worse things from ‘others‘ than from ‘our peers’. “We are civilized, while the others are barbarians at best, or savages.”

This is especially paradoxical, if we consider that that we live in the post-Wikileaks years. Not to mention everything that happened during the Cold War. Despite all of this, the instinctive reaction in front of similar facts is denial: “It cannot be true, it’s crazy!”

The only thing we can do, sometimes, is use our common sense, for the better or worse, because it is the only thing we have left. Nobody who is actually planning anything ill will come and tell you. To reject a theory only because it has been labelled “conspiracy theory” is a mistake.

 

Some facts

Questioning the authority and challenging the status quo has been the driving force behind most of the advancements in societies: from the birth of democracy in Athens in 508 b.C., to the Magna Carta in England in 1215, to the Spring of Nations in the Europe of 1848. Just to mention a couple of examples you might be familiar with. Dates are only indicative references.

In the XXI century it might appear more rational to blindly follow the guidance of a government, in this complex world we live in. Which, of course, it is more complex than ever. Except that it is not. It might sound more logical to trust a group of qualified people, who have been elected in a democratic way. After all, we have been living in a Rechtsstaat, in a constitutional state, already longer than one century, at least in the Western World. Nothing bad, really bad, could ever happen. Except that it did, it does, and it will again, given the right circumstances.

It is historically observable, as human and constitutional rights develop and raise in numbers and sophistication, how governments started recurring more and more to conspiracies to achieve their goals. Funny and logical, at the same time. As I already mentioned, kings, emperors and oligarchies did not need conspiracies or excuses of any kind in the past. No European government, at least prior 1848 (another reference date to be taken cum grano salis), has ever needed to justify a war in the eyes of its people; on the other hand, just to mention one of the last examples of a long list, the USA and the UK went to war in Iraq on a pretense, and they did so because they had to.

The list would be long. A few, even random, examples might show how, sometimes, reality surpasses fiction. The fact that a theory sounds crazy cannot be an argument to dismiss it. In the 20s, during the prohibitionism, the US government, in an attempt to discourage the consumption of alcoholic beverages, poisoned the industrial alcohols that they knew they would be stolen by bootleggers to produce drinkable spirits; in the 60s the Canadian government developed a machine that allegedly helped detection of homosexuals and, through it, excluded people from services; thanks to once-classified documents released in the past several years, we have learnt how high government officials distorted facts about events that led to the Vietnam War; former president Nixon, after denying any involvement in the Watergate affair, was found guilty and paid no consequences. There are hundreds and hundreds of examples regarding politics, war, food industry, pharmaceutical industry, sports, really anything one could think about, but I would like to shortly mention a last one that, given its proximity to our times, is mostly significant.

Especially after the developing of the Internet and the spread of use of mobile phones, there have been more and more rumours that the US government was spying on its population. As a matter of fact, not only on its population. Anyway, all of these rumours have always been refused by the authorities and ridiculed by the large majority of the population, until the day when, thanks to whistleblower Snowden in 2013, we came to know that the NSA was actually keeping track of millions and millions of people. This is a good example: a crazy theory, denied by the government, labelled as conspiracy and ridiculed publicly by the majority, has been found to be true after years. Still, when confronted with the possibility of governments collecting data on the population, some people would answer: “Why would they do it? It’s crazy, it makes no sense.”

A final note

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt in your philosophy. I always like to quote this. I know what some would say: “Yes, but those were ancient times.” Or: “Yes, those were the 40s, the 60s, the Whatevers.” “Yes, but now it’s different” is what a person who has not studied history, or actively decided to ignore or refuse it, would say.

Humankind lives under the perpetual illusion that we are the apex of civilization and, as a consequence, all the atrocities that happened in the past cannot happen now. This is one of our many errors in judgement: the arrogant approach towards history and cultural heritage that already lead to Operplatz, the obliterations of Mao and ISIS, and much more, until the ‘political correctness’ of the present, where Homer and Dante begin to suffer censorship. It is different, of course, but it comes exactly from the same arrogant and ignorant attitude. These mistakes have been made in the past and, most likely, will be made in the future. This is a general observation, but it does not make it less true or less fitting, even in the present circumstances.

Emperor Domitian, according to Svetonius, “used to say that the lot of emperors was most wretched, because they were not believed about a proven conspiracy unless they were killed.” Today, the significant difference is that many, even after the emperor is dead i.e. even after Snowden talks, still do not believe. Because a conspiracy is something that only tin foil hat wearers would take in consideration. We are more intelligent, more developed, more educated. We are better. Except that we are not.

The politics is failing.
It’s all a big show. It’s not about the essence of things, it’s about special effects, slogans and numbers. It’s about the politically correct. It’s a colorful present box with nothing inside.
The box of the present.

Mask yes, mask no. Before, if you put a mask, you were an idiot. Then, if you didn’t put a mask, you were an idiot. Now, there will always be someone considering you an idiot, whatever you do.
You’re an idiot, anyway, and your leaders tell you so.

Random numbers. Curfew at 23, at 22, at 21, let’s try. Maximum number of people meeting together. Weeks of quarantine. Infections, much more, much less. Deaths, do gunshots count? Duration of antibodies and of the effect of vaccines. Strains of the virus. Pick a number. We’ll use a roulette to decide. A Russian one, for some. The constitution? Nobody reads that crap, anymore. Many are already exempted from respecting it, anyway.
L’état, c‘est moi. Was it Gerard Depardieu?

The ‘what’s the big deal?’ process goes faster and faster, every day. It’s just the distance; it’s just a mask; it’s just an app; it’s just a form to contact you in case; it’s just a conspiracy; it’s just a deleted post; it’s just a deleted video; it’s just a deleted page; it’s just for a month; it’s just for two more weeks; it’s just so you can meet family and friends soon; it’s just so that you can meet them, but not so soon; it’s just a few freelancers; it’s just a small company; it’s just your freedom; it’s just your life.
It’s just one thing, what’s the big deal?

Life and health of billions on the market, an auction. My vaccine is 80% effective! Mine is 90%! Now, mine is 93.5%! But mine is 95%, it’s better! Who offers more? Now, yours is not safe anymore, people are dying. Yes, but they die because they’re weak and old, whereas with the virus they would die because they’re old and weak.
My news are faker than yours, damn right, they’re faker than yours.

Science. Let’s listen to the scientists, but not all of them. Just some, especially the rich ones. They must be right, if they made so much money and managed to have big companies. There are also others, yes. They studied this their whole life, PhD, working in labs, underpaid. They say things I don’t like and they’re not rich. This one developed an operating system famous for having a lot of viruses, it must have something to do with it, I’ll listen to him instead. They’re doing this for us. Novel ‘Jesuses Christs’, sacrificing themselves for us, and resurrecting in less than three days.
Can you imagine, how much money they gave away? Only for our salvation.

The light lock-down. We can go to the shopping mall, buying shit we don’t need, hundreds and hundreds of people under the same roof, packed in elevators of a building made by Escher, but it’s prohibited to be more than a bunch while training, playing, dancing. The normal lock-down. H&M is open, but gyms are closed. For sure, this will improve people’s health. Together with Netflix and McDonald’s to go. The mega lock-down. You didn’t behave, did you? Now, everything will be closed and it’s your fault. If you are good, I’ll give you some pocket money, and maybe we will go on vacation this summer. What’s coming, afterwards? The titano-lock-down? The ludicrous lock-down? Do you get inspiration from a dinosaurs manual or from Mel Brooks’ movies, to make up names for the new measures?
Words without meaning, but strictly in English, even in non-English-speaking countries, because it’s cooler.

One year has passed and nothing has been done by the politics. Some use the carrot, some use the stick, some both. That’s it. Nothing more, anywhere. No plan, no strategy. Restrictions. Some say they work, some say they don’t. Be that as it may, they are not a viable solution forever. Forever is, in fact, the possible duration of the crisis. Vaccines raise distrust, even the CEO of one producing company doesn’t look very keen to take it. Even if the whole population were fine with it, it seems that it would take years to vaccinate a decent percentage of the population. Nobody knows anything. There’s no chance to understand anything, all the messages are scrambled. There is no coherent message, not from national or supranational institutions. Ignorance, in its most ethymological meaning.

Politics is not doing anything to guarantee a decent level of social cohesion, plus it’s worsening the situation. The frequent allusions and suggestions that the ‘good citizen’ should report the neighbor, in case there is suspicion of transgression. Leaders humilating protesters, and abusing of the state of emergency for implementing unconstitutional measures. Politics is betraying its main purpose: trying to keep people together and safe. The transformation of a health problem in a moral one. A matter of science became a matter of faith. The slogan of solidarity. A new kind of solidarity, a one-way one.

One against the other. For what and why, exactly?

What you can do is deciding what side you’re on. It’s a big football match. What’s your favorite team? What colors do you prefer? Plain or striped? The alternative? Have some popcorn and enjoy the shitshow. If you can.

 

 

“The saddest thing that I’d ever seen / Were smokers outside the hospital doors”.
A song from The Editors, thirteen years ago. A different me in a different world. All changes, all stays the same.

 

I’m on the side of a trafficked road, waiting for the green light. An older woman, mask and plastic visor on, decides to try her luck and crosses with the red light. Loud horn and shouting. A car almost hits other people, in order to avoid her. She survived and gets to the supermarket one minute sooner than me.
Is a mask enough to protect us from ourselves? Is safety what we are looking for?

This is madness. It surrounds us, it always did. We do what we are told. Like those smokers outside the hospital doors, damaging actively themselves, passively the others. The saddest thing that I’d ever seen.

“One way of trying to undermine independent thought and creative
approaches to the world is to simply destroy the way of talking about things,
so the words literally almost have no meaning. In fact by now, just about
every word that is used in political discourse has at least two meanings:
a literal meaning and its opposite. And it’s the opposite that is normally used.”

(Noam Chomsky, a talk on the 17th of January, 2008)

Change is a constant. Panta rhei. This is Heraclitus, not I.
Changes have always been happening. Challenging times are catalysts for change, where these processes mostly emerge, where they become more numerous, fast and abrupt. From the radical political changes after revolutions, to the technological advancements during wars. Changes can also be worrying signs, especially when the processes are not gradual, but leaps. Cataclysmic events of the past are good examples.

I must admit, I have not closely followed the development of the Covid19 crisis. I have read some articles about it. How this virus should be different from the common flu viruses. I also read some numbers: deaths, infections, asymptomatics. The restrictions, and how they are different and the same according to countries. Luckily, I do not get bombed by media.
I have not read everything in a detailed way. The only education about these topics I received at high school, a scientific one. I know grosso modo, what DNA and RNA is, what viruses and bacteria are, but this does not give me the possibility of appreciating completely the matter, let alone of writing anything about it.
This is the downside of being part of a super specialized civilization. We just know our own small thing, and nothing else. We are already slaves of our technology, we do not even need to wait for the singularity. On the other hand, I am pretty confident I might survive fairly long, in a post-apocalyptic world. At least until I lose or break my glasses.

I apologize for the excursus, it was stronger than I. Where were we?
Change, and when it becomes worrying. What attracted my attention is, how some words lost or changed suddenly their meaning during this crisis. Mind you, this is nothing new. My good old friend Thucydides, in that Athens of 2400 years ago brought to their knees by war and plague, has been one of the many, and indeed one of the first, writers who observed this process¹, and justly gave it a negative connotation. He is also quoted in the book of J.B. White, “When words lose their meaning”. An extremely interesting read. Thucydides, too. First love never dies.

Let’s go, finally, in medias res.
I spotted the subject months ago, when I repeatedly observed the use of the word “negationism” in pandemic-related articles and talks. At first, I just thought that people were mindlessly trying to denigrate each other through comparisons with the Nazis. As a friend recently pointed out, Godwin’s law² seems to apply quite often. Then, by reading more accurately, I discovered that negationism and its derivates were used to describe the people who criticize the official narrative of the the Covid19 crisis. They are thought not to believe in the existence of the virus, i.e. they negate its very existence.

There are two main points worthy of discussion, here.

The first point is, whether these protesters really negate the existence of the virus itself. It appears that the percentage of people who negate the very existence of the virus is insignificant. You have, on the other hand, all kind of approaches, among the ‘criticizers’: the ones who believe it comes from a secret laboratory; the ones who believe it comes from the aliens or the devil; the ones who believe it is just a normal flu; the ones who believe it is not dangerous at all; the ones who are just criticizing the measures that governments took to face it (which has per se nothing to do with the existence or non-existence of the virus).
Should everything be open for debate? Maybe not. The more years pass, the more I find myself growing an oligarch spirit, in an ancient sense. Some weeks ago I even read a supposed-to-be scientific article, where it is argued that smoking can have a protective effect against the virus³. Back to the fifties, where smoking was healthy. You can literally find all kinds of things, sadly.
We can already easily see, how the “negationism” word is used as a slogan. At best, a stupid one. Almost nobody negates the existence of the virus. This is not relevant and cannot describe the general attitude of the ones who reject, justly or unjustly, out of different reasons, acceptable or not, the official narrative. Still, a new meaning for this word has been forced into our heads.

The second point, which is the most worrying one, is how this process strips the word “negationism” of its most recent – and by far more important – meaning. I am talking, of course, about the Holocaust. Yes, I know, Godwin.
It is worrying, because we, as society, have not yet completely dealt with the World War II genocide. Mainly, because physiological reasons. We have not dealt with any genocide, as a matter of fact, but that is a different and larger topic. Even though we have recordings, pictures, witnesses and material evidence, there are still people who believe that there was no Holocaust. This is, by the way, a fitting example of negating the very existence of a fact.
I would love to say that using the word “negationism” in the Covid19 matter is only bad taste. I really would love to say that, but it looks more like a matter of ignorance. Or stupidity. Or both. Many surveys find “a shocking lack of Holocaust knowledge”⁴. Many people, especially the younger ones, are either not sure about it or deny it. Some even think that it was caused by the Jews themselves. Why not by the aliens?
I have been confronted about this topic. After having explained my points and concerns, the most common reply will leave you with eyes wide open. It has been argued that, since negationism comes from negate, the people who negate the existence of the virus (or a virus, or of Nutella, for what it is worth) are definable as negationists. Words and symbols change its significance. Holocaust, itself, does not literally mean “genocide of Jews”, but not many would think about animal sacrifices, if one talks about it. As well as, if I tattooed a swastika on my chest, I do not think that people would take me as a sun god Mithra worshiper.

Thank you, Godwin, you have been a great company.

There are plenty of words that changed abruptly significance during this crisis. Thanks to the manipulative attitude of media and the ignorance of people, but also thanks to the ignorance of the media and the manipulative attitude of people. Another interesting word that can be briefly analyzed in this way is “conspiracy”. I will dedicate some time to it in a different moment. For now, I only wish I knew who introduced the word “negationism” in the Covid19 discussions, and when. I would really like to know, if it is ignorance or manipulation. I bet for the first, but I will remain open-minded.

Confucius talks about the power of words⁵. Now, I do not want to imply that Chomsky is a reincanation of Confucius. Just that, if we only consider that two of the noblest thinkers humanity has ever seen hinted to the same thing, mutatis mutandis, at the fair distance of 2500 years and even more miles, it must be something we should take in consideration.

 

Notes