Film Slavoj Žižek We’re all in the same Boat now – and it’s the Diamond Princess

As Martin Luther King put it more than half a century ago: “We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.” If we don’t start to behave like that, we may well all end up on a ship called Diamond Princess.

Li Wenliang, the doctor who first discovered the ongoing epidemics and was censored by authorities, was an authentic hero of our time, something like the Chinese Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, so no wonder that his death triggered widespread anger.

The predictable reaction to how the Chinese state deals with the epidemics is best rendered by Verna Yu’s comment “If China valued free speech, there would be no coronavirus crisis”:“Unless Chinese citizens’ freedom of speech and other basic rights are respected, such crises will only happen again. /…/ Human rights in China may appear to have little to do with the rest of the world but as we have seen in this crisis, disaster could occur when China thwarts the freedoms of its citizens. Surely it is time the international community takes this issue more seriously.”

True, one can say that the whole functioning of the Chinese state apparatus runs against old Mao’s motto “Trust the people!” – it is based on the premise that one should NOT trust the people: the people should be loved, protected, taken care of… but not trusted. This distrust is just the culmination of the same stance displayed by the Chinese authorities when they are dealing with reactions to ecological protests or problems with workers’ health.

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Chinese authorities more and more seem to resort to a particular procedure: a person (an ecological activist, a Marxist student, the chief of Interpol, a religious preacher, a Hong Kong publisher, even a popular movie actress) just disappears for a couple of weeks (before they reappear in public with specific accusations raised against them), and this protracted period of silence delivers the key message: power is exerted in an impenetrable way where nothing has to be proven, legal reasoning comes afterwards when this basic message is taken…

But the case of disappearing Marxist students is nonetheless specific: while all disappearances concern individuals whose activities can be somehow characterized as a threat to the state, the disappearing Marxist students legitimize their critical activity by a reference to the official ideology itself.

What triggered such a panicky reaction in the Party leadership was, of course, the spectre of a network of self-organization emerging through direct horizontal links between groups of students and workers, and based in Marxism, with sympathy in some old party cadres and even parts of the army. Such a network directly undermines the legitimacy of the Party rule and denounces it as an imposture. No wonder, then, that, in the last years, closed down many “Maoist” websites and prohibited many Marxist debate groups at universities – the most dangerous thing to do today in China is to believe in and take seriously the official ideology itself. China is now paying the price for such stance:

“The coronavirus epidemic could spread to about two-thirds of the world’s population if it cannot be controlled, according to Hong Kong’s leading public health epidemiologist Gabriel Leung. People needed to have faith and trust in their government while the uncertainties of the new outbreak were worked out by the scientific community, he said, “and of course when you have social media and fake news and real news all mixed in there and then zero trust, how do you fight that epidemic?” You need extra trust, extra sense of solidarity, extra sense of goodwill, all of which have been completely used up.”

There should be more than one voice in a healthy society, said doctor Li from his hospital bed just prior to his death, and this urgent need for other voices to be heard does not necessarily mean the Western type of multiparty democracy, it just calls for an open space for citizens’ critical reactions to be heard. The chief argument against the idea that state has to control rumors to prevent panic is that this control itself spreads distrust and thus creates even more rumors of conspiracies – only a mutual trust between ordinary people and the state can do the work.

A strong state is needed in times of epidemics since large-scale measures have to be performed with military discipline (like quarantine). China was able to quarantine tens of millions, and we should just imagine the same massive epidemics in the US – would the state be able to enforce the same measures? One can bet that thousands of libertarians with arms would fight their way out suspecting that the quarantine is a state conspiracy…

So would it have been possible to prevent the outbreak with more freedom of speech, or is China now sacrificing Hubei to save the world? In some sense, both versions are true, and what makes things even worse is that there is no easy way to separate the “good” freedom of speech from the “bad” rumours. When critical voices complain that “the truth will always be treated as a rumour” by the Chinese authorities, one should add that the official media and the vast domain of digital news are already full of rumors.

A blistering case of rumours was provided one of the main Russian national TV networks, Channel One, which launched a regular slot devoted to coronavirus conspiracy theories on its main evening news programme, Vremya („Time“). The style of the reporting is ambiguous, appearing to debunk the theories while leaving viewers with the impression that they contain a kernel of truth. The message (shadowy Western elites and especially the US are somehow ultimately to blame for coronavirus epidemics) is thus propagated as a doubtful rumour: it’s too crazy to be true, but nonetheless, who knows…

The suspension of actual truth strangely doesn’t annihilate its symbolic efficiency. Plus we should even nit shirk from the possibility that, sometimes, not telling the entire truth to the public can effectively prevent panic which could lead to further victims. At this level, the problem cannot be solved – the only way out is the mutual trust between the people and the state apparatuses, and this is what is sorely missing in China.

If a world-wide epidemics will develop, are we aware that market mechanisms will not be enough to prevent chaos and hunger? Measures that appear to most of us today as “Communist” will have to be considered on a global level: coordination of production and distribution outside the coordinates of the market. One should recall here the Irish potato famine from 1840s which devastated Ireland, with millions dead or compelled to emigrate. The British state retained their trust into market mechanisms, and Ireland was exporting food even when millions were suffering… A similar brutal solution is hopefully no longer acceptable today.

One can read the ongoing coronavirus epidemics as an inverted version of G.H.Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1897), the story of how Martians conquered earth, the desperate hero-narrator discovers that all the Martians have been killed by an onslaught of earthly pathogens to which they had no immunity: ”slain, after all man‘s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth”. It is interesting to note that, according to Wells, the plot arose from a discussion with his brother Frank about the catastrophic effect of the British on indigenous Tasmanians. What would happen, he wondered, if Martians did to Britain what the British had done to the Tasmanians? The Tasmanians, however, lacked the lethal pathogens to defeat their invaders.

Perhaps, epidemics which threaten to decimate humanity should be treated as Wells’ story turned around: the “Martian invader” ruthlessly exploiting and destroying life on earth are we ourselves, humanity, and, after all devices of highly developed primates to defend themselves from us had failed, we are now threatened “by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth”, stupid viruses which just blindly reproduce themselves – and mutate.

We should of course analyze in detail social conditions which made the coronavirus epidemic possible – just think about how, in today’s interconnected world, a British guy meeting someone in Singapore returns to England and then goes skiing to France, infecting there four others… the usual suspects are waiting in line to be questioned: global capitalist market, etc. However, we should nonetheless resist the temptation to treat the ongoing epidemics as something that has a deeper meaning: the cruel but just punishment of humanity for the ruthless exploitation of other forms of life on earth or whatever…

But if we search for such a hidden message, we remain premodern: we treat our universe as a partner in communication. Even if our very survival is threatened, there is something reassuring in the fact that we are punished – the universe (or even Somebody-out-there) is looking at us… The really difficult thing to accept is the fact that the ongoing epidemics is a result of natural contingency at its purest, that it just happened and hides no deeper meaning. In the larger order of things, we are a species which doesn’t matter.

Reacting to the threat posed by the coronavirus outbreak, Netanyahu immediately offered help and coordination to the Palestinian authority – not out of goodness and human consideration, but for the simple fact that it is impossible to separate Jews and Palestinians there – if one group is affected, the other will be inevitably also hit. This is the reality which we should translate into politics – now it’s the time to drop the “America (or whoever) first” motto. As Martin Luther King put it more than half a century ago: “We may have all come on different ships, but we‘re in the same boat now.” If we don’t start to behave like that, we may well all end up on a ship called Diamond Princess.