Written by: Adam Riggio

Pandemics are different threats than most of us are accustomed to dealing with, especially in the politics of powerful states. We’re used to having enemies that act with intentions, that themselves think and desire as individuals like us. We fear war, but we understand it. Fighting a contagion requires thinking like a mechanism: no desire or goal, only movement. We fight it only by blocking its movement.

Spontaneous Solidarity and Friendship Among Strangers

A pandemic is not a person, and so our response to it must not be personal. The danger of COVID-19 is that it leaps so easily from person to person, until entire communities and societies are infected. Therefore, social isolation is the most important element of fighting a contagion. The fewer casual or barely noticeable contacts that people have with others, the fewer routes COVID-19 has to move.

The irony of this social isolation is that we’re cutting ourselves off from casual human contact to maintain the fabric of our society. Social solidarity, in times of shared struggle, often emerges. Many Americans have organized public Google docs to share resources and coordinate actions to support the elderly, immunosuppressed, and even working to maintain the incomes of workers at risk of losing jobs or homes.

Even the small gestures to spread happiness in trying times are enough to encourage our own acts of care. People singing to each other from their apartment balconies is one beautiful viral example, even if videos showing corporate-owned pop song balcony serenades are all fake overdubs.

These displays are rooted in a fundamental element of human nature: we are social creatures, genuinely unable to survive and thrive as a species if we organized as fully isolated, self-sufficient individuals. Solidarity is a natural human instinct: we have always survived by accepting strangers as part of our communities, and building relationships of regularly helping each other.

Fear Overcomes Us Too Easily

If humanity is such a peaceful, cooperative species whose primary instinct is building relationships of mutual aid and reciprocity; then our entire modern economy of the exploitation and abandonment of ordinary working people is a pretty serious counter-argument. Greed, lust for control over others, and a variety of other corruptions have haunted us humans since the very beginning. The most relevant kind of human corruption in this moment is fear.

A society already overcome with a pandemic is no longer a society. Such a community has become paranoid and desperate. Desperation rises from the hopelessness of a deadly enemy surrounding you, and paranoia rises from our fear that anyone around you could be the source of the infection that kills you. We see this fear in the pathetic boasts of the American president, who demonizes the virus with the racializing epithet, ‘Chinese.’

When we become conscious of the uncontrollable danger of the world, we lapse into reflexes of fear, demonization, and aggression. Our fear reduces us to our raw individuality, and we see every other person around us as a threat. We in the West are especially prone to this fearful reactive aggression; as a result of of the strong role individualism plays in our culture politics, morality, and conceptions of what it is to be a good person.

It is all too easy for us Westerners to cut ourselves off from our communities. Even as the need for physical isolation brings out our community relationships, the fear of death from the virus brings out the aggression and selfishness that tears our communities apart.

No Room for Individuals

These individualistic drives have no place in a pandemic, since they drive only continued suffering. It takes only a few illustrations of such self-centred ego to see the common concept: the rejection of our obligations to others.

In Chicago, thousands refused to self-quarantine as the Illinois governor Pritzker cancelled events and urged people to stay distant. Some bars refused to do without the revenue from St. Patrick’s Day, and many citizens refused to alter their lives for reasons that echo the perseverance of American culture after the Sept. 11 attacks. But most often, public attitudes reflected ignorance, using hand sanitizer superficially or not at all while partying in the downtown.

This is despite the real risks of attempting to live life as usual during a pandemic, simply because you’re in a demographic less likely to become deathly ill. One person can cause the infection of thousands and the deaths of many, as in the case of South Korea’s Patient 31, a Daegu woman whose trips to church while in denial of her infection resulted in nearly 80% of COVID-19 infections in that country.

Those who have to keep working among people to maintain their financial stability will be the worst hit, as one rideshare driver reflected as he dropped his son back at his ex-partner’s house. “A passenger will give it to me, and I will give it to her. And someday, I will have to explain to my son why I needed money so badly that I killed his mother.”

“I Really Don’t Care. Do You?”

Right-wing leaders in both Canada and the United States have railed against measures to prevent infection, often dismissing them as alarmist, socialist, or even veiled anti-democratic coups. Washington, for example, is one of the hardest-hit parts of the United States, and Governor Jay Inslee has taken proactive measures to contain the contagion. One of his Republican opponents in this year’s upcoming election, however, urged patriotic Americans to gather in large groups, openly defying the state government’s ban on public gatherings an assault on individual freedom.

Ontario didn’t escape the medical foot-dragging enabled by individualist ideology. Despite Doug Ford’s Tuesday declaration of a formal state of emergency, his government has restricted the distribution of COVID-19 tests. Ford’s cuts to Ontario’s public health department continue, despite reality’s clearly having demonstrated how necessary robust public health infrastructure is for society.

Forced into action by a real pandemic, Ford’s refusal to reconsider public health cuts is another sign that he, like many conservatives, believe that community-focused health measures are socialist scams to push public money into ephemeral programs.

Ultimately, the failure of modern conservative ideology to contain the pandemic effectively lies in its indifference to the needs of people as they relate to each other in society. When the individual is all that matters, social solidarity becomes impossible, because simply fulfilling whatever self-centred desire you feel at the moment becomes your highest ideal. It deserves no more justification than stating the desire, “I’ll do what I want.”

Any society that reacts in such a way to a contagion as dangerous as COVID-19, individualist desires in denial of social obligation itself, is doomed. Thankfully, there is more to human potential than this raw selfishness.