Brave sealed world –Conclusion: Deliverance
This story comes last in a five-parts reading about the pandemic. It argues that the outbreak has vertiginously accelerated a worldwide authoritarian trend that has been rampant for twenty years.
- Introduction: 28 Days Later
about the strange hopes triggered by the outbreak at its western beginning - Part 1: Contagion
about the mechanisms that triggered panic among citizens, markets and governments - Part 2: Parasite
how differing interests orchestrated the panic to mute the public debate - Part 3: The Discreet Charm of the Authority
how the proclaimed epidemiological success of China and the Asian Dragons becomes one more nail in a twenty-years-old coffin
Conclusion: Deliverance
an argument that a tightly controlled society is already at the very root of the crisis.
Conclusion: Deliverance
Are there any reasons at all to hope for positive results of this crisis? Indeed, yes. Because in the end, this crisis might act as a revelator for the authoritarian tendencies at work. Because the new wave of inequalities triggered by the outbreak might come too strong, too harsh, and finally break the camel’s back. And because after the panic, the mother of all evils will be exposed.
All the President’s Men
In the long run, or maybe not even that long, COVID-19 could shift the balance of power away from authoritarian responses. When the time of the reckoning comes — meaning when the pandemic will have lastingly receded, either because a treatment or a vaccine has been found, or because global population has reached herd immunity — hopefully diverse policies will be faced, with objective metrics to compare them.
Not all societies opted for an authoritarian response. Countries such as Sweden did not close the schools, did not confine its citizens, did not deploy a new legal arsenal to fight the outbreak. The response emphasizes communication and responsibilization of the citizens.
By the beginning of April, the international media backlash against the Swedish policy, described as “irresponsible”, is far from being over. Media outlets spread the rumor that the government would prioritize the economic impact rather than human lives. Nonetheless, the government is following the advice of their medical experts, which is not the case of most countries (France, the UK and the US to begin with), where divergence between authorities and official health bodies is strong. Ironically, the chief economist of a liberal think tank in Stockholm opposed the local government’s policy… with an estimated number of casualties used to derive what really concerns him: the economic cost.
If the cost in human lives in Sweden revealed to be smaller than in France, a country where the state of health emergency drastically withered fundamental civil liberties (right to move, right to gather) and labor rights (number of working hours) can we imagine that there would be no consequences for politicians who initiated such actions?
To power this source of hope, a look, again, towards China: while partisans of the authority all around the world are promptly pointing at the Chinese success for mastering the outbreak, and the all-out arsenal of measures called upon (surveillance technology, liberty restrictions, the army), while citizens of the (social media) world are voicing their change of posture when it comes to evaluating China, a disturbing piece of news erupted. Beijing-based media Caixin online conducted its own investigation to estimate the death toll in Wuhan, based on the number of cremations performed within the city… and concluded that the official numbers were likely downsized by a factor of twenty.
That is a well-known feature of authoritarian regimes: information tends to be tampered with. At a time when the wave of liberty-restrictive policies become ubiquitous to fight the virus, information putting into perspective the effects of such policies needs to be confirmed and widely publicized. We live in a time when regimes in power have access to surveillance tools that would have made past dictators drunken with covetousness. We also live in a time when whistleblowers, journalists and citizens, can spread news, evidence and opinions wider and faster than was available to Serpico or Deepthroat (who respectively exposed police corruption and the Watergate scandal), as the Arab springs also put in perspective.
Authoritarian regimes also tend to make their citizens passive. First to make dissidents innocuous. Second because they inherently view the masses as infantile and unable to act responsibly. What is more innocuous than a whole population staying home, consuming streaming services, waiting to be delivered by the action of the state and pharmaceutical corporations?
In that regard, we have another example of an under-investigated solution, much less mediated than chloroquine and the screening tests: blood plasma donated by recovered patients. Such treatment has been used in infectious diseases since the 1890s, as plasma is the part of the blood that contains, in particular, antibodies developed by its donor. Hospitals are calling for more study around blood plasma. But one can suspect two major inconveniences limit how notorious the treatment can become: first, no money can be made by pharmaceutical corporations. No doubt lobbies are not very active in promoting validation protocols. Second, and to our former point: blood plasma donation implies people to be active. To be tested (hence, to know they are now immune), and to move to donate their blood. Which is in direct opposition with containment policies so far.
But we will go out of confinement sooner or later. Even if for some time, it will be under constant threat of virus resurgence and renewed confinement measures. Even if it will be a long time before we can get back to a normal life, where people gather and dance, meet in large events, or simply have such anodyne contact with each other as a handshake or a hug.
A Perfect World
But hopefully, other things will not go back to normal. For a start, the worldwide fiasco when it comes to masks, swabs for the screening tests, the tests themselves, ventilators and other medical supplies highlighted the weakness of globalized supply chains. In particular when most of these supply chains originate in the same region, and this region is locked under quarantine… A number of critical industries, among which drugs production, agri-food, machine manufacturing, could be, at least partly, relocated again. Donald Trump once tweeted (all uppercase): “IF YOU DON’T HAVE STEEL, YOU DON’T HAVE A COUNTRY!”. Only now does it seem to resonate with most orthodox analysts. In France, supermarkets are committing, for the length of the outbreak, to favor national fruits and vegetables, as well as dairy, meat and fishing products, as local producers are losing their international clients and the restaurant industry. Less offshoring is better for the planet. Less offshoring is also better for human rights, as offshoring generally targets countries where labor rights are lesser than the country of origin, a practice known as social dumping.
Hospitals and the health systems are also likely to benefit from the crisis. In the US, the death toll claimed by COVID-19 will have to be mapped to the deficiency of the healthcare system. Six months before an election and ten years after Obamacare, one can expect the issue to be on stage during the campaign. In Europe, the dramatic collapse in funding from the past thirty years is likely to come to an end.
This collapse in funding for the health system can be seen as a collateral effect of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty: by defining the stability of public debt as criteria for being part of the Eurozone, and removing sovereign monetary power at the same time, Europe actually demanded all member states for a weight-loss program. Privatizations followed throughout Europe, and were only slowed down by the subprime crisis. Since the outbreak of COVID-19 though, talks of renationalization have been an unusual voice in the “whatever it takes” tune. A number of companies, related with air travel in particular, might go bankrupt: airlines, airports… and shale oil producers.
Which brings us back to the opportunity that arises when you suddenly stop the economy: you do not need to restart it exactly as it was. The new investment will have to be made, whatever it costs: it does not mean there are not different paths to follow. Investing in transportation modes, such as high speed trains, consuming less energy, and energy that does not depend on fossil fuels.
Can the government see the opportunity amidst the turmoil? Even Larry Fink, the Antichrist of anticapitalistas, founder of Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager and its investment management system, the genius AI that predicts economic trends called Aladdin, even Larry Fink, in the 2020 issue of his annual letter to CEOs of companies in the Blackrock portfolio, announced Aladdin would now integrate ecological backlash to the prediction models.
The main issue is with the neoliberal doxa. When the government envisions itself in a strict management role, there is little it can do in the midst of the crisis, except activating emergency plans designed prior to the crisis. These plans exist in a number of enterprises and agencies: for example, nuclear power plants have plans to operate in case 40% of their manforce is missing. But a global plan coordinating all sectors of the economy does not exist. It is very unlikely that the government has the means to suddenly invest on a great green transition at the moment of the crisis.
But the crisis is here to last. At least until treatment or vaccine is discovered and industrialized, outbreaks will be controlled and resurge. China officially declared its epidemic contained on March 19th, but a new wave triggered a new lockdown in Jia county beginning of April. Resurgence is likely to happen from outside sources if broad transregional travel is allowed again. In the global economy we live in, such measures are not sustainable in the long run. What we can hope for, though, is that a systematic plan is being worked on now.
What could such a plan look like? First, we need to recognize that the crisis is systemic: the deficit in the health system, the global circulation of goods and persons, and patent inequalities all contribute to the impact of the pandemic. The past can always be of help, and considering that 2009 did not produce any turnaround in doctrine and led to a new black swan only a decade after (although Nassim Taleb himself actually claims coronavirus was an utterly predictable “white swan”, which is confirmed somehow by the 4000% return on investment performed in the first quarter of 2020 by a “black swan” hedge fund managed by a protégé of Taleb), we need to jump back to the previous systemic crisis.
In 1932, after the Great Depression, President Roosevelt’s New Deal focused on three R’s: reform of the financial system, recovery of the economy through government spending on specific projects, and relief for the unemployed and poor. As a reminder, for the richest slice of the population, the federal tax went from 25% in 1925, up to 91% in 1941, and stayed above 70% until 1980 and the beginning of neoliberalism under Reagan, as is documented in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. How do taxes for the rich relate to solving the current crisis?
It is not only a matter of financing reforms. It is also a matter of arithmetic. If one wants to contain mankind’s footprint on planet earth, it has to take into consideration that billions still have to be drawn out of poverty. There will be no rest to growth until then, and this will have a tremendous cost in energy and resources. Hence, having half of the world’s net wealth belonging to the top 1%, as was calculated by Credit Suisse’s 2019 Global wealth report, is not sustainable. If no redistribution arises, ecological collapse is bound to happen.
Any crisis is an opportunity to change the trajectory of the economy. But a vision is needed. In 1932, this vision had been built during a century, with Marxist and anarchist theories, the rise of the Syndicates, the creation of social security in different parts of the world. Can a change of vision be articulated again around sustainability and equality, without taking the environment into consideration?
Twelve Monkeys
And now, the burning question: how is the outbreak of COVID-19 related to the environmental crisis? One man can speak simultaneously with the voice of science, a mystical movement, and worldwide entertainment. The man is simultaneously an epidemiologist, one of the prominent members of the whole reinvention of hippie communities into cyberspace as a cofounder of the WELL, and a technical advisor for Steven Soderbergh’s film Contagion, probably one of the most successful films since the beginning of the confinement. In 2006, Larry Brilliant explained during a TED speech that the pandemic was bound to happen. The only question being when.
The sanitary condition created by hyper consumerism was a ticking time bomb. And from mad cow disease to the first SARS epidemic, we have been warned. Concentrating gigantic animal populations in places with no natural light, no fresh air, no individual care, fed with unnatural food: battery cages for egg-laying hens, giant slaughterhouses are all part of the equation. Diseases are designed to proliferate in that kind of environment. Animals treated as merchandise are in as good a shape as, say, humans in concentration camps.
All the disease needs to escape this environment is a suitable host, to act as an intermediary between the animal and the human. We still don’t know for sure if that host was a bat or a pangolin, but does it matter? It was a wild animal subject to poaching and trafficking in a specific country.
Last part of the equation: the hyper circulation for goods, merchandise, humans demanded by globalization, ensuring the speed and magnitude of the spreading.
We stand with two options. Reducing the commodification of the living, and recognizing humankind has to find a sustainable place with the Earth ecosystem. Or keep controlling the living, and encompassing humans inside commoditization trends: control every move of the human beings, restrain their liberties, make sure they do not put themselves in danger, they do not mingle with the animal population. Which somehow extends Heidegger’s concept of Gestell: the human inclination to put more and more of nature under the control of technique. The latter option would be to further this trend by encompassing human beings themselves under control.
Strictly surveilled and enforced confinement is the choice of the latter. And accepting for this situation to go on and on and become normalized is extremely dangerous. Read Solzhenitsyn: after a while, human beings have the unique aptitude to adapt to any situation, and accept it as a new normality. During the outbreak, China discovered the significance of whistleblowers such as Dr Li Wenliang, and largely spread his voice. Will we simultaneously be witness to the panurgic submission to Big Brother surveillance in the west, for fear of a virus?
We are still not done with the screening tests affair. In France, it has been revealed that the testing capability could be dramatically ramped up by using veterinary testing capabilities. Seventy-five of these laboratories formally reached out to the government to offer their help. Which, after three weeks, was still a dead-end, because of standard norm issues. The root cause explaining why these tests would not be suitable for humans? As one of the biologists coined it: “mankind is foolish enough to consider they do not belong to the mammal reign”.
Does the whole coronavirus crisis come down to reconsidering the relationship between mankind and nature? Will we choose to start treating the living closer to how we treat human beings, or to go on processing humans and the living as merchandise? The Mahatma Gandhi once said: “the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” We need to talk about the pangolin.
