Covid and Fear

The Covid-19 period revealed unexpected psychological mechanisms in individuals we believed to be free in their thinking. This observation led me to question the springs of belief and the role of anxiety in our relationship to reality.

The paradox of free spirits

I was regularly surprised to see people, ostensibly free in their minds and aware of the anthropological workings of the world, adhere so completely to the media and political staging of Covid. Even more troubling: some seem to want to continue believing in it after the fact, as if recanting the system they had embraced would jeopardize their identity too radically.

There is truly a religious dimension here, a belief that escapes reason. Even when faced with documented arguments, in one direction or another, for example on the side effects of Covid vaccines, the posture remains unwavering. The case of the AstraZeneca vaccine illustrates this denial: withdrawn from sale when it had been presented as absolutely safe by the most eminent authorities, this having never or almost never been commented upon. As for the Pfizer vaccine, an experimental product developed in very little time, the total absence of displayed side effects defies all medical logic. All vaccines carry risks, as their package inserts indicate. And this one much more than all the others, unfortunately, which was acknowledged from the outset by Pfizer laboratories, but not highlighted. Likewise, the fact that this vaccine in no way protected against virus transmission, therefore had no justification for the general population not at risk, but only for people over 85 and/or with comorbidities, a fact that was established by the laboratory itself from the start, and known to all authorities in charge.

My observation here does not aim to launch a debate on the relevance of these vaccines, even if my point of view on the subject is clear. I simply seek to observe people’s positions and the reasons for their adherence or not to this “narrative,” as we say today. What challenges me is to see individuals usually critical of power, trained to question the positions and anthropological workings of authority, adhere so completely to a denial that is explicitly in the service of these same powers: mass manipulation, unprecedented increase in surveillance, use of biopower, dismantling of state economies for the benefit of capitalist powers, etc.

Like any non-mandatory vaccine and by legal obligation due to the fact that it was in the testing phase during the period, it is up to medicine, and I mean medicine and not science, to inform about the risks. This was never or almost never done, even though it was an obligation. But the majority allowed themselves to be vaccinated, in a denial and blind trust, which nevertheless do not resemble many people. Similarly, the “TV experts,” never declaring their conflicts of interest before speaking, which is also a legal obligation, were never questioned by anyone, and primarily by journalists. Both parties shamelessly violated their ethical principles.

Science pertains to research, medicine to the therapeutic application of scientific knowledge. The object of medicine is not scientific research but to care for people, and even better to ensure that they are in good health. Unfortunately, this is not what is taught in medical studies, nor the economic logic that structures the healthcare system: we are focused on illness to be treated, not on health to be developed, because the profits from illnesses are much greater, not for society as a whole, but for the private actors in agribusiness and pharmaceuticals.

Anxiety as an engine of belief

The question that arises for me is therefore: why have some, and in a truly unexpected way, believed and continue to believe in the harmlessness and political and health neutrality of the entire symbolic, economic and political apparatus of the Covid crisis? Having recently discussed with several of these people from whom I expected the opposite attitude, I consistently noted that these were intrinsically anxious individuals.

“Anxiety is the state in which being faces its own nothingness,” wrote Søren Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety (1844). Faced with this existential anxiety, human beings seek answers outside themselves.

What I postulate is that their belief in the Covid narrative is so strong because it provides an external response to their anxiety. Thanks to Covid, they now have a reason to be anxious. Their anxiety is no longer their responsibility, it exists in the world and for others too. Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, in his work on transitional space (Playing and Reality, 1971), shows how individuals project their internal tensions onto external objects to better control them.

Thus, and very paradoxically, Covid will have played a deeply reassuring role for these people. Not that it resolved their anxiety, but it placed it outside themselves and in a collective way. Their anxiety became no longer an individual problem, but a collective subject, in which there can be solidarity, commitment to one another, shared fear, etc.

Émile Durkheim, in The Division of Labor in Society (1893), distinguishes mechanical solidarity, based on similarity and the erasure of differences, from organic solidarity, based on complementarity. The collective fear of Covid created a form of solidarity anxiety that belongs to this mechanical solidarity: a fusion in the identical, a reassuring uniformization.

Reinscription in the collective

This form of solidarity anxiety has a price, dearly paid, in my view. It is difficult for me to accept that people who define themselves as libertarian, anarchist or critical of power, nevertheless remain convinced that the health management of Covid was justified, including lockdowns and coercive measures. This is because for them, Covid will have been a reinscription in the collective, and they are determined not to lose this inscription that reassures them, and places them on the “right side,” socially and psychologically.

It is even as if this period came to provide an answer to their entire personal history of anxiety. Suddenly, from anxious people who were made to feel guilty for their malaise, they perhaps perceive themselves, and undoubtedly unconsciously, as scouts, as if their anxiety was in fact an anticipated awareness of reality. Their chronic anxiety would have become clairvoyance, their psychological fragility a form of premonitory lucidity.

This is obviously false, it is their fantasy, their imaginary construction. But this modifies their very definition of reality. Their relationship to the real changed during this period, and their reality is now different. They cannot leave it, because leaving it would mean taking back the burden of their anxiety on a personal level, and therefore having to question themselves, study their traumas, undertake or continue work on themselves.

Anna Freud, in her writings on defense mechanisms (The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, 1936), describes projection as a process by which individuals attribute to the outside what they refuse to recognize in themselves. Locating anxiety externally is obviously much more convenient than confronting its internal origins.

The scapegoats of the right-thinking

What is terrible is that from people claiming to be humanists, there was so much acceptance of this way of managing the Covid crisis, which manufactured scapegoats and stigmatized entire groups. Because it was obviously a real epidemic, but the political and media management of this crisis created social exclusions, ostracisms, demonizations, as well as terrible friendly, family or professional conflicts.

René Girard, in The Scapegoat (1982), analyzes how communities in crisis need to designate a responsible party to regain their cohesion: “The victimary mechanism reconciles the community in crisis at the expense of a unanimously chosen and destroyed victim.”

Well-intentioned people thus found themselves supporting the manufacture of the scapegoat, the exclusion of others, the denial of care, even endorsing the beginnings of what resembles totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), shows how totalitarian regimes gradually establish themselves through the collective acceptance of exceptional measures presented as temporary and necessary.

I find it particularly troubling to see how the people most engaged in humanism and in the defense of life can find themselves, because of their anxious profile, reassured by a situation that leads them to support what is worst and completely opposed to their values. Their anxiety has become socially legitimate, and no longer a personal problem to be resolved, which has made them pass into an entirely different reality, much more reassuring about themselves than the previous one. This social legitimization of their anxiety has a cost: the abandonment of their critical lucidity and their capacity to question power, on this particular subject.

The Covid-19 crisis thus revealed how fear, even among the most apparently emancipated minds, can lead to adherences contrary to their fundamental values. It showed that collective anxiety, when it finds an external embodiment, can make us renounce what we thought was our deepest identity. This observation is not a moral judgment, but an anthropological interrogation of the mechanisms that constitute us and sometimes overwhelm us.