Humanity’s Hubris in its Response to COVID

 

With The Covid-19 Inquiry underway, the commentariat have been given a source for think pieces for years to come (given the length of time it will presumably take to conclude). I suspect I am going to be part of that commentariat producing thinking pieces about Covid 19, whilst we wait for the final report to arrive. This is going to be a Waiting for Godot type of experience, forever waiting for an end to come, and an ad nauseam re-living in the past the past in a seemingly perpetual streaming of Groundhog Day.

 

My concern with The Covid-19 Inquiry is that it will focus on what else needed to be done, rather than on the things that were done that shouldn’t have been done. There is, fortunately, a growing volume and number of voices who are intensely critical of the whole lockdown response to the pandemic such as Laura Dodsworth, Neil Oliver etc, and no longer a ridiculing them as “Covidiots”.

 

Whilst I agree entirely with these voices, it is less clear which came first “Project Fear”, or an emotional-led panic-fuelled fear. Covid was a tiny virus, and our collective response – humanity’s response – was driven by emotion, not a rational assessment of reality. This is the view, expressed in a short epilogue in Head First: A Psychiatrist's Stories of Mind and Body, by Santhouse. Even more astonishingly, Stanhouse says: “the more authoritarian the politician’s instincts – the more they tried to face down the virus rather actually engage with the science – the worse the problems seemed to get.” Basically, a rational assessment of the situation, following the science, meant confronting the unpredictable, uncontrollable, random nature of the virus, and a recognition of our powerlessness to exert control over it.

 

It was hubris, driven by emotional fragility, that cemented the global response. Humanity had a sense of powerlessness and vulnerability. There was a danger and this provoked fear, and this required action. Something Must Be Done. This is humanity’s hubris – the inability to deal with luck, fate, randomness. We seek to re-assert control. The idea of doing nothing, and accepting a powerlessness to control an uncontrollable virus was simply unthinkable.

 

Santhouse equates the maximal fear generated by Covid to the maximal addictive quality of random enforcement gambling: “When it comes to the possibility of a very bad outcome, [where] having little ability to predict or control the outcome… it is the uncertainty that is most destructive… [and] coronavirus was fickle, unpredictable, with just enough uncertainty in its effects to maintain fear.” The randomness and uncertainty and powerlessness drives a need to exert control, and to attempt to exercise a hubristic manipulation that restores order.

 

The problem with humanity’s response to Covid – the “something must be done” model – was that this came with consequences (really, really big consequences). Trying to exert control over something random by doing something can be a comforting placebo. If I wear my lucky socks when I go to the casino, I feel better when that ball spin’s round the wheel, because those lucky socks…. If I’m faced with the apocalypse, I need to do something to make myself feel in control and relieve a part of the fear, so I’ll stock up on toilet roll, so that I won’t run out of that. If I see a Cheetah running toward me, I can’t just stand there and do nothing – I have to act; I have to do something – so I’ll start to run to try to feel I have some control. However, me running at my full tilt of 5mph, even with a 20 metre head start, is pretty pointless when the cheetah is running full tilt at 70mph.

 

In each of these cases, there is the fear-reducing placebo of invoking the illusion of control. However, there is no nocebo effect i.e. the doing something doesn’t make a bad situation worse. It just doesn’t have any effect. The hubris of seeking to control Covid, however, was far more dangerous, because the consequences of action – the doing something – will be with us for a very long time to come.