how and why covid broke the modern world
One virus, at just the right time, and with just the right virulence, managed to expose every weakness of our society.
It may sound absurd, but COVID was a doomsday event and we’re trying not to realize it or address it. Much of the social and political chaos we’re seeing today is probably a reaction to what happened during 2020 and in our rush to just move on and get back to precedented times, we’re finding out that it’s simply not possible for reasons we’ve been refusing to unpack. So, let’s unpack them and ask why the pandemic had such a profound impact on our world.
It’s not because it was such a deadly infection. It wasn’t. We’ve had global pandemics with far worse mortality rates, especially before the dawn of modern medicine. It also didn’t require a groundbreaking spontaneous discovery to subdue. We defeated it the same way we defeated other pandemics. With our best vaccine technologies.
No, it’s because it arrived with the subtlety of a sledgehammer and slammed into the already shaky pillars of modern Western society at the worst possible time. It was a stress test for the world order established around the end of the last century, and that order failed pretty much every aspect of this test publicly and loudly.
To wit, there were exactly two problems with COVID marking a profound, traumatic, and furious shift in the public’s consciousness, which is how almost immediately after the lockdowns were over and people started returning to public spaces, they seemed so angry, uncivilized, and impatient.
The first was a clear, stark confirmation that the powers that be don’t care about you, even in times of genuine crisis. You are nothing to them past a unit of consumption or production when necessary, a common aspect of every dystopian novel written since Yevgeny Zamyatin’s signature tome We.
Lost your job because of a global pandemic and no fault of your own? Fuck you, says the landlord, where’s my rent? Sick? Fuck you, says the utility, we expect your bill paid on time. Lost your parents? Fuck you, says the boss, “be a hero” and come to do what is a now suddenly dangerous job. Dying in a COVID ward? Fuck you, says the hospital administrators, someone’s gotta pay your tab.
All this abject, sociopathic inhumanity was set against a chorus of politicians howling “Get back to your offices and open everything back up you damn peasants! Our big, beautiful economy is trending the wrong way and if sacrifices must be made, so be it! Why is the orphan crushing machine crushing so few orphans?!”
The second problem is that hundreds of millions of people now had nothing to do but watch their screens and stew over who’s to blame or why this is somehow justified as public health officials were winning the fight to limit in-person contact, and slow how quickly the novel disease to which we had no real immunity was spreading.
Partially, this was so impactful in the U.S. because our general culture is individualistic to a fault. Americans today seem to navigate trough life as opportunistic pack animals patrolling their territory. If something happens to another pack, it’s not their concern, as if we are a society of feral bipeds who don’t particularly like or care for each other, either doing our best to stay out of each other’s way, or extract only what we need to survive and nothing more.
But before you judge too harshly, remember that this is how they’ve been taught to behave pretty much their entire lives. That no one owes them anything, that it’s no one’s job to look out for them, and the best they could ever hope for is perfunctory politeness from others as they go about their day. Which is also not guaranteed.
Now, this is a perfectly workable stance if you’re a homesteader in the late 1700s to mid 1800s trying to tame a piece of the rough and tumble wilderness. Not so much if you’re in a modern, interconnected society with near universal literacy and are never more than an arm’s reach away from a computing device connected to the rest of the planet and able to show you everything happening across the world in real time.
Hence the near-fatal idiosyncrasy of American culture and politics. With some of the world’s most advanced technology, most sophisticated weapons, and bleeding edge science, many of the nation’s citizens are still pretending as if they’re still those Wild West era homesteaders living off the land, their single family houses and tidy parcels with lawns and curated shrubbery being their land to farm — except that violates city code, so they actually can’t do that — and are constantly encouraged in this absurd collective delusion by their politicians.
Hit with a pandemic, they retreated to these suburban “homesteads” and watched as the wealthy and powerful lamented not the virus, not the deaths and illnesses, not the fragility and inhumanity of the system they’ve set up, but the lack of busy offices, the direction of the stock market, and the cost of keeping people fed and housed during a disaster, begrudgingly justifying tossing just a couple of extra pennies at the serfs as they very loudly kept letting us know they were very upset about having to do it.
In their eyes, it was a necessary bribe in an election year while also giving themselves lavish “loans” that were forgiven if they so much as thought about sending ten bucks to the Treasury, and one for which they still cannot forgive us.
Yet, with all that said, let’s not just let COVID itself off the hook. While it shares many genetic affiliations with some common upper respiratory viruses, and its best known symptoms are very similar, it’s not the same kind of virus. It liked to attack the blood vessels, and fever, difficulty breathing, fatigue, and nausea are just your body’s most common defensive reactions to a whole lot of diseases, related or not. This means it can have serious complications we’re still studying.
Already, scientists identified COVID infections as responsible for dramatically raising the risks of heart attack and stroke, and its ability to affect the brain also links it to all sorts of nasty complications. For example, mental fog that can last for years, damage to brain cells resulting in mood disorders, anxiety, and memory problems, and even a population-wide increase in brain aging even from just the stress of dealing with how we’ve handled the pandemic. In short, it cooked our brains.
We emerged from the pandemic angry, jaded, and with a long list of people we hated for reasons both real and imaginary. We wanted accountability, but without knowing for what exactly, we decided on revenge. Except that didn’t pan out either as all that spending fueling post-vaccine and post-disruption inflation transferred trillions more upwards and we suddenly lacked the resources to exact that revenge.
The best we could do was GameStop. The second best? Destroy the system that has shown only contempt for us with what amounts of weaponized nihilism. Last year, we didn’t see America shift right so much as we saw it shift to “fuck it, let it burn” thanks to millions of people who either no longer cared about anything, tuned out since 2021, or were actively rooting for accelerationism after living through a natural disaster that left them more isolated, angry, and tired than ever.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple magic fix that will inspire them to feel hopeful and optimistic again since promising that things will be better if we just sweep all these problems, all this trauma, all this depersonalization and callousness, and all this very open, public, naked contempt for us mere mortals under the rug and pretend none of it is a big deal while aiming for slow, incremental progress over decades with many a setback, isn’t exactly a winning formula for elections or future administrations.
We have to publicly confront that we live in a society which faced a virus that had no political ideology or preference of its own, but our government and its most vocal and proud supporters wanted to fight their fellow citizens instead of the disease.
We have to accept as a society that our wealthy, powerful, and politically connected see 90% of the country as disposable and that trend is only growing as the billionaire class become deluded narcissists with a god complex, one they take quite literally.
We have to define a way forward that doesn’t shrug off the possibility of millions out on the streets with no healthcare and options thanks to runaway automation, rampant outsourcing, and corporate auto-cannibalism for the sake of shareholder primacy and dividends as just the way the world works. Because as we can see, for something like 8.1 billion people, it really fucking doesn’t.
Our aforementioned world order set in second half of the 20th century is very rapidly being undone. It was going to happen at some point, but the reason its unraveling so quickly is thanks to the destabilizing effects of COVID. It didn’t have to be a virus, but the timing, the ferocity, and the fact that it was a natural phenomenon instead of yet another “economic crisis” or war made it a uniquely effective agent of change as we are still struggling to adequately respond to it, pretending it’s all over and we’re back to normal despite the glaring evidence that it’s not and never will be.