Pandemic!. Slavoj Žižek
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The beloved is not opposed to us, he is one with our own being; we see us only in him, but then again he is not a we anymore—a riddle, a miracle [ein Wunder], one that we cannot grasp.
It is crucial not to read these two claims as opposed, as if the beloved is partially a “we,” part of myself, and partially a riddle. Is not the miracle of love that you are part of my identity precisely insofar as you remain a miracle that I cannot grasp, a riddle not only for me but also for yourself? To quote another well-known passage from young Hegel:
The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him—or which are not present. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye.
No coronavirus can take this from us. So there is a hope that corporeal distancing will even strengthen the intensity of our link with others. It is only now, when I have to avoid many of those who are close to me, that I fully experience their presence, their importance to me.
I can already hear a cynic’s laughter at this point: OK, maybe we will get such moments of spiritual proximity, but how will this help us to deal with the ongoing catastrophe? Will we learn anything from it?
Hegel wrote that the only thing we can learn from history is that we learn nothing from history, so I doubt the epidemic will make us any wiser. The only thing that is clear is that the virus will shatter the very foundations of our lives, causing not only an immense amount of suffering but also economic havoc conceivably worse than the Great Recession. There is no return to normal, the new “normal” will have to be constructed on the ruins of our old lives, or we will find ourselves in a new barbarism whose signs are already clearly discernible. It will not be enough to treat the epidemic as an unfortunate accident, to get rid of its consequences and return to the smooth functioning of the old way of doing things, with perhaps some adjustments to our healthcare arrangements. We will have to raise the key question: What is wrong with our system that we were caught unprepared by the catastrophe despite scientists warning us about it for years?
1. WE’RE ALL IN THE SAME BOAT NOW
Li Wenliang, the doctor who first discovered the ongoing coronavirus epidemic and was censored by authorities, was an authentic hero of our time, something like the Chinese Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, so no wonder his death triggered widespread anger. The predictable reaction to how the Chinese state has dealt with the epidemic is best rendered by Hong Kong-based journalist Verna Yu’s comment, “If China valued free speech, there would be no coronavirus crisis. Unless Chinese citizens’ freedom of speech and other basic rights are respected, such crises will only happen again … Human rights in China may appear to have little to do with the rest of the world but as we have seen in this crisis, disaster could occur when China thwarts the freedoms of its citizens. Surely it is time the international community takes this issue more seriously.”1
True, one can say that the whole functioning of the Chinese state apparatus runs against old Mao’s motto “Trust the people!” Rather the government runs on the premise that one should NOT trust the people: the people should be loved, protected, taken care of, controlled … but not trusted. This distrust is just the culmination of the same stance displayed by the Chinese authorities when they are dealing with reactions to ecological protests or problems with workers’ health. Chinese authorities ever more often resort to a particular procedure: a person (an ecological activist, a Marxist student, the chief of Interpol, a religious preacher, a Hong Kong publisher, even a popular movie actress) simply disappears for a couple of weeks before they reappear in public with specific accusations raised against them, and this protracted period of silence delivers the key message: power is exerted in an impenetrable way where nothing has to be proven. Legal reasoning comes in distant second when this basic message is delivered. But the case of disappearing Marxist students is nonetheless specific: while all disappearances concern individuals whose activities can be somehow characterized as a threat to the state, the disappearing Marxist students legitimize their critical activity by a reference to the official ideology itself.
What triggered such a panicky reaction in the Party leadership was, of course, the specter of a network of self-organization emerging through direct horizontal links between groups of students and workers, and based in Marxism, with sympathy in some old party cadres and even parts of the army. Such a network directly undermines the legitimacy of the Party’s rule and denounces it as an imposture. No wonder, then, that, in recent years, the government closed down many “Maoist” websites and prohibited Marxist debate groups at universities. The most dangerous thing to do today in China is to believe seriously in the state’s own official ideology. China is now paying the price for such a stance:
The coronavirus epidemic could spread to about two-thirds of the world’s population if it cannot be controlled,” according to Hong Kong’s leading public health epidemiologist Gabriel Leung. “People needed to have faith and trust in their government while the uncertainties of the new outbreak were worked out by the scientific community,” he said, “and of course when you have social media and fake news and real news all mixed in there and then zero trust, how do you fight that epidemic? You need extra trust, an extra sense of solidarity, an extra sense of goodwill, all of which have been completely used up.2
There should be more than one voice in a healthy society, said doctor Li from his hospital bed just prior to his death, but this urgent need for other voices to be heard does not necessarily mean Western-style multiparty democracy, it just demands an open space for citizens’ critical reactions to circulate. The chief argument against the idea that the state has to control rumors to prevent panic is that this control itself spreads distrust and thus creates even more conspiracy theories. Only a mutual trust between ordinary people and the state can prevent this from happening.
A strong state is needed in times of epidemics since large-scale measures like quarantines have to be performed with military discipline. China was able to quarantine tens of millions of people. It seems unlikely that, faced with the same scale of epidemic, the United States will be able to enforce the same measures. It’s not hard to imagine that large bands of libertarians, bearing arms and suspecting that the quarantine was a state conspiracy, would attempt to fight their way out. So would it have been possible to prevent the outbreak with more freedom of speech, or has China been forced to sacrifice civil liberties in the province of Hubei in order to save the world? In some sense, both alternatives are true. And what makes things even worse is that there is no easy way to separate the “good” freedom of speech from the “bad” rumors. When critical voices complain that “the truth will always be treated as a rumor” by the Chinese authorities, one should add that the official media and the vast domain of digital news are already full of rumors.
A blistering example of this was provided by one of the main Russian national television networks, Channel One, which launched a regular slot devoted to coronavirus conspiracy theories on its main evening news programme, Vremya (“Time”). The style of the reporting is ambiguous, appearing to debunk the theories while leaving viewers with the impression that they contain a kernel of truth. The central message, that shadowy Western elites, and especially the US, are somehow ultimately to blame for the coronavirus epidemic is thus propagated as a doubtful rumor: it’s too crazy to be true, but nonetheless, who knows … ?3 The suspension of actual truth strangely doesn’t annihilate its symbolic efficiency. Plus, we must recognize that, sometimes, not telling the entire truth to the public can effectively prevent a wave of panic that could lead to more victims. At this level, the problem cannot be solved—the only way out is the mutual trust between the people and the state apparatuses, and this is what is sorely missing in China.
As the world-wide epidemic develops, we need to be aware that market mechanisms will not be enough to prevent chaos and hunger. Measures that appear to most of us today as “Communist” will have to be considered on a global level: coordination of production and distribution will have