Looking at a similarly controversial topic of the last post on mass migration, let me be explicit about my views on Covid, which I hinted at in previous posts. 1 Let's start with the less controversial stuff.
Firstly, it is obvious that there was a virus, that people died from it, and that the people who survived from it still suffered from longer term symptoms (long Covid they call it).
Secondly, it is also obvious that we lived in a climate of panic. Whether that was justified or not is another question altogether, but as this person who worked in the healthcare industry during the first year of Covid mentions, the sheer state of helplessness and desperation for the healthcare workers was real (at least in certain hospitals, again it's debatable how widespread that was).
As a result, I think it's fair to say that something had to be done about it. Even if we collectively agreed to change little about our lives, decided not to lockdown, and waited a longer time for a safe and reliable vaccine to come about, that would still be a decision, because inaction is still a choice, and perhaps it would have been a better choice, I don't know.
I don't pretend to have anywhere near the amount of knowledge to know what was a good decision or not, at a collective and individual scale, because modern societies are far too complex for any of us to grasp by themselves. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool who hasn't been humbled by the counter intuitive dynamics of complex societies that respond not just to people's behavior, but their beliefs. 2
But. What I know is that good decisions are not made from a place of panic, the kind that frames everything through black-and-white thinking, and that rejects any potential for subtlety and third alternatives. And this is really the problem that I have with the whole Covid debacle. Any discussion around tradeoffs, any doubt that the measures were done for our own good, were immediately shut down.
In a society that essentially only values economic growth, we are suddenly told that saving every single person, even if they are well in their 70s or 80s and would die fairly soon anyway 3, is the only thing that is important, no matter the damage it would have on local businesses and lower class people.
And in a society that supposedly values "critical thinking", we are now told to worship "Science" like people in the past used to worship their religions, without any understanding of what the people in it actually do, and more importantly where their interests (and funding) lie, but trust that what they say about things that people cannot verify for themselves is legitimate. How is that for cognitive dissonance?
I will get into the specific measures in a bit, but I hope you can appreciate that the whole environment that fostered discussions (or really, anti-discussions) didn't lead to any constructive exchange. If people disagreed in any shape or form with the status quo, people defending it would immediately call them out for being monsters, or conspiracy theorists, or "anti-vaxxers", that type of thing. It's impossible to have any cohesion as a collective with this type of emotional judgement going around so frequently.
It's not surprising then that the years that followed Covid saw an even more pronounced turn away from the left wing, and any sense of legitimacy of mainstream institutions, towards decentralized and alternative views of politics, society, and even Reality. Not that this swing of the pendulum was better, as this post on 'What Wokeness got right' highlights, the new thing we have is really just another mindvirus, albeit a post-Woke virus now.
But it's to be expected when so many people lost most of their freedom for such an extended period of time, and for many people their income or their business, that they would start to view this cluster of collectivist, outwardly "nice", pro-institution, pro-"Science" leftism as incredibly corrupt, and start to look for alternatives. This is why the modern right is so keen on being openly cruel, anti-institutions (though many of them love the Christian Church, because that one can't be corrupted of course), anti-science (often veering into outright denial of the theory of evolution, not just refutations of it) and completely fine with the outrageous inequality of the modern world. 4
I'm not calling out the problems with Covid because I'm part of the latter camp, I would just like the basic social fact that complex problems can never be resolved with the type of binary thinking and name calling that happened during that period to be acknowledged. Do we agree with that now? Great. Let's get to the specifics.
I feel the need to mention them because lots of people get hung up on those when talking about Covid, which to be fair, they are important, since they dictate people's lives. But I personally do not attach myself very strongly to my own views, simply because again, I don't have the knowledge to make very confident claims about what was, or wasn't, a good idea for that time. So let me list my main views about the specifics of the Covid measures.
§1. Lockdowns are a brutal measure for the local economy as mentioned above, as well as people's general psychology, but at least they can deliver on their promises if people follow them. I was privileged enough at that time (going to school) that I wasn't really impacted by them, but it's unfair to say that they do not have heavy consequences, and that the people who oppose them do not have any good reasons for doing so. While the middle class enjoys the benefits of remote work, the lower class simply loses their job. This type of inequality wasn't considered in the discussions during covid, which unsurprisingly further cemented the gap between the left and the right, even if obviously, the most vocal people on the right are not working class either.
§2. Travel bans on the other hand were far more reasonable, provided that you didn't get stuck in a foreign country because of them, simply because they restricted secondary activities instead of the necessary ones that keep people alive, fed, and part of the economy. The bans certainly had an impact on the economy because many countries depend on tourism, but first of all, tourism is definitely a first world, fairly privileged activity to begin with it, and second of all some compromises had to be made, and this was definitely the most reasonable.
§3. I am not convinced that the plexiglass barriers and the covid masks did much to prevent the spread of the virus, especially the former. From what I can read online, the point of a mask is to prevent you from spreading the virus, not from catching it, and as such it might be useful. But personally, I found them quite intrusive, because they made it difficult for me to breathe fully uncomfortably. Basically whenever I breathed with a mask on, I would get a headache very quickly, which meant that I prefered to sit at home where I didn't have to wear a mask, rather than go outside. It was also obnoxious how some people were essentially policing others for not wearing it properly, even though in my case I had some breathing problems as mentioned. My breathing is not amazing by default, so the mask on top of that really didn't make it comfortable for me.
§4. Social distancing is another measure that makes sense if you don't care about the tradeoffs, but first of all, wasn't very well applied and wasn't very coherent as a guideline, and second of all, was once again very restrictive in terms of what you can do. You could not really go outside because of the lockdowns, but when you did, you had to wear a mask and you had to distance yourself from other people. In other words, you couldn't have a social life anymore. The people who talked as if all of those measures didn't have an impact on people's personal well-being were very unpleasant, and contributed to the backlash against authorities and institutions that we see today.
§5. Finally the infamous vaccine. First of all, I have no problem with long established vaccines which have been tested for many many decades, if not more than a century for many of them. Even if I don't completely understand a technology, the fact that it has a long track record makes me more prone to trust it. The covid vaccines already violated that trust for me, because they were hardly tested for very long, and on top of that, there were obvious financial incentives to not care so much about people's health, despite what was said.
It was also very aggravating that any doubt about the vaccines were immediately labeled as 'anti-vax' as mentioned above, especially because those new vaccines worked in a different manner than the previous ones. Traditional vaccines work on the intuitive mechanism that the body develops resistance against what it is exposed to, and thus, by introducing a weakened version of the virus we wish to fight against, we can develop antibodies. The concept makes sense to me, and again, because of the long established track record in caccines, I trust them. But the new covid vaccines were mRNA vaccines, which operate in a totally different manner, and were tested for a significantly shorter duration than traditional vaccines.
All of this is why I completely understand why people wouldn't want to take the vaccine, because there was a very clear environment of coercion against people who did not want to uncritically agree to it. This doesn't mean that I'm against all vaccines, and certainly doesn't mean that I believe in what people call 'conspiracy theories' which while partially true in the sense that powerful people with agendas can get together and work in union, is ultimately very limited in what it can understand about our world.
It is strange to me how few people talk and think back to covid, but I can understand why. It was a very difficult time psychologically speaking, a very surreal period because our sense of time was completely warped by the social isolation and the lockdowns, and because it feels impossible to talk about it without inviting strong political partisanship.
To me the main takeaway is not about how this or that side of the political compass is wrong, but more the confirmation to myself that societal collapse will not be handled well, and that we will not unify to turn around and bring about a better world. There wasn't enough social cohesion for us to even have conversations when it came to a fairly non-threatening virus, (compared to some of the worst ones in history) so you better expect that when it comes to fundamental problems in which there are only trade-offs in a declining world, that things will be even worse, that people will be even more selfish and cowardly, and that the people and institutions in power will do everything they can to save themselves, even at the expense of the rest of the population.
Covid was a clear sign to me that there is no political solution, and there is no way to save this current form of society. The modern world looks solid, but it's only because there hasn't been any serious shocks being applied to it for any long period of time. Now we are seeing the shocks, and are seeing how brittle the systems we depend on really are. People want to keep their heads down and hope that everything can go back to 'normal', but there was there never was a normal, because all of our prodigious wealth is built from the extraction of non-renewable resources. Like it or not, but the trajectory of the coming decades is downwards.
What can happen in the meantime however no one knows. Our current society is far too complex to make any specific prediction about the current months or even years. Political analysis by itself is prone to doomerism, but my point is that you should not concern yourself with politics in the first place, because you have so little control over it, and anyway, it could not even lead to the kind of utopia that it promises to people. One thing that people unexpectedly found during covid is that the increased time by themselves and away from busy work gave them the time and space to think about what was truly valuable to them.
This is a silver lining that we can find in collapse. As Death becomes less of an abstraction and more of a reality, we find that our current moments become so much more precious in comparison, and we cut away all of the bullshit from our lives. It wouldn't be fair to see that covid was a good thing, but for many people, it was an important wake-up call, that life is too precious trying to maintain a fundamentally unsustainable society and work away at a life that you hate.
1 Such as this one where I put "pandemic" in quotation marks (not that covid wasn't a real problem of course, read ahead for my views), or this one about the emotional appeal to the "science" during the lockdowns.
2 Financial markets are infamously difficult for that reason, amongst other things. It's not just about what will become more valuable over time, it's also about what people believe will become more valuable.
3 Now to be clear, every death is a tragedy for the individual, I recognize that. But we should also recognize that we live in a complex society of billions of people, and that sound decisions cannot be about avoiding death at all potential costs, because death is literally unavoidable (despite what the techno-optimists say, though at least it is unavoidable now, that is undeniable).
4 If the motto of the right-wing is that we should promote circumstances where people are incentivized to rise through society through their own efforts, so as to promote competition and thus excellence, how come the businesses of the wealthiest people on Earth are essentially monopolies? Amazon hardly has any competition, because its network effects make it essentially impossible for any other actor to enter the market and have a notable presence.
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Covid Collapse Politics Discourse Death
2026-08-17