Panic engendered by cultivation of fear of death

Problematic Sexual Paradoxes of Pandemic Response (Part #10)

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Fear of collapse? Fundamental to experience of the pandemic and the response to it is fear of death. Much has been made of the manner in which a culture of fear has been engendered and cultivated. It is understood as the manner whereby fear may be incited  in the general public to achieve political or workplace goals through emotional bias (Frank Furedi, The Culture of Fear: risk-taking and the morality of low expectation, 1997; Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: why Americans are afraid of the wrong things, 2009).

Fear is evoked and enhanced in the public by media articulations in support of masking, social distancing, lockdowns, sanitising and vaccination -- and the threat of infectious disease. This period is witness to considerable speculation regarding the imminent collapse of global civilization, variously understood as a consequence of a failure of governance and its catastrophic consequences with respect to conflict between countries (Mind Map of Global Civilizational Collapse: why nothing is happening in response to global challenges, 2011). Such speculation is compounded by anticipation of the fulfillment of religious prophecies regarding "end times" scenarios.

This focus on collapse can be understood in terms of a death drive, as originally proposed by the pioneering psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein (Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being, Journal of Analytical Psychology. 39, 1912, 2), and adopted by Sigmund Freud (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920). This destructive tendency is often expressed through aggression, repetition compulsion, and self-destructiveness. It is understood as opposing the tendency toward survival, propagation, sex, and other creative, life-producing drives. This understanding has been defened by subsequent psychoanalysts such as Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein.

Less evident is the correspondence between the death drive experienced by individuals and that at the group and societal level. The latter is implied by the study of Jared Diamond (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, 2005). However Freud himself developed this insight at the collective level (Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930) -- notably with respect to the challenges of Western civilization.

Obsolescence of cognitive modalities? Recognition has been assiduously accorded to dead religions, most obviously through the death of the gods which have been a focus for collective belief (500 Dead Gods, Atheism: proving the negative, 6 February 2008). More problematic are the many deities whose existence has been forgotten (Lists of deities, Wikipedia).

In that light it could be argued that disciplines may themselves have a form of death drive through which their mode of engagement with reality is rendered irrelevant (Carroll Quigley, Obsolete Academic Disciplines, 2015; Superseded theories in science, Wikipedia). This suggests a complement to Diamond's study: How Disciplines Choose to Fail or Succeed. (Are the disciplines dead? Institute of Education, 3 October 2017; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 2003).

The argument has been discussed with respect to science (End of Science: the death knell as sounded by the Royal Society, 2008). A related argument has been explored as a result of the dubious complicity of science in strategic responses to the pandemic (Robyn Chuter, The Death of Science? Empower Total Health, 17 May 2021). The possibility can be explored in terms of limitation (John Horgan, The End of Science: facing the limits of knowledge in the twilight of the Scientific Age, 2015; John D. Barrow, Impossibility: the Limits of Science and the Science of Limits, 1998; Nicholas Rescher, The Limits of Science, 1999). What might be understood as driving science to its own destruction -- and what degree of panic does it evoke unconsciously for those identified with that cognitive modality?

Spielrein as a symbol? Spielrein serves to highlight the complex subtleties and symbolism of the relationships between innovative approaches to comprehension of the dynamics underlying the conventional behaviours that are the focus of the behavioural sciences. She was in succession the patient, then student, then colleague of Jung, with whom she had an intimate relationship. Spielrein had a collegial relationship with Freud and worked with and psychoanalysed Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. However, predictably, her skiils and insights have been much distorted and deprecated by colleagues of her own profession, as noted by Angela M. Sells (Sabina Spielrein: the woman and the myth, 2017).

As the originator of the concept of the death instinct, Spielrein is increasingly recognized as having been marginalized by history because of her unusual eclecticism, refusal to join factions, feminist approach to psychology, and her death in the Holocaust. Spielrein and her daughters were shot dead by a German SS death squad in 1942 as a consequence being Jews. From that perspective she could come to symbolize the unvaccinated and the fate which may be reserved for them -- if only symbolically -- as a perceived source of impurity.

Such symbolism is now all the more sensitive, and potentially relevant, in that she would have been obliged to wear the Star of David to signify her racial impurity for the regime. With current recognition by the CDC that the unvaccinated themselves constitute a pandemic in their own right (being "uncleaned"), how they come to be visibly identified is probably an issue for the immediate future. Suggestions that any such indication might be reminiscent of use of the Star of David by the Nazi regime have aroused considerable protest -- as an offence to the memory of the millions killed in the Holocaust.

The situation is all the move complex in that the unvaccinated will in future include the many millions in the developing countries who have been deprived of vaccines by the developed countries hoarding stocks -- potentially enabling a Holocaust in its own right (Maria De Jesus, Global herd immunity remains out of reach because of inequitable vaccine distribution: 99% of people in poor countries are unvaccinated, The Conversation, 23 June 2021). This is reinforcing conspiracy theories regarding a hidden depopulation agenda of far greater proportions than the Holocaust (Conspiracy chaos: coronavirus, Bill Gates, the UN and population, Population Matters, 24 May 2021).

The scenario is reminiscent of allegations of the early distribution of smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. The poignancy of Spielrein's much-cited poetic comment, in anticipation of her death, may come to frame such possibilities for millions of others -- I too was once a human being. My name was Sabina Spielrein -- to be inscribed on an oak tree she planted.

Engendered panic? The prospect of death, exacerbated by the pandemic, has engendered a degree of individual and collective panic (Byron J. Good, Culture and Panic Disorder: how far have we come? Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, 26,  2002, 2). It can be argued that this is evident in the decision-making capacity of authorities in response to the pandemic.

It can also be argued that engendering panic, as with a culture of fear, is being adopted by some as a means of enabling social change -- thereby bypassing democratic processes and justifying the expanded emergency powers of authorities (John Tierney, The Politics of Fear, City Journal, 20 May 2020; Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Coronavirus: how media coverage of epidemics often stokes fear and panic, The Conversation, 15 February 2020; Amy Lauren Fairchild, et al, Why using fear to promote COVID-19 vaccination and mask wearing could backfire, The Conversation, 29 January 2021).

Risk-taking and triage: an unexplored possibility? The strategic challenge of the pandemic has been widely framed in terms of war, as noted above. It is therefore curious that the primary response has effectively been to encourage the population to "cower", as separately argued (Cowering for One's Country in the War against Coronavirus: They also serve who only cower and wait? 2020). Arguably this is a collective demonstration of risk-aversion precluding any consideration of the risk-taking which is otherwise upheld as a necessary response in war time -- and duly honoured for the courage that individuals and communities demonstrate.

The focus of leadership in the pandemic has been on saving lives at all costs -- a strategy with disastrous economic implications in the present and in the time to come. For some the consequences are indeed comparable with war. Leadership in wartime is however renowned for its questionable tolerance of death -- whether among its own forces or among those of the enemy. The examples of World War I trench warfare and Hiroshima need little commentary, These can be understood as risk-taking, however questionable. The pattern has been evident in arenas in the Middle East.

Cultivation of risk-aversion has precluded any systematic assessment of how tolerance of risk of death might be assessed in relation to the pandemic. Despite this posture, people are indeed dying in numbers which may exceed those in some recent arenas of military conflict. There is therefore an undeclared tolerance of death -- dubiously extended to the numbers dying from COVID-related infections in developing countries, and predictably expected to die there in the immediate future. These numbers follow the "calculated" (?) risk of not allowing them access to the stocks of vaccines hoarded by developed countries.

It could therefore be argued that there is indeed an undeclared system of triage in place. Triage is indeed an unfortunate characteristic of wartime and the challenge to allocation of scarce resources. Conventionally a 5-fold classification is used to indicate the level of threat to life, irrespective of whether resources can be deployed in response. As a form of rationing, restriction of vaccination to particular age groups can be seen in this light. The effective response of developed countries to developing countires could however be understood as a cynical application of such a classification to justify degrees of negligence.

Potentially more relevant is the manner in which risk-taking by individuals and groups has come to be penalized in the response by authorities to the pandemic. The short-term political benefits of risk-aversion have engendered an avoidance of any assessment of the consequences of accepetance of a higher level of risk -- a level characteristic of wartime. The skills of the insurance industry in that regard have seemingly not been brought into play -- despite the obvious economic impacts.

With the strategic emphasis on "cowering" appropriately, individuals and groups have been deprived of the possibility of taking levels of risks they deem appropriate -- as in wartime. Significant in those periods are distinctions between forced conscription, voluntary conscription, and the use of a lottery system to select those to be "sent to the front". There is no consideration of such options in relation to the pandemic.

With little analysis, it is assumed that those taking life-threatening risks are in all probability a threat to the wider community -- when whole countries are locked down as a result of a threat in one suburb. How might this threat be limited without the current levels of institutionalisation of risk-aversion -- with its potential implications for the psychology and culture of populations in the future? What consideration is given to enabling people to move beyond the fears reinforced by cowering (Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear: thinking sensibly about security in an uncertain world, 2003; Dorothy Rowe, Beyond Fear, 2011).

If the pandemic is indeed to be considered a "black swan event", as would argue Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable, 2007), then missing is the existential requirement for groups and individuals to be able to choose to have "skin in the game", as he argues in a subsequent study (Skin in the Game: hidden asymmetries in daily life, 2018).

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