Social Anti-Intellectualism and Irrationality Exposed by COVID-19

Until now, COVID-19 prevention measures have shifted from one stage to another depending on the number of confirmed cases, but the public has continued—indeed, increasingly and progressively—to live under COVID’s grip. How long are we going to go on living like this? I believe that today’s society, living under the grip of COVID, reveals a profound irrationality. Here, I would like to briefly organize my thoughts around three major points.

One is the public’s irrational fear of COVID infection itself, which is based on a highly reductionist view of disease. Another is the irrationality of the prevention measures. The public has obediently complied with totalitarian prevention measures without realizing what they are losing. Finally, there is the problem of biased information, which stems from the selective management of COVID-related information by major media outlets and governments.

I said “people gripped by COVID,” but I do not mean people who have actually contracted it. In fact, most people who got COVID—if otherwise healthy—recovered after being sick for a few days, much like with a cold. In the United States as well, 20,000 to 60,000 people die annually from the flu, colds, pneumonia, and similar illnesses. But they do not die because these diseases are terrifying, untreatable illnesses. Most of them are people with underlying conditions or elderly people with long-term illnesses; simply put, it is not so much that the cold virus itself caused death, but rather that their immune systems had weakened to the point that they could not even overcome a virus at the level of a common cold.

Doctors know this too: what defeats disease rests most fundamentally on human immunity. Medical treatment is only a means of assistance; ultimately, the patient must be able to overcome the illness. Of course, medical treatment in special situations—such as emergency care or surgery—plays a very important role. But unlike such cases, infectious diseases are closely tied from the outset to one’s immune condition. This is nothing new; in 19th-century Europe, it was a central topic in medical debates over contagious diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis. In the 19th century, tuberculosis was a terrifying disease in Europe. Its fatality rate approached 40 percent, and regardless of age or sex—soldier or elderly person alike—roughly one-third of those infected died.

Compared with that time, medical knowledge, hospital care, and prevention policy have advanced beyond comparison. Yet people today, from the standpoint of medicine and hygiene, live like plants in a greenhouse. Antibacterial agents and disinfectants are everywhere, and people live wearing masks at all times. Seen from another angle, viruses and bacteria have always existed alongside humanity and throughout nature, and now they are suddenly being driven as though they were humanity’s enemies.

The coronavirus. Because it is impossible to know exactly how many people have actually been infected, it is difficult to calculate a fatality rate statistically. At present, even on the high end, the fatality rate appears to be under 1 percent. People were frightened by the many alarmingly announced death tolls—especially in the United States—but, just as people with underlying conditions or severely weakened immunity die from colds or pneumonia, they were dying from COVID. In essence, it is no different from the large annual numbers recorded for pneumonia deaths or flu deaths.

Yet no one seriously reflects on the medical essence of what the flood of statistics—such as the constantly reported numbers of confirmed cases—actually means. Because of those numbers alone, people are forcibly made alert and live in fear. To my eyes, this entire scene is stained with irrationality. If a virus of this level is enough to put all of society into lockdown and require everyone to wear masks, then from now on humanity will simply have to live watching or suspecting one another’s illnesses and barricading itself against others. Or rather, it would be better simply to live in a sterile chamber.

One of the fundamental reasons society has moved in this direction lies in totalitarian prevention policy. Throughout last year, countries around the world, especially advanced nations, competed in implementing these totalitarian prevention policies because of COVID. If they fell behind even slightly, their governments seemed destined to be criticized in comparison with others. There was no difference here between ruling and opposition parties. They merely fought over whether prevention measures were being carried out more thoroughly or less thoroughly, without even realizing what they were fighting for. And so, in competing to carry out stricter prevention measures, they naturally implemented them in a totalitarian way. Just as the nation-states of World Wars I and II took on the character of total war, prevention policy too has come to take on the character of total war encompassing the entire population of each state.

In relation to COVID prevention in particular, the part that I, as an individualist, pay closest attention to is the compulsory mask-wearing policy—especially the guideline requiring people to cover their noses with masks—and there is a reason for this. At the heart of the individualism that developed in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries was the concept of private property rights. Later, as legal notions of individual rights developed, their scope came to include not only visible things like land and mansions but everything that could belong to the individual: the body, emotions, thought, freedom of belief, and so on. In the modern state, individualism is premised on these legal rights of individuals, and the most basic of these is surely bodily freedom. In particular, a guideline that restricts what is most basic even within bodily freedom—the “right to breathe freely”—by forcing people to cover their noses with masks directly violates that principle.

Fundamentally, the controversy between individual liberty and compulsory prevention measures is an old debate. The right answer is probably that it differs case by case depending on the social severity of the disease in question. In the case of the Ebola virus currently rampant in Africa, for example, the fatality rate is very high (50–90 percent), so strong prevention policies may be justified. But for a disease like COVID, which shows low virulence, policies that seriously violate individual liberty and rights are difficult to justify.

Consideration for others and social safety are, of course, important. Rather, Koreans—among whom it had been commonplace to cough without regard for those around them—should take this opportunity to recognize both the hygienic importance of being aware that one’s droplets can land on others and the social etiquette involved. But in a normal society or state, something like this would be appropriate: “Please be careful when coughing or speaking, out of consideration for others, so that your droplets do not land on them. Wearing a mask can be one way to do this.” Why, then, must it be enforced that “Masks must be worn at all times, and when wearing a mask, both the mouth and nose must be completely covered”?

Covering one’s mouth with a mask may be an act of social cooperation and consideration for others, but forcing people to “cover the nose as well” with a mask is a serious infringement on basic individual rights. Do people not understand this difference? Even if I block my nose with a mask, the breath coming from my nose does not disappear somewhere, and unless I am performing surgery, leaving my nose uncovered with a mask does not in any way increase the risk of infecting others.

It cannot possibly be beneficial to health to live all day re-inhaling the waste products coming out of one’s own body, and there are also theories that oxygen deficiency is related to the onset of various illnesses, including cancer. Above all, no research has been conducted on the health effects of restricted breathing caused by masks—for example, no long-term comparative control-group study between mask wearers and non-wearers has been carried out. The fact that harmfulness has not been proven is no basis for concluding that something is harmless. In the long term, which is more harmful to health: getting a virus and suffering for a few days, or living for as long as two years unable to properly inhale fresh air and forced to recycle the inadequate air inside a mask?

But even setting aside these medical issues, we need to recognize that this is not simply a matter of health or convenience, but a situation in which basic individual rights and the very existence of independent individuality are under threat. The right to live while breathing fresh air is one of the most basic human rights. All life lives by breathing. Taking away the freedom and right to breathe is the first step in violating all of an individual’s basic rights.

Finally, there is the problem of bias in COVID-related information on the internet and in various media. In a society where people die every day from cancer, traffic accidents, suicide, and countless other illnesses, COVID alone has for two years received the special treatment of having not even deaths, but the number of confirmed cases, announced day after day. In addition, Google, YouTube, and mainstream media in Korea never convey the “different opinions” on COVID that I have discussed above. Although there are clearly many experts who do not agree with government policy, the situation is made to feel as though everyone in society agrees with the current COVID prevention policy and shares the same view in support of it.

If you search the internet regarding COVID, views that differ from those of governments or mainstream media are dismissed as myths, conspiracies, fake news, or unscientific beliefs. What is easily found online is not serious, professionally presented “different opinions,” but only articles or videos that introduce the mainstream view on prevention measures as though it were the one and only truth, or that criticize or explain away mistaken information or falsehoods that ordinary people happen to misunderstand—content that, from an expert’s point of view, is obvious enough. In fact, writings or information that present “different opinions” in depth on COVID illness or prevention are often lumped together wholesale with such simplistic, nonprofessional, and unscientific false information.

In other words, it is difficult to find writings or videos through which people can directly hear the voices of those holding a variety of opinions about COVID. So even if I want to learn in detail what people with views similar to mine think, it is extremely hard to encounter them. It resembles a society that treats certain ideas as profoundly dangerous. There is always a possibility that I am wrong.

COVID will leave many scars on society as time goes on. Above all, the unnecessary totalitarianism and the way differing opinions have been blocked as though they did not even exist are more than enough to make one skeptical about what current prevention policy is actually seeking. Every totalitarian regime that has appeared in human political history has claimed, as its justification, that it exercises the absolute responsibility to protect the lives of the members of that society.

But if a society in which even the “right to breathe through one’s nose”—the beginning of the most vital of individual basic rights—is infringed because of an infectious disease like COVID, for which no agreed scholarly basis clearly distinguishing it from influenza exists, is not a picture of an irrational society, then I think it would be hard to find any human society more irrational than that.

Bae Min, history teacher at Soongeui Girls’ High School

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Original title: 코로나19가 드러낸 사회적 반지성과 비합리성

Author: Bae Min

Date: 2021-08-23

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=free_opinion&pn=10&idx=24137