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Dostoyevsky lesson’s from “Notes from Underground”: only a spiritually and aesthetically impoverished society would encourage the state to police it, tame it, watch it, measure it, average it out. The individual, if they wish to remain an individual, must go ‘underground’ — must give up their place in society.
To look at America through the pages of a Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Kafka is to realize that this growing obsession with cleanliness, predictability, and control will not go away after Covid-19 is gone: it will perpetuate itself in new and frightening ways.
Our extremely sensitive PCR tests can detect the virus at levels exponentially lower than what an infectious person carries; this is not a conspiracy, but a widely documented medical fact. A 40-cycle PCR test might give you a positive reading 60 days after you’ve been infected or lead a doctor to think Covid-19 was the primary cause of your death. We have a testing system — we conflate a positive PCR test with active infectious status — that essentially guarantees panic and underwrites a permanent state of emergency. And why isn’t this reported? Why isn’t the data contextualized? The answer is that contextualized data is less sensational and less scary; good reporting makes for bad ratings; sane policy making is bad politics. Systems — systems which deliver information, systems which police and regulate us — are too complex to follow anything other than primitive imperatives. Sensitive tests fuel the cancerous government-media complex. Poorly interpreted PCR tests are carcinogenic — feeding the tumor of passive, surveillance authoritarianism.
An absurdity: none of the measures that Europe employed that supposedly controlled the virus, none of the measures Trump was supposed to have employed (resulting in the absurd claim that he killed 200,000 people) have worked: the virus is not under.
