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.
