Member-only story
I think there is a growing number of people who are tired of the performative risk-aversion and just want to stop pretending that the fate of the world hinges on whether that guy going for a run is wearing a mask — or whatever. Conversely, there is a reason-resistant subgroup, which is actually increasingly absorbed by the performance — who increasingly associate themselves with the performance of ‘good citizen’ that they play (largely on the Internet).
At some point, there will be a revision and a re-evaluation; the hysterics will be held accountable for the time, care, energy, goodwill — for the wasted vitality — that they have extracted from the rest of us. I think Covid hysterics implicitly sense this: they sense that the great pendulum of history is swinging back in their direction. I’ve compared them to Robespierre’s before, and the analogy on seems more and more apt to me: the Committee for Public Safety’s reign of terror was as brief as it was deadly; in a few years — if we’re lucky — we’ll wonder at how a few fanatical bureaucrats managed to briefly seize the reigns of power across the developed world.
