This story comes first in a five-parts reading about the pandemic. It argues that the outbreak has vertiginously accelerated a worldwide authoritarian trend that has been rampant for twenty years.
Introduction: 28 Days Later
about the strange hopes triggered by the outbreak at its western beginning
- Part 1: Contagion
about the mechanisms that triggered panic among citizens, markets and governments - Part 2: Parasite
how differing interests orchestrated the panic to mute the public debate - Part 3: The Discreet Charm of the Authority
how the proclaimed epidemiological success of China and the Asian Dragons becomes one more nail in a twenty-years-old coffin - Conclusion: Deliverance
an argument that a tightly controlled society is already at the very root of the crisis.
Introduction: 28 days later
The Day After Tomorrow
Many of us knew this day would come. Many at least are saying these days they knew. What exactly, they don’t know. Neither do I. The day when pasta and rice would become scarcer than kale, quinoa, tin cans and chocolate? This fact alone sure is significant. Please consider this inconvenient truth : in the face of apocalypse, stores were raided by people who were neither gluten-free advocates (who would not raid pasta), nor survivalists (who know conserves are the only food you will store in a bunker) or even foodies (low-cost went first). What had become of my fellow citizens of the world? Consumer marketing personas were not applicable anymore. Unless in the face of apocalypse, people suddenly ceased to behave like perfect economic agents, making rational choices to maximize their own personal utility function?
In other words: once again, orthodox economic theories were not true anymore in the face of an event they did not predict, that some might fancy calling a Black Swan (which refers to an economic theory, not Natalie Portman portraying a ballerina. So as not to frustrate the readers, I will invoke her picture nonetheless).
The many who are saying they knew all along, whatever they knew, intend to make a point, and a valid one : whether they are survivalists, collapsologists, ecologists, alter-globalists, socialists, or let’s say anything but mainstream capitalists, they spent the last decades arguing for drastic changes in “the system”. The system typically answered : the system intends to maximize global utility for all. Act too strong for climate change, social justice, working time, and you will decrease economic growth, which in turn will create unemployment, social turmoil, more poverty. Nothing is to be done except maximizing economic growth, meaning the growth of the inflation-adjusted Gross Domestic Product.
Well. For the first time in my life, I witnessed governments worldwide going against economic growth. From China to Italy, planes have been grounded, restaurants shut down, as well as any store “which is not essential for the life of the nation”, as the French government would put it. You all know the drill by now : we need to “flatten the curve”. At all costs. By “social distancing”, we will keep the virus from overflowing healthcare system capacity.
Results are astounding. Waters in Venice are crystal clear and dolphins are back in the city. Air quality in Beijing would allow walking without masks (were it not for COVID-19), and Parisian skies… well, an image from a rooftop ascent is better than words :
As you can imagine, on an usual Monday morning, the blue would be slashed with white trails. If things were to last, this crisis could even put the last nail in the coffin of one of the longest standing conspiracy theories : chemtrails. We’ll know for sure within a few weeks.
Fluctuating Futures
Counter-intuitive as it may seem, COVID-19 is hence feeding wild hopes in many places. Because for the first time ever, a crisis was deemed threatening enough to go against the sacrosanct rules of capitalism and slow down the economy. In all recent crises (2001 and the Internet bubble, 2009 and the subprimes), the burst of a bubble severely impacted the global economy, but the only objective was to restart it. This time, one interest was bigger : public health. Or even, to go one step further, the health of the weakest and less productive, as COVID-19 mainly strikes the elderly. For the sake of that group, the economy has been put to a halt, or at least dangerously slowed down.
Of course, the focus will soon shift towards relaunching the economy. But in what way? Should we really restart the economy exactly as it was? One example : if shale oil producers and airlines and automotive companies were to run towards bankruptcy, should public money be used to refinance them? Would it not be useful instead to leverage that money to shuffle the transport sector from planes, cars and petrol towards trains, nuclear and more sustainable jobs? If so, we need to think about it now that the planes are grounded, not after.
Covid-19 is an immediate threat, but its amplitude is arguably not on the same scale as the one the ecological crisis will have on current or future generations. If any reminder of that was needed, one could look at scientific publications blaming smog for as much as one third of deaths in China. As inflated as these numbers could be (and deflated or inflated as official COVID-19 deaths could be), the death toll of both crises simply do not have the same order of magnitude. Nonetheless, in the half a century since the release of the 1972 first report to the Club of Rome, no political action of the current scale was ever initiated for the sake of mitigating the impact of humankind on the environment. Now that we have seen that ECB can muster 750 billion euros to support the measures unilaterally decided by several European governments, some are optimistic enough to hope that some of this (financial) energy can be used to redesign governance models, inequality reduction, and of course consumption models, climate change and impact on ecosystems. Is it part of the government’s agenda around the world?
It should. Because if you look at the countries severely hit by coronavirus and now under confinement rule, a rather mystifying pattern emerges : mainland China and the Hong Kong protests. France and their Gilets Jaunes. The UK and Brexit. Italy and the Five star movement. Iran and the riots that led to more than 7000 arrests from November to the end of the year 2019. The US and the Trump impeachment saga (or any other Trump saga you will find suitable). The pattern: these governments were in the midst of political turmoil and a strong contestation of the system in place. Again : these governments have a God-given opportunity to redeem themselves in the eyes of their governed, and restart things differently. Supposing they maintain their composure in the storm.