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Title: Against Social Distancing Author: Dabtara Date: March 31, 2020 Language: en Topics: COVID-19, individualist anarchism, individualist Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-01 from https://lewaniaan.com/2020/03/31/covid-zine-preview-against-social-distancing-by-dabtara/
As of now, multiple states and cities have been put into what amounts to
near-complete lockdown. Most of the East Coast of the U.S. has
prohibited mass gatherings of people and forced restaurants to stop
serving people in the building. Some states have even started to enforce
curfews and travel restrictions.
At this point, the speculation is not when this will abide, but how much
worse it is going to get.
These measures have been based around a general preventative principle:
social distancing. Social distancing has, in the span of a month, gone
from tactic to unquestionable dogma, and I believe it is worthwhile to
unpack how it functions ideologically and why it needs to be subjected
to a critique.
In a distinctly American way, our crises have brought out the Puritan
core of our national psyche.
Social distancing has been predictably utilized as a form of control and
shunning; you are a bad person if you go out or meet other people
because you are putting your needs above that of the group. You are
being bad because you are helping spread the disease. Good people stay
inside and follow orders.
Trying to shame people for going outside is more pathological than the
disease itself because it completely fails to grasp the current
situation. As hard as it is for some people to hear this, diseases
arenât spread by bad people. Anyone can get sick and there are going to
be a large number of people who, despite practicing social isolation,
will contract the disease and there will be an even larger number who,
despite venturing outside and coming into contact with others, will
emerge completely unscathed.
Diseases infect people, no matter how self-righteous they are.
The elevation of social isolation into a dogmatic belief in part stems
from fear. People seek to perform certain self-congratulating rituals in
order to protect themselves from contagion, sealing themselves away in
hermetically sealed apartment units from the contagion of selfish and
bad people on the outside. The underlying Protestantism of it all shines
through as people care more about shaming those they see as disobedient
or lazy, trying to berate others into submitting to their personal
rituals because they identify personal moral failure with biological
contagion. This was true long before any disease broke out; this crisis
just helped make this all the more explicit.
The leadup to the full lockdown saw the scolds and fear mongers pulling
out their hair in panic at the sight of people eating at restaurants,
going to the gym, clubbing at bars, going to church, etc. Rideshare
drivers breaking down in tears at the idea of dropping someone off at a
club, how could they be so selfish? Why arenât they locking themselves
in their panic rooms at the first sign of danger?
Liberated from the obligation of hours of commutes and direct
supervision, God forbid people want to take advantage of their time
while they still have it.
People were going out to eat or drinking in bars because they knew their
time was limited. Shutdown was imminent and in many ways this last gasp
only accelerated the perception of doomsday. The worst is assumed: the
person at the gym only cares about their own health (an unforgivable
crime) and needs to be stopped for their own good. Contemporary ideology
is entirely convinced that people are not making calculations or being
strategic when they go out to a club full of healthy young people or
seeing friends one last time before they close ranks among their family;
no, theyâre just being hedonistic pleasure-seekers and for this they
need to have their movement restricted, activities monitored, and
behavior castigated in public.
The reaction against social isolation is a reaction against social
control.
At the time of writing, more than a fifth of Americans are under orders
to stay home by the state.[1] Social isolation is now no longer a
suggestion, but a mandate. Puritanical ethos is law.
Faith in the state, of course, is poorly placed. Its goal at the moment
is to preserve two things: its image and the economy. Your health, which
will get worse if youâre forced to stay in a 30 square foot apartment
for months at a time, is not the concern. You as an obedient citizen are
expected to make sacrifices for the greater good and let the authorities
make all the decisions about where youâre allowed to go and who youâre
allowed to see.
No good crisis isnât going to be taken advantage of.
âThis Strife is good for mortalsâ
âHesiod, Works and Days
This contracting loss of physical freedom has come with a strange kind
of liberation from white collar work. The digital economy has turned
everyoneâs bedroom into their office and, essentially their whole world
(unless, of course, youâre working in any kind of job that actually
matters for social reproduction).
The divide, now more explicit than ever, is between âsurvival jobs,â
consisting of a hodgepodge mix of Uber Eats drivers, supermarket
workers, retail employees, bus drivers, and medics, now is faced with
the endless task of making society run despite being exposed to the
worst pandemic of their lifetime. Most of these jobs, especially in food
service, have no benefits or job protection, revealing again the class
stratification inherent in the service economy.
The ideal worker in the eyes of the state now is not the âsurvival
worker,â despite the allowances they are given to travel relatively
freely (provided it is during working hours). In fact, the perfect
worker is the one working from home, hidden from everyone else and
slowly losing their mind to cabin fever and lack of face to face social
contact. This is the upstanding citizen, one whose whole life can be
reduced to a single room: âput your head down and work away, just wait
for things to blow over, donât do anything that might make things more
difficult for us.â
The widespread and near-universal adoption (at least among the
well-meaning) of social isolation in many ways speaks to the wholly
technocratic and elitist way in which crisis is still being handled in
the present world.
There is no concept of community solutions, but rather a top-down
command economy of disaster capitalism with UBI characteristics.
Failures of the centralized state are taken to be a lack of strong
leadership or lack of obedience by the populace. People just need to
listen to the experts, damn it!
Social isolation is a catechism and public health experts are its
clergy. Their word here is law and ordinary people apparently have no
idea that coming into contact with sick people spreads disease. Young
Americans are medieval peasants ignorant of modern medicine, rather than
people taking calculated risks about exposure and treatment. It is up to
the quarantine state apparatus to make these decisions for them.
There is no room for debate or discussion, only obedience. Donât think,
just act; otherwise people will die.
âNow on his way to Sacramento, Jesus traveled along the border between
Stockton and Modesto. As he was going into an encampment, ten men who
had breathing difficulties met him. They stood at a distance and called
out in a hoarse voice, âJesus, Master, have pity on us!â
When he saw them, he said, âGo, show yourselves to your family.â And as
they went, they were cured.â
âLuke 17:11â14
The isolationist impulse produces scared, obedient, and atomized
individuals. Freedom is selfish, autonomy is a contagion.
Healing doesnât happen through isolation; isolation is a way to shut off
and hide away the sick and dying. Rather than threaten the already
buckling and incompetent health infrastructure, the contagious are told
to stay home or risk being shipped off to somewhere even more isolated
and inhospitable.
Our collective imagination is itself diseased. In the face of chaos we
wait for a savior to swoop in from the outside and solve this problem
for us. We felt disempowered before this crisis even began and now that
what remains of society has ground to a halt we are even less capable of
imagining ourselves as playing any role in our own salvation.
Never forget that the state and its legion of Ivy-certified experts are
more than willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives to Mammon
to preserve itself. Ask yourself, is the remedy to be christs among the
lepers, or the city on the hill?
In their commentary on the pandemic, CrimethInc. made a series of
comments that I think are deeply relevant here:
We wonât be safer if our society is reduced to a bunch of atomized
individuals. That would neither protect us from the virus nor from the
stress of this situation nor from the power grabs that capitalists and
state authorities are preparing to carry out. As much as the elderly are
at risk from the virus, for example, older people are already
dangerously isolated in this society; cutting them off from all contact
with others will not preserve their physical or mental health. All of us
need to be embedded in tight-knit groups in a way that maximizes both
our safety and our collective capacity to enjoy life and take
actionâŠWithin your group, as long as no one has the virus, you can still
hug, kiss, make food together, touch the same surfacesâas long as you
agree about the level of risk you are collectively ready to tolerate and
communicate about it when a new risk factor arises.[2]
The ideology of isolation is a presumption of guilt before innocence, of
a hidden sin that you carry with you that can unknowingly seep into the
ones you live and drain them of life before your very eyes. The point of
social isolation is to make you fear yourself as a carrier, one with an
impure seed that you cannot know until itâs too late.
This is a kind of original sin where we are contaminated from the start.
But this is not who we are. Community lets us be giving and healing and
protective in a way that grants us agency rather than submission. We
need mutual aid now more than ever.
The Faustian bargain we are each presented with is that it is better to
be safe in Hell than sick in Heaven.
Every crisis in the 21^(st) century plays itself out the same as before.
Experts, despite being completely unprepared for whatâs happening and
offering solutions arguably as calamitous as their problem, are elevated
to the positions of unquestionable authority in the discourse and
dissent is treated as yet another contagion to be sanitized.
My advice to the reader is the following:
measures.
this one.
pandemic will never break.
Remember, Sloboda se ne prodaje za sve kuga maske svijeta; Liberty is
not sold for all the plague masks in the world.
âDabtara
After circulating my first draft of this piece, less than a week had
gone by before there have been some radical shifts in the current social
climate that need to be addressed. We are living in tumultuous times and
anything written runs the risk of undoing itself before it can even be
published.
First, let me reiterate that the object of critique here is not the
practice of social distancing itself, but rather its position in the
contemporary discourse around the COVID-19 pandemic. Social distancing
does save lives (when done sensibly), but the problem is how this act of
potential solidarity is being transmuted into a double-edged sword of
alienation and distrust.
âSocial distancingâ as it stands is being conflated with social
isolation, turning the jogger on the street into a potential carrier and
your neighbor into Typhoid Mary. Paranoia leads to messianism at a time
when it should be clear that the state cannot (nor wants to) save us.
Hucksters and cultists can look to gurus and prayer for solutions, but
radicals need to recognize the danger of idolizing isolation and start
working toward providing concrete and material aid in the face of
imminent crisis.
It should be clear to us by now that we need mutual aid. It is going to
be quite literally a matter of life or death. This is not a call to play
doctor for the sake of boosting oneâs ego, but if you believe collapse
is coming then you better start brushing up on basic first aid skills.
For your own sake, donât let yourself be in the position where something
goes wrong when all the beds in the hospital are full.
Finally, as much as I would like to be optimistic at a time like this, I
know the hopes of this opening up anything but fragmentation are slim.
We need to be in it for the long haul and itâs going to be rough for the
foreseeable future. Take care of yourself and take care of the ones you
love, and most importantly, be ready for the worst. There will be
moments of genuine compassion and solidarity that will give you hope,
and now is not the time for self-flagellating pessimism.
Even with sober senses, the best we can say is that the future is deeply
uncertain. I still have hope that between system collapse and dystopia,
we might be able to crack open history and claim a little freedom for
ourselves.
âDabtara
[1]
[2]