This post about cardinal misjudgements related to COVID was published on December 17th, 2020. Let us see how we relate to the original five years later. Find the lessons seen from today by the end of the post.

The original:

Misjudgement nr. 1

The so-called second wave of COVID-19, driven by SARS-CoV-2, is universally recognized as a crisis. And indeed, it is a crisis, as our lives are seriously abridged almost everywhere in the world. But is it a disease and a virus behind it a cause of crisis or something else?

First of all, we should understand what a crisis is.

A crisis is an event or a series of linked events that are 

1. unexpected, 
2. create uncertainty, and
3. are seen as a threat to essential goals (Wikipedia).

While COVID was unexpected, created uncertainty, and was seen as a threat to essential goals in spring 2020, its second wave most certainly was not unexpected. It no longer creates uncertainty in autumn 2020. We all expected the second wave, and so it did not create uncertainty. Indeed, we were not sure how serious the second wave would appear to be beforehand.  Nevertheless, no one really believed that the virus would cease to exist or that it would no longer affect human bodies. Indeed, the COVID crisis ended in spring 2020.

This leaves us with the third quantifier of a crisis, a threat to important goals. And here is the story of what really constitutes the crisis of the autumn of 2020: shifts from the virus to measures taken by different states as they try to fight it. 

To understand this, one should consider a stakeholder analysis of the situation. Whose important goals are threatened? While the effects of disease threaten most certainly important goals of hospitals, how does an average citizen feel real threats to their own essential goals?

Based on my own experience, exchange of experiences with my friends and peers, analysis of different reflections in media, it is clear that at the moment, the much larger threat to our essential goals comes from measures that hamper our lives daily than from a disease that could put us in bed for a couple of weeks and could cause our death. Measures are overwhelming, constant, and real, while a disease is optional; even if the option is realised, the risk of serious consequences is negligible.

While intellectuals and technocrats can single out one issue and neglect the complexity of issues that are as important as the one they investigate, a normal human being, a normal citizen, feels the complexity and intuitively adjusts to it. A normal human being knows that their life is endangered from various threats from birth on. He constantly evaluates such threats (and opportunities) in relation to his ambitions, goals, and age. He knows that he has an unproportionally greater chance of dying from cancer or some cardiovascular disease than from COVID. All other threats—not only from diseases but also from crime, car accidents, and other accidents—are unpredictable taken separately, but 100% predictable as a totality of all threats. After the initial surprise, COVID becomes a negligible threat.

But the fact is that we live in a crisis. If COVID does not cause this crisis, then the only other option is government measures against COVID. Normal citizen knows that »Life is bitch and then you die« meaning that one struggles all his life and then eventually he dies. And why should then state measures cause us to struggle more for no apparent benefit? We understand that the only benefit of these measures goes to hospitals, not to us, since we know we will eventually end up in this or that hospital, if not directly in a mortuary.

Misjudgement nr. 2

From the first misjudgement comes the second one. 

Since we do not feel the crisis is coming from the biological virus, we see measures as the cause of our personal crisis. And for that reason, we do not take them seriously. I should better say that we take them seriously, for the authority could penalise us for not obeying them, but we perceive the penalty as coming in the form of a fine and not in the form of a disease. 

Even more. Since we feel a real threat from the measures, we have developed a wide range of strategies and tactics to cheat. So one could now observe two types of responses to measures. Silent and loud. Loud ones are now protesting against measures worldwide. But much larger is a group of silent ones, who know that it is not sustainable to fight against the government. They invent various ways to avoid measures and make their lives closer to personal aspirations. The situation is similar to the USA alcohol prohibition measures at the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, all measures that represent a serious threat to our most important goals are being trespassed upon in this or another way. 

The second misjudgement thus stems from technocrats in our governments’ inability to understand that humans are not rational beings. We are not like Western doctors who know everything about the disease and nothing about human life. The average citizen, fortunately, does not understand (rationalise) the complexity of life; they live it and feel it. And this is something contemporary technocrats cannot comprehend; for that reason, their measures are not only ineffective but also increasingly counterproductive. As we know, boozing in the USA was never so popular as during prohibition.

Misjudgement nr. 3

But don’t life and health come as the top two values in almost all cultures? Isn’t life and health thus the most crucial goal of each individual? For if it were, then my previous two misjudgements would prove to be only my imagination.

This seems to be the most complex challenge to my thesis: it is not the biological virus but the memetic virus, visible through memes, which feels like the real threat to the ordinary citizen. 

It might be hardest for many, but not for those who understand the difference between abstract values and real values. It is the difference I experience each time I help clients define their brand. When it comes to values, they all immediately put forward their most important values. But then, if the branding process takes the right track, they all, sooner or later, discover that those first values sound nice but are in fact not their actual values. True values are, namely, those that you would really die for, and their nature is that they are so profoundly and unconsciously rooted in our being that it takes time to dig them out. And we always have to dig them out from all sorts of rationalisations, simplifications, political correctness, and so on. I have to kill intellectualism first to get closer to a client’s specific values. The process is similar to that of psychoanalysis.

Life and health are definitely the most essential values and the issue of every person on earth; if life and health are taken personally. And if taken personally, then the value of life and health for me differs from the value of life and health of every other person on Earth. My particular life and health values depend on my priorities, my key performance indicators for risks and opportunities, and my specific goals. Mixing values represented by different polls, abstract values presented in WHO, UN, and other similar reports, with specific personal values is a third cardinal misjudgement that creates the present revolt against government measures.

Appendix to the death

And here I have to add one more inconvenient truth. The one so politically incorrect that I took quite some time deciding whether to publish it. It is directly linked to COVID. The fact that the older you are, the more you are endangered. Since we live in a civilised society that is founded on the political correctness of equality, it is inconceivable that one would take as normal that the older you are, the closer you are to death, as much as it is inconceivable for our society to accept that some children have better cognitive abilities and others are stupid and strong, for instance. It is inconceivable to leave people to die. We are all equal, so even if you are 120 years old, the state should take care of you as much as it does for a young adult. 

It is unspeakable what I write now in our society. But again, the average unspoiled human being knows/feels the reality of life. He knows that life is a bitch, and then you die. He suffers when an older or younger relative of his or a friend dies, but since he often laments that the best die first, he also understands that there is no equality in life. He understands that there are no measures to equalise individuals. He understands that, as he gets older, he is closer to the final gap and that it is he alone who evaluates the threats and opportunities of his life until the very last moment.

Our civilization does not accept the option that an elder would one day vanish from his community in the wilderness to die. Our civilisation does not, but each of us deep down in his unconsciousness does. It is the inability of our civilisation to conceptualise, to talk about, this inconvenient law of nature that adds up to devastating confusion, hampering both individuals and states in their confrontation with COVID.

The 2025 remark:

What is clearly seen from the five-year distance is that:

1. I  was right to take COVID as a memetic crisis and not as a traumatic physical event. Reflections on COVID forced me to elaborate on the distinction between trauma and crisis in the paper “The Trauma and the Crisis.” So, apart from the fact that the physical SARS virus avoided me—at least for the moment I’m writing this post—I even got some scientific recognition. 
2. The death issue, on the other hand, developed in a direction that I did not expect back then. Euthanasia was not only legalized inbetween in many Western countries, but the number of euthanasia cases plummeted. In Canada, from 194 in 2016 to 15.343 in 2023!!! It is not politically incorrect to talk about death, but it is politically incorrect to be against medical assistance in dying. A similar trend is seen with the rise in abortion rates. The fear of death connected to the COVID crisis in 2019 seems like a bad joke, considering the death culture we are living in currently.