Sibylla Bostoniensis

04:38 There's another aspect of work under
04:40 capitalism that is equally important to
04:42 understand. Let's talk about alienation.

04:46 In the not so distant past, human beings –
04:49 at least a portion of the population – had
04:51 relative autonomy and control of their
04:53 lives. Merchants and craftspeople owned
04:56 what are called the means of production.
04:58 The carpenter had control of his
05:00 woodworking process from beginning to
05:02 end. He made his own furniture and he
05:04 owned the finished product until he sold
05:07 it to someone else. The bootmaker made a
05:09 pair of boots and they were his. The
05:11 product of his labor belonged to him. As
05:14 capitalism developed this began to
05:16 change. Factories were built and they
05:19 needed labor. As poor workers flocked to
05:21 the cities from the countryside, they
05:23 took their places along the production
05:25 chain and in exchange for a wage, they
05:28 traded their autonomy – their agency – and
05:31 became just one cog in a much larger
05:33 machine, fracturing the work that used to
05:36 be done by one person or a small team
05:38 into many different hyper-specialized
05:40 pieces, so that now no single worker
05:43 could say they were a boot maker or a
05:45 furniture maker. They just did one small
05:48 thing, day in and day out.

In this new
05:51 arrangement, a tiny handful of people, the
05:54 capitalists, owned the means of
05:56 production – or the means by which goods
05:58 were produced. The workers, without the
06:00 means of production, were left with only
06:03 one thing to sell: their own labor. That
06:06 same arrangement persists to this day
06:08 and the psychological effects are the
06:10 same. Workers become alienated from their
06:13 selves and their own autonomy and
06:15 dignity, from their fellow human beings,
06:17 and from the product of their labor.
06:19 Let's take a quick look at all three.

06:22 First, alienation from the self: When you
06:25 go to work for the capitalist, when you
06:27 surrender your autonomy and become a cog
06:29 in their machine, you experience a
06:31 distinct loss of control over your own
06:33 destiny and sense of self. The things you
06:36 produce are no longer an act of
06:38 self-expression, as a fine pair of boots
06:40 was to the boot maker, but rather an
06:43 endlessly repeated task that is dictated
06:45 to you by someone else. For the vast
06:47 majority of people your job has nothing
06:50 whatsoever to do with your goals, your
06:52 desires, what you want to do with your
06:55 life. It's simply a way to make sure you
06:58 don't starve, that you can keep a roof
07:00 over your head and pay your bills. In a
07:02 sense, this alienation from the self
07:05 reduces human beings to little more than
07:07 animals, acting only out of the direct
07:10 need for self-preservation, that very
07:12 most basic need.

Second, alienation from
07:16 other people and society at large: Once
07:19 you accept the capitalist conception of
07:20 society, the traditional and natural view
07:23 of other human beings as friends and
07:25 community is destroyed. Each other person
07:28 becomes a threat, a challenge to be
07:31 overcome.
07:32 What if they take your job?
07:34 What if they get the promotion and you
07:35 don't? What if they're willing to work
07:37 for less money? This fear, caused entirely
07:41 by a system that pits humans against one
07:43 another for advancement and even mere
07:46 survival, causes intense feelings of
07:48 separation – of being apart from other
07:50 human beings – and for far too many people
07:53 it becomes accepted as normal, as the way
07:56 things are.

Third, alienation from the
08:00 product of your labor: In a capitalist
08:02 society for 99 percent of the population, what
08:06 you produce does not belong to you.
08:09 You sell your labor in exchange for a
08:11 wage, and whatever you produce during the
08:14 hours you've sold becomes the property
08:16 of the capitalist. That property is then
08:19 sold, netting the capitalist a healthy
08:21 profit. In stark contrast to workers
08:24 owning the means of production – the boot
08:26 maker, for example – the products workers
08:28 produce under capitalism do not benefit
08:31 the worker at all. In fact, they become
08:34 yet another challenge to overcome.
08:36 Whereas the boot maker can make a pair
08:38 of boots and then they are his to do
08:39 with whatever he likes – wear them or sell
08:42 them – workers in a factory may produce a
08:44 hundred tvs a day and own none of them.
08:48 They would have to pay the money they
08:49 receive in their wage to buy the very
08:52 thing that they have produced with their
08:54 labor.

08:55 That's alienation in a nutshell and it's
08:58 an essential feature of capitalism. It
09:00 also goes a long way towards explaining
09:02 why so many people are miserable in
09:04 their jobs. In a time when simply going
09:07 to work could mean dying, when your
09:09 existing economic precarity is made
09:11 worse by a global pandemic, and when
09:13 billionaires become even more massively
09:16 wealthy as a million of your fellow
09:18 human beings die, 09:19 it should be very clear why so many
09:22 americans are leaving their jobs.

A bit before midnight on January 20, a Harvard epidemiologist named Eric Feigl-Ding posted a long, terrifying Twitter thread mostly summarizing, and in a few places contextualizing, a new, pre-publication paper on the infectiousness of the novel coronavirus that had, at the time, forced Wuhan into a total lockdown but had not yet been detected outside of China. The context he added was, mostly, alarmism.

“Holy mother of god,” the thread began, “the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!!” That figure referred to what’s called the reproduction number, or “R0,” of a disease: how many people would be infected by a single sick person. “I really hate to be the epidemiologist who has to admit this, but we are potentially faced with … possibly an unchecked pandemic that the wold has no seen since the 1918 Spanish Influenza. Let’s hope it doesn’t reach that level but we now live in the modern world 🌎 with faster ✈️+ 🚞 than 1918. @WHO and @CDCgov needs to declare public health emergency ASAP!”

The thread has since been deleted, though you can still read a preserved version of it here. It was, for many Americans, if not the first time they had heard of coronavirus, perhaps the first time they had seen a global alarm raised over it. And in doing so, it produced what is by now a sort of predictable backlash: other scientists and science journalists taking issue with it, en masse, pointing out that the paper had not yet been published; that Feigl-Ding’s comparison to the infection rate of SARS was inaccurate; that most estimates of the R0 number were now lower than 3.8. Feigl-Ding’s tweets got more readers than those of his critics’. But those credentialed in epidemiology and public health were much more likely to see the criticism as sober and responsible, Feigl-Ding himself as an irresponsible alarmist, and the impulse to raise alarm a deeply reckless one. An Atlantic story about it was headlined “How to Misinform Yourself About the Coronavirus.”

Two months later, we are, inarguably, in the midst of a global pandemic. It took three months for COVID-19 to reach 100,000 confirmed cases globally; ten more days to reach 200,000; just four more to reach 300,000, and three to reach 400,000. [...] In just two months, what sounded like hysteria to scolding experts has become conventional wisdom among even cautious epidemiologists. “We’re looking at something that’s catastrophic on a level that we have not seen for an infectious disease since 1918,” Dr. Jeffrey Shaman, a Columbia professor projecting the spread of the virus, told the New York Times on Friday. Where had I read that before?

[...] And the broad message? The purposeful incitement of public alarm? If the question is whether Feigl-Ding was right to be alarmed by what he was reading, whether alarm was an appropriate response to what we knew even then about the infectiousness and lethality of this disease, and whether it was therefore responsible to induce panic in the public, we can say — with the benefit of hindsight, yes, but also definitively — it was. And if the question is whether, on January 20, the world as a whole should have freaked out considerably more about the coronavirus, initiating emergency planning and launching medical preparation on a war footing immediately, the answer, eight weeks later, is blindingly obvious: Yes, of course we should have, and we would all be in a much better, safer, and probably more prosperous place if we had.

[...]

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and there are surely plenty of situations where we would want to guard against overreactions as zealously, or more zealously, as we would underreactions. But in a time of good governance, this is a central function of government: to prepare for the risks that the public can’t process rationally. And though we often feel, on social media especially, that we live swimming in a sea of alarm, it may be the case, instead, that the general din prevents us from hearing real cries of alarm by teaching us that almost anybody raising their voice above the crowd is a nut, or a narcissist, or a troll.

This is bad. As I’ve written before about climate change, when the news is alarming, the only responsible response is to be alarmed — and raise alarm. And like runaway climate change, the threat of a global pandemic, which graybeards have been warning about for years, is a reminder that we should always build public policy around the precautionary principle, rather than waiting until uncontestable and inarguable evidence arrives that action is necessary. If we wait that long, it will always be too late. Would it have been better if Feigl-Ding’s tweet thread had made a more precisely accurate comparison to SARS, and included some more caveats around the R0 3.8 figure? Perhaps. But science proceeds by increments, and in times of rapid, onrushing crisis the direction is important, too, not just the degree. The fact that we are now living more or less precisely through the situation Feigl-Ding warned us about in January suggests that two months ago we should have understood that this outcome was, at the very least, a possibility, and therefore worth planning for — rather than dismissing it as irresponsible fearmongering.

[...]

So, what happened? Why were so few sufficiently alarmed about the threat as it emerged, and why were those raising the alarm largely dismissed or sidelined? Aside from perhaps some amount of heightened personal anxiety and a few more fights in supermarket aisles over bundles of toilet paper, it’s hard to see a meaningful cost that heightened public anxiety about this virus would have produced over the last few months. But as I often say about the question of climate anxiety, if you are worried about the psychic cost of contemplating a bleak future, surely you should be more worried about the psychic cost of living through it, should we do nothing to avoid it. And, especially in the absence of public leadership, with the country and indeed much of the world operating in a vacuum of guidance that forced individuals to make possibly dangerous social choices entirely on their own, it’s very easy to see what benefit more public alarm about COVID-19 would have produced: more handwashing, and of a more vigorous kind; more temperature-checking; more isolation by those who felt a little sick; more voluntary social distancing, and then, when public “shelter in place” orders began finally to arrive, more complete honoring of those orders. Instead, almost everywhere in Western Europe and the U.S., we have chosen to be less alarmed. Already, that has proven a deadly choice.

[...]

But there are more quotidian explanations for our indifference — indeed, these are probably the most powerful explanations. We are selfish, and don’t want to even entertain the possibility that what we take to be our “needs” could be threatened or taken away. As recently as a few weeks ago, even the most apocalyptic among us probably didn’t truly believe that devastation at such a scale was possible, that the little fortresses of our modern lives could be so assaulted by a distant virus. A virus! That was the sort of thing that threatened the global south, we thought, or was limited to the “wet markets” and exotic-animal-cuisine cultures of Asia we felt so culturally superior to. It is a cruel irony, if possibly a temporary one, that this pandemic, which promises to be the most deadly in a century, emerged not out of the tropics or the global south but was passed around the world along vectors of globalization and cosmopolitan wealth, and has not yet even passed into the parts of the world which, for centuries, Westerners regarded as diseased and pestilent. Instead it’s our imperious cities incubating this virus, and which may well unleash it soon on the impoverished nations of the world. [...]

Indeed to judge from our preparation, we still felt invulnerable just weeks, or even days, before lockdown. The bias wasn’t just cultural, but cognitive. We didn’t believe anything could happen that didn’t have a precedent in recent memory, having built up conceptual models of what was possible over periods of just a decade, in some cases less. We’d lost so much esteem for experts over the last few decades that we found it more comfortable to substitute our own nonexistent expertise and common-sense heuristics (“how much worse than SARS could it really be?”) than to trust those telling us this was different. [...]

But the experience of Eric Feigl-Ding suggests two additional, related problems. First, and less significant, a culture of sanctimonious concern-trolling on elite social media, smaller of course than the problem of disinformation and yet problematic precisely because it suggests any kind of alarmism is disinformation. Second, and more important, a widespread cultural conviction that keeping your cool and trusting the political and social status quo is preferable to a radical response, any radical response — in all ways, at all times, and in the face of all kinds of threats. Indeed, that the ideal political and social response, no matter the particular crisis, is not responding to the threat but just grinning and bearing it. [...]