“Heroism” in the face of COVID-19?

It never ceases to amaze me just how much COVID-19 antimaskers and anti-“lockdowners” have fallen into exactly the same narratives commonly used by antivaxxers that I used to write about for years and years before the pandemic. I realize that it shouldn’t amaze me anymore, particularly given how much COVID-19 minimization narratives have nearly completely embraced common antivaccine narratives, but occasionally it does. For example, earlier this week I came across what will likely become (for me, at least) a classic example of COVID-19 minimizers and antivaxxers embracing an old antivax message at—where else?—that never-ending font of misinformation, pseudoscience, and disinformation about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines, the Brownstone Institute, in the form of a post by someone (whom I haven’t heard of before) named Haley Kynefin entitled Covidianism Inverts the Heroic Archetype. It’s a post that reminds me of something I wrote about over five years ago, something that could have been written by a certain antivaxxers whose blatherings and frequent fantasies about “heroism” I’ve written about a number of times, namely Kent Heckenlively, such as when he fantasized about being Aragorn, Son of Aragorn, the lost true king of Gondor, charging into battle against the Dark Lord Sauron in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Before I get into Kynefin’s unknowing callback to prepandemic antivax narratives, let me first mention another common antivaccine narrative inherent in the very title of her post, namely the reference to “Covidians.” There is little doubt to me that this was very intentional and knowing. Basically, using the term “Covidian” to imply, not-so-subtly, that those who support science-based measures to mitigate the spread and death toll from COVID-19 belong to a cult or, at best, are basing their beliefs not on science but religion. Indeed, I’ve seen a particularly blatant variant of this ploy in which those who criticize antivaxxers and COVID-19 minimizers have been referred to as “Branch Covidians” or members of the “Branch Covidian,” which not only portrays COVID-19 science as religion but plays on the name of a famous cult that ended in violence and death 30 years ago, the Branch Davidians. It’s a term particularly loved by Brownstone Institute flacks, who have used it before on a number of occasions. Indeed, personages no less important to the Brownstone Institute than its “scientific advisor” Dr. Martin Kuldorff and Brownstone Institute contributor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, both of whom were contributors to the Great Barrington Declaration, the bold eugenicist “declaration” from over two years ago that advocated a “let ‘er rip” approach to the pandemic:

And:

Again, it’s not subtle, although Kynefin doesn’t, like her leader, directly refer to “covidianism” as a religion, complete with high priests, she does represent it this way:

You could be fooled into thinking this Covidian safetyism was perhaps synonymous with heroic selflessness. After all, we recognize heroes not only as adventurers, explorers or martyrs for a transcendental cause. Our concept of heroism is also deeply tied up with the ideal of the selfless sacrifice. 

In the Christian tradition Jesus Christ, for example, died on the cross to save the world; local heroes like firefighters go into burning buildings to save the lives of trapped civilians. The Covidian philosophy asks people to sacrifice only their livelihoods and lifestyles (at least in theory), by shutting their businesses, putting aside their social engagements, postponing their vacations or taking school and church online. In exchange, it promises increased protection for everyone. On the surface, it sounds simple and perhaps appealing.

Sound familiar? It should. Notice how Kynefin portrays those who favor collective action and sacrifice to keep as many people as possible safe as “inverting” the “heroic archetype,” as the title puts it. This is very old antivaccine narrative that seeks to portray those who understandably wish to protect themselves and others against potentially deadly infectious diseases as being irrationally “anxious”—cowardly, even—about a tiny risk, as Dr. Vinay Prasad did last year, expressing utter contempt for those who have the temerity to try to minimize their chances of catching COVID-19 by using CO₂ monitors and masks.

Now let’s go back to our old friend Kent Heckenlively in 2017:

When I watch I imagine myself as Aragorn, taking the Dimholt Road under the mountain, clutching the sword, Anduril, Flame of the West, offering a deal to the souls of the dishonored dead if they would join me in battle. I picture myself as Aragon, astride my horse in front of the Black Gate, telling my troops, I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day! This day we fight!Then I jump off my horse, and with the setting sun behind me, a reckless, almost manic glint in my eye and a crooked grin, I am first to charge into the enemy army.

As I related at the time, this was, of course, one of my favorite scenes from both The Lord of the Rings books and the movies. In it, the last heir of Isildur, Aragorn, had brought his forces to the Black Gate of Mordor to challenge the Dark Lord Sauron to battle, not with any hope of victory, but as a diversion to distract the Eye of Sauron long enough to allow the hobbits Frodo and Sam to cross Mordor and reach Mount Doom, there to destroy the One Ring, the source of Sauron’s evil power, by throwing it into the molten lava in the Crack of Doom. Aragorn, Gandalf, and his companions fully expected to die in the effort, and it looked as though they would do just that after hordes of orcs issued forth from the Black Gate and the battle was joined. They were saved because Sam and Frodo did reach Mount Doom and the ring was destroyed, thus destroying Sauron’s power and causing his armies to flee, before the hordes of Sauron’s orc’s could destroy Aragorn and his vastly outnumbered force. The point, of course, is that Heckenlively views himself (or fantasizes himself) as a heroic figure from the world of epic fantasy like Aragorn. Walter Mitty-like, Heckenlively fantasizes that it’s him leading a doomed mission to the very Black Gate of Mordor, knowing he’s unlikely to come out of it alive, in order to give others the chance to defeat the great evil against which he strives.

Now there’s the archetype of heroism, complete with heroic self-sacrifice in order to save the world, right?

Now let’s see how Kynefin promotes the very same self-image for the band of “heroes” full of heroism over at Brownstone:

There is a basic conflict common to all life; and that is the conflict between risk-aversion — also known as “harm avoidance,” or the self-preservation instinct — and novelty-seeking. These are psychological terms, of course, but this conflict exists in animals as well as, on a micro-scale, in plants and even single-celled organisms. All living things attempt to assure their continued existence, and all living things also “seek” and explore their environments in “search” of food and favorable living conditions. 

Exploration, of course, is dangerous. The world is much bigger than ourselves and is home to many threats and hostile forces — predators, poisons, parasites and illnesses, harsh weather conditions, famine, competition for resources, and natural disasters, just to name a few.

But the world beyond us also offers us immense opportunity. Exploration can lead us into greater harmony with our environment, as we adapt to new challenges and develop resilience to a broader spectrum of threats. It can also lead us to new and better food sources, more hospitable territories, or put us in contact with new allies or symbiotes.

I bet you can see where Kynefin is going with this:

Most animals prioritize survival in this equation. If they have everything they need, they have little incentive to leave their comfort zone. They explore mainly in the interest of securing comfort and safety, and once that is assured, they are generally content to simply exist. 

But humans are special. Survival is not enough for us. Neither is comfort. We seek something more, something beyond our physical reality and spurred by our imagination. 

We imagine abstract, transcendent ideals which imbue our experiences of the world with meaning beyond mere physical pleasure and survival. We tell ourselves stories about things that matter more than food, comfort and pleasure: stories about gods and spirits, about transcendent worlds and universes, about true love, about experience for the sake of experience, about adventure and achievement, courage and revenge, brotherhood and camaraderie and the search for truth. 

Now guess where the Brownstone Institute and people like Haley Kynefin put themselves in this spectrum, between prioritizing safety and meeting one’s creature physical needs versus seeking something “more,” following “transcendent ideals” beyond mere physical survival and pleasure. Actually, you don’t have to guess. She makes it painfully obvious with every paragraph she writes.

She then goes on to quote, of all philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, specifically his passage from Thus Spake Zarathustra in which he states that ““Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman— a rope over an abyss.” She even goes on to argue:

By this he [Nietzsche] meant: man has a choice. He can choose to prioritize his survival instinct, and regress to the status of the animals from which he evolved; or, he can select transcendence, embracing the heroic archetype — what he called the “Superman” — and fulfilling his highest potential.

Nietzsche saw the “Superman” as a remedy to hyper-rationalist materialism, which, in the late 1800s, was already eroding traditional values and creating a spiritual vacuum. He predicted that man, losing his faith in the transcendent principle, would have no motivation to push himself to greatness. This would cause him to regress to his animal instincts, and give rise to what he called “the last man.” 

“The last man” would reject transcendence altogether in favor of the materialistic, animal impulses: safety, comfort, routine, stability, security, practicality, conformity and pleasure. He would no longer seek beyond himself, no longer take risks or strive for achievement, no longer be willing to die in his quest for meaning. In so doing, he would lose the spark that makes humanity special.

Guess who’s the “last man” in this Kynefin’s analogy citing Nietzschean philosophy? Obviously, you don’t have to guess. Kynefin makes it painfully obvious. The “last man” rejecting heroism, struggle, and transcendence in favor of safety, pleasure, and having material needs met is, of course, those who dared to criticize the Great Barrington Declaration as “eugenicist” and public health officials and leaders who opted to use collective action to try to slow the spread of COVID-19 with mask and vaccine mandates and “lockdowns.” Never mind that nothing resembling a true “lockdown” occurred outside of countries like China, an authoritarian regime; that is, unless you consider curfews and temporary business closures that were leaky as leaky could be to have been “lockdowns.” Don’t get me wrong. Some of the policies used to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and minimize disease and death did have harmful side effects. One had to weigh those potential harms versus the benefits, a complex question, with decisions having to be made based on very incomplete information in the face of major uncertainty.

Not for Kynefin are any of the complexities about weighing risks and benefits of complex policies in the face of a deadly pandemic bearing down on the world and the political resistance to it! Not at all! To Kynefin, we are, apparently, Nietzsche’s “last man”:

The Covid crisis inverted the heroic archetype and assaulted the very root of what makes us human. The philosophy that justified unprecedented restrictions on human freedom was the philosophy of Nietzsche’s “last man.” We were told that heroes “stay home” rather than venturing out into the unknown; “stay safe” rather than take risks; “save lives” rather than transcend the survival instinct. 

So what does Kynefin think people should have done? Just let the virus rip, with those unfortunate enough to suffer and die from it just being the “heroes” who fell in order to allow the rest of us to go on with our lives? Of course, it’s one thing for a firefighter to choose to go into a burning building to save lives. That’s heroism! Kynefin even agrees! She uses that example. She even uses the example of Jesus Christ dying on the cross to save the world, because of course she does. (I also can’t help but wonder why she’s invoking Christian religion, even as she accuses “covidianism” of being a religion.

It’s another thing to have no choice because you are in a high risk group and everyone else at lower risk is not doing anything to lower the chances of your acquiring the virus.

But, not for Nietzschean “supermen” doing their heroic heroism are such considerations, at least not to Kynefin, who once again invokes a tiresome comparison to religion:

We were asked to approach even the most mundane aspects of our lives with neurotic levels of risk-aversion: we were, for example, advised to wash our groceries after purchasing them; told to avoid singing in church or at parties; and forced to move through stores and restaurants in a single predetermined direction. 

We were told that we must do whatever we can, that even if there was only a small chance of reducing viral spread or saving lives, it was worth it. And those who refused to participate in the absurd micromanagement of their lives were vilified as “irresponsible” and “selfish.” 

There was no higher purpose allowed here. Love, spirituality, religion, camaraderie, learning, adventure, connection to the natural world, and the experience of living life itself were all jettisoned, deemed suddenly unimportant. We were commanded to come together to worship instead at the altar of the collective self-preservation instinct. 

Of course, no one—and I mean no one—argued that “love, spirituality, religion, camaraderie, learning, adventure, connection to the natural world, and the experience of living life itself” were unimportant. This is a massive straw man. Was Kynefin even paying attention? Balancing COVID-19 mitigation measures and all of these things were debated and endlessly rehashed ad nauseam.

Kynefin goes on and on, citing Joseph Campbell’s archetypical journey of the hero in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, and others, all to contrast the supposed contrast between true “heroism” as one of the key things that make us human and what happened during COVID-19, which supposedly was the “last man,” the animalistic in us, and the rejection of the “transcendent.”

To her, the novel coronavirus that became known as SARS-CoV-2 and whose disease became known as COVID-19 was an “opportunity” for us to prove our “heroism”:

In general, we don’t wish pain, suffering or death on anyone. It would be great if we could seek the hero’s journey and save lives, follow our transcendent ideals andsurvive, embrace meaning and self-interest. But when faced with the difficult choice between one or the other, it should be obvious which one we should sacrifice. Whether the choice is an individual or a collective one doesn’t matter. 

In theory at least, the Covid crisis presented us with just such a choice: collectively face the death, suffering and pain thrust on us by a novel respiratory virus, or collectively jettison all of our transcendent, human values in a futile and childish quest to “save lives.” 

Seriously, a human being wrote something that callous and stupid. Kynefin seems to be arguing that heroism would involve letting the virus rip, that if we can’t be heroes and have as many as possible survive, we should just let people die, rather than do something that is not “heroic” to try to save them. Note the straw man, too, the claim that it was a choice between not doing anything to minimize suffering and death versus jettisoning “all of our transcendent, human values.” It’s a straw man so massive that, were it set on fire, it could be easily seen from the International Space Station.

Don’t get Kynefin wrong, though. She’s not “minimizing” the death (actually, she is):

That death, suffering and pain should not be dismissed or minimized. Real people were and would have been affected by the cruelties of life, regardless of which choice we made. But as humans, we have a unique ability that makes us great, that helps us to process these kinds of difficult situations. We have the ability to mentalize, to tell stories of transcendence, and to imbue our reality with a sense of higher purpose and meaning. We have the archetypal journey of the hero. 

It is the heroic archetype that makes us human. Without it, we are no different from animals, and as Viktor Frankl suggested, we are not worthy of our suffering. 

The secret, and the lesson that the myth of the hero teaches us, is that suffering is a part of life. Death is a part of life. Pain is a part of life. They are inevitable, and our futile attempts at avoiding them amount only to a comfortable illusion. 

I really, really hate how Kynefin misuses Victor Frankl here. There is a huge difference between transcendence and bravery in the face of being victimized in an event the Holocaust, which was an intentional program to exterminate an entire race of people from an entire continent, and efforts to prevent mass suffering and death due to a natural, impersonal, implacable novel respiratory virus. In one case, it is humans causing the suffering; in the other, there is no intent, just the natural world. The only way she can even semi-justify this horrific misuse of philosophy is to claim that everything that was done was pointless and futile anyway, dismissing “lockdowns, restrictions and mandates” as being at best able to “only delay the circulation of respiratory viruses.” She seems to forget one huge part of this equation: Delaying the circulation of the virus until vaccines were available could—and did—save lives. Delaying the spread of the virus to minimize—or at least spread out—the overload on hospitals was a reasonable strategy. Kynefin intentionally portrays public health interventions as futile interventions of sheep seeking only safety and willing to impose being “sheeple” on everyone.

Indeed, she concludes that we should embrace the suffering that comes our way. Seriously, I kid you not:

The myth of the hero does not teach us to eradicate life’s pains and risks in pursuit of only comfort and safety. That is the doctrine of the animal. Rather, the myth of the hero shows us that it is necessary to embrace suffering and risk in order to experience life’s miracle; and that, for such a transcendent reward — for such excellence — that is a price worth paying. 

Sure, embrace danger, suffering, and death due to a natural virus, which does not in the least bit care about your “heroism.” Do you see echoes of any sort of philosophy in this sort of argument, a philosophy that glorifies the hero and heroism above all else? Any particular political philosophy at all? Any ideas?

OK, I’ll quote Umberto Eco and go there:

In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live Death!”). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

Sending other people to death is pretty much what the Great Barrington Declaration was all about, given that the privileged purveyors of the GBD—yes, I’m talking to you, Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, and Sunetra Gupta—were all pretty much safe in their laptop class lifestyle, even before vaccines against COVID-19. They could work from home online, order their food delivered, and basically live reasonably well, while the virus raged around them, killing off the elderly, the sick, and minorities far more than the privileged academic class to which they all belonged. (Let’s also not forget to mention the working class, whose jobs did not allow them to work from home but instead forced them into contact with people, as was the case for grocery store workers, people working in agriculture and in meat packing plants, delivery people, and retail workers in stores that were considered essential businesses.) The same privilege applied to Jeffrey Tucker, who helped bring the GBD authors together at the headquarters of the right wing think tank American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) before leaving in 2021 to found the “spiritual child of the GBD,” the Brownstone Institute.

Kynefin’s article is the clearest indication yet that I’ve come across on the Brownstone Institute website of its affinity towards fascism, which echoes a longstanding affinity between antivaccine beliefs and fascism worshiping strength that I wrote about in detail a year ago. Brownstone flacks are portraying “resistance” to any sort of collective action or public health mandate of any kind as “cowardice” and “bravely” letting yourself get infected with a respiratory virus that can kill you as “heroism.” (Just forget about all useless eaters who will die, as truly Brownstone is a cult of death—just like the one Eco described.) I no longer care how much they might howl about my pointing this out, either. Eugenics, worshiping death, portraying any collective action to save lives as weakness, we have a word for that philosophy.