Viral Confusions

During a pandemic, we are forced to articulate our greatest fears in the face of disease. To cope with an unwanted intruder, the mind seethes in a conflagration of emotional responses. In these few months living under coronavirus, how have we used basic psychological responses to understand the specter of illness?

Source: Rami Gabriel

Descriptions of the disease are multifarious and mysterious, our understanding of it gains signification with every report we read or hear, with every frantic minor eureka we experience the possibility of actually knowing what it is. Somehow a broader story with metaphysical qualities, like the revenge of Nature or the spite of an angry god would be more satisfying than pictures of a nefarious suction-cupped molecule: It came from the East, from some perverse animal domestication wherein ancient rites and magical elixirs unleashed poison from a dark cave. Thus stories abound, advice is proffered, and information streams in, the headlines of every newspaper proclaim about one thing and one thing only. Our lurid fascination with understanding what is happening seems irresistible.

The physical metaphors for and about this illness suggest we are concerned with increasing social distance, vigilance in our hygiene, distrust of other’s hygiene, and most importantly, the limits of what we can know about our very own bodies. Social distancing can be seen as a reflection of the socioeconomic disparities that plague contemporary capitalism. The most vulnerable workers are more likely to catch the disease while those who can telecommute double down on their sequestered screen-mediated lives. Concern with hygiene, on the other hand, reveals the insidious psychological sense of stigma. Shared public spaces and objects like doorknobs are viewed as unclean, we revert to an overwhelming need to avoid the pollutions of the other. It appears that when the mind is under duress and routines have been replaced with open-endedness, fear and suspicion seem to be the most likely psychological response.

The psychological roots of such evolved stigma behaviors are based on our emotional systems for fear and disgust. The unwanted intruder is a possible predator and thus we experience fear. Whereas the disease awakens our ability to stigmatize the other leading to the feeling of disgust. Disgust has enabled us to adopt social distancing behaviors with incredible rapidity. Consider how odd our current social distancing behaviors would have been seen just a few months ago, coincidentally it has become easy to view the ways we used to interact in close physical proximity with perplexity.

Through constantly updated statistics, our vulnerabilities seem on meticulous display. Depending on one’s underlying conditions, past traumas, and several other factors, an individual will tend to some position on the continuum between out-of-control paranoia and glib nonchalance. To defray the weight of vulnerability, each individual hosts a particular collection of facts, a vision of the state that we are in. He has a bevy of facts to choose from to support whichever position delivers a satisfying-enough sense of knowledge.

The most poignant conundrum for our sense of making meaning of the pandemic is the epistemic stalemate of knowing whether or not you "have" it and a lack of tests that would provide certainty. You may have it and not know it; you may have it, not express any symptoms but still be spreading it; you may have it but it won’t be expressed for weeks, etc. This metaphor of obscured knowledge is the perfect anxiogenic, you don’t know and can’t know, not only about your own body, but about any body around you. Only paranoid schizophrenic delusions and high-octane drug hallucinations bear a resemblance to this toxic checkmate of fear and paranoia.

There must be room in our worldview for not knowing, it might be painful to accept the duress that not every disorder has a remedy, and that there are things that are out of our control. This tolerance for the very basic vulnerability of the body, and the body politic, seems to be a crucial ingredient for successful coping in a disaster. It might seem irrational to accept that there is no single story that can be told which explains the situation in a satisfying manner. Clinical psychology outlines an ever-growing list of regular irrationalities that people hold, from mood disorders to anxiety disorders, and more. This seems to show that the effect of trauma and duress during development leads to modifications of our notions of when and where to experience and express fear and anxiety.

Yet to experience emotions like fear and suspicion when under threat is not an irregularity, it is not an illness in itself. It is a clearly motivated evolutionarily adaptive desire to be in control of the unwanted intruder, who is the source of our vulnerability and fear. We view this stranger in the room with stigma and thus any other body that may be a carrier is viewed with disgust. At the same time, our psychological mechanisms for dealing with unpredictability, and the close proximity of death and confusion have come to the fore. What we learn is that each neurotic holds out for his version of a cure that makes sense of the disorder that has infected accepted notions of normality.

The question is, will we get used to relying on the fear and disgust mechanisms we have adopted during this liminal period, or will we find a graceful manner to occupy the house we live in.