Evil In Our Time: Naomi Wolf on the Covid Response

The Bodies of Others

• The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human
• In her new book, Wolf addresses the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the worldwide reactions to its spread, and the consequences of those reactions.
• Wolf's book is a travel through time, switching between discussion and analysis of the situation at each stage and a kind of personal diary of how she and those around her were affected.

The lockdown is an abandonment of free society

• It signifies a new kind of society; a totalitarian oligarchy, and the fact that we allowed it means we have lost our freedom for the unforeseeable future.
• The fear of the virus has turned into a cult, the virus taking on the form of "Milton's Satan."
• Wolf discusses the interests at play and explains how lockdowns have benefited certain business sectors, especially Big Tech, large corporations at the expense of small businesses.

In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben analyzed the situation based on three key concepts in his philosophy, **** Sacer, the State of Exception and Bare Life

• **** sacer is someone who is at the same time sacred and excluded.
• He can be killed with impunity, but he cannot be sacrificed; he is subject to the power of government, but not protected by the law.

The state of exception is realized when law and constitution are abandoned and the executive arm of the state takes the reins

• usually based on a declaration of a state of emergency
• In the Third Reich, the Weimar constitution was in fact "unplugged" right at the beginning, while formally being unchanged the whole time.

Who are the homines sacri?

• With the lockdowns and other restrictions, we have all become homines suri, outside civil society yet subject to the power of the rulers
• Broadly speaking, there are three layers of freedom: work, expression, and political participation
• The lockdowns signify the abolition of rights and freedom, but also of our existence as humans
• Within the biopolitical regime, it is the outlaw, **** sacer, who still enjoys some level of freedom
• Isolation, deprivation of human connection; this is the essence of lockdowns
• Children deprived of the company of their peers, the emptiness in the eyes of the old and frail kept away from their loved ones by force, withering away in isolation, the crushed principles, empathy evaporate

 

https://brownstone.org/articles/evil-in-our-time-naomi-wolf-on-the-covid-response/