‘The end of diversity. Corona as a psychological and political crisis.’ An essay by Malte Nelles

1. THE END OF DIVERSITY
It is late summer 2020 in Germany. Two distinguished scientists publish a popular science book on a health threat that has brought us the first long-term suspension of fundamental rights since the Second World War and the biggest economic slump since the global economic crisis of 1929. Immediately after its publication, the book lands at number one on the Spiegel bestseller list. I probably wouldn’t have heard about it at first if I hadn’t seen a post on social media with a link to an interview with the scientists in question in the Kieler Nachrichten newspaper. On page 10, under the heading ‘Schleswig Holstein,’ Karina Reiss, professor of biochemistry, infectiology, cell biology and medicine, and her husband Sucharit Bhakdi, until this year a highly respected, award-winning specialist and professor of infectious epidemiology, were given space in the regional pages for an interview. On the websites of the major daily newspapers and news magazines that I read regularly (faz.net, zeitonline.de, spiegel.de, nzz.de and others), I have not found a single article on this subject (as of 12 August 2020).
The conclusions that Reiss and Bhakdi draw in their book (title: Corona-Fehlalarm? Zahlen, Fakten und Hintergründe) may be exaggerated and probably incorrect or polemical in quite a few places. However, they are not alone in their diagnosis of an immense medical and political misjudgement of the coronavirus risk and can refer to well-founded scientific sources. As a medical layman, I do not wish to enter into a debate with all the know-it-alls and their figures and study results. What concerns me is the phenomenon that a contribution by proven experts is being treated by the German public as if it did not exist – and this deliberately. Given the enormous sales figures for the book and the overriding relevance of the topic, it can no longer be said that the book has been overlooked: it is being systematically hushed up.
This seems all the more astonishing when contrasted with the supposed values of the age we live in. A concept that is presented as an end in itself in other social issues of our time is that of diversity. In gender relations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion and much more, the cultural model of our time lies in the recognition, appreciation and, in some cases, explicit promotion of differences. The internal contradictions that this model contains, alongside its emancipatory potential, must be addressed elsewhere.
In relation to the coronavirus issue, it suffices to remember that the acceptance of ‘diversity’ is supposedly one of our most important social goals. But what has happened to the principle of diversity when two distinguished scientists have been consistently ignored or defamed for five months instead of being heard? They can be found in their YouTube videos on the subject, in which they cite study results based on the latest evidence-based medicine, in close proximity to links to Attila Hildmann and other idiots who believe that lizard people sent us the virus and are controlling our politics from inside the Earth.

‘SOMEONE MUST BE BEHIND IT’ – THE CHILDISH LOGIC OF CONSPIRACY THEORY
A psychologically simple interpretation of the phenomenon of ignorance of Bhakdi and Reiss’ positions in the German public sphere seeks to identify those responsible for ensuring that uncomfortable positions are silenced. Someone has an interest in deceiving us and is pursuing their own agenda in the shadow of the current state of emergency.
We find this psychologically undifferentiated interpretation of events in the manifold conspiracy theories circulating. Behind it lies the simple, what I will call ‘childish’ logic that everything that happens is caused and intended by people. The logic of exposing the conspiracy follows this pattern: the alleged perpetrators who set the whole thing in motion must be publicly exposed. We find this in the most stupid and confused versions in the aforementioned Attila Hildmann, but also in state leaders such as Donald Trump, who even after six months of mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States wants to shift the blame to China.
But we grossly and naively overestimate the power and sphere of influence of individuals and groups when we assume that the whole thing is a sophisticated plan by the elites of the ‘deep state’ or other obscure powers. Of course, we can see that in the global economy, this crisis is also leading to some super-rich companies expanding their monopolies, that for some pharmaceutical companies, the business of a lifetime awaits, and that political representatives of an absolute health dictatorship are able to strengthen their positions. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the editors of FAZ, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit and the public media met and swore to communicate only a very specific interpretation of the coronavirus events, to promote certain researchers and systematically exclude others. No, something much simpler is probably the case: it just happened that way. No one made a plan. Things took their course and now here we are.

THE DIVISION OF REALITY
Instead of accepting different opinions, it is now impossible to have a conversation with friends, family members or colleagues if opinions on the danger of coronavirus and the policies surrounding it differ. The public parroting of the principle that we must adhere to science has long since given way to a deep ideological divide. Scientific contributions that do not conform to the prevailing opinion are ignored or, better yet, deleted, as YouTube did in the spring, if a contribution does not comply with WHO guidelines. Here is a quote from Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube: ‘Anything that violates the WHO’s recommendations would be a violation of our guidelines. Therefore, removal is another important part of our guidelines’ (quoted from Reiss, Bhakti (2020): Corona-Fehlalarm (…), p. 201.). And this is not just about Donald Trump’s suggestions to simply consume disinfectants orally, but about the positions of scientists and medical specialists who have dedicated their entire professional lives to the treatment and research of infectious diseases.
Conscientious mask wearers or coronavirus deniers – in August 2020, there seems to be no room for anything in between in Germany. In recent years, we have looked on with some disbelief at the division of public opinion into two realities in the United States. Today, we ourselves are on the verge of being ruled by ‘alternative facts’ and the exclusive information many citizens receive via new media channels, which convey a completely different view of things than what is now often referred to as ‘mainstream’ reporting. As ridiculous as the American dispute over the number of visitors at Trump’s inauguration seemed to us, we are now discussing on social networks whether 17,000 or 1,300,000 people took part in the demonstration in Berlin on 1 August. 1,283,000 – that is apparently the difference between the realities in which people in Germany now live.
How can we understand this division if we do not allow ourselves to be seduced by the childishly naive explanation that it is all the work of individuals and dark forces? What clear-minded observer of political events could seriously believe that a power-conscious but unpretentious person like Angela Merkel, after 15 years as chancellor, would seize the last opportunity to go down in history as the chancellor who permanently suspended fundamental rights in order to secure dictatorial powers for herself?

PSYCHOLOGY AS THE STUDY OF THE SELF-MOTION OF THE MIND
If people like Bill Gates, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, Angela Merkel or Christian Drosten did not conceive of the total polarisation in which we find ourselves, then what happened? I would like to attempt a psychological explanation here. Psychology, however, is not understood here as something that goes on inside individuals (feelings, thoughts, motivations, drives, etc.), as is commonly assumed, but as the study of the self-movement of the mind or soul or consciousness. In the following, I will often use the terms mind, soul and consciousness synonymously, even though the three terms have differences and completely different origins. Two characteristics of the understanding of psychology that we pursue and develop at our institute are essential here and must suffice for the following thoughts:
When I speak of the soul or the mind, I mean something different from the psychic apparatus that controls perception, feeling, thinking and other psychic functions. In the Western tradition, the soul was what remained of a person when the physical body and the ego, in which these psychological functions coincided, died. The realm of the soul is thus that realm of the human being that lies beyond the sphere of influence of the conscious ego. The soul refers to that aspect of human life that transcends biological, mere life. Applied to the individual, it is the other within oneself, the unfathomable, under whose influence I and my life are without my having chosen this. If, for example, I am seized by the spiritual power of love, this does not happen because ‘I’ have chosen it, but it happens to me. ‘I’ only come into play when dealing with this feeling and the question of what I make of it. The great Other in human life, which in other times was also called ‘God’ (I am currently writing a book on this subject with the working title ‘God Lives,’ which is scheduled for publication in 2021), was there before the desires of my ‘I.’ I now stand before it. Therapy in the depth psychology tradition begins with getting to know this other within me and integrating it into what I experience as ‘myself.’
In the West, we have a tradition, which is disadvantageous for some considerations, of seeing the soul as something belonging to the individual. Another concept from our tradition that can help us emancipate ourselves from this individualistic perspective is that of the spirit. A spirit is something that does not actually exist, but nevertheless has an effect through its haunting presence. In German, we have the wonderful term Zeitgeist to describe the collective spirit of our culture. No person or institution has created it; rather, it is the sum of our opinions, thoughts and suppressed feelings, and it reigns supreme over our minds and our personal desires and plans.
Here are a few examples of the Zeitgeist’s influence from the recent political history of the Federal Republic of Germany: In 2000, contrary to what many considered to be its supposed political DNA, the SPD introduced the Hartz laws. In the following two decades, the CDU implemented the nuclear phase-out, the abolition of compulsory military service, marriage for same-sex couples, the opening of Germany’s borders during the refugee crisis, etc. The simple, childish explanation offered by critics is that Schröder and Merkel sold out their party’s values and the good old Federal Republic. A slightly more nuanced version is that they had no choice but to act as they did due to political realities (mass unemployment, Fukushima, changing social values, the refugee crisis, etc.).
This fails to recognise that reactions to political events do not simply follow a natural automatism. Everything that happens is interpreted and linked to ideas. The mediator of ideas between what is happening and how people react to it is the spirit of the times. It has in common with the soul of the individual that it contains truths that those concerned have not conceived or intended. The psychology of the individual, the perception, feelings, thoughts and actions of the individual, is determined by the logos of the mind, which defines the framework within which these functions are exercised.
In this understanding, which goes back to the Jungian psychoanalyst and philosopher Wolfgang Giegerich, psychology is the study of the self-movement of the mind in which we live. Psychological analysis is primarily interested in the changes and ruptures in consciousness, i.e. the evolution of truth and the inner logic of an era. The Zeitgeist is the conductor who leads, but who does not exist as an actual person or institution. It is literally nothing that sets the tone. All the people in the orchestra: Ms Merkel, Mr Spahn, Mr Söder, Mr Laschet, Mr Drosten and Mr Wieler all have their positions, but each actor is only as powerful as the prevailing zeitgeist allows. The spirit is not a subject, not an agent pulling the strings behind the scenes, but lives and acts only in and through the events themselves.
In order to understand people’s actions in a particular time, we must look at the intellectual logic that makes it possible for individuals to feel, think, speak and act in that time. We are interested in the psychology (translated: the logos of the mind) of a particular time. In relation to Corona: What spirit guides politics, the media and people, and thus determines how this phenomenon is dealt with?
Although coming from a completely different background, we find a similar approach in the thinking of the postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault was interested in the production of knowledge in our society with the political background idea that ‘knowledge is power’. What is truth – in our words, the truth of the Zeitgeist – is revealed through the discourses within which the knowledge that is valid for us is created. People are important here in that they take on certain roles in the discourse, but it is not individual people who are decisive for the final outcome, but the process of knowledge generation itself. According to Foucault, we must examine this process by means of discourse analysis if we want to understand how truth and knowledge are created.

THE ABSOLUTE LACK OF ALTERNATIVES
Like other political discourses in recent years, the political discourse on the coronavirus epidemic is characterised by one feature: the respective political direction is presented as absolute. This first became clear in Angela Merkel’s famous dictum of ‘no alternative’, which found its way into political discourse in a different context, namely the euro rescue.
While there was still a political debate at the time about whether there really were no other viable options, this is no longer the case in the German public and political sphere when it comes to dealing with coronavirus. There is no alternative to the one path that has been chosen. Anyone who discusses the pros and cons, right and wrong, disregards the victims in northern Italy, Spain, Great Britain and New York and the feared demise of African societies, which so many have predicted but which has not yet materialised. Looking north to the stubborn Swedes evokes either cognitive dissonance or simple head-shaking among the political and media elite at the audacity of this small country to want to provide its own response to events.
What has happened in the collective soul that we have allowed ourselves to be manoeuvred into this situation, which completely contradicts our values? Scientific diversity, differences of opinion, a discourse in which the most important points are debated reasonably and transparently by and with recognised experts – surely this should be in keeping with the spirit of our times, which in so many other areas of society is pushing for transparency, equality, pluralism and scientific evidence. How can we, in the face of what is likely to be the greatest social challenge of the 2020s, suddenly find ourselves in a position where we simply exclude unpopular positions from the discourse? What has happened?
At the end of March this year, a miracle happened. The world’s leaders shut down most of our economies for a record-breaking period of time. I speak of a miracle because in our supposedly secular age, the logic of our desires, fears and assumptions is ruled by a god to whom we sacrifice our entire lives and so much more: yes, I am talking about money. In non-corona times, we debate for decades how we can achieve a few percentage points of CO2 emission reduction without this even being reflected in the second decimal place of the economic growth figures. In our private lives, as in the sphere of business and politics, hardly anyone admits it openly: money comes first for us. The friendly, politically correct way of saying this is: we must ensure growth or we must not stifle growth.
What a profound impact it has had on the collective world soul when this quasi-natural law has been abolished at a stroke for modern man. No one really expected the meteorite impact called Covid-19. In January and February, the West was still weighing up the situation, aware that this was a problem that might be typical of China, with its wet markets selling live animals and its completely overcrowded cities. When it became clear that the virus had reached us, naked fear reigned.
What does modern man need in times of fear and terror? In Germany, above all else, toilet paper for the body and numbers for the mind. In March, the Federal Ministry of the Interior quickly made its first internal projections (based on very pessimistic assumptions). An initial forecast for the worst-case scenario predicted around one million victims in Germany by the summer. The images from northern Italy suggested that this could indeed be the case. It was the sheer fear of one’s own death, that of one’s loved ones and neighbours, and of the potential chaos in which Germany could sink if we did not respond with the strongest means available, namely a social lockdown. Within days, the protection of physical integrity replaced the pursuit of capital gain as the most essential human need in the late modern affluent society of the West. This is a tectonic shift in the cultural unconscious of our community, the consequences of which we are only slowly becoming aware of.

THE CALL FOR A STRONG FATHER
In crises where fear dominates consciousness, many people experience a phenomenon that we describe in our therapeutic work as a regression to a childlike state of mind. The psychological phenomenon of regression is one of the oldest ways of thinking about psychological pathologies, and Sigmund Freud observed many of his patients’ symptoms through this lens. What happens to a child in fear? It abandons all its efforts to achieve autonomy and seeks a strong attachment figure who will protect it from danger.
It is a telling phenomenon that since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the majority in Germany would rather have Markus Söder as chancellor than Armin Laschet (the once promising candidates Robert Habeck, Annalena Baerbock and Friedrich Merz have long since been forgotten). It can hardly be based on the bare facts, because North Rhine-Westphalia is doing better than Bavaria in terms of infection rates and death rates. No, what distinguished Laschet and Söder was above all their rhetoric and their different weighing up of central human values. While the former expressed his concerns about shutting down our economy and education system and isolating the elderly, the latter had the right political instinct and, with Bavaria’s long-standing tradition of going its own way, presented himself as the protector of the people, a father figure who rules with clarity and consistency and protects the children, the people, without compromise.
Importantly, this is not Markus Söder’s doing. He was only able to make a name for himself politically in this way because he tapped into the protective instincts of the majority of the population. The need for a strong father figure was simply in the air. The collective consciousness, gripped by fear, had already made its decision.
All politicians should have learned from Laschet’s experience: anyone who relativises Corona or even weighs it up against other social goods loses the electorate – and what politician wants that? The direction and momentum of the political discourse have now been set. When schools reopened in North Rhine-Westphalia after the summer holidays, 2.5 million pupils between East Westphalia and the Eifel region were initially required to wear masks throughout the entire school day – contrary to the recommendation of the Marburger Bund, the professional association of doctors in Germany. Armin Laschet has also learned from the new spirit that is stirring the German soul.
Only Wolfgang Schäuble dared to say that human life is not an absolute value in itself. As a high-risk patient due to his age and disability and the simple fact that he no longer has to win elections, he was able to take the liberty of striking one of the very few discordant notes in the handling of the coronavirus. All other parties involved who may have had doubts or different opinions were marginalised or simply submitted to the prevailing opinion of the zeitgeist.

THE ABSOLUTISATION OF THE DISCUSSION USING THE EXAMPLE OF THE MASK
In public, the coronavirus measures have since taken on the logical form of increasing absolutisation. This development can be traced back to thepublic symbol of the coronavirus era par excellence: the mask. As recently as April, official sources, primarily the WHO, stated that there was no scientific evidence that wearing respiratory masks would protect against infection with viruses or that it was recommended for the protection of others. On the contrary, masks were even rejected because they could lull the wearer into a false sense of security that they were protected from infection. And five months later?
My wife recently told me about a pregnant friend who is being required to wear a mask during the birth of her child at the clinic where she plans to give birth. I researched this report, which I initially found unbelievable, and it does indeed appear that this is the new modus vivendi in many gynaecological wards, even though there is no recommendation from the WHO (yet). Such a practice means that a measure that has not been scientifically proven (respiratory masks are permeable and do not offer 100% protection against infection) takes precedence over what is appropriate for a healthy and successful birth for mother and child.
Masks are one of the few things people can do, apart from washing their hands and keeping their distance, to protect themselves from infection with Covid-19. The fact that all three measures of the ‘AHA rules’ (distance, hand hygiene, everyday masks) ultimately offer only relative protection against the virus must not be mentioned. The main thing is that people do what they can.
I do not wish to argue against the use of face masks here. I am impressed by the East Asian practice of wearing masks in public when you have a cold – not to protect yourself, but to protect the general public. I remember the arrogance with which this was ridiculed here in March. I also cannot understand the hysteria when people think it is impossible to wear the thing for half an hour while shopping at the supermarket. However, it gives pause for thought when the mask becomes the fetish of our time and no area of life is spared from it. In the case of the expectant mother, for example, a pragmatic quick test could be envisaged. If this is possible for holidaymakers returning from Mallorca at the airport, what right is there to deny it to a woman in labour and force her to take this measure, which goes against everything that is important in the birth process?
The only explanation for this is that the logic of the mask has taken on a life of its own. Its usefulness and the consideration of its use seem to have been lost within a very short time. It is now a matter of principle! It has become a fetish. In professional football, substituted players sit down with their teammates on the bench and put on their masks first. These men are tested constantly, spend all their time together, exchange saliva, sweat and sometimes blood with each other every day in training and matches, but when you sit next to each other, being a role model is crucial – and at the moment, it seems that you are only a good person in public if you wear a mask.
Another example from sport: national basketball player Joshiko Saibou was dismissed without notice by his employer, Telekom Baskets Bonn, because he took part in the Berlin demonstration against German coronavirus policy and did not wear a mask. As the principle of freedom of expression also applies to athletes, the only reason for his dismissal could be that he had violated the club’s hygiene measures. This raises another pragmatic question: How about a test instead of expulsion? How would the club have reacted if Saibou, a black German man, had been caught without a mask at a Black Lives Matter rally instead of the coronavirus demonstration? My guess is that, given the expected media outcry, he would never have been dismissed. The diversity of our opinions seems to be welcome as long as it corresponds to the spirit of the times.
It seems that one of our oldest and simplest forms of logic has once again gained ground in the coronavirus debate: the division of reality into supposed good and evil. When the going gets tough, this early Christian classic suddenly seems – completely unconsciously, of course – to be the means of choice for ordering the phenomena of our complex reality. Evil is the coronavirus denier Saibou, who is fired for his sin. On the other side, all opponents of coronavirus policy band together and seek out the evil among the ‘ruling class’ (Drosten, WHO, RKI, the British government, Bill Gates, etc.). What falls by the wayside? Any possibility of moderation and practical reason. In the second part of this essay, I will offer some thoughts on this, or quite simply: my opinion on what is happening.

2. A PLEA FOR A MATURE APPROACH TO CORONAVIRUS
THERE IS NO CERTAINTY
One of the most important psychological drives of modern humans is control over nature. Starting with the development of animal husbandry and agriculture, we have now reached the point where we can strategically modify our genetic makeup. The coronavirus, which we do not yet understand why it kills some people and does not even cause symptoms in many others, is an affront to modern humans’ desire for control. A tiny bit of nature is bringing the whole world we have built to a standstill. It reminds us of something that we temporarily lose sight of in our unconscious fantasies of godlike omnipotence: no matter how much we do, life remains, and here I quote my father from an older article, ‘life-threatening’. Suppressing this simple fact is neurotic.
This does not mean that we should not take sensible measures to deal with the virus. But absolute safety is a mirage. In northern Italy, nurses and doctors contracted coronavirus in March despite wearing FFP3 masks, and some of them died. Anyone who does not want to live like a hermit, shunning a reasonably normal life, or who does not want to see all social processes completely regulated, cannot avoid the realisation that there is a real danger that we can become infected with the coronavirus.
Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannides has calculated that the probability of a healthy person under the age of 65 dying from the virus is about the same as driving 32 kilometres a day (quoted from Bhakdi, Reiss: op. cit., p. 29). Who would give up their car at this risk? (I suspect that cycling is no less dangerous.) The 940,000 coronavirus deaths worldwide to date (as of 17 September 2020) are offset by 1,500,000 children who die every year from easily preventable diarrhoeal diseases. Where is the outcry here?
In order to be able to read, understand and classify figures correctly, the entire population would first need to take statistics courses. As they have been used in the last six months, they have caused fear rather than enlightenment, creating a climate that calls for ever stronger measures to create a childish illusion of security.

ENOUGH WITH THE IDIOTIC MEASURES
The desire to regulate every area of life with the new coronavirus regulations leads to a variety of idiotic measures alongside sensible ones such as banning large events. Here are a few examples from my own life and current politics.
My daughter’s nursery has a water pump that the children can use in the summer to enjoy the cool water and play in the mud. The use of this pump has been prohibited by the authorities because too many children could gather in one place and thus transmit the virus. How well toddlers can comply with social distancing rules can be imagined when you try unsuccessfully to teach them not to pour their juice over their buttered bread at breakfast.
No toddler understands these rules. If they were actually enforced in the long term and children had to refrain from all physical contact, this would have a variety of negative consequences for their natural bonding behaviour and emotional development. I owe a debt of gratitude to the pragmatic educator who dispelled the children’s disappointment at the closed pump by simply spraying them with the hose in temperatures of over 30 degrees.
Another practice that a friend from Bavaria told me about: his son is in his first year of school there. His class has been divided into two groups, so that there are only alternating weekly face-to-face lessons. The children meet in the morning every two weeks, keeping the required distance, but they all get together every afternoon at the after-school care centre, where they play happily and exchange bacteria and viruses.
In the square, we are allowed to sit ‘topless’ in the restaurant and cinema, but as soon as we stand up, we need to wear a mask. Are we really ensuring safety, or are we simply appeasing our fears with semi-magical rituals? Are such measures really evident, as one would say in medical jargon, or are they not rather an expression of state-imposed pedagogy that seeks to regulate behaviour in every area of life? Instead of this circus with masks on and off in restaurants, how about the following very simple measure: if you don’t want to get infected or want to make your personal contribution to preventing the spread of the virus, simply don’t go to a restaurant. Conversely, anyone who does go to a restaurant may, in the worst case, become infected there. Among my acquaintances, there were people who wore masks and practised social distancing with the utmost discipline throughout the entire lockdown phase and still became infected with Covid-19.
As soon as infection rates rise, there are virtually no limits to regulatory activism. In Spain, smoking outdoors was banned in August, with a few exceptions, on the grounds that people ‘would not wear masks’ when smoking (here in Der Spiegel). SPD health politician Karl Lauterbach demands that ‘at a time when obesity is a proven risk factor for severe Covid-19, junk food should not be advertised’ (here on Twitter). So overweight people lose weight when they see less McDonald’s advertising and then no longer die of coronavirus? Not only is this scientific nonsense, but here, as with other issues, an attempt is being made to paternalistically enforce a political goal (the ban on fast food advertising) by playing on the fears of the population. When this comes from other political camps, it is called populism.
It seems as if there is hardly any health policy ban that cannot be justified by coronavirus. When it comes to protecting against the virus, nothing is sacred anymore. The real problem with these measures is that they are sparking enormous anger among more and more people who feel they are being treated like children. When the public and politicians ask people to follow the rules, those rules must be sensible, evident and absolutely necessary. And here, too, the liberal principle must apply: no rule is better than a superfluous rule.
The political community of the Federal Republic of Germany thrives on the broadest possible consensus among large sections of the population. If things continue as they are, we are in the process of dividing our political culture into a frightened majority and an angry minority. And this is not about the sometimes demanded ‘listening’ to the ‘angry citizens’. It is about ensuring that different opinions and political views, whether you like them or not, are represented in the self-proclaimed ‘quality media’ and the democratic party landscape. These opinions exist, but no one dares to come out of hiding because the fear of ostracism in these circles is greater than the fear of the virus. It is not the virus that is consuming us, but fear and the way we live.

THE DIVISION BETWEEN GENERATIONS
The divisive movements are not only taking place between health absolutists and coronavirus deniers, but increasingly between generations. The way the middle generations deal with the ‘young’ and the ‘old’ is particularly interesting here. Neither group has a voice in the public discourse, but my generation (I am 38) and the middle-aged, who occupy the important positions in society, like to talk at length about both. The elderly are seen as the vulnerable group that needs to be protected, while the young are already being pilloried in many places as the cause of the second wave.
My first thoughts go to the elderly. Apart from exceptions of severe cases with lasting health damage in younger people (which, incidentally, can occur with many infectious diseases – I myself have been affected by this for 20 years after a very unfortunate course of a staphylococcal infection), it is mainly older people with serious pre-existing conditions who are at risk of losing their lives. The prevailing argument in public discourse is therefore that the elderly must be protected. I have two personal experiences to share on this as well.
I recently visited my grandmother in a nursing home with my daughter. She is 95. She had not seen her great-granddaughter, who is the only thing she is still enthusiastic about, since the end of 2019, as we had not been allowed to visit her since the outbreak of the coronavirus. When we were with her a few weeks ago, she asked me if I was a father and got to know her great-granddaughter all over again. Another elderly lady who saw us said that she hoped my grandmother had given her great-granddaughter a ‘proper cuddle’. She wouldn’t let anyone stop her from doing that. My grandmother didn’t do this, and fortunately there was no danger of her doing so, as the little girl didn’t know her great-grandmother and would certainly have rejected any attempts at cuddling, so I didn’t have to intervene. What kind of ‘protector’ asks our ‘elderly’ whether they want to live as long as possible or whether they would rather fill the little time they have left with things that bring them a little joy?
What is really going on in nursing homes? It is necessary to protect the facilities where elderly people live and the people who care for them. However, it is neither necessary nor morally legitimate to patronise the elderly and decide what is right for them. Most of the elderly people I have spoken to do not long for the longest possible life, but for one that offers moments of vitality until the end. And in the vast majority of cases, moments of vitality are social moments. What gives us the right to speak for these people who have experienced things completely different from us middle-aged people?
Our policies do not protect the elderly, but rather the institutions that enable us to ensure that our elderly no longer live in our households as they did in the past. This is necessary, but it does not require the false heroic pathos of charity towards the elderly that health policymakers are suddenly discovering.
Apart from coronavirus, older people have little lobby in our community. At the weekend, an elderly woman at a flea market in Berlin asked me if she could have my deposit bottle. She was well-groomed and extremely reserved. We got talking and she told me that she had worked for 43 years and had a pension of £600 with her husband. That’s why she was collecting bottles. We, the Good Samaritans, suddenly want to protect the elderly from coronavirus, but politically, our community has so far failed to provide this woman with a dignified life in her old age. We look away from the slow death of poverty in old age, which sends this woman to collect bottles at a Berlin flea market in 30-degree heat, unless we happen to encounter someone like her, as I did on Sunday.
Who is supposed to believe our kindness towards the elderly, which we suddenly claim to have discovered because of the coronavirus threat? Is it really about the elderly and the sick, whose lives and needs we otherwise simply do not care about in so many ways and whom we gladly send to old people’s homes, nursing homes or homes for the disabled so that their limitations do not disturb our lives? Or are we not, in the end, once again guided by our own fears, which we can now ennoble with our newly discovered compassion for the elderly and sick?
At the beginning of the epidemic, it was the well-travelled elites and people of East Asian appearance who were blamed for spreading the virus, but in late summer, the baton was passed on to young people, who, despite the pandemic, are taking the liberty of partying in private. With a few isolated exceptions of severe cases, the vast majority of young people experience a coronavirus infection with mild or no symptoms at all. A friend in his 50s told me about the practice of his children, who are 19 and 24 years old and who established a consistent system together in the spring in which they avoided all contact with their parents and older relatives. He told me how impressed he was by their concern and sense of responsibility.
After the lockdown and six months without clubs and real nightlife, these young people are now being told by the ‘sensible’ majority that they are breaking the rules and causing the ‘second wave’. One wonders whether this moral finger-pointing comes from people who were never young or who have simply forgotten what was important at that stage of life. For the past six months, a significant proportion of young people have been deprived of what makes youth what it is: dancing, intense and diverse social contact, exuberant celebrations, sexual exploration.
My generation and those slightly older are restricted in their private lives by the fact that schools and daycare centres were closed and cultural institutions still are. This is not pleasant for many, but as long as kindergartens and schools are open again, much of it can be endured. Young people, on the other hand, whose lives are all about partying and experiencing new things, have had to give up almost everything since the beginning of the pandemic. Instead of appreciation and respect for these sacrifices, they are told they are selfish rule-breakers.
In the spring, many young people showed enormous discipline to protect our healthcare system and the vulnerable older generation, even though most of them were only at risk of catching a cold. German hospitals were never overburdened, quite the contrary. In some hospitals, doctors were even sent on short-time work. If we really want to have young people on board when things get tough again, we would do well not to condemn them morally.

LIVING WITH THE VIRUS
The virus is now here and cannot be kept out of society permanently without setting up a system of total surveillance. If things go really badly, it could be populist-governed countries such as the USA and Brazil, with their mixture of ignorance and incompetence in dealing with the virus, that are currently experiencing uncontrolled high infection rates and will be the first to achieve widespread herd immunity next summer.
The projections made by scientists in the spring, which assumed that 70% of the total population would need to be infected, appear to be incorrect, as researchers assumed in their prognostic model calculations at the time that people had no immunity to Covid-19. We now know of multiple cross-immunities and successful immune responses to the virus in many people. If such a situation were to arise, we would find ourselves, in the very countries that have been relatively successful in containing the virus, in a situation where we might have to hole up for years to protect ourselves from the virus. The implications for our lives, the further political division in our country, economic security, the neurotisation of children and young people, the isolation of many people and so much more are easy to imagine.
The current strategy is to collectively hide from the virus and pin our hopes on the development of a vaccine or effective drugs, as if these would lead us back to the promised land. Whether this gamble will pay off cannot be said at this point in time. It is also unclear whether the vaccine will be sufficiently effective and free of dangerous side effects. The pressure to present something is so high that it is likely that some issues will be overlooked.
Anyone who has ever had a glimpse into everyday research knows how studies are conducted and how ‘open-ended’ science actually is. And even if we do not end up with a general vaccination mandate, there will certainly be political calls for mandatory vaccination of healthcare workers, children in schools and nurseries, and other professional groups. Even before the coronavirus epidemic, the Measles Protection Act came into force on 1 March this year, according to which children without proof of vaccination are no longer allowed to attend schools and daycare centres. The legal intervention in the sphere of one’s own body has thus already been opened up.
What could be a mental alternative to our logic of fighting (vaccination and medication) and hiding (social distancing)? A look at psychotherapy can help here: when a person with unpleasant symptoms enters therapy, the first step is to help them become aware of their psychological repression and avoidance behaviour. In a second step, the therapeutic movement often consists of allowing the thing that is being fought against, excluded, and that one does not want to have under any circumstances, into one’s own mental space.
In relation to symptoms, the question is what they symbolically represent in terms of mental content and how we mentally digest this content and these messages. Healing in a psychological sense – not to be confused with freedom from symptoms – initially occurs when what was previously rejected is allowed to emerge into the mental space of one’s own self.
Applied to the virus: we practise absolute avoidance behaviour. The simple message ‘it is there and it will remain there for the foreseeable future’ must not be true. It must be suppressed, fought, rejected. However, the simple truth is that it is there and for some of us it is dangerous. As with other viral infectious diseases, people will die from it. For many people, the virus is relatively harmless, for a few it is dangerous, and for some it is deadly. Weighing up how to deal with this dilemma is the social task we call politics.

DEVELOPING A RELATIVE PERSPECTIVE
When the virus is present, the question of how dangerous it is arises. Few comparisons are as hotly debated as that between COVID-19 and normal influenza. Anyone who has ever had real flu, rather than just ‘flu-like symptoms’, knows from experience that flu can be more than just unpleasant.
In 2017, 25,000 people died in Germany from a flu epidemic. This also underscores the seriousness of a flu infection. If coronavirus is more dangerous and deadly than the flu, the question arises as to how much more dangerous it is. What do we do as a society during a flu epidemic? Ultimately, very little. We call on risk groups to get vaccinated, but healthy people have not yet been forced to restrict their lives when the epidemics peak at the end of February. And with coronavirus? We have been in lockdown for almost two months, face masks are part of our everyday life, our education system has fallen into chaos, hundreds of thousands of businesses will go bankrupt this year, and so much more. To put it in a nutshell: if we went into battle against the flu in previous years with a kitchen knife, we have launched a nuclear war against coronavirus.
These severe measures are entirely understandable in light of the initial predictions that this would be a killer virus that would hit a population with no immunity whatsoever. We now know more, and while coronavirus is more dangerous than the flu, it is still far from what we feared in March. This should also be allowed to be said without being defamed as a ‘denier’ or ‘downplayer’. However, once you have started a nuclear war, it is difficult to go back to using more harmless weapons.
Here, too, the psychotherapeutic perspective offers some insight. When people with neurotic symptoms seek therapy, it is always because they have lost themselves in absolutes in their feelings, thoughts and actions (see Wolfgang Giegerich’s groundbreaking book: Neurosis. The logic of a Metaphysical Illness). For someone suffering from a phobia, the fear of a spider is no longer relative; it is absolutely unthinkable for them to touch it. An anorexic patient feels absolutely ‘too fat’, even if she is just skin and bones. For a narcissistic man, it is absolutely unthinkable not to be the centre of attention. In neurosis, the principle of the absolute reigns supreme; there is only black or white. Approaching the spider a little closer, gaining 3 kilos, holding back a little – all of this is impossible. The illness consists of imposing an either/or mentality on the complexity of reality. Collectively, we are becoming neurotic about coronavirus – if we are not already.
Quite a few scientists and doctors, such as Hendrik Streeck, see the situation in a much more nuanced and relaxed way than it is being discussed in the media and politics. The public discourse is becoming detached from what is really happening, which is reflected, among other things, in the silence surrounding the article by Bhakdi and Reiss. The dangerous thing about conflicts with absolute, non-negotiable positions is that they develop a momentum of their own, where each party to the conflict finds itself in a position where it can no longer relativise or change its own point of view. The peaceful possibility of exchange, of mutual understanding, of a genuine intellectual struggle for the truth takes a back seat to the fundamental goal of defending one’s own position.
In relation to coronavirus: the harsher and sometimes more nonsensical the measures taken to contain the virus, the more difficult it will be to expect people to take risks and have confidence in life again at some point. Research has now also proven that a fear-free state of mental well-being has a positive effect on the immune system.

THE WILLINGNESS TO LEARN
Another virtue that we like to preach in education, but which we treat completely differently, not only in relation to coronavirus, is the willingness to make mistakes and learn from experience, and to be able to change, adapt, abandon and rediscover one’s opinions in the course of a process. We can describe this virtue in one word: it is about the human ability to learn. We must learn from the virus. It is new, and in many ways its effects are puzzling.
One example we could learn from, if we did not barricade ourselves behind ideology, is Sweden. It was the only Western European country that did not close its schools during the height of the epidemic. With 63 infections among children, it had roughly the same number of infected people per capita as neighbouring Finland, which closed its schools. On what basis are children in Germany now being forced to wear masks during breaks and in some cases even during lessons, when their Swedish peers have managed just fine without them during the period when the virus was actually rampant? The fear is that this is no longer about scientific motives, but rather political and media motives, about appeasing irrational fears among the population and ultimately about the battle for the CDU leadership and the chancellorship between Armin Laschet and Markus Söder.
In a public climate where a decision-maker is held responsible for every coronavirus death, where the number of infections (and paradoxically not the number of actual clinical cases) is the most important indicator of good governance, an absolutism of absolute risk minimisation prevails. Better to have more and more restrictions and regulations than to see that, from 2017 to now, we have had two and a half times as many flu deaths as coronavirus deaths in 2020.
It becomes really tricky when we try to quantify the indirect victims of coronavirus policy, as a trainee lawyer from the Home Office attempted to do in an analysis, which was completely ignored by his superiors, prompting him to publish it online as a whistleblower. Operations that are not taking place, doctor and hospital visits that people no longer dare to make, a presumably imminent sharp increase in suicides and mental illness due to bankruptcies, and so much more. Just as the media ignored Bhakdi and Reiss’s book in August, the thoroughly profound analysis of a political expert on the lockdown was simply hushed up instead of being debated and refuted in an open, transparent discourse.
The WHO’s recommendations are sacrosanct and our own thinking has been incapacitated. The politically dangerous thing about this is that any other legitimate assessment that does not correspond to the zeitgeist of the public must now seek other media outlets in order to be articulated. There is anger, disappointment and, in turn, exaggeration. Because they are excluded from public discourse, reasonable critics of coronavirus policy suddenly find themselves in the company of right-wing or left-wing conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis who want to storm the Reichstag, and people who are or become opposed to the system and everything it stands for.
Politicians must and are allowed to make mistakes. As long as we hold our political decision-makers collectively responsible for being flawless, we pay for it by being governed by cowards. Instead of strong fathers and mothers or all-knowing gods, our politicians are small, fallible human beings like ourselves. If we allowed them this, we could actually gain something that we supposedly demand but almost never want to hear: honesty and the courage to admit mistakes and ignorance.
A glance at one of our small neighbouring countries shows that things can be done differently. Austrian government advisor Franz Allerberger, professor of infectious diseases and head of the public health division of the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES), spoke openly in a remarkable interview in August about misjudgements and upcoming challenges in the coronavirus situation (here on YouTube).
Without justifying his earlier predictions, he assumes that the mortality rate for coronavirus infections is 0.25%, which is pretty much the same as for a normal flu epidemic (meaning that, statistically, one in 400 infected people would die from COVID-19). At the time, politicians were advised on the basis of knowledge that has now changed. Covid-19 is somewhat more dangerous than influenza, but in terms of mortality, it is not nearly as dangerous as the Spanish flu, which was used as a reference epidemic at the beginning. For the autumn and winter, he advises ‘courage to take risks’ in view of the expected increase in cold symptoms, as there are neither sufficient testing capacities for every infection with a sore throat, nor should people stop working every time they catch a cold.

LIFE WITHOUT ENEMIES
One final thought on the phenomenon that the virus has triggered in our consciousness. First, a quick question: When was the last serious, internationally planned terrorist attack that you can remember? Right, it’s not easy to remember (the local Nazi acts in Hanau and Halle come to mind), because since Corona, at the latest, our ‘main enemy’, international Islamist terrorism, has apparently been preoccupied with pandemic control and fear management and has not been able to focus on its core business. At least that’s how it appears in the media.
It almost seems as if humans are not made to live without enemies and fear. Now that Western societies are no longer tormented by terrorism, whose only political capital lies in ruling over people’s fears, the ‘war against the virus’ (Emanuel Macron) is the new conflict that is supposed to mobilise us all. Someone has to take on the role of the first villain. What if Covid-19 turns out to be serious but ultimately less dangerous than initially feared? That no longer matters once the internal and external war machine has been set in motion and the archetype of the enemy has been established in the collective mind. The psychological perspective aims at nothing other than becoming aware of this process and the effect that arises from encountering this insight.

THE LAST EXPERIENCE
This essay originally ended here, and I had approved it for publication. This morning, I met an old friend whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. After greeting him, I got a little worked up about the latest coronavirus measures and travel warnings that affect me, and he told me that he had been to a funeral last week. His best friend died in his mid-40s from heart muscle inflammation after contracting Covid-19. He leaves behind his wife and two children, aged 8 and 12. He contracted the virus during a training course led by someone with respiratory symptoms, which in retrospect turned out to be Covid-19.
It was the first time I had heard of someone in my circle dying from coronavirus. I felt deeply ashamed of the ramblings he had to listen to at the beginning of our meeting. I also wondered whether, in what I had written in this essay over the past five weeks, I had lost all humility in the face of what the virus means to some people. Perhaps, after the very difficult winter that lies ahead, I will read this text and shake my head in shame. Perhaps, when we have come through the crisis, I will look back on it and think that I was right in my assessment. Perhaps I will fall ill myself and, due to my pre-existing conditions, experience coronavirus in a completely different way than from media reports. Perhaps it will affect someone in my family. Ultimately, I know nothing for certain about what will happen, but my gut feeling tells me that we should at least talk about it openly.
Malte Nelles, published on 23 September 2020
The copyright of the text belongs to the author. The text may be distributed digitally and in print.
professor of biochemistry, infectious diseases, cell biology and medicine, and her husband Sucharit Bhakdi, until this year a highly respected, award-winning specialist and professor of infectious disease epidemiology, were given space in the regional pages for an interview. On the websites of the major daily newspapers and news magazines that I read regularly (faz.net, zeitonline.de, spiegel.de, nzz.de and others), I have not found a single article on this subject (as of 12 August 2020).
The conclusions that Reiss and Bhakdi draw in their book (title: Corona-Fehlalarm? Zahlen, Fakten und Hintergründe) may be exaggerated and probably incorrect or polemical in quite a few places. However, they are not alone in their diagnosis of an immense medical and political misjudgement of the coronavirus risk and can refer to well-founded scientific sources. As a medical layman, I do not wish to enter into a debate with all the know-it-alls and their figures and study results. What concerns me is the phenomenon that a contribution by proven experts is being treated by the German public as if it did not exist – and this deliberately. Given the enormous sales figures for the book and the overriding relevance of the topic, it can no longer be said that the book has been overlooked: it is being systematically hushed up.
This seems all the more astonishing when contrasted with the supposed values of the age we live in. A concept that is presented as an end in itself in other social issues of our time is that of diversity. In gender relations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion and much more, the cultural model of our time lies in the recognition, appreciation and, in some cases, explicit promotion of differences. The internal contradictions that this model contains, alongside its emancipatory potential, must be addressed elsewhere.
In relation to the coronavirus issue, it suffices to remember that the acceptance of ‘diversity’ is supposedly one of our most important social goals. But what has happened to the principle of diversity when two distinguished scientists have been consistently ignored or defamed for five months instead of being heard? They can be found in their YouTube videos on the subject, in which they cite study results based on the latest evidence-based medicine, in close proximity to links to Attila Hildmann and other idiots who believe that lizard people sent us the virus and are controlling our politics from inside the Earth.

PSYCHOLOGY AS THE STUDY OF THE SELF-MOTION OF THE MIND
If people like Bill Gates, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, Angela Merkel or Christian Drosten did not conceive of the total polarisation in which we find ourselves, then what happened? I would like to attempt a psychological explanation here. Psychology, however, is not understood as something that goes on inside individuals (feelings, thoughts, motivations, drives, etc.), as is commonly assumed, but as the study of the self-movement of the mind or soul or consciousness. In the following, I often use the terms mind, soul and consciousness synonymously, even though the three terms have differences and completely different origins. Two characteristics of the understanding of psychology that we pursue and develop at our institute are essential to me and must suffice for the following thoughts:
When I speak of the soul or the mind, I mean something different from the psychic apparatus that controls perception, feeling, thinking and other psychic functions. In the Western tradition, the soul was what remained of a person when the physical body and the ego, in which these psychological functions coincided, died. The realm of the soul is thus that realm of the human being that lies beyond the sphere of influence of the conscious ego. The soul refers to that aspect of human life that transcends biological, mere life. Applied to the individual, it is the other within oneself, the unfathomable, under whose influence I and my life are without my having decided to be so. If, for example, I am seized by the spiritual power of love, this does not happen because ‘I’ have decided to do so, but it happens to me. ‘I’ only come into play when dealing with this feeling and the question of what I make of it. The great Other in human life, which in other times was also called ‘God’ (I am currently writing a book on this subject with the working title ‘God Lives,’ which is scheduled for publication in 2021), existed before the desires of my ‘I.’ I now stand before it. Therapy in the depth psychology tradition begins with getting to know this other within me and integrating it into what I experience as ‘myself.’
In the West, we have a tradition, which is disadvantageous for some considerations, of seeing the soul as something belonging to the individual. Another concept from our tradition that can help us emancipate ourselves from this individualistic perspective is that of the spirit. A spirit is something that does not actually exist, but nevertheless has an effect through its haunting presence. In German, we have the wonderful term Zeitgeist to describe the collective spirit of our culture. No person or institution has created it; rather, it is the sum of our opinions, thoughts and suppressed feelings, and it reigns supreme over our minds and our personal desires and plans.
Here are a few examples of the Zeitgeist’s influence from the recent political history of the Federal Republic of Germany: In 2000, contrary to what many considered to be its supposed political DNA, the SPD introduced the Hartz laws. In the following two decades, the CDU implemented the nuclear phase-out, the abolition of compulsory military service, marriage for same-sex couples, the opening of Germany’s borders during the refugee crisis, etc. The simple, childish explanation offered by critics is that Schröder and Merkel sold out their party’s values and the good old Federal Republic. A slightly more nuanced version is that they had no choice but to act as they did due to political realities (mass unemployment, Fukushima, changing social values, the refugee crisis, etc.).
This fails to recognise that reactions to political events do not simply follow a natural automatism. Everything that happens is interpreted and linked to ideas. The mediator of ideas between what is happening and how people react to it is the spirit of the times. It has in common with the soul of the individual that it contains truths that those concerned have not conceived or intended. The psychology of the individual, the perception, feelings, thoughts and actions of the individual, is determined by the logos of the mind, which defines the framework within which these functions are exercised.
In this understanding, which goes back to the Jungian psychoanalyst and philosopher Wolfgang Giegerich, psychology is the study of the self-movement of the mind in which we live. Psychological analysis is primarily interested in the changes and ruptures in consciousness, i.e. the evolution of truth and the inner logic of an era. The Zeitgeist is the conductor who leads, but who does not exist as an actual person or institution. It is literally nothing that sets the tone. All the people in the orchestra: Ms Merkel, Mr Spahn, Mr Söder, Mr Laschet, Mr Drosten and Mr Wieler all have their positions, but each actor is only as powerful as the prevailing zeitgeist allows. The spirit is not a subject, not an agent pulling the strings behind the scenes, but lives and acts only in and through the events themselves.
In order to understand people’s actions in a particular time, we must look at the intellectual logic that makes it possible for individuals to feel, think, speak and act in that time. We are interested in the psychology (translated: the logos of the mind) of a particular time. In relation to Corona: What spirit guides politics, the media and people, and thus determines how this phenomenon is dealt with?
Although coming from a completely different background, we find a similar approach in the thinking of the postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault was interested in the production of knowledge in our society with the political background idea that ‘knowledge is power’. What is truth – in our words, the truth of the Zeitgeist – is revealed through the discourses within which the knowledge that is valid for us is created. People are important here in that they take on certain roles in the discourse, but it is not individual people who are decisive for the final outcome, but the process of knowledge generation itself. According to Foucault, we must examine this process by means of discourse analysis if we want to understand how truth and knowledge are created.

2. A PLEA FOR A MATURE APPROACH TO CORONA
THERE IS NO CERTAINTY
One of the most important psychological drives of modern humans is control over nature. Starting with the development of animal husbandry and agriculture, we have now reached the point where we can strategically alter our genetic makeup. The coronavirus, which we do not yet understand why it kills some people and does not even cause symptoms in many others, is an affront to modern man’s need for control. A tiny bit of nature brings the whole world we have built to a standstill. It reminds us of something that we temporarily lose sight of in our unconscious fantasies of godlike omnipotence: no matter how much we do, life remains, and here I quote my father from an older article, ‘life-threatening.’ Suppressing this simple fact is neurotic.
This does not mean that we should not take sensible measures to deal with the virus. But absolute safety is a mirage. In northern Italy, nurses and doctors contracted coronavirus in March despite wearing FFP3 masks, and some of them died. Anyone who does not want to live like a hermit, withdrawing from a reasonably normal life, or who does not want to see all aspects of social life completely regulated, cannot avoid the realisation that there is a real danger that we can become infected with the coronavirus.
Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannides has calculated that the probability of a healthy person under the age of 65 dying from the virus is about the same as driving 32 kilometres a day (quoted from Bhakdi, Reiss: op. cit., p. 29). Who would give up their car given this risk? (I suspect that cycling is no less dangerous.) The 940,000 coronavirus deaths worldwide to date (as of 17 September 2020) are offset by 1,500,000 children who die every year from easily preventable diarrhoeal diseases. Where is the outcry here?
In order to be able to read, understand and classify figures correctly, the entire population would first need to take statistics courses. As they have been used in the last six months, they have caused fear rather than enlightenment, creating a climate that calls for ever stronger measures to create a childish illusion of security.

THE DIVISION BETWEEN GENERATIONS
The divisive movements are not only taking place between health absolutists and coronavirus deniers, but increasingly between generations. The way the middle generations deal with the ‘young’ and the ‘old’ is particularly interesting here. Neither group has a voice in the public discourse, but my generation (I am 38) and the middle-aged, who occupy the important positions in society, like to talk at length about both. The elderly are seen as the vulnerable group that needs to be protected, while the young are already being pilloried in many places as the cause of the second wave.
My first thoughts go to the elderly. Apart from exceptions of severe cases with lasting health damage in younger people (which, incidentally, can occur with many infectious diseases – I myself have been affected by this for 20 years after a very unfortunate course of a staphylococcal infection), it is mainly older people with serious pre-existing conditions who are at risk of dying. The prevailing argument in public discourse is therefore that the elderly must be protected. I have two personal experiences to share on this subject.
I recently visited my grandmother in a nursing home with my daughter. She is 95. She had not seen her great-granddaughter, who is the only thing she is still enthusiastic about, since the end of 2019, as we have not been allowed to visit her since the coronavirus outbreak. When we were with her a few weeks ago, she asked me if I was a father and got to know her great-granddaughter all over again. Another elderly lady who saw us said that she hoped my grandmother had given her great-granddaughter a ‘proper cuddle’. She wouldn’t let anyone stop her from doing that. My grandmother didn’t do this, and fortunately there was no danger of her doing so, as the little girl no longer knew her great-grandmother and would certainly have rejected any attempts at cuddling, so I didn’t have to intervene. What kind of ‘protector’ asks our ‘elderly’ whether they want to live as long as possible or whether they would rather fill the little time they have left with things that bring them a little joy?
What is really going on in nursing homes? It is necessary to protect the facilities where elderly people live and the people who care for them. However, it is neither necessary nor morally legitimate to patronise the elderly and decide what is right for them. Most of the elderly people I have spoken to do not long for the longest possible life, but for one that offers moments of vitality right up to the end. And in the vast majority of cases, moments of vitality are social moments. What gives us the right to speak for these people who have experienced things that are completely different from us middle-aged people?
Our policies do not protect the elderly, but rather the institutions that enable us to ensure that our elderly no longer live in our households as they did in the past. This is necessary, but it does not require the false heroic pathos of charity towards the elderly that health policymakers are suddenly discovering.
Apart from Corona, old people have little lobby in our community. At the weekend, an elderly woman at a flea market in Berlin asked me if she could have my deposit bottle. She was well-groomed and extremely reserved. We got talking and she told me that she had worked for 43 years and had a pension of 600 euros together with her husband. That’s why she was now collecting bottles. We, the Good Samaritans, suddenly want to protect the elderly from coronavirus, but politically, our community has so far failed to provide this woman with a dignified life in her old age. We look away from the slow death of poverty in old age, which sends this woman to collect bottles at a Berlin flea market in 30-degree heat, unless we happen to encounter someone like her, as I did on Sunday.
Who is supposed to believe our kindness towards the elderly, which we suddenly claim to have discovered because of the coronavirus threat? Is it really about the elderly and the sick, whose lives and needs we otherwise simply do not care about in so many ways and whom we gladly send to old people’s homes, nursing homes or homes for the disabled so that their limitations do not disturb our lives? Or are we not, in the end, once again guided by our own fears, which we can now ennoble with our newly discovered compassion for the elderly and sick?
At the beginning of the epidemic, it was the well-travelled elites and people of East Asian appearance who were blamed for spreading the virus, but in late summer, the baton was passed on to young people, who, despite the pandemic, are taking the liberty of partying in private. With a few isolated exceptions of severe cases, the vast majority of young people experience a coronavirus infection with mild or no symptoms at all. A friend in his 50s told me about the practice of his children, who are 19 and 24 years old and who established a consistent system together in the spring in which they avoided all contact with their parents and older relatives. He told me how impressed he was by their concern and sense of responsibility.
After the lockdown and six months without clubs and real nightlife, these young people are now being told by the ‘sensible’ majority that they are breaking the rules and causing the ‘second wave’. One wonders whether this moral finger-pointing comes from people who were never young or who have simply forgotten what was important at that stage of life. For the past six months, a significant proportion of young people have been deprived of what makes youth what it is: dancing, intense and diverse social contact, exuberant celebrations, sexual exploration.
My generation and those slightly older are restricted in their private lives by the fact that schools and daycare centres were closed and cultural institutions still are. This is not pleasant for many, but as long as kindergartens and schools are open again, much of it can be endured. Young people, on the other hand, whose lives are all about partying and experiencing new things, have had to give up almost everything since the beginning of the pandemic. Instead of appreciation and respect for these sacrifices, they are told they are selfish rule-breakers.
In the spring, many young people showed enormous discipline to protect our healthcare system and the vulnerable older generation, even though most of them were only at risk of catching a cold. German hospitals were never overburdened, quite the contrary. In some hospitals, doctors were even sent on short-time work. If we really want to have young people on board when things get tough again, we would do well not to condemn them morally.