Denial, and the Comorbidities of Politics

I won’t waste time debunking the bullshit claim that COVID-19 deaths have been inflated, and only six percent of reported deaths are authentic. Smarter critics than me have already done this. I’m more interested in what this denialism says about Americans collectively, that so many people willingly reshare this message. Why are we so reluctant to accept that this disease even exists, much less do anything about it?

Marxist critic Slavoj Žižek compares the global COVID-19 crisis to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ celebrated Five Stages of Dying. He postulates on ways we’ve passed through Denial, through Anger and Bargaining, and into Depression. How, he wonders, will society behave when we reach the Acceptance stage? But Žižek apparently overlooks one important point: the stages aren’t sequential. We can slide backward, as the Six Percenters prove we’ve backslid into Denial.

Change is hard. Changing our ways hurts, because our habits are instantiated on our brains, and changing our ways forces us to rewire our bodies, just as exercise rewires our muscles. That's why demanding people do the right thing simply because it’s right, does no good. Because people will continue doing what they do as long as they can, desperate to avoid the pain which change inevitably brings.

In life, as in dying and grief, we work desperately to avoid pain. We keep events as simple and mechanical as possible, letting ourselves think as little as necessary. But COVID-19 rejects that. America currently has a 9/11-level mortality event every two days, and our refusal to act hasn’t made it go away, just kicked the issue down the road. We’re like a patient deferring a cancer diagnosis, refusing to change the ways that made us sick.

I don’t make the cancer comparison lightly. I currently have three friends facing cancer treatment, and have witnessed, at different levels, the pain and indignity which cancer therapies force on patients. Cancer therapies are painful, degrading, and costly, but the cost of doing nothing is mortality. That’s what we’re facing collectively right now: fixing our problems will hurt, probably a lot, but avoidance will cause massive suffering and death.

Like COVID-19, cancer patients suffer comorbidities that hasten death. Looking around, it’s clear America suffers pervasive comorbidities. Racism, like cancer, turns certain parts of our bodies against one another. Likewise climate change, where our shared body, the earth, is developing a fever strong enough to broil out the infectious agent. Like chemotherapy, our various comorbidities are trying to kill us just enough to destroy the infection, and save the body.

President Trump and Dr. Fauci obviously differ on how to face the problem.

That’s why we need systemic change. Like the infected body, we cannot expect one organ to heal itself in isolation, and have it make any difference. We can’t ask individuals to not be racist, while official policies keep disadvantaged populations down. We can’t ask people to think environmentally, while our economy lives and dies based on selling and consuming hydrocarbons. Our entire body is diseased together, and needs systemic treatment.

Because change hurts. Exercise is painful, like education, like chemotherapy. And as individuals avoid cancer diagnosis, or even a prostate or gynecological exam, we collectively have deferred future social pain by avoiding facing our suffering right now. Climate change and racism and pandemic are rampant, but doing anything about them is painful, and always will be. Like an oncologist, we need to force the change, even when it hurts.

Systemic change, though, requires a functional system. Our system is dominated by two parties which effectively avoid problems for literally decades. The Democrats shun meaningful reforms for fear of causing offense, while Republicans tell their emotionally rabid base anything they want to hear. Our elected officials, fearful of losing power, are unwilling to face the near-term pain necessary to prevent the cancer spreading and killing us later.

We’ve heard the words “Constitutional Crisis” ballyhooed so much during the current administration that they’ve become banal. But the collision of racism, state violence, plague, and global warming shows us that our current Constitution, devised for a much smaller nation, just can’t address the problems we have now. We’ve lost the plot because our system no longer works, as we see demonstrated in the streets of Kenosha today.

Our administration’s response to COVID-19 has literally been to deny there’s a problem. That denial, like a patient’s refusal to accept mortality, make is more likely that we’ll die sooner. That’s compounded by our collective denial that the problem runs deeper than one administration. We need to fix the system, before it kills us all.