In 2022, the World Health Organization appointed University College London professor Susan Michie as the new Chair of its “Technical Advisory Group on Behavioral Insights”. A psychologist by profession with no medical training to her name, but specializing in manipulating social behavior, Michie has since been working to “nudge” states into rigorous vaccination, masking, and lockdown regimens, which are now contractual in the form of the WHO Pandemic Treaty to be installed this year.
A member of the British Communist Party, Susan Michie channels a particular legacy, which is now to be welded into technocratic elite institutions like the WHO. In an interview from the year of her WHO appointment, Michie responded to accusations of purposefully streamlining public discourse and opinion with her political leanings. But while she claims that “my politics are not anything to do with my scientific advice”, she simultaneously offers a whiff of the mindset that her ilk—unelected leaders whose only purpose is to make the coming legal and factual expropriation of individuals look expedient—promotes: collectivism.
“What I don’t see a lot of amongst my colleagues maybe, but certainly the media, and especially the papers that you mentioned, would be much more emphasis on individual freedom, individual rights, rather than taking a sort of more collective population approach. But the reality is that this pandemic has shown everybody that no individual is an island, we are very interconnected, and no one community or no one socio-economic group within society can think that they can solve it for themselves and protect themselves, because it is not like that”.
According to Michie, the new science of Public Health is collectivist by nature, seeking to provide group-wide solutions to health challenges. It is only logical that it should downplay individual rights. The bigger problem seems that this view is obtaining increasing social acceptance.
Since Covid, so-called natural rights—rights intrinsic and inalienable to human nature, such as the right to dignity, life and liberty, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, recognition as a legal person, the prohibition of torture and slavery etc.—have been increasingly flattened by the executive power of the state, at the expense of the legislative and the judiciary. The political Left has been the architect of this dramatic shift.
Since Covid, natural rights have been increasingly flattened by the executive power of the state, at the expense of the legislative and the judiciary. The political Left who has been the architect of this dramatic shift.
Note for example Judith Butler, whose Manicheaism has now fully replaced whatever was left of the political ideas of enlightenment in the Left’s intellectual horizon. In a discussion with Cornel West, she said: “The intensification of state powers and surveillance mechanisms in particular—we are no longer able to have that conversation. Put both values [state power and individual liberty] on the table!” — West: “See that is exactly what I mean by licentiousness…the way personal liberty language is mobilized for licentiousness”. — Butler: “We’re linked in this living world, on this planet, which is why the interdependency that we need to understand to fight Covid is also the interdependency we need to understand to fight climate destruction”. — West: “I agree, I agree!” — Butler: “We need a completely different ethics and a politics of care, so I’m pushing against the personal liberty folks right now”. Butler goes on to propose a “communist ontology” to reach the goal of the complete subjugation to the State’s—the collective’s—interest. And Cornel West nods along like a geriatric altar boy.
In the history of radical Left thought, “collectivism” and “the collective” were always revered as desirable goals for a future “socialist” society (much to what would have been Marx’s dismay). The individual became a public nuisance because of a dangerous interpretation of the idea of “society” on the Left, a Left now in charge of all dominant ideologies of power.
For example, when Marx said that a society consists not of individuals, but of the relations between them, the Left believed this meant one could just ditch the individual. But without the individual as prerequisite, there is no relation between individuals; without the unit of the person—his or her physical and psychological integrity and unity—we cannot enter social relations at all. Even the individual as the “ensemble of social relations”—though this formulation gives way to an idealist (!) denial of the physical existence of every human being—presupposes single bearers said social relations.
Without the individual as prerequisite, there is no relation between individuals that could form a society; without the unit of the person—his or her physical and psychological integrity and unity—we cannot enter social relations at all.
But it is precisely this rejection of the physical existence of every individual which gained so much currency during Covid. The bitter irony being, of course, that to “protect others”, especially vulnerable groups, everyone was asked to violate their own bodily integrity: a practical self-contradiction, as the protection consisted in the violation. Ultimately, the “other” everyone was supposed to protect no longer existed, because everyone—and especially “vulnerable groups”—had to endure the state’s encroachment. Yet this is what the political and activist Left promoted.
In order to “protect others”, especially vulnerable groups, everyone was asked to violate their own bodily integrity: a practical self-contradiction, as the protection consisted in the violation.
One could see the fallout from this discursive transformation towards the “rights of the collective” in debates surrounding vaccine mandates. One of the instigators of the Great Barrington Declaration, Sunetra Gupta—a well-known critic of what she perceives as a “typically capitalist” (or “neoliberal”, on which more later) reaction to Covid, namely lockdowns, but a supporter of mandatory vaccinations—is dismissive of bodily autonomy. But isn’t this in fact in line with what lockdowns perpetuated? That not individual autonomy, but the state, decides the radius of my social interaction? With this doublethink at work, the lockdown critic’s own blind spot has been revealed, namely that the lockdowns she publicly condemns in fact converge much more with her socialist ideal than a “capitalist” one, however that is defined.
One of the instigators of the Great Barrington Declaration is dismissive of bodily autonomy. But isn’t this in fact in line with what lockdowns perpetuated? That not individual autonomy, but the state, decides the radius of my social interaction?
What is worrying about this tendency to renounce bodily integrity in the name of “solidarity” is the resurrection of a biopolitical concept from the National Socialist (and Japanese Imperial) cookbook: the “Volkskörper” (National Body; Kokutai in Japanese), where it is not individuals who own their own body, but the “Volk” (the People) who own a collective “body”. This collective body that belongs to the State/the Party/the Emperor then needs to be nourished and protected at the cost of the individual one.
This National Socialist-type ideological claim also reverberated with German politicians who were firing up social division with vaccination mandates and claimed that “collective freedom”—a non-sensical term—ranked higher than individual freedom. As Hendrik Wüst, member of the CDU, said: “It’s about showing the vaccinated … that we won’t allow people to continue to put their individual freedom above the freedom of society as a whole”.
The collective’s anti-social traits were blatant: lockdowns in the name of “public health” killed all social activities and led to the widespread isolation of old, sick and young people, an epidemic we are still recovering from.
The collective’s anti-social traits were blatant: lockdowns in the name of “public health” killed all social activities and led to the widespread isolation of old, sick and young people, an epidemic we are still recovering from.
The open contradictions of the collectivist worldview and its promoters’ conscious abandonment of the democratic foundations of society have been succinctly reviewed in German lawyer Frauke Rostalski’s new book The Vulnerable Society (2024). In a mental and ideological landscape determined by collectivism, the vulnerability paradigm serves as a totalitarian scheme with a remarkable logic: when vulnerability discourse—we must think of others, never of ourselves—is used to infringe on our own individual rights and freedoms, it means an infringement on the rights and freedoms of all, which in turn makes society as a whole more vulnerable to state-authoritarian measures.
Neoliberalism vs. Solidarity
Not only high-ranking WHO officials or lockdown critics, but also prominent academics have tried to push the idea of an “antiquatedness” of individual rights and freedoms. One of these, Berlin Free University professor Philipp Lepenies, wrote an essay called “Renunciation as First Civil Duty”, that interestingly lets its technocratic-collectivist vision of society pass off as a critique of neoliberalism. Much like Adam Tooze and others, the author rides the wave of the disfavored concept of “neoliberalism” for clout, continuing to flog what is seen by many as a dead horse. But riding the wave of the unpopularity of “neoliberalism” helps Lepenies to smuggle in a greater acceptance of collectivism, by pitching neoliberalism as the “ideology of egotism” vs. an alleged idea of “solidarity” to be found in the collectivist mindset:
“[What] the neoliberal worldview produces … is not an idea of community and togetherness. It is the world view of self-sufficient individuals who are only connected to each other through the functioning of the market. Hence Margaret Thatcher’s provocative assertion that there is no society, but only individuals. It is an expression of an intensifying extreme individualization with little regard for the next person, the public and the harmful effects of one’s own consumptive action”.
Consumption bad, autonomous individuals worse. Mainstream propaganda on climate change has been banging that drum for decades now. But while a political implementation of anti-democratic laws was previously rejected—see, for instance, the German federal government-published proposal “World in Transition – Social Contract for a Great Transformation” of 2011, which was mocked at the time by mainstream outlets—a fundamental denial of individual civil rights has become widely accepted since 2020.
While a political implementation of anti-democratic laws was previously rejected—like a 2011 German government paper, which was mocked at the time by mainstream outlets—a fundamental denial of individual civil rights has become widely accepted since 2020.
To help make such a scenario even more palatable, Lepenies (and others) have contrasted the “bad neoliberal” mindset with a morally more acceptable one: solidarity. In the context of increasing infringements on civil rights, the concept of “solidarity” became the killer term to stifle objections and make pristine authoritarianism more acceptable to the public.
But solidarity in times of Covid meant its opposite: in its original meaning, “solidarity” is something endowed on the other voluntarily , not through state coercion, and it is held in defiance of the powerful, not in support of them. “Solidarity” in its new meaning therefore comes to mean submission, in the name of a a morally “right” cause dictated by the state. From the judicial perspective, as Rostalski notes, solidarity in its original meaning also encompassed the principle of proportionality:
“The commitment to the principle of proportionality, on the other hand, creates protection against a collective that can arbitrarily determine what is ‘solidarity’ and what is not without clear constitutional rules … Anyone who imposes compulsory solidarity on people with content that can be determined at will by a collective threatens to tip over into authoritarianism in the true sense of the word”.
More recently, however, a new term (with the same authoritarian goals) has gained traction: “adaptation”.
Climate change makes “adaptation” necessary
Historically, the primacy of the “collective”, of the “community”, the “Gemeinschaft”, in which the individual is nothing, and the state everything, is the hallmark of totalitarian regimes, from Germany’s National Socialism to Stalin’s Soviet Russia. Under the motto “collective interest comes before self-interest”, the National Socialists brought institutions, such as the educational system, in line with the NSDAP, dissolved trade unions and the free press (Gleichschaltung), rubbing ideological shoulders with the Soviet Bloc, whose fundamental ideological basis was political, economic, and social collectivism.
The resuscitation of that idea 35 years after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and in the Western intellectual class, of all milieus, is something to behold. Philip Staab, the young rising star of German sociology, published at the “social conscience” of all high-profile publishing houses in Western Germany, Suhrkamp (Frankfurt School Critical Theory’s former hub), has written a book about how we must give up on the idea that prosperity, comfort, or even (technological or material) progress are still realistic political goals.
The resuscitation of the idea of collectivism, 35 years after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and in the Western intellectual class of all milieus, is something to behold.
Instead, he says, the population should warm to the idea of renunciation and should increasingly “adapt” to it:
“Adaptation to what is necessary for the self-preservation of society. Mourning the loss is not enough. The big warning sign is climate change … That is why we should stop deluding ourselves that we are still living in the era of progress. We are not. We are living in the era of adaptation. This adaptation is not passive, it requires the ability to act. In psychoanalytical terms: it is about accepting the reality principle after grief and developing the strengths of the ego”.
Note how adaptation receives a new spin: what is emphasized is the “active” (= positive) component of the term. This is deliberate and to be understood as a substitute for the intellectual, “passive” labour of questioning the political, very pragmatic decisions, that made adaptation an alleged objective constraint (climate change, the Virus) in the first place. Thinking for oneself, therefore, is portrayed as suspicious. To dress his vision in an activist (i.e. positive), “inspiring”, and somewhat chummy outfit, Staab tells a story:
“I was in South Korea recently. After the Korean War, the south was massively deforested. In the 50s and 60s there were a series of floods like in the Ahr valley, with many victims. And afterwards, during the military dictatorship, there was a gigantic reforestation project in which half of society was involved. At the weekend, parents planted seedlings with their children. Today, South Korea is more densely forested than China, India or historical Europe. I met critical sociologists in South Korea who rebelled against the military regime as students and are not suspected of glorifying it. I asked them about this reforestation project and the answer was astonishing. They looked at each other and sang a song they used to sing when they planted trees with parents, teachers, classmates. It was an experience of collective freedom and mobilization”.
A society in which The Socialist Kindergarten is the ideal of our foremost public intellectuals—a society in which we all become children again, sing songs, and plant trees—has long ago given up on the ideas of enlightenment and its exit from what Immanuel Kant called “self-inflicted immaturity”. But being children again might suit those who have always wanted to hand over responsibility for their own lives to the “state as father” (Vater Staat).
This is a political culture in which the respectful address to a general audience, “Ladies and Gentlemen”, is viewed as offensive—and not only because it is allegedly exclusive of trans people. It is disapproved, because the addressees clearly are adults. Respecting privacy, and therefore, individual freedom and autonomy, includes the unspoken agreement that not everyone wants to be called “Joe” or “Lucy”, and not everyone “doesn’t mind”.
The collectivist society aims for a kind of Socialist Kindergarten, where we sing happy songs planting trees, and adult behaviour— including the address “Ladies and Gentlemen”—is viewed as offensive.
Infantilization, the kindergarten culture of “openness”, including to the intrusions of teachers (a song like The Mothers of Invention’s “What’s the Ugliest Part of your Body?”, including its parodistic undertones, could only have been born in the Hippie era) always comes at the cost of privacy and the loss of personal freedom and autonomy. These have therefore become the counter-enlightenment New Normal’s primary targets.
The contradictory and self-infantilizing idea of “collective freedom” is a sign of societal degeneration. There is no collective freedom where the freedom of the individual is eclipsed. In that sense, Staab proposes a practical solution to the “objective constraints” of pandemics and climate change. What we would need is a
“criticism of individual egoism and the desire for clear political control from above. This is not a new authoritarianism, but the desire for functional hierarchies as a condition for the success of everyday adaptation. Less inequality, less capitalism, more political control”.
Freedom, Marx said in his early writings à propos of Prussian censorship laws, “is so much the essence of Man that even its adversaries realize (verwirklichen) it, by fighting its reality”.
To be sure, the disavowal of this deepest of all human essences has always been The Rulers’ Plot. In a democratically organized society, civil freedoms—which are always both negative freedoms, as freedoms from state encroachment, and positive freedoms (freedom of speech, of the press, of movement) have always been to the detriment of elites, because they are detriments to domination and control.
That today, control and “functional hierarchies” are cheered on by the educated classes and parroted by the editorial lines of nearly all of Western media companies, that the renunciation of individual freedom is expressed so candidly, publicly, and shamelessly, probably clears the path for the most drastic of the consequences which the New Normal has in store for us.
