In your recent book “True Revenge”, you described the pandemic as a lens through which we can better understand the fundamental problems of our society. Which ones are most important to you have become visible?
We must now ask what happened and why? The pandemic reveals the way we organize society and what do we need to change? Where should you start? The world’s population involuntarily participated in the largest comparative governance experiment in history. The virus is a control variable, and it is now possible to evaluate the different responses of different governments and political cultures. We see that regardless of factors such as per capita income, some countries are more effective than others. One thing that has been exposed is the governance crisis in Western societies, especially in the United States, where even access to medical care has been privatized, and this is also true in Europe. Insufficient masks, insufficient detection capabilities, arbitrary measures, and politicization of coordination, many people would rather believe in false information.
The pandemic is a crisis, but our own response, not just the government’s response, is also a disaster. The virus has mapped us just as we did for its spread. One lesson we can learn from this is what I call “social epidemiology”: the pandemic clearly shows us that society is not “individual to country” or “individual to collective” dynamics. However, despite the culturalist rumble of populist leaders, there are still some very basic and non-negotiable things: the interdependence of biology, biochemistry, and biopolitics always has a planetary dimension. This pandemic destroys the illusion that this reality can be ignored by the populist politics we have seen in the United States, Europe, Britain, Russia, Brazil, India and elsewhere in the past decade. The world is more than just a text. This is real revenge.
So, the fact that some Asian countries have better controlled the virus has nothing to do with previous epidemic experience, but more with different political cultures? It can be said that more willing to accept governance?
