dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

The world after covid-19: By invitation: Edward Luttwak

The heavy toll of a virus that exposes uneasy truths wherever it infects

AFTER 1918 women stopped wearing corsets and men gradually stopped wearing top hats. Both had always been dysfunctional and expensive, but it was not until years of casual wartime clothing had exposed their absurdities that such accoutrements were abandoned.

What are the equivalents of corsets and top hats for the post-coronavirus world? Some things are easily predictable because they are already emerging: online shopping will expand even faster, with the demise of many shops and entire shopping centres. Remote working, now that employers see that it can be effective while saving the cost of office space, will increase. With artificial intelligence replacing employees altogether, the demand for office buildings might fall even faster than the demand for shopping centres.

America’s fee-for-service medicine will also come under scrutiny: with physical visits drastically curtailed, it turns out that many tests and examinations were unnecessary, except to increase the bill. And covid-19 marks the end of “why not” international travel because few will want to risk a two-week quarantine, or the prospect that destinations that are reopened will suddenly lock down again.

Yet the biggest impact may be on politics. Looking back, we might call the coronavirus of our affliction “the truth virus”. Wherever it has spread, it has revealed submerged truths about political regimes, entire societies and international institutions.

We always knew that China’s party regime, under Xi Jinping’s autocratic rule, must suppress the truth. What we could not imagine is that despite the country’s experience with SARS in 2003, party leaders in Wuhan would conceal the arrival of a similar new coronavirus and silence doctors, including the late Li Wenliang who tried to warn us all. He is now the hero to all sentient Chinese, but the party wants them and the entire world to admire President Xi instead, in spite of his own blunder in closing Wuhan much too late.

After China, the truth virus went to expose the servility of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organisation. He effusively praised China’s “transparency” while excluding Taiwan from deliberations in obedience to Chinese demands, in spite of its proximity and vulnerability to the outbreak. On January 14th the WHO tweeted that “Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission”—which was literally true, because it had silenced the doctors who called for an investigation of that very question.

When the virus arrived in Iran, it exposed the blind fanaticism of its theocracy. Iran’s leaders refused to stop daily pilgrimages by hundreds of busloads of devotees from remote villages across the vast country, many packed together day and night. For the virus, pilgrimages are the perfect diffusion mechanism. Even as government officials were falling ill and dying, it took time to overcome the opposition of those who insisted that the shrines would heal the sick, not sicken the healthy. By then it was too late.

In Italy the virus was especially lethal because of a combination of exceptionally healthy private lives and an exceptionally unhealthy public life. Italians boast lifespans that are among the world’s longest (around five years more than Americans, for both men and women), as a result of intelligent eating, strong family support and much outdoor life. With a virus especially dangerous for the very old, Italian death rates were bound to be high, but the shambolic organisation of health care, especially in nursing homes, made it much higher still.

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2020/05/11/by-invitation-edward-luttwak?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/theworldaftercovid19byinvitationedwardluttwakbyinvitation