Exhibit A:

“You know that famous phrase, ‘The cure is worse than the disease’? That is exactly the territory we are hurtling towards. You think it’s just the coronavirus that kills people? This total economic shutdown will kill people. A UK study calculated that 130,000 people died avoidably from austerity there between 2012 and 2017. The years of austerity for America to pay the cost of this shutdown will be worse. Adjusting to the size of our economy, it’s over a million deaths. But the family thrown out of their home, the mom gets sick, the kids are orphans – her death won’t be counted. The dad who’s been out of work for 30 years and finally got a job last month and now he’s back on the scrap heap and turning back to drink and drugs. His death won’t show up in a neat little box on cable news.

Poverty kills, despair kills. This shutdown is deadly. The president announced a 15-day plan to beat the virus. After that, let’s say right, we came together to slow the spread, now let’s come together to protect the vulnerable, get the ventilators, get the beds, get the equipment for our heroic nurses and doctors. Keep the ban on large gatherings but stop the total shutdown for everyone and start the total protection of the elderly and those most likely to need hospitalization. Don’t turn a public health crisis into America’s worst catastrophe”

(Steve Hilton, Host and Former advisor to David Cameron, from the March 22, 2020, episode of Fox News, The Next Revolution With Steve Hilton)

Commentary:

Among other things, the Coronavirus pandemic confirms that we have, for at least 150 years now, been living in an epoch which can only called bio-political. The latter is a form of politics which politicizes biology, which presupposes that it’s the job of governments to manage, regulate and enhance life, to define the difference between life and death; thus the only questions of importance for political and social existence are questions which relate to the human-life process.

The bio-political paradigms, long latent, have now been activated by this pandemic in a most striking way. The above remarks by Steve Hilton bear this out. For instance, the writer observes that the virus kills, but so will a shut-down of the economy. Interesting – it seems that Hilton has inadvertently chanced across the key prejudice of bio-political thinking: that the economy is nothing but the human life-process writ large. Work and labour are the metabolic interchange with nature by which human beings reproduce themselves on the species level. Perhaps ironically, given Hilton’s Republican views, this was Karl Marx’s preeminent lesson. So yes, the economy can kill and foster life, just as a biological process – the virus – kills and gives life. Nothing surprising in this revelation if you are familiar with the premises that underlie the bio-political mind-set. But again, strangely, it puts Hilton smack bang in the camp that he identifies as his enemy: those who prioritize the response to the virus as a “public health crisis” which calls for mobilizing all the forces of ‘big government’.

In this respect, it’s a pity that Hilton did not try to look a little more deeply into that very handy little rubric upon which he fastens with such glee in the opening line: “The cure is worse than the disease”. Of course, in our bio-political world, how could it not be? After all, if you define life in strictly biological terms, that’s precisely what a virus must be: an expression of the vitality of the life-process, a sort of strange inversion by which the forces of life begin to attack a living body from within; likewise, in epidemiology, the cure often comes from the disease. Conventionally, to be immunized is to be injected with a tiny fragment of precisely what you want to be protected from. So of course, if the cure is worse than the disease, that’s because the cure is the disease. But we can’t expect Mr Hilton to grasp such subtleties, especially since, judging by his remarks, the man is clearly in a state of deep psychic confusion and disorientation. Nevertheless, it’s precisely this confusion, along with a certain disconnect from reality, which, in the characteristic manner of the schizophrenic, he’s able to rationalize very colourfully and cleverly.

One of the effects of the current situation is a breakdown all the old ideological mechanisms for carving up reality and making sense of the world. I think it’s really this breakdown which commentators like Hilton are, without really being aware of it, experiencing on an intra-psychic level. And it leads them to create arguments like the above that, whilst they may appear on the surface to be logical, when you look closer, reveal that the logic in this case is the relentless logic of schizophrenia. The schizophrenic, engaged in a desperate endeavour of ‘making sense’, and having altogether disconnected from reality, has a capacity to make any argument appear plausible and very convincing. Indeed, plausibility is here a substitute for a process of inquiry which seeks to understand reality.

Then there is the language of Hilton’s discourse, the distinctive voice with which it speaks. Ordinarily, language is the human act whereby one seeks out the other, expresses a desire or a wish to make sense to the other, and for the sake of the other. Whereas Hilton’s remarks convey quite the opposite impression. The clue is the hysterical tone: this is a type of language which has no wish to communicate, to make contact with the other. Rather, with its rhetorical insistence, it’s the language which reveals a self narcissistically seeking to reassure itself. In short, the persuasiveness of Hilton’s language aims to persuade no one but himself.

Hysterical formations are always excessive; it’s precisely their excessive display of certitude which reveals how inwardly unsure the person really is. Indeed, there’s no surer sign of inner uncertainty than rousing expressions of iron-clad convictions. The desperate grasping for conceptual traction, for orientation points, for wild ‘correlations’ (like that between economic austerity and mortality), the attempt to make distinctions between terms where no such distinction can possibly exist – for example, between “public health crisis” and “America’s worst catastrophe”, or between “coronavirus that kills people” and a “total economic shutdown” that “will kill people” – and, finally, the urgency with which the author fixates on certain conceptual ‘connections’ – for example, between poverty and mortality: all this reveals a voice reverberating in an echo-chamber. Clearly, the circumstances surrounding what is happening in the US have provoked for many media commentators like Hilton a kind of internal crisis, a psychic panic which leads to denial and tautological self-referencing.

Ultimately, this is a nation of narcissists.

(Yarkov Halik, April 2020)