Lefty Writer and Former Covid Panic-Sower Freddie DeBoer: Covid Panic Is a Game of Constant Virtue Signaling One-Upsmanship

John Sexton writes about Freddie DeBoer, a leftwing writer, and who confesses to having earlier over-sold the threat of covid, notes that his fellow leftists have turned covid panic into a competitive social game of points-scoring one-upsmanship.

I keep chewing on what function this disaster porn performs. It's hard to say that it has any bearing on public health; does anyone think that the problem with the vaccine-hesitant is that they just haven't been told loudly enough that Covid is bad? No. I do think that this worry is a performance, but I don't think the unvaccinated are the audience. I think the audience is, as for so much of what these people do, their peers, other people in the broad world of the educated, the liberal, the upwardly-mobile if not affluent, the very online. These people compete against each other relentlessly, habitually, ritualistically...

When this major international crisis arose, they felt a lot of legitimate fears and worries, which just makes them human. But when it became clear that the public health response to Covid involved denying ourselves things we wanted and enjoyed, including non-negotiably important things like in-person schooling and face-to-face human contact, they (subconsciously) saw an opening: if denial of human pleasures is virtuous, I can be more virtuous than my peers. If caution is noble, overcaution must be even nobler...

For some people, it seems, being more freaked out about Covid is quite like an I Voted sticker or a BlackLivesMatter sign in their window. It's another way to let everyone know that they have the greatest wealth of all, the wealth of superior character, of greater moral standing. They're fond of pointing out those 5.3 million people who have died, in the midst of their self-aggrandizing diatribes. I would perhaps invoke the dead in a different way: even this, even now, even them, you turn into yet another way to let the rest of us know how advanced you are.

Anything can be turned into a competitive social game of one-upsmanship. That's where things always get stupid -- and often start getting dangerous.

Here's a recent example of the game of competitive bidding in public virtue signaling.

You see this game constantly, especially on the fervid left.

You see it when someone says "I disagree with his speech!" and someone ups the ante with a bid of "I hate his speech!" and someone trumps with "I think his speech should be censored, that's how much I hate it, the rest of you saying you hate it obviously don't hate it that much because you'd still allow it!"

And then from there come the over-trumps: "I hate his speech so much I think we should pressure his employers to fire him!"

And ultimately: "I hate his speech so much I think we should kill him. Or put him in a camp."

In any game of competitive bidding, you can only take the trick and score points by outbidding the previous bid. You always have to go further.

And in these crazed supercharged hyperideological pressure cookers, there is no one to say "that's going too far," because anyone saying that is immediately deemed an Enemy and is immediately targeted -- and made eligible for the camps himself.

posted by Ace at 03:35 PM

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