On the transformation of a human in the covid era

Alina Vitukhnovskaya, writer

Against the backdrop of the global COVID-19 pandemic and poisonings entering the political fashion, the scenario for the nearest future may look something like this. Gradually, viruses and chemicals attack a significant part of the population, turning their carriers into a kind of zombie, of which only the outer human shell will remain.

But due to the high adaptability of a person to any negative influences, mutations will inevitably occur. At the same time, it will be almost impossible to distinguish a mutant from a healthy person. A global hybrid war of chemicals and viruses against humans will be unleashed. But it will look like an ordinary war between people.

Society will be divided into three categories - the infected, undergoing treatment and others in a state of neurotization, most of the latter will live under antidepressants, drugs, alcohol. For what they are forced to observe is too unbearable for the psyche.

This situation will force humanity to look for ways and technologies of liberation from physiological captivity and the associated limitations of consciousness. Including by solving global environmental problems. But in addition to the problems of the natural environment, the problem of man himself, as a creature potentially capable of overcoming his essence, already today requires an urgent solution. One of the first steps on this path is the creation and operation of neural interfaces.

The fear of chipping is just a repressed fear of the future, moreover, the present, even for a modern person, has already turned into a kind of totalitarian dystopian space, in which, with the help of quite traditional tools, human and consciousness are not so much suppressed as redirected to the needs of maintaining society. While the very essence of progress, among its other components, lies in the release of perhaps the only irreplaceable resource - the conditional life time.

The world has radically changed, but the behavior models of the subject and society have not. And this is a global problem. Practically no one can bear the truth about himself, nor can he admit that all his life he has been doing not what he really needs. Even fashionable innovations, which are shocking at first - from body positive to revision of gender relations, do not change anything in essence, because they are innovations only outwardly. Time has long overtaken them. The distancing of a person from the time in which he lives is fraught not only with large-scale social trauma of entire social groups, but also with the prospect of civilizational degradation.

Observations of contemporaries of the COVID era are interesting. For example, poet, prose writer, translator and publisher Dmitry Volchek writes:

“The epidemic as a parody of the Stalinist terror. The number of infected (enemies of the people), hospitalized (arrested) and deceased (executed) is increasing. Along the way, panic is growing, and huge queues of people wanting to be tested appear, like queues with transfers to a prison. Family members of traitors to their homeland are also arrested (quarantined).

At the same time, mass entertainment does not stop, people bustle in parks and houses of culture, and even the festival of documentary films, which was suppressed in March, has been resumed. I saw Lovemobil, a film about prostitutes working on the autobahn near Würzburg. They have a gray-haired patroness, a former prostitute who bought a dozen trailers, set them up in the forest and charges the girls 70 euros a day. The customers are workers at the local BMW factory, exhausted from stress.

Now, one must think, this business has died. The main victims of the epidemic are prostitution and cinema. But under Stalin they flourished".

As usual, I arranged a survey on my Facebook. And I got a lot of interesting observations. For example, that the trust in the media has been completely lost. It is symptomatic that we are not even talking about Russian sources, but about German ones.

It is worth noting that people themselves are not so much interested in factual science as they are looking for the emotional consonance of external information vibrations with their thoughts, and are also content with cunningly twisted, sometimes internally flawlessly logically built conspiracy theories, but inevitably disintegrate when trying to compare them with reality.

The attitude of people towards their own health has also changed dramatically. The society has split into two large groups. One began to observe all the precautions, do the necessary tests, study the market for vitamins, supplements and drugs, in general, independently study all medical aspects related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Others, on the contrary, express a demonstrative disregard for quarantine measures, self-isolation and flaunt their readiness to die. I must confess that this bravado is disgusting. For such people endanger not only themselves, but others as well. It is surprising and paradoxical that I, a pessimist by nature, a subject who rejects being as a metaphysical concept, carry around with my body as with a written bag. Not only is this due to the fact that I consider it necessary to complete my affairs and implement my ideas, it seems to me to die a stupid death - this is to become a loser. And I never wanted to be.

In 2008, when the danger of a hybrid revolution hovered in politicized Moscow, Heydar Jemal, with whom I often spoke at that time (I was interested in his existential views), told me that he was moving to another address. He explained this by the fact that after rereading books about the events of 1993 in Moscow and having learned which houses were in the shelling sector, he realized that he was in danger. This, of course, can be called paranoia. But I think he was right in his own way. As an extraordinary person, aware of his own worth and significance, he acted quite wisely. Contrary to Castaneda and his gullible fans, who call to get rid of the sense of self-importance. Castaneda, like Pelevin, fits very well with Russian hopelessness and the paradoxical combination of humanism with absolute fatalism and indifference to his own life.

Keep your sense of self-importance in mind, maintain social distance, and wear masks and gloves in public.