Lies in the Time of COVID

Abstract

How can one possibly explain 'people's propensity to believe lies', asks J. Hillis Miller? A 'scandal to cognition', he continues, is the difficulty in understanding why this propensity is so deeply rooted. How in the world can so many people be brought, for example, to vote against their own self-interest, to shoot themselves in the foot, so to speak? That seems an unfathomable mystery. (Miller 2016, 139) These questions, and the role of deconstruction as an analytic resource with which to answer them, are all the more urgent today. The already overwhelming threat of global warming that Miller was considering in 2015 (which has provoked unprecedented wild fires and floods around the world), is now accompanied by a global pestilence of historic proportions. Yet notwithstanding these crises, a significant number of people (particularly in North America) appear to have pre-emptively rejected the vaccine that has not yet been developed to prevent the SARS- COV-2 virus. An eq ually significant number refuse to make even the most basic efforts to limit its spread. Instead, taking a page out of the 'anti- vaccination playbook' (Ireland 2020), anti-masking groups in Canada, the US, and elsewhere are protesting against physical distancing, mandated mask-wearing, Contact tracing, and other proposed public health measures. Objections are made on the false grounds that non- medical face masks are harmful to health, and that the severity of the COVID-19 disease is misleadingly overstated.