Gottfried, Long COVID, and the Therapeutic State

SUBMITTED by IMPERIUM PRESS

Gottfried, Long COVID, and the Therapeutic State This is a re-worked version of the “Elon vs. the Therapeutic State” article at the Imperium Press Substack page (imperiumpress.substack.com)

Summer is almost here, monkeypox is in, COVID is out, but one thing never changes—the dissident right is beefing on Telegram. On the one side you have COVID deflation, the position that COVID was mostly what it seemed to be: dangerous initially, lockdowns obviously went too far, but nothing especially new—a continuation of shenanigans that had already been underway for decades. On the other side you have COVID amplification, the position that COVID represented a paradigm shift in Davos Man tyranny: a clear psyop from the beginning and an unprecedented step toward centralization of power at the supra-national level. I try to stay out of these debates. My position has essentially not changed since the run-up to the 2020 election: COVID has laid waste the notions of democracy, constitutionalism, and popular sovereignty, and utterly vindicated elitist and absolutist conceptions of politics—that social change is top-down, that sovereignty is unitary and indivisible, and that all our political concepts are thinly veiled theological concepts.

Frankly, I don’t give a shit whether COVID was engineered or a lucky break for elites, because it doesn’t change its consequences—what we might call Long COVID. Long COVID has left massive structural changes in its wake, not least of which is that it has inaugurated a permanent state of exception. Even the man in the street now understands that laws basically mean nothing and can be bent into whatever shape will produce desired outcomes. We in the radical right have known this for decades, 1 that laws and constitutions are just pieces of paper and can’t overrule men because they don’t have will and men do. Even so, the law may only be a speedbump, but it still is a speedbump. Legal formalities have had to be overcome, and they have been overcome by a mechanism laid out by Paul Gottfried 20 years ago—by expanding the definition of “harm”. The harm principle is nothing new.

On paper, the American constitution still has a strong element of classical liberalism in it, and this harm principle is as old as liberalism itself. Formulated as early as J. S. Mill, we know it as “your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins”—libertarians’ celebrated “negative rights”. This principle of “harm” as the limit of rights is the Trojan Horse by which modern liberalism (which is just to say, consistent classical liberalism) smuggles into our lives what Gottfried calls the therapeutic state. Drawing on the work of Christopher Lasch, the basic idea of Gottfried’s therapeutic state is that the state’s legitimate duty of care can be beaten into any shape that will serve the cause of progressive social engineering.

Even the most hardcore social justice advocate would not deny—at least openly— that people must be accorded a certain degree of freedom. But this freedom is a brake on Cthulhu’s leftward drift, and so at every turn the progressive will tell you that “freedom is limited” (although it never occurs that the freedom of the twelve-year old to forestall puberty might be limited). The principle that governs this limitation is harm, and so to overcome any possible barrier to progressivism, the definition of harm must be expanded. Take racism. This is the cardinal sin in modernity, and so the man in the street finds racial discrimination repellent—so repellent, in fact, that it constitutes for him a positive harm. And since harm is the line where your freedom ends and law enforcement begins, we get Civil Rights legislation.

Robert Filmer made this same point in the 17th century. to limit the harm done by people noticing basic facts. But this is not enough—to accelerate progress, harm must be expanded, and “systemic racism” is born. Harm is no longer confined to refusing to hire someone, but the very fact of disparate outcomes is evidence of harm, and so the law must step in to make reparations for your unconscious bias, bigot. It gets worse. We not only harm others, but sometimes even ourselves. Self-harm falls under the scope of the state’s duty of care, too—the state is obliged to step in when a mentally ill person is a danger to himself, for example. If we could rebrand certain un-progressive attitudes as pathologies, we would then have license to intervene for the good of the racist himself. And this is what the introduction of medical language into political discourse has done.

You are not just prejudiced, you are a xenophobe, a homophobe, a transphobe; you are not just sexist, you are sexually dysfunctional; you are not just a fascist, you have the Authoritarian Personality Type and must undergo social therapy designed by Theodor Adorno. This makes a medical issue of dissent against liberal orthodoxy, which can then be dealt with coercively like other medical issues, all while maintaining the fiction of a society founded on openness and tolerance. Hence the obsession with “safety” and “well-being” which is itself genuinely pathological. The bigot is not only mentally ill, but he turns anywhere he goes into an “unsafe space” and threatens the well-being of all he meets.

By understanding this genuinely pathological worldview from the inside, we can make a kind of sense out of the idea that while COVID was a health emergency the Floyd riots were not, because “racism is a public health emergency” which is far more dangerous than a mere virus. Because these threats to well-being are completely bogus, public perception must be carefully managed. From this we get an “expert consensus” which has always already been reached before any investigation of the facts. The vaccine works because doctors say it works, because if they don’t, they lose their license.

This need to manage information flows is the root of the hysteria surrounding “disinformation”. The greatest harm to “our democracy” is done by disinformation, and because your freedom ends where harm begins, the state must step in to police your speech. This is a matter of survival for the state, and is typically managed through public-private partnerships such as those between the CIA and NGOs or big tech firms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

The way has been paved for all this by COVID. Schmittian decisionism is clearly the natural state of politics, so the COVID deflationists are right in that the sovereign has always reserved for itself the rights that it has asserted since 2020. And yet the COVID amplifiers are right to point out that, at least in the modern West, the sovereign’s self-assertion has never been so naked and unapologetic—it has undergone a change, not in degree, but in kind. However strong our present-day elite looks, they are tottering. An elite that feels itself to be stable and in control doesn’t act hysterically, it doesn’t worry publicly about its hegemony, and it certainly doesn’t use hard power unless it must. Gottfried and other elder statesmen of the radical right saw all this coming decades ago, and have given us the tools with which to analyze these developments and to foresee their course. Long COVID marches on—these trends will only continue—so we would be wise to heed their warnings.