Page 164 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

radical and horrendous as parents abandoning their children to
their fate. At the beginning of The Decameron, a series of novellas

that tell the tale of a group of men and women sheltered in a villa
as the Black Death ravaged Florence in 1348, Boccaccio writes
that: “fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own
children, untended, unvisited, to their fate”. In the same vein,

numerous literary accounts of past pandemics, from Defoe’s A
Journal of The Plague Year to Manzoni’s’ The Betrothed, relate
how, so often, fear of death ends up overriding all other human
emotions. In every situation, individuals are forced to make

decisions about saving their own lives that result in profound
shame because of the selfishness of their ultimate choice.
Thankfully, there are always exceptions, as we saw most
poignantly during COVID-19, such as among the nurses and

doctors whose multiple acts of compassion and courage on so
many occasions went well beyond the call of their professional
duty. But they seem to be just that – exceptions! In The Great

Influenza, [142] a book that analyses the Spanish flu’s effects on the
US at the end of World War I, the historian John Barry recounts
that health workers could not find enough volunteers to help. The
more virulent the flu became, the less people were willing to
volunteer. The collective sense of shame that ensued might be

one of the reasons why our general knowledge about the 1918-
1919 pandemic is so scant, despite the fact that, in the US alone,
it killed 12 times more people than the war itself. This, perhaps,

also explains why to date so few books or plays have been written
about it.

Psychologists tell us that cognitive closure often calls for black-
and-white thinking and simplistic solutions [143] – a terrain
propitious for conspiracy theories and the propagation of rumours,

fake news, mistruths and other pernicious ideas. In such a
context, we look for leadership, authority and clarity, meaning that
the question as to whom we trust (within our immediate

community and among our leaders) becomes critical. In
consequence, so too does the countervailing issue of whom we
distrust. In conditions of stress, the appeal of cohesion and unity
increases, which leads us to coalesce around our clan or our

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