Philosophical and Political Identity in the COVID-19 Age
Has the landscape changed, or have I?
After finishing high school in a regional part of southern Australia, I attended the University of Melbourne to study for a Bachelor of Arts. Considered by many to be a rather useless degree in real-world terms, I learnt a lot during the course of three years while completing my double major in psychology and criminology. However, perhaps the most important ‘learning’ I did was outside the lecture halls and related to broader political and philosophical matters.
It was the early 2000s and in the wake of 9/11 there was much anger and confusion on the part of students in response to the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. We protested and picketed the Vice Chancellor’s office and rallied with thousands of others in marches through Melbourne city. Social conversations between friends and family were dominated by talk of these events and often became heated (although strangely, I don’t recall anyone being ‘cancelled’ for their views, regardless of which ‘side’ they were on).
Over the next several years, I joined marches and other events in support of issues including animal welfare, women’s rights and gay marriage, and supported causes like Amnesty International, Doctors without Borders and the Wilderness Society (I even worked for TWS for some months and dressed up as a Koala to collect donations). If you’d asked me, or indeed likely many of my more politically-central friends, they would have no doubt described me as an obnoxious and unapologetic ‘leftie’ (which leads me to ponder whether I might now be experiencing some sort of karmic retribution).
For many years, I identified on the political left and supported causes and voted accordingly. After finishing my BA, I completed a Bachelor of Nursing and set to work becoming a critical care registered nurse to further my aspirations of helping others. I moved across the country and met my future husband and felt deeply fulfilled in my personal and professional lives.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when things started to change. If I really think about it, things began to get more complicated in late 2015 when I was struck down with a flare-up of a chronic illness (which at the time was undiagnosed) and had to leave intensive care, which was a crushing blow to my professional identity. From there, a combination of my chronic health issues, burnout and a subtly changing political landscape amplified by social media, suggested my overall identity was being challenged.
These circumstances forced me to grapple with many aspects of my real and perceived identity, including as an ICU nurse, as a wife, as a daughter, as a friend, and as a potential future mother. While these components of my identity are important (and I intend to elaborate on the circumstances surrounding each of them further in future posts), here I want to focus more on my political and philosophical identity.
I honestly self-identified as being on the political left until very recently, and some days I still do. This is perhaps due to the fact that I don’t feel as though I have changed all that much. Despite arriving at middle-age with a decent amount of challenging life experience and having reflected deeply on the same, I think that at my core I’m fundamentally the same person I’ve always been. I’m sensitive (or so my mother says), I care about others, and values of integrity, fairness, equality and justice are important to me.
Imagine my surprise then, in the context of the global pandemic, to be labelled a ‘selfish, anti-vax idiot’, and a ‘health worker who doesn’t believe in medicine’, simply because I didn’t concur with the mainstream view on the pandemic management. I still can’t quite believe it was so easy for politicians, in concert with the mainstream press, to label career doctors, scientists, nurses and other healthcare workers as ‘anti-vaxxers’, even when many of them are ‘fully vaccinated’ (whatever that means right now) themselves.
I can recall several early conversations during which the mere mention of the potentially devastating economic consequences of lockdowns gave way to accusations of selfishness and an obvious lack of compassion for others. Perhaps my articulation was lacking at the time, but I couldn’t understand how people did not appreciate that the healthy functioning of the economy represents the broader health of our communities, both literally and figuratively.
Similarly, once the COVID-19 vaccine rollout began in earnest and COVID-19 vaccine mandates emerged as the ‘public health’ policy du jour, the ‘selfish’ label was repeatedly invoked by loved ones, governments and media alike, who claimed that advocating for a person’s individual liberty would undermine our collective wellbeing. I would argue that there was never really a time when this even remotely applied in the context of this pandemic (perhaps with the exception of the fleeting moment Pfizer announced that their COVID-19 vaccine had an efficacy against infection of 95% – ahhhh, those were the days!), but even if it were the case with COVID-19, what so many fail to grasp is that there is no collective wellbeing without individual liberty. In order for our society to function in a collectively healthy way, we must all have certain inalienable individual human rights. In speaking up for mine, I am also speaking up for those of others, whether they realise or accept that or not.
And so, overnight it seemed I had been shunted along the political spectrum into totally unfamiliar territory. I now find myself labelled (by association) with terms like ‘right-wing extremist’, ‘far-right conspiracy theorist’, and perhaps the least accurate but certainly most dangerous (and by that ,I mean dangerous to me), ‘terrorist’.
This is where the conversation (can it still be called a ‘conversation’ when it’s simply one party giving the other a firm dressing down?!), needs to stop. If certain people want to erroneously label me ‘right-wing’ or some similar political insult, I’m not that bothered (although when they do the same to others, I’m not okay with that). I know that despite being figuratively ‘bruised and broken’ from various life experiences, the fundamental fabric of who I am as a person and who I am as a community member has not changed. But now that the discourse has ventured into the dark and categorically incorrect territory of so-called ‘terrorism’, this cannot be allowed to stand.
Governments like that of Justin Trudeau in Canada (and we in Australia are not that far behind) have sought to so aggressively marginalise regular, law-abiding citizens fed up with his poor excuse for leadership, that they resort to shameless public vilification so contemptuous it borders on despotism. Labelling entire groups of average citizens with such incendiary language, for daring to speak out against morally and ethically repugnant government policy, is a new low in the Orwellian-style doublespeak we now seem to have largely accepted in broader pandemic-era discourse. I am not now, nor have I ever been a terrorist. Nor are thousands of other Australians (Canadians, or any other nationality) who have completely legitimate concerns related to the mandating of new pharmaceutical products, and have simply exercised their fundamental human right to refuse these procedures. I would suggest those who seek to label people like me this way, take a long hard look at themselves in the mirror before directing such treacherous terms at others.
Although I've leaned left for most of my life, the past two years have convinced me that the Left and the Right are, as Upton Sinclair so memorably put it, "two wings of the same bird of prey". The real dichotomy is between authoritarianism and libertarianism/voluntarism.
The future - if we have one - is decentralised. Central planning has failed miserably in every state that has tried it. And we sure as hell can't trust corporations to act in our interests.
We have to take back responsibility for ourselves, our health, the education of our children, food production and distribution, and the care of vulnerable members of our community - everything the state has taken over from us.
Love your work