MISREMEMBERING 🎗️

HOW WE ARE BEING MADE TO BELIVE THAT OUR MEMORIES ARE WRONG

I recently read this article in the newspaper “Die Zeit” and I was utterly appalled to put it mildly.

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To be sure to give people the correct memory, Die Zeit even dropped the paywall for a change on this article that was published on November 1st.

Here is the translation of the above article:

Dealing with the Corona pandemic

The virus in people's heads

A study shows that many consider the pandemic measures to be nothing more than a scourge. But the other side also misremembers. This is a danger for the future.

The friendly hairdresser no longer fits into these unfriendly times. "We can do it" is by far the phrase he uses most often in his barbershop on the outskirts of Berlin, often accompanied by "brother" or "man". Even if he is only talking about hairstyles, there is something of the summer of 2015 here, when Angela Merkel coined this legendary phrase and the major social debates still had a different tone. There may be Babylonian linguistic confusion, but the atmosphere is great. Except when the conversation comes back to the topic of coronavirus on a Thursday in the summer of 2023: "I've been through it all, brother, first vaccination, second vaccination, third vaccination, but I wouldn't do it now, it all sucks." What makes him think like that? "Look around you! No corona!"

No coronavirus, true - but could that also be because someone like him, who works a lot with people, was vaccinated early on and the virus tended to spread less as a result and then became endemic more easily? "Yes, yes, man, we can do it." He now sounds rather tired, resigned and a little hostile, as if he doesn't really feel like discussing all this rubbish again.

You don't have to attach too much importance to such a small everyday scene characterised by language barriers. But it does show that the coronavirus grudge is still there, even if in many places - especially in view of the current news situation - it's not on the surface. But does that really mean that the pandemic is also over in people's minds? And if not, what remains of it that can be transferred to the other major issues that are currently preoccupying our society?

54 per cent of the unvaccinated firmly believe that the coronavirus measures were a pretext for restricting civil liberties.

As little as the last question can be answered seriously: There is now quite alarming scientific evidence of the fragmentation of our public along corona conflict lines. A study published this Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature shows that a substantial proportion of people in Germany, but also in other countries such as Italy, Sweden, Mexico and Japan, consider it scientifically proven that the pandemic measures have had no effect. What's more, many believe that the measures were "arbitrary and were intended to get people used to being coerced and patronised". Despite all the justified criticism, this is not only wrong - countless studies have concluded that the measures as a package have repeatedly slowed down the spread of the virus, even if it is unclear how effective individual measures were and it can or even must be disputed which measure was proportionate at which point in time. It also reveals a frightening view of statehood.

Unlimited criticism

The study also shows how distorted people's views of the pandemic, the dangers and the countermeasures are - and how wide the gap between the vaccinated and unvaccinated remains. The researchers confronted around 10,000 test subjects from eleven countries with statements that go back to an essay that we, the two authors of this text, published last year. In it, we described the various facets of a reinterpretation of the corona pandemic, which we saw being actively pursued by some commentators from (pseudo-)science and the media at the time. We opposed those voices that denounced restrictions on freedom such as contact restrictions and mandatory masks across the board as a "crime" and "excessiveness" and wanted to see this as just the first step in the state's overstepping of boundaries, which would inevitably be followed by others. We recalled that measures - even those that later turned out to be excessive or wrong - were originally taken to protect people's lives and health, especially the vulnerable - such as the pre-ill and elderly.

We tried to distinguish fact-based and balanced criticism of coronavirus policy and court judgements as well as justified attention to the mostly young victims of pandemic measures from the strategic activities of a group of lateral thinkers, libertarians and troublemakers who wanted to spread a narrative of political failure and malice. In their reinterpretation, the risk posed by the virus was marginal, but enabled politicians to commit senseless and excessive assaults through deception and lies. We recognised not only a deeply anti-state narrative, but also an anti-science narrative, in that it made scientists complicit in alleged state misdemeanours, stooges of evil.

However, we were of course unable to assess the extent to which these interpretations really worked. Even the clamour on social media often only allows us to draw tenuous conclusions about what is actually on the minds of the majority of people.

68 per cent of the unvaccinated believe that politicians have held on to the coronavirus measures for so long to save face after initially overreacting.

This gap has now been filled by the surveys conducted by psychologists Cornelia Betsch, Philipp Sprengholz, Luca Henkel and Robert Böhm at the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023, for which we were allowed to suggest some questions. They show how sceptically many people in Germany look back, especially the almost 15 percent of adults who have not had a single coronavirus vaccination. For example, 68 per cent of the unvaccinated, but also almost 20 per cent of the vaccinated, firmly or very firmly believe that "politicians have held on to the coronavirus measures for so long to save face after initially overreacting". More than half of the unvaccinated and around ten per cent of the vaccinated believe that the coronavirus measures were a "pretext" to "restrict civil liberties" and that they were "arbitrary and intended to get people used to being bullied and patronised".

A need to punish and "burn society to the ground"

In fact, highly critical attitudes were not only found in Germany, where the test subjects came from the Cosmo Panel, which Cornelia Betsch from the University of Erfurt and her colleagues used to repeatedly survey the attitudes of the population during the pandemic, sometimes on a weekly basis. According to the study, 20 per cent of people in Italy and ten per cent of Swedes are also of the opinion that it has been scientifically proven that the measures have not worked. And just under 20 per cent of Spaniards and 15 per cent of Italians now believe that the measures were a mere "pretext".

But let's stay with us for now: 68 per cent of the unvaccinated and 20 per cent of the vaccinated are certainly not the silent majorities that the agitators and strategic disinformers would like to have on their side. But that is already enough reassurance in view of the astonishingly high degree of radicalism of this minority - a large minority after all. The data shows that people who thought the pandemic measures were less appropriate had a much greater need to "punish" politicians and scientists. This is also deeply worrying because they, who were also more likely to be non-voters, also showed an increased willingness to throw the entire political system overboard. For example, they were more likely to agree with the statement: "I think society should be burnt to the ground."

Even if the psychologists have researched the interpretation of the pandemic: Their findings seem to reveal something more general, which the sociologists Oliver Nachtwey and Carolin Amlinger describe in their book Gekränkte Freiheit (Offended Freedom), namely an unbounded form of criticism of power. If you believe Nachtwey and Amlinger's explanations, you have to imagine the arrival of the virus in the world as an exemplary shock: All of a sudden, something becomes real and forces a radical change in behaviour on society. Within days, weeks at most, people first have to believe that a virus exists, then understand the dangers for themselves, their loved ones and society and then also the government's response to it. For a moment, the image of reality shared by the majority of society becomes visible for what it actually is, precisely because it is so shaken up, write Nachtwey and Amlinger: simply a "consensus about the meaning of the world" and "a kind of belief that does not perceive itself as a belief", as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once described it.

A dam can break, and in this case it does indeed seem to have broken: The reality shared by the vast majority that the existence of the virus has brought with it great dangers and necessitated a response is, as of this moment, perceived by a significant minority as something that is merely an orthodoxy. And if the findings of laboratory science, the warnings of epidemiologists and the explanations of vaccine experts are merely orthodox, does this not actually raise the question of what else is pure orthodoxy that needs to be questioned?

If you follow this impetus, as (too) many have done during the pandemic, you end up with a kind of generalised suspicion and "addiction to revelation". Now, Nachtwey and Amlinger write, it is enough for a truth to be recognised in order to place it under suspicion. "Anyone who harbours a general suspicion sees reality as a hermetically sealed conspiracy stabilised by the media and police."

The pandemic as a further catalyst for fundamental doubt

In this respect, the study that has now been published can be read as evidence that certain milieus have opened themselves up to completely unrestricted criticism as a result of the pandemic, which sees dark intentions behind every form of government action. The pandemic is unlikely to have been the only catalyst, and certainly not the first. And yet, looking at the results of the new study, the question arises as to how the perception of the pandemic and the debate surrounding the state-imposed countermeasures will shape future political discourse: What consequences will this fundamental doubt, which may also creep into other milieus, have for other discourses that are definitely prone to conspiracy theories? For the question of measures to stop climate change? For dealing with Putin's Russia, whose propaganda machine is trying to fuel this fundamental doubt anyway?

That's what makes the whole thing so tricky: The pandemic is just one of several shocks that are currently challenging the consensus about the meaning of the world and our actions as a society. And the many small opposing voices - against the war, against the hygiene policy, against the building energy law - can, within the framework of the unbounded critique of power, turn into a major social condemnation between those who fundamentally trust the democratic state and its ability to weigh up different goods against each other, and those who consider its abolition to be at least an option worth considering. Thus - and this would be the point that the study also underpins - "communities of mistrust" are emerging, of which it is not yet clear whether they will be fleeting in nature, whether they will endure or whether the counter-narrative will become even more powerful with increasing distance from events.

It would be completely wrong to read these considerations as an attempt to delegitimise criticism of state action or fundamental oppositional attitudes - such as pacifism, for example. But it is precisely the ongoing criticism of coronavirus policy that is so problematic because it is all too often based on distorted memories. In the Nature publication, the researchers from Erfurt, Bamberg, Bonn and Vienna also provide experimental evidence of the "motivated information processing" that drives polarisation here. For another part of the study that has now been published, they asked people they had already interviewed about these topics at the height of the pandemic (in summer 2020 or winter 2020/21) to recall their answers at the time: How afraid were you of infection at the time? How appropriate did you think the measures were?

This revealed something that is well described in psychology - a so-called recall bias. Almost nobody remembered their own judgements accurately. Instead, memories were strongly influenced by how afraid people were of being infected with Sars-CoV-2 today. When the psychologists divided the respondents into vaccinated and unvaccinated, it became apparent that the bias was not uniform, but went in opposite directions: Vaccinated respondents tended to overestimate how strongly they had perceived the danger at the height of the pandemic. The opposite was true for the unvaccinated.

The recall bias was extremely consistent. It was not only recognisable in Germany, but also in ten other countries in which the scientists surveyed test subjects. Only one thing helped to reduce it: if the psychologists offered the test subjects the prospect of money for remembering exactly, the bias became smaller - a clear indication that the test subjects did not initially want to remember their own fears and attitudes during the height of the pandemic so precisely.

How the vaccination decision became a question of identity

It was particularly striking that those who identified strongly with their own vaccination status ("I am proud (not) to have been vaccinated against coronavirus") also looked back in a particularly distorted way. Vaccinated and unvaccinated people alike - which brings us (at the latest) to the centre of an identity debate.

In the end, vaccination, like other measures such as advertising bans or taxes on unhealthy foods, is at risk of being categorised as supposedly right or wrong according to (other) political preferences. Nobody who is interested in people's health can be happy about this. But it has been happening in the USA for a long time. There, Republican voters were much less likely to be vaccinated than Democratic voters - and therefore probably died in greater numbers. Vaccination has long been part of the culture war; it pays into so-called mega-identities, as described by US journalist Ezra Klein in his book Why We're Polarised: huge magnets that lead to a merciless sorting of previously completely disparate concepts, preferences and ideas.

Of course, the US mega-identities cannot be easily transferred to Germany: in this country, there is no such stark divide between progressives and conservatives, coasts and hinterland, between Nascar and Colin Kaepernick. And yet, since the pandemic, we have increasingly observed a sorting of identities along certain poles: If you don't believe the state's good intentions when it comes to epidemic control, you won't believe them when it comes to arms supplies or the Building Energy Act. These identities make little sense in a left-right scheme; in terms of phenotype alone, they link - as we remember from the first big lateral-thinking demos - hippies in eco-slippers with staunch fascists. But for those who reject measures, reforms and laws, they make sense as a positive sense of freedom and community in contrast to the actions of elites perceived as dodgy and their presumably rigged game.

The question is how to counter this self-encapsulation. And the answer is certainly not: by encapsulating ourselves. Of course, it was almost without exception the right decision to get vaccinated. Simply because the risks of vaccination were so much lower than those of infection with the virus. And, of course, vaccination was always also a question of solidarity - only a high vaccination rate appeared to be good insurance against the collective risk of overburdening the healthcare system. The frustration of vaccinated people that others did not want to be vaccinated was therefore understandable. And yet the charging of vaccination status as a question of identity with injections in the Twitter bio and breaking off contact with unvaccinated relatives is one that has side effects; not as a breach of civilisation like the Star of David with the "unvaccinated" imprint at the other extreme (which can easily be recalled in the current debate about so-called imported anti-Semitism). But it does come across as rather merciless virtue signalling that makes it immediately clear: I am on the right side and either you agree with me or there will be stress.

As with almost every polarisation, even if it were so easy, the others are not always solely to blame. And being in favour of government measures can also go hand in hand with a false sense of reality. As the data from the study shows, those who are "proud to be vaccinated" today overestimate how vulnerable they thought they were to the virus in the past. In other words, many of those in favour of the measures did not perceive the situation as being as blatantly unsafe as they do against those who oppose the measures today - who, for their part, act as if everything was completely harmless at all times, even though they themselves had concerns at the height of the pandemic.

This may be understandable in terms of retrospective rationalisation ("I already know why I was so careful and why I restricted myself so much"), but it still stands in the way of an honest debate about the appropriateness of the measures. Anyone who exaggerates the danger in retrospect ultimately prevents themselves from recognising certain countermeasures as excessive.

In this constellation, the radicalisation of the social fringes proves to be less the project of a group with the will to divide, but rather the result of an identitarian, distorted view - of two camps. The division does not (only) take place where the explicitly politicised participants in the discourse attack each other. It has a subtle effect in stairwell conversations and family gatherings, in which they initially sound out which side the other is on and how big the ice floe of shared reality actually still is. However, this is not just about sides in a political dispute, but about sometimes irreconcilably different memories of a shared experience.

Bringing these memories closer together again, initiating reappraisal, even reconciliation: That may be a pious wish. But it is also a social necessity. It may be that it feels good to forget the coronavirus at the moment - especially in light of all the other crises. It may also be that a current survey in the current situation would reveal less corona-related anger than the study discussed here, most of whose data comes from last winter. Nevertheless, the social and mental consequences of the pandemic remain visible. And that, in the clear words of Barber from the beginning, really sucks. And for everyone.

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What bothers me most about this article is that the so-called journalists have the audacity to claim to have science on their side. It is an undisputed fact that the jab was never tested to prevent transmission of a virus - Pfizer openly admitted to this - which for me makes it very clear that all measures were not only useless but also illegal and dangerous. But there is also no mention of the fact that there has never been an open and, above all, public investigation into the coronavirus pandemic and its measures.

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The casual use of the usual buzzwords and phrases such as

(pseudo-)science

lateral thinkers

troublemakers

reinterpretation

deeply anti-state narrative

anti-science narrative

agitators

strategic disinformers

radicalism of this minority

generalised suspicion

dark intentions behind every form of government action

conspiracy theories

communities of mistrust

Republican voters were much less likely to be vaccinated than Democratic voters - and therefore probably died in greater numbers

staunch fascists

radicalisation of the social fringes

in this article don’t cease to astound me. All that's missing is right-wing radicals and Nazis, then the usual collection of words and phrases used by the self-proclaimed righteous would be complete.

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The narrative-loyal journalists - I really struggle to call these scribblers such - use a lot of words to say very little. At the end of the day, it is nothing more than a PR stunt to justify the ridiculous measures, without any criticism or reappraisal of the inhumanity, and serves only to confirm the government’s actions about how wonderful everything was, how many lives were saved so that those responsible can pat themselves on the back for a job well done!

For me, one of the most offensive sentences in this article is:

But it is precisely the ongoing criticism of coronavirus policy that is so problematic because it is all too often based on distorted memories.

And this is the other one that triggered a very unpleasant response in me:

Of course, it was almost without exception the right decision to get vaccinated. Simply because the risks of vaccination were so much lower than those of infection with the virus. And, of course, vaccination was always also a question of solidarity - only a high vaccination rate appeared to be good insurance against the collective risk of overburdening the healthcare system.

It is also a disgusting condemnation of everyone who had the audacity to ask questions, who had uttered doubts about the measures, and who questioned the overall actions of the current government.

It is a brilliant example though of how the mainstream media is desperately trying to influence and convince the public of the approved narrative.

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🎶My Song of the Week

I chose a song from 1983 that has more significance today than ever - Anne Clark with Sleeper in Metropolis

For more good music, go to this Spotify playlist where you can find all the songs from the Change & Evolve Letters!

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📚My Poem of the Week

Is by Margaret Atwood (born November 18, 1939)

The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

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👀Impressions

I have the great pleasure of spending some time with my sister and this week’s image is from another stunningly beautiful lake, Lake Geneva, and the Mont Blanc

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I am truly tired of the current media and the way they continue with their gaslighting of the public.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments or send me a message. I very much enjoy hearing from you.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend.

Yours

Tanja 🤗

Change & Evolve