Juan M. Blanco
In Blindness, José Saramago imagined an epidemic that robs people of their sight, plunging society into fear, group pressure, and a sudden collapse of critical judgement. But this kind of thing can happen outside fiction as well. When the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in 2020, the world seemed to lose its perspective. Authorities reacted in ways never before seen in modern times. Overnight, entire countries shut down, fundamental freedoms were suspended, schools closed for months, and any infection was treated as intolerable. Nothing of the sort appeared in the pandemic preparedness plans governments had drafted over decades. No previous pandemic — not even the severe influenza outbreak of 1957 — had been managed in this way.
The West acted as if seized by sudden amnesia. Long-established health protocols, historical experience, the basic rationality of weighing costs and benefits, the fundamental principles of science — rooted in debate, not censorship — and even the rights and liberties underpinning democratic life: all of this, long considered prudent and sensible, was abruptly treated as suspect or even dangerous. Only a handful of countries, such as Sweden, followed the traditional playbook; yet public perception inverted the facts and cast Sweden as the reckless outlier. But it was the script itself that had vanished.
Much has been written criticising lockdowns, but surprisingly little about the deeper forces that pushed governments towards such extreme measures. Yet without understanding those underlying causes, we will be unable to prevent similar mistakes in the future. The explanation, however, is complex. What erupted in 2020 was a perfect storm: cultural, political, psychological, and legal processes that had been forming and intertwining for decades. Once combined, these forces transformed the response to Covid into something resembling a global experiment.
Attitudes towards disaster — and even the very concept of “catastrophe” — had changed profoundly over the past half-century. In Risk and Blame (1992), the anthropologist Mary Douglas noted that premodern societies attributed every misfortune to a culprit, and every death was, in theory, preventable through some ritual or spell. Modernity replaced that magical thinking with the idea that many tragedies are unpredictable or simply the work of chance. Thus arose concepts such as “accident” or “natural disaster”, events for which no human fault is implied. But Douglas also warned that, in the late twentieth century, Western societies began drifting back towards premodern ways of viewing risk. Accidents once again came to imply that they were avoidable; disasters were taken to mean that someone must have failed to do “everything possible”. A new culture of blame emerged — one that moralises risk, rejects misfortune as such, and searches relentlessly for a responsible party.
Other deep cultural shifts reinforced this transformation. Technological progress fed the illusion that everything can be controlled. Growing prosperity and security lowered our tolerance for risk to unprecedented levels. Nature itself came to be viewed in an increasingly idealised way, as if incapable of threatening us. And death — long a familiar, visible part of human life — was pushed out of sight, into hospitals, far from daily experience, no longer seen as a natural stage of life but as something exceptional, even intolerable.
Together, these changes created a new mentality — almost a social infantilisation — marked by the difficulty of accepting misfortune, illness, or death without immediately seeking someone to blame. Lawsuits for damages that once would have been dismissed as unavoidable accidents multiplied. Defensive medicine spread as doctors, fearing litigation, ordered unnecessary tests or treatments that served to protect themselves rather than their patients.
The pandemic of 2020 struck a society already steeped in this culture of blame. China’s lockdown might once have been dismissed as an authoritarian excess. But when Italy imposed similar measures, they suddenly fell within the realm of “everything possible” — and therefore everything necessary. Governments responded with a form of defensive public health: extreme decisions that were difficult to justify from any rational cost-benefit analysis, yet very effective at deflecting blame elsewhere. These draconian measures worked like old-world incantations: not solving the problem but shifting responsibility away from those in charge. By contrast, the few governments that relied on voluntary guidance, like Sweden’s, were vilified as negligent — even though they ultimately recorded excess mortality well below the European average.
Thus, almost every leader judged it safer to adopt the strategy that best protected… themselves. Even Boris Johnson, who resisted lockdowns for several weeks, eventually yielded to overwhelming pressure; today he is accused of acting too late. In a culture of blame, maintaining a balanced policy — respecting freedoms and appealing to individual responsibility — requires a conviction and courage that contemporary politics rarely provides. And once imposed, strict measures did not calm the public; instead, they triggered a feedback loop between extreme restrictions and rising fear, feeding a cycle that soon seemed impossible to escape.
SARS-CoV-2 was a new virus capable of causing severe illness or death among older people or those with underlying conditions. But for the young and healthy, it was relatively benign. Yet perceived risk soared far beyond actual risk. The human mind is ill-equipped to assess complex hazards: doing so requires time, data, and calm reasoning. Instead, we fall back on intuitive shortcuts. One such heuristic is inferring the severity of a threat from the severity of the measures imposed. The implicit but powerful logic was: if the government is taking such extreme action, the danger must be enormous. Generalised fear pushed people to demand ever harsher measures; and those measures, being so drastic, reinforced the belief that the threat was extraordinary. Fear intensified the lockdowns, and the lockdowns intensified fear — empty streets, curfews, and mandatory masks became daily reminders of danger, driving anxiety higher still. Many hoped stricter measures would ease their fear, only to find that fear intensified further. In the few places that rejected lockdowns, perceptions of risk remained closer to reality.
And this dynamic was compounded by the “reputational cascades” described by Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein. People often express opinions they believe align with the majority and remain silent when they fear social disapproval. During the pandemic, dissent carried a high moral cost: questioning lockdowns meant being branded irresponsible or worse. Many who believed the measures were excessive chose to remain silent; others were openly censored. A false consensus emerged, ultimately persuading almost everyone. This phenomenon was especially damaging within academia, where science can only advance through debate and challenge. When it is claimed that only one truth exists and divergent expert views must be silenced, science gives way to dogma. In consequence, debate — both scientific and public — was stifled at the very moment it was most needed.
The result was an extreme form of groupthink: individuals trapped in an emotionally charged atmosphere that suppressed critical judgement, leading them to adopt dominant views no matter how irrational. Even the idea that recovering from infection provides natural immunity — a basic principle of biology — became almost taboo. Two years later, after mass vaccination, widespread natural immunity, and a virus circulating everywhere, many remained fixated on avoiding an inevitable infection at any cost.
The impossible aspiration of “zero Covid” has its roots in behavioural economics: the zero-risk bias. Our impulsive side longs to eliminate a specific risk entirely because doing so offers an immediate illusion of safety — even when it creates far greater harms elsewhere. And the culture of blame amplified this bias until eliminating the virus became a moral imperative, with little regard for its huge social costs.
Yet none of this would have been possible without a prior political transformation: the normalisation of the state of emergency. For decades, liberal democracies have expanded the circumstances under which fundamental rights can be suspended. Once reserved for wartime, exceptional powers have increasingly been invoked for a wide variety of events, each emergency creating a precedent further enlarging executive authority. After 9/11 this trend accelerated, and the 2020 pandemic crystallised it in an outsized “war on the virus” that allowed rights to be curtailed indefinitely. We had grown accustomed to emergencies justifying extraordinary measures; the pandemic pushed that logic to its limits.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the entire episode, however, was not the response itself but the absence of reflection afterwards. Once fear subsided and emotions cooled, one might have expected a sober assessment of decisions made under pressure. But such a reckoning never came — or arrived in the form of reports that merely reaffirmed the assumptions shaping the initial response. The clearest example is the UK’s Covid Inquiry, which, far from questioning excesses, criticises the government only for not imposing an even earlier and stricter lockdown.
If critical self-examination was once one of the West’s strengths — an engine of progress — why did it fail us here? Revisiting the past would require acknowledging that much of the harm was caused not by the virus but by disproportionate decisions, a recognition that immediately collides with cognitive dissonance. After making enormous sacrifices — enduring lockdowns, curtailed freedoms, and social paralysis — we cling to the belief that these sacrifices were necessary; admitting the opposite would mean accepting a grave error in judgement, with painful consequences for our self-image. Science, too, has avoided the open debate one might have expected: much of the scientific community remains entangled in the logic of the pandemic, reluctant to admit that valid voices were silenced or that mistaken certainties guided crucial decisions.
The pandemic was a mirror reflecting our cultural, political, and emotional fragilities: our difficulty tolerating uncertainty, our obsession with zero risk, our tendency to seek blame before solutions, and our surprising willingness to accept severe restrictions on liberty. To learn from that reflection, we must first dare to look at it; because unless we understand these weaknesses, the next crisis will find us just as vulnerable. The epidemic ended, but the blindness depicted by Saramago — our difficulty in examining our own decisions — has not yet lifted. Only when we dare to think again, to see with clarity, will we avoid stumbling once more in the dark.