Did COVID really prove that humans are terrible?
The pandemic has annihilated so many people's belief in a better future. Is that fair?
This is part of a running course on mutual aid. You can read the other articles here.
Last week we discussed “disaster utopias,” the phenomenon in which, when something really terrible happens, people on the whole respond with kindness, selflessness, and bravery.
This phenomenon is well-documented, even though the media in moments of crisis tends to amplify (often exaggerated or entirely false) stories of crime and violence. The phenomenon could also be described as “spontaneous mutual aid,” and it seems to confirm what the anarchists have long been saying about human nature: we are fundamentally cooperative creatures at our core. When the social constructs of our capitalist society fall away, we revert to our normal state: members of a community, working for the common good.
There’s a fly in this argument’s ointment, though: the COVID-19 pandemic. Whereas catastrophes like hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornados send people into the streets, seeking connection, solace, and safety among their neighbors, early COVID was by necessity an isolating disaster. Babies were born without their wider families present, funerals had to be unattended, and trauma was borne in solitude.
Worse — it seemed that people got worse after the pandemic hit. All of the sudden, previously normal people were shouting at store clerks who asked them to put on a mask, all of the sudden, your cousin was railing against 5G towers and COVID vaccines as part of some deep state ploy. I do not think any of us look back on 2020 as a year we came together as a country.
But the early COVID-19 pandemic did have elements of disaster utopias, and there was a massive surge in mutual aid projects in the wake of the viruses spread. Our decision to see COVID-19 as an example of how people are terrible is just that: a decision. And it’s a decision that has largely been made for us.
Mutual Aid (and general human decency) in the pandemic
Let’s get this out of the way up top: millions of people were fucking great during COVID. Setting aside the people who did dangerous and vital work (nurses, doctors, teachers, grocery store workers, librarians, and anyone else given the title of “essential worker”), on a day to day basis, most of us sacrificed something huge to keep people safe.
We sacrificed personal connection, we sacrificed childcare, we sacrificed emotional and physical support, we sacrificed our basic well-being to keep the more vulnerable people in our lives healthy and safe. And we did all of this while dropping off rolls of homemade sourdough at friends’ places, while checking in with nightly Zooms and remote game nights, while giving money and resources to the people who suddenly found themselves without a job. When things started opening back up, millions of us wore masks, got vaccinated, made tough decisions about family gatherings and holidays, and marched against police brutality to boot.
If this — and not QAnon conspiracy theorist psychopathy — was your reality during the pandemic, then you need to ask yourself why you’re preferring the awful narrative to that of your own experience.
But all of that low-hanging goodness aside, there were some excellent instances of mutual aid during the pandemic. My personal favorite is ASS.
ASS — the Auntie Sewing Squad — is a mutual aid mask-making operation organized by the performer Kristina Wong in the early days of the pandemic. Wong began making cloth masks before it was officially recommended by the CDC (who waited until April of 2020 to make that particularly big decision), and realized there was a huge unmet need for the life-saving face coverings. She began to organize a group of mostly Asian women, whom she affectionately dubbed the “Aunties,” and they worked together to sew masks and distribute them to marginalized communities.
Wong recognized the irony of her situation, and told the LAist in an interview, “I'm ordering a bunch of Asian women to do this labor that our grandparents or parents never wanted to do ever again because this country, which is the most powerful country in the world, has failed to provide us with masks.” She leaned into the concept, and dubbed herself the “Sweatshop Overlord.” There was a massive elastic shortage in those early days of the pandemic, so the Aunties snipped elastic out of old bras and fitted bedsheets.
Such mask-sewing groups were common during early COVID: my earliest and best cloth mask came from a coworker who belonged to one of these groups. Some of these groups fell away after the CDC recommendation, which turned masks into a commodity to be sold on Etsy or in local shops. ASS remained steadfast in its commitment to mutual aid, refusing to charge for its masks and making sure it got to marginalized communities, whether that was to Indigenous reservations or to undocumented immigrants.
But the mutual aid of that era went beyond masks: The Trump Administration predictably blocked immigrants out of any of the protections offered in the early bailouts, and as a result many immigrant families lost housing and experienced food insecurity. Immigrant advocacy groups like Movimiento Cosecha started mutual aid funds to support immigrant families who were struggling in that period, raising over a million dollars.
Food insecurity in general ballooned during COVID (and recently shot up again because of expiring COVID-era programs), and since the government seemed largely uninterested in whether or not its subjects starved, the gaps had to be filled in, hodgepodge, by wide-ranging mutual aid programs. The most popular of these are community fridges or pantries1, which offer a place for people to drop their leftover food so that others can take it. In my town alone, I saw these pantries spring up in daycare centers, libraries, and churches.
Anecdotes aside, the numbers are there: during the pandemic, more Americans engaged in mutual aid than ever before, and since the peak of the pandemic, more are willing to engage in mutual aid.
So what’s happening here?
Obviously, this isn’t all good news: mutual aid tends to exist where it has to exist among marginalized people, when society as a whole fails a specific group. If COVID did anything, it just made those margins a lot bigger. COVID was also an abnormally long catastrophe: most of the disasters we’re comparing it to, whether they are earthquakes, tornados, or terrorist attacks last minutes or even seconds. COVID lingered. And that has real consequences: while studies have thoroughly demonstrated the rise in social cohesion post-disaster, they’ve also shown that the cohesion only lasts for about a month on average before the old ways of doing things reassert themselves.
Participation in mutual aid efforts also dipped after the peak of the pandemic, when vaccines finally arrived and we collectively decided the still-with-us pandemic was “over.” Since then, many of the meager protections doled out in the early COVID bailouts have expired, and homelessness and food insecurity has, as a result, exploded. Unless the US Government starts caring about its people a whole lot more, these lingering problems will continue to be addressed by a patchwork of nonprofits and mutual aid networks. The good news is that many nonprofits are now looking to the mutual aid model as an engaging alternative to traditional hierarchical charity. One nonprofit, Ioby (short for “In Our Backyards”) has built a crowdfunding platform and offers coaching to help hyperlocal mutual aid groups become more sustainable.
It is obviously not ideal that our government has neglected so many corners of our society that we need to do all of the work ourselves, but if we truly want wide-reaching (even revolutionary) changes in our society, this is the type of work that needs to be done first.
So in short: none of this is good, but it all has the potential to be great.
The Anti-Good Bias
So why isn’t everyone doing this? Why doesn’t everyone find mutual aid projects to engage in? Why don’t we just start building the society we’d like to live in within the wreckage of the one we currently live in?
One major stumbling block is the negativity bias. This is just one of our brains’ inherent biases which make it hard for us to adequately process information.
Our brains evolved to understand the world in order to protect us: by enabling us to learn, to find patterns, and to predict what might happen in a given situation, it was enabling us to keep ourselves safe.
In order to do this, it had to prioritize certain data. While it’s lovely to spend our time feeling the breeze through our hair and the sand beneath our toes, those stimuli do not necessarily keep us safe. Early animal brains evolved to understand that nice data required less attention than negative data. The reason is obvious: The wind through your hair is nice, but it is more important to pay attention to the alligator that’s trying to sneak up behind you while you sunbathe.
Unfortunately, this bias has been thoroughly and consciously hijacked by modern media outlets, which understand that you’ll pay more attention if they flood you with an onslaught of terrible news. Conservative outlets in particular understand that scared people vote more conservative or don’t vote at all, and the best way to make people feel scared is to make them feel as if there is crime and violence around every corner. This is why they will report on a grisly murder, but not on an overall decline in the number of local murders.
This sense that we are under constant attack — from criminals, from immigrants, from refugees, from terrorists, from gangs — makes us less likely to trust a random person on the street who may be in need of help. And that trust is the core ethic of mutual aid.
COVID put us inside and it filtered our entire understanding of the world out there through modern media — and this, perhaps more than anything, has done the most to erode our sense of trust in others.
How do we rebuild trust?
Next week, we’ll be looking at how we can dip our toe into mutual aid and community engagement without having to spend a bunch of money or put ourselves in situations that go too far outside our comfort zones. We’re going to do that by spending the week squarely within my personal comfort zone: the local library.
Most of next week’s article will be paywalled, but reminder! I will be offering the whole course in ebook form, and, of course, I offer 7-day free trials.
As always, leave comments and questions below! I try to respond to all of them.
In two weeks, I’ll publishing an interview I did with Chelle King, a Sacramento resident who built her own community fridge, so stay tuned for that!