How do we understand Americans’ utter disinterest in protecting one another — and themselves — from COVID? One writer looks to Sigmund Freud for answers:
As Freud saw, the real opposite of both love and hate is in fact something else altogether: indifference. And here lies the true horror of the death drive: it is an indifferent principle of destruction. Insensate and unsatisfiable, it may well pulse within you, and undo you, but It Does Not Care About You. Your suffering and your symptoms signify; they ramify personally and in your relationships. The death drive, in its indifferent purity, operates on another order of scale entirely, liquidating you and them alike. It may kill you, but It Is Not About You. To be sure, the death drive is present in murder, war, and our desires to dominate, exploit, and destroy. But we betray ourselves when we call such things examples of “inhumanity,” since they are obviously human, all too human. The death drive both gives a name to this paradox and resolves it by suggesting that we exist at the mercy of an entropic principle that is in-the-human yet downright unhuman in the purity of its indifference to humans and human affairs more generally. It is a kind of dark sublime in the shadow of which our activities unfold and dissolve.
