Moral hypocrisy is fundamental to the sociology of human-being. But nowhere and in no time has it been more pronounced than in the liberal West during COVID-19.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Never before have the forces of good been so amassed for the salvation of humankind than currently under COVID. From out of every crack and crevice anyone of good intention has crawled to voice their support for anything and everything that will save a Schindler life. We must do anything we can, not let one single leukemic child die, no 95-year-old grandmother with stage-3 brain cancer, and no morbidly obese patient should have to suffer the tragedy of a premature death from COVID-19. We must prevent all death with comorbidity, not least because W.H.O. guidance doesn't produce any other kind of actionable data.

The more esteemed the profession, the more in lockstep to the prevailing orthodoxy around COVID it is: 'medical professionals', academics in the natural sciences, elected officials, and every other privileged liberal generally. But it is in the doctor that the most extreme form of this group-think reveals itself.

Of course, there's a myth about the good nature and altruistic motivations of those who work in the medical profession that has long been understood to be undeserved. Anyone that ever knew anyone at the moment they went into 'pre-med' knows what their motivations actually were despite how refined they eventually became. Perhaps they didn't have a clue what to do; maybe their family expected them to do it; maybe they just wanted a good, secure salary; maybe it wasn't that difficult of a major, being mostly memorization and rote. The reasons vary across this spectrum of self-interest. Which makes what one encounters in a doctor's office more often than not a bit less surprising: because the last thing on most of these people's minds is almost always the patient.

They could care less what you have to say, probably think you are making most everything up from something you read on a website, won't waste any opportunity to comment on any aspect of your life they think could be lived better so as to produce an outcome more in line, obviously, with their own lifestyle choices. Diagnosed with a serious illness? It'll be more about learning which doctor you can find by scraping through every shred of information you can find on the internet, from friends and references to locate someone that will even listen to what you have to say. Every doctor one visits is a lesson in just how narrow a person's self-interest can be and how militant they are about the only way to do good being their way or 'you're welcome to go back into the misery of the market to try to locate someone else for another opinion'.

And yet unlike scum-of-the-earth lawyers, doctors are still held in such high esteem by the public, the myth about their profession persisting.

COVID-19 has given us a glimpse into the performative structure of the medical profession. Dealing with the vaccine from very early on was presented as an aspect of morality: one had to get the spread under control through lockdowns to prevent the system from collapsing. There was the morality of wearing masks to protect not yourself, but others. Then the moral argument of vaccination to prevent the spread of the virus. Now that the vaccines have been shown to not prevent transmission of the virus¹ and to wane in effectiveness², the moral argument is once again about reducing serious illness and hospitalization that will prevent the healthcare system from treating other illness and the death that will result if it cannot.

Doctors perform the myth of their goodness by supporting and reinforcing (this or any) pervasive moral discourse, not by going against it. By dismissing casually every counter-vailing factual as unresearched, immoral, or unsubstantiated by science, the group-think of these doctors leverages the morality of public discourse to perform an idealized conception of what it means to be a doctor. The reality of this performance thereby turns this soulless, class position and privelage-based profession into something which it is certainly not, thereby perpetuating the myth of the Good Doctor.

This is only distinguished from ordinary human hypocrisy and performative goodness by degree, and from ordinary liberal hypocrisy by actually being a profession that objectively does good, despite its motivations. Collectively, the entire globe is now suffering under the weight of this ordinary sociological hypocrisy. Perhaps the next decades will be as defined by it as the previous have been of liberal efforts to do good and spread democracy around the world.

Footnotes