The pandemic did not just reveal our vulnerabilities; it revealed the world’s willingness to sacrifice meaning itself at the altar of survival. I’ll never forget the moment it became clear that this wasn’t about a virus anymore. It wasn’t about protecting health, saving lives, or flattening curves. It was about control—about reshaping society into something cold, mechanical, and utterly dehumanized.

Without debate or consent, a social triage was imposed. The lives of the old were elevated above all else, and the lives of the young—their futures, their connections, their joy—were cast aside. A generation was told that their isolation, their suffering, their missed milestones were the price of safety. Safety for others. Safety at any cost.

It was a cost borne in silence, enforced by fear, and rationalized by a grim, narrow vision of the good: life reduced to bare survival. Ivan Illich foresaw this in Medical Nemesis, where medicine, untethered from humanism, becomes an ideology that consumes the very society it claims to protect. Foucault, too, saw it in his analysis of plague management, the grim forerunner of modern biopolitics. (See Geoff Shullenberger’s excellent essay on the topic.) In times of crisis, public health becomes a pretext for absolute social control—a panopticon with no walls, where fear does the work of chains.

And fear ruled. Those who questioned the measures—lockdowns, forced isolation, masking, vaccine mandates—weren’t met with debate; they were met with derision. The same voices who once railed against the authoritarian excesses of the post-9/11 security state now cheered its revival under the guise of “public health.” Security theatre, bad; hygiene theatre, good. The left, once the champion of solidarity, human connection, and shared struggle, abandoned its principles without a second thought.

When Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya proposed the Great Barrington Declaration, calling for “Focused Protection” of the vulnerable rather than blanket lockdowns, they were not met with reasoned critique. They were met with a scorched-earth campaign to destroy their reputations. These scientists—seasoned epidemiologists with decades of experience—were smeared as pawns of libertarianism, their nuanced ideas dismissed as dangerous heresy.

I, too, found myself ostracized for daring to question the orthodoxy. A prominent epidemiologist featured on the cover of The Nation magazine, labeled me part of the “anti-state state,” as though dissent itself was a crime. The principles I thought were universal—freedom, dignity, the importance of human connection—suddenly felt alien. I found myself politically homeless, watching as the left abandoned its commitment to humanity and the right—ironically—became the reluctant guardian of basic freedoms.

What was the justification for these measures? “To save lives.” But whose lives? People die of disease. It’s unfortunate but it happens. Humans aren’t rats in a science lab, and as much as our techbros and #BelieveTheScience overlords wish, we are not immortal creatures who can escape death with the right technocratic tools. And at what cost? The answer was always the same: the cost didn’t matter. The harm didn’t matter. The goal of preserving bare biological existence overrode everything else. Life’s meaning derives from its finitude—a concept any reader of Hägglund or Gulliver's Travels would grasp.

This is the politics of bare life. It is life stripped of meaning, reduced to its biological minimum: the beating of a heart, the drawing of a breath. It is a vision of existence devoid of joy, love, or connection—a life whose sole purpose is its own perpetuation.

But this vision is not neutral. A society that values survival above all else will do anything to ensure it, including sacrificing the very things that make life worth living. Worse still, a society that reduces life to mere biology will find it easy to justify taking it away. If life is nothing but a biological fact, ending it is no crime.

This is why lockdowns weren’t just a policy mistake. They were a moral catastrophe. They revealed a world willing to abandon its humanity to prolong its existence. A world where families couldn’t gather to grieve, where lovers were separated by mandates, where children grew up behind screens, all to preserve a vision of life that was hollow and lifeless.

And yet, there were voices of dissent. The Brownstone Institute, often derided for its libertarian roots, became one of the few spaces where humanist critiques of the pandemic response could flourish.

The question we must ask is not whether the lockdowns “worked.” The question is whether the society they created is one we want to live in. Do we want a world where fear dictates policy? Where human connection is a luxury, not a necessity? Where life is reduced to the cold logic of disease control?

The pandemic exposed a deep failure of imagination. We forgot that life is not merely the avoidance of death. It is love, laughter, creation, struggle, and joy. These things cannot be measured in statistics or justified by cost-benefit analysis. They are the reason we live.

If we don’t reckon with what happened, this will happen again. The politics of bare life—so easily invoked in the name of safety—will creep back in the next crisis, and the next, until there’s nothing left to protect. We cannot allow this.

It is time to reclaim the things that make life worth living. It is time to demand a world that values humanity over mere survival.