Pandemic Reflection Pool

The revelations of the last two weeks bring to mind the very first two weeks, six years ago today. The truths now laid bare are a song that once meant something to us — music that helped us move past heartbreak, yet whose melody now recalls thoughts and feelings long buried. Soft and inescapable, a profound melancholy returns.

I have often wondered what psychological mechanism marked the difference between those people who complied with any absurdity and those who never did.

Today, Homer’s myth of heroism, The Odyssey, plays in the theaters. Meanwhile playing on the televisions is another version of the Narcissus myth, this time pleading the Fifth.

To quickly recap of The Myth of Narcissus, Narcissus is an exceptionally handsome young man — whom everyone fell in love with — and Echo, a mountain nymph, eventually came under his enchantment and fell in love with him too. Echo was unfortunately cursed: She was only able to repeat the last words spoken by someone else. She could only echo Narcissus’s words and was cruelly rejected by him. She eventually wasted away until nothing remained of her but her voice — an “echo.”

Narcissus on the other hand was punished by the goddess of retribution, Nemesis. She led him to a clear pool of water where Narcissus saw his own reflection and fell in love with it. He was unable to leave the pool, and refusing food, slowly wasted away from unrequited love for his own image. When he died, a flower sprung up — the Narcissus or Daffodil.

Today, the word narcissism is used to describe a wide range of applications, but the origin myth remains the same — a man who cannot move past his own perceived importance, his lover who can only echo his words, and their shared ruin — both undone by unrequited love.

I have always been struck by what I considered an anomaly of history; at the very least a strange coincidence of circumstance that crosses time and culture.

Why, for instance, does Nicolae Ceaușescu’s wife Elena exclaim, “Shame on you. I brought you up as a mother. I raised you,” to the soldiers binding her hands and preparing to execute her? One of the soldiers allegedly replied to the Romanian dictator’s wife that she was no mother, since she had killed their mothers. She died incapable of understanding how her actions led to her outcome.

Why, for instance, does Erich Mielke, the Minister for State Security (head of the East German Stasi) exclaim to parliament after the Wall fell, “I love…I love all people.” He later spent his final years in a modest East Berlin flat, widely despised, politically irrelevant, and incapable of understanding how his actions led to his outcome.

Of course, there are other examples, Lavrentiy Beria, Pierre Laval, Julius Streicher, Wojciech Jaruzelski, Augusto Pinochet, etc. All of these people once wielded near-absolute power over their countrymen, yet they were all doomed — unable to move past their own perceived importance — and either executed or reduced to living ordinary lives, publicly hated, with immense legal vulnerability, and the permanent loss of status.

There is a new applicant to these ignominious ranks — Anthony Fauci.

The revelations of his professional journal — diary — show a persistent pattern of both self-absorption and sidelining of scientific signals. Dominated by an exhaustive cataloging of his rising fame, they contain comparatively little scientific substance yet they reveal a growing and persistent awareness from 2020 onward that the shots would not perform as expected, and they document that knowledge which directly contradicted the coercive policies he was publicly advocating.

Of course, the ending of his story begins with an unprecedented, preemptive, blanket, ten-year pardon, followed by a Congressional hearing in which he pleaded the Fifth one hundred and eleven times, and refused to look at his victims.

I found myself reflecting during Fauci’s hearing what it is I might have done if I were in his situation.

My wife made the argument, and she may be right, that my libertarian bent would have me respond with the Fifth Amendment in the same way that Fauci did, but I continued to come back to the thought that if I truly believed my actions were justified — especially given the protections of the pardon, the limited consequences a contempt or perjury charge would have, and the advanced age of 85 — I would have defiantly stood by my actions, by selectively answering the questions always standing by how correct I thought my actions were.

After all, the numbers are enormous. In 2025, the JAMA Health Forum put out a study giving a main estimate that 2.5 million deaths were averted globally by the vaccination campaign. That study stated that 15 million life-years were saved. The sensitivity ranges for both estimates were 1.4 million – 4 million and 7 million to 24 million respectively. 90% of the benefit in the study was attributed to people aged 60 and over.

Then there are the studies related to the lives saved by lockdown measures. The early Imperial College London model indicated that 3.1 million deaths would be saved by locking down. Despite the obvious flaws of that model, later empirical studies focusing on the spring of 2020 by Herby, Jonung, and Hanke put a lower end to the estimate stating that roughly 6,000 – 23,000 lives were saved by lockdown measures in Europe, and 4,000 – 16,000 were saved in the US.

If I truly believed I saved somewhere between a conservative estimate of 4,000 lives and a very liberal estimate of 4 million, why would I feel any regret at all when being asked to look at the victims of my lockdowns and coercive vaccination strategies? After all, there was a common Covid-era phrase: If it saves just one life, it’s worth it. In other words, I should feel justified to look into any lockdown victim’s eyes and tell them to their face that my policies saved at least one life, so even though all of these other terrible and ancillary things happened to them, they were all ultimately worthwhile.

In the words of Georges Danton — an architect of the French Revolution — who later found himself defiantly climbing the guillotine’s steps saying, “My turn now!” before exclaiming his last words to the executioner:

Tu montreras ma tête au peuple ; elle en vaut la peine.

—Georges Danton

(Show my head to the people. It is well worth seeing.)

Of course, that all contradicts the reality revealed in Fauci’s own professional journal. The journal records both his self-absorption and the lies he was telling the public. The enormous figures of projected lives saved ultimately prove hollow. Rather than stand by his claims and actions, the avoidance of accountability becomes his goal.

Which brings me back to my original question — what psychological mechanism marked the difference between those people who complied with any absurdity and those who never did?

I do not have an answer, but I strongly think that it is the power of not only self-reflection, but also the ability to project oneself into another’s situation — called cognitive perspective-taking.

In other words, when one looks at the pool reflecting one’s image back at them, they can see not only themselves, but also what they would be if they were the ones demanding their friends wear masks, vaccinate, or avoid them entirely. They can look at those reflections of themselves and fully understand what that means to them and then proceed accordingly.

In the Narcissus myth, Echo on the other hand significantly lacked the power of self-expression and independent agency. The myth takes it to the extreme that she can no longer speak in her own words, but rather only repeat the last words spoken by someone else:

Stay Home, save lives.

Follow the science.

If it saves one life, it’s worth it.

We’re all in this together.

Echo’s curse was more than only being able to repeat the last words said to her; it was the complete loss of autonomous identity. Meanwhile, she is still a conscious being, and she retains her emotional capabilities of love, grief, and anger. Coupled with the erasure of her power to give original form to her inner life, her voice becomes purely reactive.

The loss of Echo’s original voice is the tragedy of the story. It’s an idea maybe captured better by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des hommes) :

“Their fate may not cause these people suffering. It is not an impulse to charity that has upset me like this…What torments me is not the humps nor hollows nor the ugliness. It is the sight, a little bit in all these people, of Mozart murdered.”

So the song currently playing brings back memories of heartbreak and terror that arose from the restrictions of March 2020. The vindication many may feel will be both fleeting and ephemeral. The rare bit of joy about being definitively proven correct is balanced by the immense and profound sadness of how terrible the lockdown era was.

Interestingly, the story as of this week even includes a bouquet of flowers. Just like the myth, what appear to be yellow chrysanthemums, were delivered to Fauci’s doorstep. While in the US, the bright color is often associated with joy and optimism, an old Victorian era meaning could sometimes signify slighted or neglected love, just like Echo was slighted in the myth.

Though not daffodils this time, yellow chrysanthemums are commonly called mums.

Fitting, I suppose, because mum’s the word.