The “underground man” in pandemic times

At the start of the pandemic, we saw the appearance of a peculiar type of character who has become symbolic of the political division and the misinformation of our time. This emergence has made some of our family gatherings awkward and unfortunate events. Many of us have had to block or unfollow certain people on social media who resemble this character. We’ve all seen such personas in the news.

 During this period of isolation, many have wondered what caused such a character to emerge: the character of “the underground man.” Yet it seems little has been done to decipher their nature. 

While reading Notes from The Underground—considered one of the first existential novels—written by Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1864, I found some interesting passages which I’d like to share with you in order to shed some light onto the phenomenon. The novel, which explores the depths of the human psyche presented as the confessions of a man alienated from the rest of the world, begins like this:

“I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. […] No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand.” 

Who could fail to recognize in this passage the mindset of some of these “yahoos”—as our premier used to call them, before his unfortunate silence—who continue to deny the existence of COVID-19 and protest against vaccines? 

The character of the “underground man,” who spurns reason out of spite even in the face of his own demise, has become all too common. One should ask why someone would be willing to gamble with their own life. Is it not a senseless thing to risk your wellbeing on a whim? But there may be more to it:

“And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive—in other words, only what is conducive to welfare—is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? […] Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact. […] I hold no brief for suffering nor for well-being either. I am standing for…my caprice, and for its being guaranteed to me when necessary.” 

I do not wish to pretend that the character from these “notes” is the same as COVID deniers, or the fringe groups of political extremism and conspiracy theorists like QAnon, or other similar groups. 

This character exists now as an existential feeling that expresses itself in many ways in our society, and not only in those types of people we find extreme. 

It is happening to family and friends, and it is happening to all of us—this sensation of looming despair, this feeling of existential dread that reason cannot readily appease or explain. There is simply too much to worry about now.

Is it a coincidence, then, that in the age of the internet, so many people rally together to express a similar aimless suffering? Even the slightest inconvenience can turn into maladaptive anger:

“I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache, on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan, not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by progress and European civilisation, a man who is ‘divorced from the soil and the national elements,’ as they express it now-a-days.”

Now let me ask you: if you had recently lost your job, if you had learned you had terminal cancer, if you were told you couldn’t go out to see your friends and woke up the next day with tooth decay and no proper health coverage, would you not want someone to blame?

Perhaps we should consider that the state of our world has had a deeper effect on our psyche than we thought, and that some of us have had better support systems to navigate these difficult times. 

This is not to forgive the behaviour of those who recklessly endanger their lives and the lives of others, but simply an attempt to understand. Because if their behaviour cannot be understood, then this denial of reason in place of spite will continue to grow.

As the underground man says: 

“My liver is bad—well let it get worse!”