The Inhumanity of Disease

“Worst of all, it isolates us.”

Disease is a horrid thing. It admits no distinction between the rich and poor, man and woman, old and young, and could take any of us at any moment. As Albert Camus—for one—knew, it is insidious. It works its way into our daily lives, wearing us down in a double-punch: exhausting us while also making rest impossible. Worst of all, it isolates us. It cuts us off from those around us, and we grow fearful of the simple act of association as if we are guilty of some crime just by standing side-by-side with others.

Of course, Camus was not writing only about disease. His 1947 book The Plague (la Peste) was, in part, an allegorical work on the oppressive power of totalitarianism and his experiences as a Frenchman during the early 1940s. What Camus depicted most accurately was the silent power of the National Socialist regime and its project of isolation; just as with the Cheka, the NKVD, and the KGB in the USSR, the Gestapo throughout the Nazi regime made clever use of informants. Throughout its existence, the actual size of the organization was much smaller than most citizens thought. The Gestapo ensured that the fear of the Other was inculcated through a program of terror and control. Members of the Gestapo, for instance, would appear in the dead of night and in full public view, taking away those who dared to resist the regime. As a result, no one knew whom they could trust, so, in turn, they trusted no one.

This isolation, Camus shows, was not achieved through obvious measures of force, such as a curfew or the control of movement. Rather, it was reached through inculcating a culture of fear of the Other, for what they might be or do to us. This goal could only be achieved by people who were, in fact, deeply aware of the fundamentally social nature of human beings; as Georg Hegel argued, we come to know ourselves through the Other, a morally autonomous being over whom we have no claim of authority or control, but out to whom we extend our Will and through whom we return to understand that Will’s limits. If we cannot engage in this eternal return (not, to clarify, as Friedrich Nietzsche understood the term) of our Will through the Other, we cannot learn about ourselves and cannot develop into a full person. Thus, we become mere bodies, essentially undifferentiated from any other body and, therefore, disposable.