More on Niall Ferguson’s Doom
Ferguson’s new book notes early on that “of the big disasters in human history, the biggest have been pandemics and wars.”
Just some kind of free-associating comments. The quote brings to mind Albert Camus’ novel The Plague, about a disease that effectively shuts down the northern Algerian port city of Oran. Camus was born in Algeria, even though he lived most of his life in France. It was written just after World War II, and I think that along with Orwell’s 1984 it is one of the great fictional responses to that war.
I believe many plagues and even individual illnesses are psychological in origin or at least have contributing emotional factors. And my opinion is that some of the government response to Covid-19 was either psychological hysteria or just stupidity.
The idea of the Apocalypse, the end of the world, is powerful in human psychology. My university had an entire graduate-school course on literature of the Apocalypse that centered on The Bible‘s “Book of Revelations” but also took into account non-biblical literature dealing with the end of the world. Thanatos as Freud would say.