One intriguing cultural manifestations of Covid insanity, is the degree to which this mind virus has taken root at universities. Private institutions of higher education in the Anglosphere in particular descended into paroxysms of containment euphoria seen nowhere else outside China. Early in the pandemic, they effectively imprisoned their paying student populations, and even now many of them continue to mandate perpetual vaccination for everyone, regardless of the failure of the vaccines to stop transmission and the very low risk that Omicron poses for anyone who is not very old or very sick.

A long time ago, I wondered whether this hygiene radicalism might have been driven in part by a broader “emotional and ideological exhaustion with prior tyranny of Wokeness.” Since then, I’ve thought a lot more about the parallels between Covidianism and Wokery, and I’m increasingly convinced that they draw on the same social and cultural circuitry. They’re both rooted in very naive and one-sided concerns about health and safety, and they’re both very useful for extending the size and prerogatives of the administration. Perhaps even more significantly, they both benefit from an internal, self radicalising mechanism, by which I mean that moderate positions on both topics are effectively self-defeating. Only by adopting the most extreme opinions can you avoid being outflanked by overzealous subordinates.

This theory prompts a small prediction: