The Plague Doctor Redux

Camus in the Age of COVID

Chōkōdō Shujin on Camus, COVID, and the ferocious mechanisms of the new normal.

A ferocious and senseless mechanism deprives man of his only means and purpose: he is a human being.

— Hideo Kobayashi

Hideo Kobayashi was a man of immense will and foresight. His deftly penetrating essay on Albert Camus’s La Peste [The Plague] offers a thorough, profound examination of the human condition under crisis, most notably focusing on the themes of enforced isolation, the absurdity of existence, and the various mechanized responses to human suffering. It even seems that Kobayashi foresaw the coming “new normal,” a term that I can only employ here with the most derisive contempt.

In Camus’s novel, the Algerian city of Oran is quarantined due to the bubonic plague. Camus uses this as a symbol of confinement, where ordinary lives are stripped to their essentials, much like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Kobayashi invokes this reference as a parallel of normalized abnormality. He lauds Camus for dismantling what he describes as conventional novelistic tropes—psychology, customs, ideology—as fraudulent in a modern world, instead probing the limits of various ideas amidst existential pain, rejecting passive skepticism for a clear-eyed realism.

The plague, as Camus’s allegory for Nazi occupation, exposes how the absurd is inevitably revealed during times of crisis, be the crisis in question real or manufactured. One sees humanity’s futile struggle against indifferent forces, where solidarity and common decency are brought about not by any grandiose ideologies, but by forthright action. Yet Kobayashi detects a “truly painful” quality within the genesis of La Peste—a new mechanism born of exhaustive critical analysis in a hyper-competitive literary landscape, lacking what he terms “spontaneous flowering.”

Kobayashi’s framework serves as a dark mirror for the lockdowns of 2020, where governments worldwide imposed draconian lockdowns as a purported bulwark against the spread of what they billed as a deadly virus. But unlike Camus’s plague, which demands ethical rebellion, the lockdowns devolved into an unscientific, tyrannical overreach that inflicted far more harm than good, exacerbating the very absurdities Kobayashi identifies: distrust in history, fragmented principles, and the dilution of human depth by mechanistic social controls.

What began as “fifteen days to slow the spread” dragged on into months—even years—of arbitrary restrictions, echoing Kobayashi’s critique of postwar après-guerre [post-war] consciousness. It is a collision with history’s inhumanity, where rationalist views fracture beneath the reality of experience. The lockdowns, far from a spontaneous flowering of protective talent, were an absurd and painfully engineered apparatus, imposed by bureaucrats with “surprising clarity of vision” only in their own hubris, ignoring collateral devastation in pursuit of zero-risk illusions. They were, in short, hysterical.

“It is as reasonable to express one kind of confinement by another kind of confinement as it is to express something that actually exists by something that does not exist,” Kobayashi writes.

At their core, these lockdowns embodied the “confinement” that Kobayashi draws from Defoe’s epigraph: expressing real threats through nonexistent justifications, much like Camus’s fictional plague chronicling the actual horrors of occupation. In Oran, isolation is no anomaly, but the baseline of absurd existence; Rieux, the calm realist, rejects fantasies of deliverance, focusing on minimal necessities in the face of constant threats. Similarly, the so-called “quarantines” forced billions into artificial islands of solitude—homes as prisons, cities as ghost towns—normalizing what Kobayashi calls a “debilitating fantasy” of loneliness as societal norm. But where Camus’s characters find heroism in resistance, lockdown architects such as Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins dismissed all alternatives as dangerous, all the while admitting privately that measures such as the six-foot rule “sort of just appeared” without presenting the merest shred of tangible evidence, while publicly enforcing them with relentless zeal.

This was no honest inquiry into the limits of human suffering; it was passive skepticism weaponized, transformed into active oppression, questioning not ideas such as freedom or humanity, but instead trampling them beneath their unproven edicts. It was the utmost exercise in petty legalism. All who opposed such extreme measures were thoroughly denounced, even demonized. Without resorting to hyperbole, one could describe it as the deification of science. Heretics were not to be pitied, but hated; no doubt, there were many who wanted them eliminated.

The criticisms are damning and well-substantiated: that what the lockdowns were intended to do provided little benefit in proportion to their costs. Countless reviews eventually revealed that they provided little or no difference in outcomes, with similar death trajectories across both stringent and more laissez-faire regions, as variation in lockdown intensity failed to correlate with reduced mortality after accounting for other factors. Beyond this, one must question why anyone considered it necessary to contain a virus that is hardly more deadly than the common cold, although that remains a separate and more disturbing issue.

Schools were shuttered unnecessarily, while masks and the grotesque notion of “social distancing” lacked anything resembling randomized controlled trials. Alternatives such as the Great Barrington Declaration, which emphasized voluntary precautions undertaken by the vulnerable while allowing normal life for those who so chose, were suppressed, dismissed as quackery. George Orwell himself would have found this paranoiac comedy of errors to be far too broadly drawn. Vaccine passports extended this deadly farce, segregating the “unvaccinated” based upon debunked claims that vaccination halted transmission of their beloved and dreaded virus, their sinister deity.

In essence, the lockdowns were a fraudulent “new mechanism,” as Kobayashi might say, peddling ideological control under the guise of science. The harms were catastrophic, outweighing any marginal benefits and echoing his invocation of wartime memoirs such as Kike Wadatsumi no Koe [Listen to the Voices of the Sea], where soldiers felt exiled from “this world” amidst senseless mechanisms stripping them of human dignity.

In the name of public health, gyms, hiking trails, and beaches were closed. Meanwhile, the only “surge” that came about was in the rates of mental illness, with around forty percent of adults reporting varying levels of struggle or some form of substance abuse. Naturally, suicide rates increased across all age groups. These were not anomalies, but instead made plainly visible the predictable anguish wrought by policies that, as Kobayashi critiques in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, reject freedom’s reality for imperceptible subjugation. Economically, too, the devastation was unforgivable.

Across various nations, constitutional freedoms were suspended indefinitely, prioritizing abstract power over concrete human lives, much like Kobayashi’s Tolstoy critique: historians, or officials in this case, mislead the public by focusing on apex commands while ignoring base realities. In Kobayashi’s terms, this was a “ferocious and senseless mechanism” depriving humanity of purpose, akin to the bomb’s lair where neither courage nor will survives—only resignation to an unavoidable death more evil than human.

Ultimately, Kobayashi’s essay warns that true postwar renewal demands confronting such absurdities without falling prey to ideological fraud. The lockdowns, by contrast, were a disastrous betrayal. What we saw was an authoritarian plague far more deadly than any virus, arbitrarily imposing confinement that diluted human dreams, passions, and connections into flattened oblivion. They were not salvation but subjugation, demanding not decency but blind compliance. As Camus’s Rieux might say, the true pestilence was the overreach itself. Surely their history will echo Kobayashi’s call for honest realism over painful mechanisms. Retrospectives confirm lockdowns’ harms vastly outweighed benefits, a mechanistic fraud Kobayashi would decry as “disgusting” justice.

The essay culminates in a poignant reflection that relates Tolstoy’s War and Peace to Camus’s narrative, emphasizing the novel’s rejection of mechanistic ideologies in favor of raw human emotions and paradoxes. Drawing from the ordinary, illogical conversation between Pierre and Natasha, where understanding defies reason, governed by emotions more than logic, Kobayashi likens this to dreamlike contradictions, full of uncertainty yet brought to order by feeling. He argues that Camus, as novelist, manages to confront eternal human unsalvageability. The form of La Peste becomes an “insulator” against “inhuman ideas of power, technology, state, and class”—armored forces commanding humanity—or seductive fantasies like God, freedom, and humanity.

As Kobayashi says about Robinson Crusoe, “Because of the strain of his daily life, he sees no reason to despair, just as he sees no reason to believe in some distant ideal or hope. He has only the bare minimum of necessities, does not believe in any fantasy, and lives under constant threat of the unforeseen. Observe this man’s life and you will see what is abnormal about him. Can we not assume that the author wanted to say that?”

Camus’ Rieux, the non-commander doctor, offers not salvation but knowledge, viewing death through unsentimental “justice” amidst fatigue, rejecting heroic illusions. Kobayashi evokes Kirillov from Dostoevsky’s Demons, a suicide-affirming, absurd freedom, noting Camus’s love for such doomed figures. Such deaths underscore love’s inadequacy to express itself fully, appearing as “fragments” amidst grotesque scenes: trams hauling flower-strewn corpses by night, rocking over the sea. This demands a “special way of talking” with readers, intimate and emotional, much like that of Pierre and Natasha. This finale sharpens Kobayashi’s critique of modernity’s painful mechanisms. He views the novel as confession, preserving ephemeral human depth against weakening social realities. In La Peste, confinement reveals not anomaly but a certain baseline of absurdity. Yet, as Kobayashi implies, such clarity requires effort against overwhelming powers, insulating the “Romanesque” soul from abstraction.

Five years on, in December 2025, this resonates devastatingly with the 2020 lockdowns, the florid excesses of bureaucratic overreach that, far from insulating humanity, armored it with “inhuman ideas of power” and technology, casting individuals into fragmented isolation. Where Camus’s Rieux rejects fantasies of salvation for knowledge, lockdown architects peddled zero-COVID illusions, ignoring the reality of fatigue and the demands of justice. The “special way of talking” was vanquished by mandates that criminalized gatherings, reducing human connections to computer screens and faceless, masked anonymity. Kobayashi’s corpses-on-trams further evoke lockdown horrors: lies about overflowing morgues, funerals forbidden by the state, families hurling virtual flowers at the dead by way of apps. Love, too, appeared as “fragments”—stolen embraces through windows, the elderly dying alone—while states wielded contact-tracing apps and vaccine passports as commanding armies, seducing the masses with the false promise of agency.

Kobayashi’s insulator-form protects against such fantasies; again, lockdowns were the plague itself—senseless, vicious, depriving individuals of all sense of purpose. Indeed, many people seemed to derive a perverse sense of meaning from “staying safe” from The Virus™️. Rieux’s fatigue-insulated realism contrasts lockdown sentimentality: officials hailed as “gods of salvation” with unproven injections, yet dragged humanity into despair. Five years later, the après-guerre distrust that Kobayashi foresaw deepens. We see history’s collision not with any virus, but with inhuman mandates. Camus loved paradoxes; lockdown architects ignored them, subjugating freedom for illusory control. As Kobayashi halts his essay, demanding emotional dialogue, so must we: reject these mechanisms, reclaim human fragments through integrity, lest the plague recur. The cure was worse—indefensibly so.