What fear did to us

The Covid period revealed, beneath the veneer of our democracies, mechanisms of collective fear whose consequences have not yet been fully measured. This article is an attempt at understanding, not condemnation. It is addressed to those who were afraid as well as those who were stigmatised, and to all those who want to understand what happened, so that it never happens again.

Fear, a philosophical continent

Fear is the oldest political emotion in the world. Even before human societies organised themselves into states, fear was already there, shaping relationships between individuals, between groups, between peoples. Thomas Hobbes, in the seventeenth century, made it the very foundation of the social contract: it is the fear of violent death that drives human beings to surrender part of their freedom for the security of the Leviathan. Spinoza, his contemporary, replied that fear founds nothing lasting: it only creates servitude.

What happened during the Covid period, in France and across much of the Western world, led me to revisit these philosophical intuitions in the light of lived experience. Not fear as an abstract concept, but fear as it took hold in our lives: fear of death, fear of the police, fear of social exclusion, fear of harming others, fear of losing one’s social standing. Each produced its own renunciations, its own wounds. Some may never heal.

Let me say it from the outset: I write this article as someone who was among those stigmatised, labelled a “conspiracy theorist,” excluded from social life for refusing to submit to what I perceived as a mandate lacking sufficient scientific basis. But I am not writing for revenge, nor to stigmatise in turn. I write to understand. Without understanding, no forgiveness is possible. And without forgiveness, we cannot move forward.

September 2020: the moment of awakening

It was in September 2020 that I truly became aware of the democratic failure unfolding before us. The open letter published in Le Parisien by thirty-five researchers, academics and doctors, including sociologist Laurent Mucchielli and physiologist Jean-François Toussaint, bore a title of striking clarity: “Covid-19: we no longer want to be governed by fear.”

The text said what needed to be said: “We, scientists and academics from all disciplines, and healthcare professionals, exercising our free will and our freedom of expression, declare that we no longer want to be governed by and in fear.” It called for a clear distinction between informed responsibility and moralistic guilt-tripping, between civic education and infantilisation. It recalled that science requires, as a sine qua non, transparency, pluralism and adversarial debate. It demanded that the Covid-19 Scientific Council, which did not meet all these criteria, be either reformed or dissolved.

What struck me then was not only the content of this open letter, but the violence of the reactions it provoked. Laurent Mucchielli documents this precisely in his book Défendre la démocratie, une sociologie engagée (2023): the signatories were labelled “reassurists” by Libération, ridiculed, accused of demoralising hospital workers, even threatened at times by journalists who had appointed themselves thought police. Unable to counter their arguments on substance, their critics resorted to moral disqualification. This mechanism, which sociologist Howard Becker had already described in Outsiders, “the final outcome of a moral crusade is a police force,” deployed itself with formidable efficiency.

Anatomy of fears

Fear of death

This is the first fear, the most archaic, the one that paralyses. Laurent Mucchielli reminds us that television remains the primary source of information for the French, and that during this crisis it broke audience records with a daily televised ceremony: the Director General of Health reciting each evening the number of hospitalisations and deaths. The fear of dying is the most powerful fear imaginable. It paralyses critical thinking and maximises the classic phenomena of conformism towards the dominant group and submission to authority figures.

Giorgio Agamben, one of the rare intellectuals who took the risk of speaking out against the Covid doxa from the very beginning of the crisis, had already analysed in Homo Sacer (1995) how the state of exception becomes the new norm: “the sovereign is simultaneously inside and outside the law: he produces both the exception and the norm.” The political management of the Covid period provided a total experience of this: every anomaly had to be contained, every surprise neutralised, freedoms suspended, temporarily, we were told, criminalising humanity in its very essence, family bonds, and even funeral rites, the foundation of our spirituality, forbidden for a time.

Fear of the police

A very close friend of mine, who had the health pass, refused to lend it to me when I was resisting and had decided not to get vaccinated. Not because he disapproved of my choice. But he was afraid of the police. Afraid of the legal consequences, afraid of punishment. This fear, apparently trivial, permanently damaged our friendship, despite our mutual efforts to preserve it. This is no small violence of that period: to have broken intimate bonds between people who loved each other, through the mere threat of the rule.

Barbara Stiegler, in her pamphlet De la démocratie en pandémie (2021), showed how the government weaponised fear to impose a permanent state of exception, turning every citizen into a potential suspect, every public space into a zone of control. The philosopher analyses how this situation revealed a conception of democracy no longer founded on the trust and autonomy of individuals, but on their surveillance and submission.

Fear of social exclusion

Doctors were struck off the register. Healthcare workers were suspended for two years. Employees lost their jobs. Others, who did not wish to be vaccinated, eventually gave in, not out of health conviction, but to avoid social downgrading. It was a means of pressure, as I have already written, particularly infantilising and dishonest. If you did not get vaccinated, you would be socially downgraded, lose your job, your access to public places. How does one live in a society that excludes you?

A recent article by Éditions Marco Pietteur, “Covid-19 vaccine side effects: from denial to admission” (February 2026), documents this mechanism with precision: doctors who received patients suffering from post-vaccination adverse effects found themselves facing an impossible choice: acknowledge these symptoms and risk their career, or minimise their patients’ suffering to preserve their professional peace of mind. Renowned scientists were banned from television studios, including 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine laureate Luc Montagnier. Ordinary citizens lost their jobs for simply sharing their personal experience. The message was clear: shut up, or face the consequences.

Fear of causing harm

This is perhaps the most pernicious of all fears, because it disguises itself as virtue. The fear of transmitting the virus was converted into civic commitment to public health. Those who reported their neighbours during the first lockdown, those young people having parties, felt they were upholding democratic values even as they stigmatised people and infringed upon their freedom, without any personal effort to inform themselves about the actual level of danger. The virus had become a common enemy, and the fear of transmitting it justified every denunciation. To believe that mainstream media would only convey the truth is deeply naïve, and this is not “conspiracy thinking,” because if we follow that logic, Pierre Bourdieu, Noam Chomsky or George Orwell would be the founding fathers of conspiracy theory!

As is now widely known, and as the Pfizer laboratory itself has acknowledged, vaccination in no way prevented transmission of the virus. This fact was established from the outset and known to all the authorities in charge. Thus, the entire moral edifice underpinning the stigmatisation of the unvaccinated, Emmanuel Macron’s notorious “I couldn’t care less about the unvaccinated,” rested on a lie. A lie consciously perpetrated by the authorities and the laboratories.

From denial to admission: facts catch up with the narrative

Three years later, the landscape has radically changed. The official figures now speak for themselves. ONIAM (the French National Office for Compensation of Medical Accidents) has recognised over 3,000 cases of serious adverse effects linked to Covid-19 vaccines, with compensation amounting to millions of euros. The recognised pathologies are varied and often severe: myocarditis, pericarditis, thrombosis, neurological disorders, Guillain-Barré syndrome. These figures, however, represent only the tip of the iceberg.

How could we, as a society, have ignored to such an extent the suffering of our fellow citizens? This question, well posed in the Éditions Marco Pietteur article, is fundamental. It goes beyond the victims of side effects. What is at stake is the mechanism by which an entire society can collectively decide to deny reality, to silence those who bear witness, to crush those who question.

For justice must be done to all those who dared to speak when it was still dangerous to do so. Those doctors, scientists, ordinary citizens who, at the cost of their careers, their reputations, their social lives, maintained a dissenting voice. Laurent Mucchielli and the thirty-four co-signatories of September 2020 were among them. Professor Christian Perronne was among them. So many others, anonymous, were among them. Science advances through contradiction, not through forced consensus. This is an epistemological truism that this period trampled underfoot.

The cascade of rules: when exclusion becomes automatic

In a recent article, I proposed the concept of the « cascade of rules » to shed light on the mechanism by which social exclusion no longer proceeds solely from individual decisions or explicit ideologies, but now operates through the automatic propagation of rules embedded in our technical infrastructures. Drawing on the workings of CSS stylesheets, the computer languages that structure the layout of every web page we visit, I showed how a system of cascading rules can produce absurd, opaque effects that escape any identifiable human control.

The Covid period perfectly illustrated this logic. Exclusion from social life was carried out according to criteria that constantly shifted: first being ill with Covid, then simply testing positive without being ill, then being a contact case of someone who tested positive, with a de facto mandatory vaccination that had never been designed to prevent transmission. A system of manifest absurdity, whose rules cascaded towards ever more controls, ever more arbitrary.

Lennie Stern coined the concept of “technofascism” to describe this logic, while adding an essential nuance: the word “technofascism acts as a misaligned magnifying glass,” because it leads us to look for power where it is most visible, when what really matters plays out in procedures, technical architectures, conditions of access. What is at play today is not a frontal political violence: it is a gradual drift in which technical infrastructures become the silent matrix of our collective decisions.

Platform algorithms, programmed to identify certain keywords, have created mass censorship on an unprecedented scale. Automated fact-checking systems, presented as tools to combat misinformation, have become instruments of speech control. When a handful of technology companies can unilaterally decide what can and cannot be said, we are facing a form of power that escapes all democratic control.

The media manufacture of consent

One cannot understand what happened without looking at the role of the media. The map of French media, that extraordinary document regularly updated by Le Monde diplomatique and Acrimed, entitled “French media: who owns what?”, reveals the extent of media concentration. Nearly all the news outlets that “shape opinion” depend on industrial or financial interests, and for the most part, on the same shareholders as the pharmaceutical laboratories.

The nine wealthiest billionaires on the planet, along with the major shareholders of pharmaceutical laboratories, doubled their fortune in two years of Covid crisis. This is a fact unprecedented in the history of capitalism. The psychological domination exercised over populations, the collective psychosis orchestrated by a media system funded by the same actors, served the interests of some of the largest capitalist groups.

Jacques Ellul had warned us sixty years ago in Propagandes (1962): “Opposite the propaganda of agitation, we find the propaganda of integration, which is the propaganda of developed nations, and characteristic of our civilisation. It is a propaganda of conformity.” For in a democracy, as Mucchielli emphasises in his analysis of the behaviour of French journalists during the health crisis, citizens must be given the feeling that they have willed the government’s actions, that they are responsible for them, that they are committed to defending them.

Thus, for more than two years, the mainstream press functioned as a relay for government communication, abandoning any pretence of investigative journalism. The principles underpinning professional ethics, notably those set out in the Munich Declaration of 1971, were systematically violated: freedom of information, freedom of criticism, the prohibition of unfair methods, the correction of any inaccurate information. As Upton Sinclair put it well: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” (Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, 1934). He was speaking about the difficulty of making voters understand the reality of the economic system and social injustice, when so many depend on that system for their livelihood.

Cognitive dissonance, or the malady of our time

This period produced immense cognitive dissonance across the population. Some were convinced of their commitment to public health, the most zealous informers feeling they were upholding democratic values. Others gave in, coerced and constrained, sensing that something did not add up. As Winnicott distinguished the “true self” from the “false self,” there was true commitment and false commitment. We believed we were defending democracy, but deep down we could sense it was not about democracy at all, but about defending the worst of capitalist systems, which cared nothing for public health, while making us believe we were committed to health.

Post-truth did not begin with Donald Trump. It began with us, with our acceptance of a regime of health-related post-truth. We made choices based on lies that it was perfectly possible to uncover at the time, by seeking out other sources of information. But because we had made those choices, we continued to deny the fear that had driven them, convincing ourselves that it was objective reality. The expression “You can argue about anything except the numbers,” endlessly repeated by the mainstream media, is symptomatic of systemic deception, for we know just how easily numbers can be made to say whatever one wants. This dissonance is the breeding ground of extremism. If someone like Trump was able to carry so many people along, it is because the terrain of dissonance was already there, manufactured by the very people who now claim to be fighting it.

Biopower and self-presence as resistance

Michel Foucault developed the concept of biopower, extended by Giorgio Agamben with that of biopolitics. In these visions of power, what is at stake are the choices made by the powerful to control, normalise and manage life: the right to make live and let die, accompanied by increased control and an assault on the presence of each individual, that is, their free will.

The intentional manifestation of self-presence places the person in a position of independence and grounding in their fundamental values. A person present to themselves, capable of thinking for themselves, which has nothing to do with erudition, will be less easily subjected to a policy that does not respect them. They will more naturally challenge unjust, unfounded and arbitrary policies. The mental state of trust or fear is part of care. And care also involves taking account of a reality and intending to improve it.

This is where the philosophy of care meets political philosophy. Care is first and foremost care of the self, attention to the context in which we live, to the relationships we maintain. This environment, this context that we tend to, builds capacities for robustness, resilience and immunity. Immunity comes from a healthy life ecosystem, from presence to oneself and to the world, not from an injection.

Respecting those who shock us

Here is my fundamental proposal, and it is no doubt the most difficult one. For several years, I have been reflecting on and working towards welcoming into cultural venues people who vote for the far right, including radicalised young people. How can these people, who are just as worthy as anyone else, let us never forget, feel respected, welcomed in a democratic context, where they will not immediately be told they are monstrous? If we fail to do this, we exclude them from the democratic space and produce the opposite of the values we claim to defend.

The same principle applies to the Covid period and its aftermath. It is terrible that it was the far right that took up the arguments of common sense and freedom during the crisis. The far right carries values of rejection of the other that I consider unacceptable. But what is more unfortunate still is that the loss of freedom, the stigmatisation, the totalitarian regimentation were carried out by people who did not present themselves as extremists, even though they were. Historian Pierre Serna coined the concept of “extreme centre” to describe this phenomenon: a power that presents itself as moderate, but practises a politics of violence, surveillance and exclusion.

The philosophical lesson of this period, for me, echoes an intuition of Paul Ricœur. In Soi-même comme un autre (1990), Ricœur shows that the identity of the subject is never constructed in frontal opposition to the other, but in the recognition of the other as a self. Ricœurian ethics is neither opposition (“I fight you”) nor submission (“I turn the other cheek”), but the “aiming at the good life, with and for others, in just institutions.” It is our institutions that we must transform, not the individuals we must designate as enemies.

Emmanuel Lévinas, in Totalité et infini (1961), goes further still: the face of the other obligates me. Not through force, but through its very vulnerability. The face of the one who stigmatised me, of the one who gave in to fear, of the one who denounced me, also obligates me, because it is a human face, with its fear, its weakness, its anguish. Dignity is not a reward granted to the virtuous; it is a primary fact that precedes all judgement.

Understanding to forgive, forgiving to move forward

If I take up my pen on these subjects, it is not to stigmatise in turn those who collaborated during the Covid period. It is to better understand the systemic reasons that led certain people to find themselves in those positions. Everyone is responsible for their actions, of course, and obeying the most problematic orders is always being responsible for one’s actions. But environment has its influence. We are not alone. The same person, in different contexts, can do good as well as evil.

Understanding is not excusing. But without understanding, no forgiveness is possible. And without forgiveness, we remain stuck. I bear no grudge against anyone. I bear no grudge against those who stigmatised me, despised me, excluded me, reported me. I know the spark in each of them. I know that those who did the worst are also capable of doing good. What I wish to cultivate is love of neighbour. Not as Christian morality, but as secular ethics. What I wish to defend is the dignity of the other as universal respect, as absolute value.

This is why I respect those who hate me, because I do not enter into that hatred, I do not cultivate it. I place myself in the space of love and dialogue, including with my “tormentors.” For it was not just him or her who did that; it was him or her caught up in a system of which they too were prisoners, even without being aware of it.

The philosopher Simone Weil wrote in L’Enracinement (1949) that the needs of the soul are as real as the needs of the body, and that among them is the need for truth. This need was massively violated during the Covid period. What was lacking was not information: it existed, it was accessible to anyone willing to seek it out. What was lacking was the collective courage to look it in the face.

Proposals for the future: towards a democracy of acknowledged fear

What lessons can be drawn from this period, not to settle scores, but to build a more just future? I propose a few avenues, which are as many philosophical and practical undertakings:

• Recognise fear as a political fact. Fear is not shameful. It is human. But it becomes dangerous when it is denied, converted into “commitment” or weaponised by those in power. The stronger the denied fear, the stronger the commitment, the stronger the collaboration with state orders. The first proposal is therefore to create spaces where fear can be spoken, named, analysed, without being immediately converted into coercive action.
• Structurally protect adversarial debate. Mucchielli’s open letter already recalled that science requires, as a sine qua non, transparency, pluralism and adversarial debate. Saying so was not enough; institutional safeguards were needed to guarantee that no power, whether health, political or economic, could monopolise truth. These safeguards did not exist. They still do not exist. Let us build them.
• Put the rules back on the workbench. As I proposed in Politics and digital technology : the cascade of rules, the best practices developed by the web developer community to manage the complexity of CSS (layering, systematic documentation, limiting cascade levels, regular code review) may constitute a model transferable to the governance of our digitised social systems. Not to abolish the cascade, but to retain mastery of it. If within a system of cascading rules we constantly work to put the rules back on the workbench, to clarify them, to document them, then democracy, clarity and meaning can exist.
• Respect those who shock us. This is the very condition of democracy. You do not build a just society by excluding those who think differently, whether they are “anti-vaxxers” or “far right.” Fighting for democracy does not mean fighting against categories of people. It means creating the conditions for a dialogue in which everyone is recognised in their dignity, even when their ideas repel us, or terrify us to the highest degree.
• Cultivate presence and critical thinking. Critical thinking carries a considerable social cost, particularly in times of crisis. The one who questions is perceived as a traitor. But critical thinking is the condition of freedom and democracy. It must be exercised everywhere, including and especially upon what is taken for granted, upon what “everyone knows.” For that is where the worst blind spots hide. Critical thinking means questioning from the outside practices that have been internalised. To do so, experimentation, cultural action, play and subversion are avenues I find particularly suited, because they involve a playful sideways step.

Fear and love

There is, in this story, something that goes beyond politics and science. Something that touches the most intimate depths. Fear is an emotion that cuts us off from love. It cuts us off from others and from ourselves. Where fear governs, love has no place. And without it, we are capable of the worst: denunciation, exclusion, contempt for the other, the quiet violence of the one who “follows orders.”

The Covid period showed us the fragility of our democracies in the face of information manipulation and the weaponisation of fear. But it also showed us, by negation, what we truly hold dear: the freedom to think, the dignity of each person, the right to question, the bond with the other.

What if we began by forgiving each other our failings, in order to build together a future where fear would no longer be the engine of our collective choices? Not by turning the other cheek, nor by opposing one another, but by creating together the conditions for permanent democratic vigilance. The rehabilitation of dissenting voices must not be a simple role reversal in which yesterday’s censors become tomorrow’s censored. It must be an opportunity to fundamentally rethink our relationship to information, to science and to democratic debate.

For if history teaches us one thing, it is that power corrupts, especially those on the “right side,” and that only civic vigilance can preserve our fundamental freedoms. This vigilance begins with a simple and radical act: daring to be afraid, daring to say so, and refusing to let that fear be turned against us.

References

• Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, 1998 [1995].
• Becker, Howard, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, Free Press, 1963.
• Éditions Marco Pietteur, “Covid-19 vaccine side effects: from denial to admission,” blog.editionsmarcopietteur.com, 3 February 2026.
• Ellul, Jacques, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, Knopf, 1965 [1962].
• Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish, Pantheon Books, 1977 [1975].
• Labourdette, Benoît, “Politics and digital technology: the cascade of rules,” benoitlabourdette.com, January 2026.
• Lévinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity, Duquesne University Press, 1969 [1961].
• Mucchielli, Laurent et al., “Covid-19: we no longer want to be governed by fear,” Le Parisien, 10 September 2020.
• Mucchielli, Laurent, Défendre la démocratie, une sociologie engagée, Éditions Marco Pietteur, 2023.
• Ricœur, Paul, Oneself as Another, University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1990].
• Serna, Pierre, L’Extrême Centre ou le poison français: 1789-2019, Champ Vallon, 2019.
• Stiegler, Barbara, De la démocratie en pandémie, Gallimard (Tracts), 2021.
• Weil, Simone, The Need for Roots, Routledge, 1952 [1949].