The Metaphysics of Lockdown, According to Albert Camus

by Jeffrey A. Tucker
The American Institute for Economic Research

For many people, it was their first experience in a full denial of freedom. Locked in their homes. Prevented from traveling. Separated from loved ones. Forced to spend day after day wondering about big things previously unconsidered: why am I here, what are my goals, what is the purpose of my life?

It was a transformation. We are not the first to go through this. It is something experienced by prisoners, and by previous populations under lockdown.

I’m reading – over and over – Albert Camus’s classic and astonishingly brilliant book The Plague from 1947. There is a chapter that describes the inner life of people who have experienced lockdown for the first time. It came suddenly in the presence of a deadly disease. The entire town of 200,000 closed. No one in or out.

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