What happens when sociality is twisted this way? Warped, as an American might say, through the iron hand of “the market”

But what does that phrase really mean? Something like this. In the East, it’s considered a grave violation of social norms not to treat your elders with respect. To treat life casually. To be indifferent to human suffering. It’s an abdication of one’s own social responsibility to spread a lethal disease, to not take it seriously, to deny it exists.

There’s a simple and beautiful lesson that the West appears to have forgotten. We are social beings. We do not exist in a vacuum. The things we are really after — happiness, meaning, purpose, fulfillment, a sense of worth — they are all things that come to us from our sociality. Without relationships, they don’t exist at all.

The world’s top performers against Covid? Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, New Zealand, South Korea. They’re not just mostly Asian — they’re also far, far poorer and less powerful than the West. Even Africa, blighted by centuries of enslavement, has done better than the West. Why? How did this come to be? After all, these societies have a) less money b) less “talent” c) fewer resources. Everything you can imagine was stacked against them.

And yet — strikingly — just the opposite has been true. The West is the one that’s been ravaged by Covid, and it’s most powerful nation, the USA, is the society with the worst outcomes on the planet. Nine of the world’s top ten Covid hotspots are American states.

There are a handful of societies in the world who managed to beat Covid. What’s remarkable about them is that they’re not the ones you might expect. At the beginning of this pandemic, the predictions went like this: the pandemic would ravage the poor world, and spare the rich, powerful West.

What is the thing the East had that the West didn’t — that made all the difference in fighting Covid, much more so than money and resources and so forth? Sociality. Social cohesion. Social bonds. Trust, relationships, ties. An economist might call that “social capital.” You can use that term if you want — I won’t, because, like I said, this lesson goes so, so deep that I want to take pains to really explain, and you can tell me if I succeed.

But sociality can be twisted on itself, too. And that’s what seems to have happened in the West. There, sociality has been put into a straitjacket. The Western way — exported from America — is fast becoming something like this. You are a consumer, an employee, a boss, a producer. First, and usually only that. Then you are a citizen, brother, sister, father, friend, inhabitant, person, last — if at all.

So which way is right? The Western way of egocentrism — putting one’s self first — or the Eastern way of allocentrism — putting all first? “Right” is not the correct word. The better way to ask the question is: which way is, in a human sense, truer. Which one is going to help societies be successful in the 21st century — because it is less false, full of nonsense, built to last, full of the thing that endures most, the truth?

It turned out that they have something much more valuable than money, talent, or resources. Something that’s devalued in the West, as soft, weak, meaningless, and useless — especially so in Anglo societies, like America and Britain. There, this thing — this little piece of magic — barely exists at all, so America has the worst outcomes in the world, while Britain has the worst ones in Europe.

We all want this miserable year to be over. For this miserable plague to go away already. And after Donald Trump, then Covid. But let us first learn the lesson of the last year. It goes like this.

To the Western mind, that’s a bizarre thing to say. The Western mind — maybe even you — will deny that, object to it, try to find objections. You don’t want it to be true. Your mind can’t quite handle it, because it turns everything you’ve been taught on your head. And yet there the East is — having beaten Covid, precisely because people put others first, not just themselves.

A Western social scientist might say that Easterners put social responsibility first, and individual responsibility second, while Westerners do the opposite. I think that’s true, but obtusely put. It’s better to simply say that people in the East care about each other more than they do themselves.

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in the city did end up dead during the AIDS crisis between 1980 and 1996, taking with them a great deal of the city’s—and world’s—art scene. A “cultural cataclysm” that, as Katharine Duckett wrote last year, “cleared the way for the rapid gentrification and development of areas like the Lower East Side.” The neighborhood, it’s worth noting, also saw significant departures during the first weeks of Covid-19.

What the East was able to do was cooperate as societies to fight Covid. And it turned out that you couldn’t beat Covid without cooperation at the largest scale — the social scale. The scale of a city or town or block just wasn’t enough. And it was because it enjoys significantly higher levels of sociality that the East was able to — as we say in the West — “pull together” and beat off Covid.

These questions are as old as time. And so far — if you ask me at least — the answers that we have aren’t really working. The human race remains as violent and predatory and stupid as it has always been. But don’t call me a pessimist. Think with me, my friend. Learn. Let us reflect and contemplate together, like fellow travellers on this dusty and strange road.