Homo Sovieticus

and the robot ladies

Have spent the last couple of weeks going in and out of a giant urban hospital as a visitor, a long story I’m mostly not planning to tell. Having failed to receive the Sacrament of Obedience, I’m obligated to produce a fresh new Covid test every time I enter, lining up in the Children of Men security checkpoint to perform my entry rituals. A machine at the door reports my temperature over an image of my face, and a security guard, approving the number, steps aside to allow me entry to the next station. Remarkable how quickly and completely we got here, and remarkable how much the Blue Zones and the Red Zones have diverged in the performance of simple daily tasks.

Observers of the Soviet Union noted the presence of Homo Sovieticus, the species adapted to the culture: “a double-thinking, suspicious and fearful conformist with no morality.” It seems fairly clear that the Blue Zones are birthing a version of this creature, well accustomed to a life centered on compliance rituals and the production of the Required Documents™.

But Soviet subjects usually found a layered response to the compliance culture, with backdoor deals and systems of baksheesh. Factories and offices evolved a set of people who learned the skills of a fixer, greasing supply chains and easing problems with a little something for your family. I just happen to have a couple of extra cartons of cigarettes, friend, and about that delayed shipment of ball bearings…

So one of the things that’s interesting about Large Urban Hospital, where the rules are the rules and I’m sorry, sir, that’s our policy, is that the rules aren’t entirely the rules, and the luck of the personnel draw sets your course. I already know the helpful front desk check-in staff — Hi, welcome back! — and I already know which one scowls at the computer, and asks if you’re sure you cleared your visit in advance, and says she’s going to need to make a few phone calls to check on your paperwork, and I need to see those test results again (she says, pulling on her scowling at documents glasses). Checking in at the lobby desk can take thirty seconds, or it can take ten minutes; it can be miserable and hostile, or it can be relatively pleasant and human. But in both cases, the person behind the computer, and the people who put them there and provide them with the systems that govern their work, believe that the work is standardized, and everyone at the check-in desk is enforcing the rules.

We have literally insane systems of ritual behavior, but within those systems we have people who are still people, and people who have very much embraced the compliance behaviors. There are dehumanizing institutions, and holy shit are there people who like it.

See also.

The hospital, by the way, is ringed by Covid test pop-up shops, like bail bondsmen around the county jail, sparsely furnished storefronts that provide the paperwork to get you into the big institution. Compliance is a business, and that’s a good part of the reason it’s so hard to kill the thing.

There’s money to be made and power to be had. And so here we are.