The Group Is Always Wrong, or: Institutions Explaining Poetry

In the last few weeks, increasing numbers of important people want to know if Covid-19 started in the lab in Wuhan. This has brought reservations about mutual economic dependency with China to their highest pitch since the manufactured deaths of millions of its people under Mao Tse-Tung.

In the middle of the Covid-19 origin question is the World Health Organisation whose name is the masthead of ‘institutional trust’, yet whose vacillating at the behest of China recalls the obsequious courtier Osric in Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

Hamlet: Put your bonnet to his right use; ’tis for the head.

Osric: I thank your lordship, t’is very hot.

Hamlet: No, believe me, ’tis very cold. The wind is northerly.

Osric: It is indifferent cold, my lord, indeed

Hamlet: But yet methinks it is very sultry and hot for my complexion.

Osric: Exceedingly, my lord. It is very sultry — as ’twere — I cannot tell how.

I see the ignominious role of the W.H.O. as a culmination of years spent in a bath of consensus, with comfortable notions of feedback and crowdsourcing and putting heads together. This is especially what people do in a stagnant economy.

In crucial matters, the group is always wrong.

By the time a group agrees on enough principles to establish a consensus, the environment will have changed. The world…