פוליטיקה נגיפית של חרדה קיומית: בין התנגדות איתנה לחסינות גמישה

We all know we will die, but not when and how. Can private death awareness become public, and what happens when it does? This mixed-method research on the Covid-19 crisis reveals how pandemic politics cultivate and use mass existential anxiety. Analyzing global discourse across vast corpora, we reveal an exceptional rise in global ‘mortality salience’ (awareness of death), and trace the socio-political dynamics feeding it. Comparing governmental pandemic policies worldwide, we introduce a novel model discerning ‘mortality mitigation’(coping mechanisms) on a scale from steadfast resistance (‘oak’) to flexible resilience (‘reed’). We find that political trust, high median age, and social anxiety predict a reedy approach; and that the oak, typically pushing for stricter measures, mitigates mortality better. Stringency itself, however, hardly affectsCovid-19 related cases/deaths. We enrich our model with brief illustrations from five countries: China and Israel (both oaks), Sweden and Germany (reeds) and the USA (a hybrid of oak and reed)