ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we address three key issues that characterize the various strategies that have been addressed to cope with the avalanche of painful experiences brought on by the pandemic crisis. The first aspect highlights, in the face of the pandemic implosion in early 2020, the deployment of three forms of containment of the threat represented by the global spread of the virus: The first of these, coming from tradition, has been to "ward off spirits", based on the mytho-ritual action of confronting the beneficent forces responsible for the well-being of the community with the maleficent forces represented by the virus. By confining the population in closed spaces and thus making impossible the dynamogenetic collective effervescence that characterizes the ritual, the success of this form has been very limited. The second form has been the modern formula of "killing germs", typical of the bio-medical episteme which, although it has not succeeded in immunizing the different populations, from the second year of the pandemic crisis onwards, has managed to drastically reduce the lethal effects of the infection. The third form has been the "control of social interaction" by the State and the individual use of masks in public. Undoubtedly, from the beginning, this has been the way that has prevented a devastating impact of the spread of the virus, although within different cultures, nations and civilizations the reactions have not been the same. In any case, these three strategies have acted in dynamic tension with each other, the more open and dynamic the civil sphere, the greater the tension between the three forms of contention of the virus. The second aspect concerns two forms of available knowledge confronted with two forms of socially existing uncertainty they seek to combat. The first of these is "the known unknown" which is deployed at the end of the 18th century to deal with uncertainty and whose protagonist is the human being and the second is "the unknown unknown" which is deployed today and whose protagonists are systems. The third aspect reflects the existing conflict between the social institution of truth produced by scientific knowledge and the contestation represented by the emergence of new styles of thought and forms of action, some of them represented by conspiracy theories.
