The Pandemic Atmos-Fear

Abstract. Psychology has been challenged by its own terminological limitations, in which phenomena of large-scale, field-like kind force us to innovate with our theoretical tools. Phenomena with global impacts – epidemics, pandemics, famines, and the like – remain on the periphery of psychology’s theoretical efforts. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 is no different. Like previous pandemics, it reveals the difficulty of dealing with phenomena on a global scale and understanding the inherent organization of the cloud-like phenomena. Psychological research has mainly focused on individual traumatic experiences, impacts, and consequences. Less attention has been paid to how people in different societies make meaning of these changes in everyday life. Psychologically, people want to control the pandemic, while in reality we simply escape from it. All of the measures instituted in response to it are escape-oriented, not glorious accounts of winning a war on the invisible enemy. Theoretically, we learn from the current experience the relevance of how humans escalate and circumvent the proliferation of the panic of fear through building and demolishing borders in mind and society. We all are living in a sort of atmos-fear, a culturally cultivated state of affective limbo that is easy to trigger and difficult to modulate. How do human beings deal with this core issue of feeling safe/unsafe, and how does it affect individual and collective conduct? This paper attempts to demonstrate how the COVID-19 example can theoretically illuminate new perspectives of international psychology that will become increasingly more crucial in a future where global events are likely to recur.