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The moral actualization is real; it comes slowly at first, but then you realizing you’re changing and there’s nothing else you can do; the stream of life as its conditioned by a credit card, phone, public transportation, and so on, slows down, trickles to a halt. Suddenly, the stream is a pond and you’re sinking, you can’t swim, you never learned — you were used to being carried away by the stream.
Global, centralized systems exist to arrest the flight of the tragic and clip its wings. Global capitalism — that vast, unwieldy abstraction — exists to keep tragedy at a distance — over there. And it remains over there until some other force, a third force, swings the balance in favor of tragedy, brings it over here. In our present case, that force is the little Coronavirus.
There’s something pathological about wanting what is to be something that isn’t, about desperately prevaricating with the present in the hopes that it might turn out to be something other than what it is. It won’t turn out to be something other than what it is — so you should really be asking yourself how you can adapt. Idealism is often animal fear dressed up with words, inaction written off as neurosis.
