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The consequences of modernization, of government intervention, are rarely known in the present; inevitably, interventions are always celebrated at first as signs of progress. We are now in the surreal phase of the pandemic response where social alienation (distance), masked faces, the surveillance of strangers by strangers, or neighbors by neighbors, is celebrated as a great triumph of scientifically informed public policy.
What we don’t see or hear, are the malign effects that these massive, externally-driven shifts have on our organic patterns of living — on ‘the social fabric’. We can’t really know — because it’s something intangible that can only gradually be articulated over time — what effect that the incredible media-driven campaign of fear has had on our habits, thoughts, beliefs… on our bodies and souls; we can’t know, and I sense, for many, we don’t want to know.
We have not really calculated all the ways in which we have impoverished ourselves; the media simply speculates, calculates, on the number of lives saved or lost according to its pre-conceived idea of what saves live (lockdowns). Life is reduced to a metric which reflects the ideological consistency of a particular state or nation. Bare life is leveraged to celebrate the evolution and survival of the spectacle society. Does anyone want to live in a nursing home? Do few people even last for very long, under any…
