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Diary of a Plague Year

novalis
2 min readJul 12, 2020

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And yet the revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis. — Heidegger

Our relationship to risk — the risk of being alive — is out of wack; a new paradigm of knowledge has arrived in which risk does not exist — a paradigm in which absolute biological safety is the only mode of life that we acknowledge. Fear is trivializing; an insistence on predictability is infantilizing. A bubble society is self-parody — a society in which fragilized little creatures scurry to Trader Joe’s to secure sustenance before scurrying home to watch Netflix and read the New York Times and complain about how the government — whatever government, state or federal — is getting things wrong, messing up.

Photo by Alexander Dummer on Unsplash

Nobody thinks about what they can do for themselves. It would never occur to them to strengthen body and soul in response to this two-bit, sideshow pandemic. No, no — we must always find some expert who tells us which governments officials are right and which government officials are wrong. Expert-oracles can entertain us for months at a time — as we’ve seen. They’re so entertaining; in fact, thanks to them, we’ve lost the ability to entertain ourselves — lost the capacity for that queer thing called thinking. I just read an article that warns not to celebrate the fact that Sweden‘s daily Covid deaths now approach zero… because how could…

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