30 October

For nearly all of history, you or I as ordinary people would have been peasants. More than 90% of societies always were peasants. So what changed that? The only thing that changes anything. Catastrophe. The Black Death in Europe killed nearly half of the population. That gave the surviving peasants much more negotiating power with the gentry/landholders. Suddenly they were mobile, paid workers. The status quo at the time was so alarmed, that Edward III issued a Statute of Laborers in 1351, to try to outlaw this gain in power for peasants. It failed. The Black Death is the only reason you or I still aren’t peasants. We saw the germ of the same shift with Covid. Work from home is now much more widespread, though many employers are still trying to rein it back in. The status quo pretended the vaccines ended the pandemic and threw the rest of us back into our old working arrangements, telling us infection is great for our immune systems. The stupid celebrate that as ‘freedom’, and the monumentally stupid as a ‘natural’ boost to their immunity and health.