31 January

Three catastrophes paradoxically gave us the peaceful and prosperous lives we’re used to. If you study history you’ll see that the era post-WW2 is unprecedented in human history, for its prosperity and peace. But why did that happen? It started in the mid-to-late 19th century. Big epidemic diseases like cholera were preventing societies from functioning. Then came the 20th century, and WW1. Right on the back of that came the Spanish Flu, a massively lethal pandemic. Then in the mid-20th century, WW2. Why did all of this lead to such peace and prosperity? Because the only thing that changed millennia of hierarchical society was these catastrophes. They were the only thing powerful enough to suspend the hierarchies that had dominated for centuries. First the epidemics of that late-19th century caused the creation of what we now call public health practice, to deal with plagues. Londoners were drowning in their own shit. Then WW1 and WW2 caused so much social damage, that societies invented social security systems. Public health and social security were the foundations of that post-WW2 golden age, where we all grew up. And what have those old hierarchies been doing, since about the 1970s? Trying to strip all of that away, to return us to the default state of the previous millennia. To remove ‘the public’, the very idea of ‘society’. They don’t even pretend they’re not doing that. if you want to know why we’re being asked to live with a pandemic, there’s your answer. To these hierarchies, we’re nothing but the peasants of the previous 20 centuries, who were always left to die.