#auspol #covid19aus Because the people who see society as an Economy are desperately trying to return to the…
#auspol #covid19aus Because the people who see society as an Economy are desperately trying to return to the old 'normal' before the catastrophe of the past 2 years forces changes on it, a few thoughts. /1 https://t.co/Se5STFXkGU
Notice that the Economy crowd are always relentlessly on message, a slogan for every eventuality. People need to be the same, in opposing them. They literally workshop this every single day, whether there's a pandemic or not. /2
Listening to constant calls to 'balance' public health action against 'the Economy' should have galvanised us from the beginning of 2020. It's the same schtick the Economy crowd pulled with climate change, that 'balance' framing. What it actually means is 'we will use.../3
...the existing status quo as an excuse to change nothing, but sound reasonable doing it.' Balancing is such a warm, cuddly-sounding activity. Like all the slogans, spend even a minute with it, and it's revealed to be totally devoid of content. /4
The question this pandemic should have led our societies to is: what is this 'Economy' thing, that we use to describe what we used to call a society? How could something we constructed with our ow hands need to be 'balanced' against our own health? We made the Economy.../5
...and so we're completely free to make it do anything we want, including saving lives. We should have been led to this question because this mythical Economy is also used to oppose action on climate change. *There's* a clue to what the Economy actually is. /6
The idea of an economy came from the early 20th century, where it began as a measure of national income. It measured *one* aspect of society. Nothing wrong with that. But over that century, a dangerous shift occurred. A measurement, something out of double-entry bookkeeping.../7
...or a spreadsheet, was granted agency of its own. THE Economy. Suddenly a small measurement of one aspect of social life, commercial transactions, became a thing. The Economy became an independent social entity, alongside society. All very deliberate political strategy. /8
Now people who were doing very well out of those commercial transactions could gradually replace consideration of society itself, with this idea of an economy. Economics came to the party, and made it a self-regulating equilibrium machine. Now political decisions.../9
...on any matter at all, from anywhere in society, could be said to impact the Economy. In fact it got worse, because gradually the Economy was seen as what enabled all other social activity. The Economy makes social activity of any type possible. It pays the bills. /10
Complete sleight of hand here, because society didn't have bills, before we invented the Economy. It's not a business. We're always able to undertake social tasks using a variety of methods, the economic one is just one of many. /11
The genius of all of this as political strategy was, now some politicians and their backers could make intrinsically political decisions, while pretending they were just following the laws of economics. They have to follow the laws, they say, to keep the Economy going. /12
Otherwise society, they say, will grind to a halt. They've now replaced the idea of society entirely with that of the Economy, and its enabler the market. Both abstractions of wider social activity, stripped of its complex multi-dimensionality and replaced with.../13
...a handful of metrics and indicators. Usually graphed. Notice the Treasurer and PM when talking about the Economy are unable to do so, without pointing at graphs. That's the only place 'the Economy' actually exists. /14
Anyway, this deliberate substitution of the Economy for society leads us to a situation now where vast existential threats, like climate change and the pandemic, are laughably claimed to need balancing against the Economy. The Economy is only a spreadsheet.../15
...specifically designed to rationalise existing commercial interests. It's politics filtered through pseudo-mathematical mumbo jumbo. Again, all deliberately done, we're patsies. Every journalist now says 'the Economy' as if it's as real as Mt Everest. Both sides.../16
...of politics the same. Never mind that Covid showed comprehensively that what disrupts society, like people getting sick and dying, destroys the economy too. Such overwhelming evidence of the non-existence of the Economy as a thing still hasn't budged it. /17
Bugger all the Left and Right nonsense. Our collective enemy is the Economy. This nonsensical mathematical construct that has been substituted for our complex social lives. /end