There’s an (often implied) assumption that if Covid gets bad enough, the deniers will eventually come to…

There’s an (often implied) assumption that if Covid gets bad enough, the deniers will eventually come to their senses. I think that’s as dangerous as assuming Covid will become more mild. We have the evidence that this is unlikely - climate change inaction. /1 #COVID19 https://t.co/OIVZ0iL5wN

A much bigger existential threat, ignored for decades by the same people now doing everything to downplay Covid. ‘Surely they wouldn’t just let people die, or send them off to work infected, or infect children, or flog HCWs half to death’. They already are. /2

They’ll meet little resistance because we’ve substituted lifestyles, for lives. Look around you, in the pandemic, and you’ll see it. The reason we can’t fight Covid with everything we might throw at it? It will disrupt lifestyles. Businesses, travel, tourism, socialising etc. /3

That’s all the ‘Economy’ is. Lives and their material necessities, replaced by transactional lifestyles. A cafe or restaurant going out of business is seen as more of a tragedy than somebody being infected with Covid. The minimisers organise and welcome the infection. /4

Societies who can’t function and fight off infectious disease threats at the same time, can’t survive in the long term. Plagues are in the DNA of history. Too many decades of lives and work decoupled from the physical realities of life on Earth. /5

After the horror of World War 2 we made a silent contract with ourselves to reject the miseries of millennia of human life, and recast all existential challenges as engineering challenges to be project managed. There would always be a pill, a new way for less people to grow…/6

…more food, HVAC and architecture and civil engineering to avoid climate extremes. Shit would no longer happen, shit was now a liability claim. We lost all sense of some things being bigger than us and out of our control, and thus the capacity to deal with them when they…/7

…happened, physically and psychologically. Every day of this pandemic you can see people saying they choose to not accept it as even real, or to not fight it because somehow ignoring it means it will go away. Or reframing reality to make Covid ‘just like the flu’, as if…/8

…wanting that to be true makes it true. From the beginning of the pandemic I’ve thought Covid would have to make us really suffer, to fundamentally break us and society, for us to take it seriously. Just as the world wars and their well over 100 million dead shifted our…/9

…horizons, as above. Nothing else shifts our deepest habits of thought and life, except catastrophe. And so here we are, sadly. History teaches us pretty much nothing. Hardly anybody studies it now anyway, they do business studies. They have lifestyles, not lives. /end