Most (rich) governments around the world are basically giving up, with Covid. Think about what great…

Most (rich) governments around the world are basically giving up, with Covid. Think about what great collective projects societies put on hold to fight Covid, that they want to get back to. Their moonshots. There aren’t any. /1 https://t.co/KSQBWfKLcO

Overwhelmingly the drive to end trying with Covid, in rich countries, is to get ‘normal’ life back. Normal INDIVIDUAL life. Socialising, mostly. Travelling. Dining out. It’s like rich societies are eternal cruise ships. /2

Barely one leader of these countries has mobilised their publics in a collective way, framed Covid as a fight that we need to win. More often they’ve apologised for the public health tools used in that fight, and promised they’ll stop using them as soon as possible. /3

So, again, what is this ‘normal’ life that couldn’t be sacrificed any longer? What great collective project was it, that we want to have back? Nothing. It was rich countries who have become so divorced from some of the basics of existence, that life in them serves no…/4

…purpose beyond the gratification of individual desires. Life literally as a cruise or holiday. No multi-generation cathedral building, no passion for collective solutions to problems of disease or environmental damage, or climate change, energy production. No moonshots. /5

For all of us, the return to ‘normal’ is actually the return to, as the late Dave Graeber said, meaningless ‘bullshit jobs’. To pay off enormous personal debts. We’re all so relieved to be getting our lives back! Really? Is that why lotteries and gambling were so popular…/6

…pre-Covid? Why job satisfaction surveys consistently showed that people were sick of their jobs? For me, the great urge to go back is a profound disappointment. Societies desperately needed rebooting, away from decades of the philosophy of libertarian self-everything. /7

Imagine living in another time, where great collective projects gave life and work a larger purpose, beyond our individual enjoyment. Maybe the great Elizabethan engineering works of the 19th century were the last time in peace time there was a passion to do collective things. /8

Stonemasons once began great buildings they knew wouldn’t be finished in their lifetimes, or even the lifetimes of their sons. Now this great mass of libertarian individual self-enjoyment is chained to a 3-4 year electoral popularity cycle, which is akin to everybody…/9

…on the cruise deciding on the cruise director for the next trip out and back. ‘We can’t live like this forever’, say the Covid minimisers. Let’s get back to - what? The meaningless orgy of self-enjoyment? Tedium. /end

(That should say Victorian.)