The pandemic is a war about the public. A ‘public’ is not just everybody in a society. It’s not a counting…

The pandemic is a war about the public. A ‘public’ is not just everybody in a society. It’s not a counting thing. The ‘public’ is about interdependency, about how all of the different characteristics of people and groups are required for a society to function. /1

A public school (in Australia) for example, isn’t just a school that is open to all. It’s a school where people from all parts of society mix and have to accomodate their differences, in some way. A ‘comprehensive’, as some used to call them, a more descriptive term. /2

The public is also not consensus, or any sort of uniformity. It’s fundamentally about difference. A recognition that differences both exist and are critical to how society operates. With public health for example, it matters that all people are healthy, no matter their…/3

…circumstances, because it’s the differences between people that actually make society function. So if we try to apportion sickness to selected groups (i.e. the disadvantaged), there’s no escape for us ultimately, it will find its way to us, not least in the social breakdown…/4

…it causes. They are the staff of our key services for starters, as we’ve discovered in the pandemic. The Covid minimising politicians and experts nearly always have no conception of the public. They think in minorities and majorities, with majorities winning. /5

What they forget is that those majorities cease to function if they ignore all of the interdependencies with the people they’re excluding. To beat Covid we need to rediscover the public, as a political concept. The ‘there is no such thing as a society’ political libertarians…/6

…will never see it, it’s a core article of faith for them not to. We’re losing against Covid because of the politics of these beliefs. Until we challenge their ridiculous separation of individuals and groups, they’ll keep winning. Their reality is a laughable fiction. /7

It’s not about always opposing their N=1 thinking by saying ‘but think of the group’. That binary is how they win. It’s about pointing out that individuals only have freedom through the interdependency of all people, of the public. They’re shooting themselves in the feet. /8

Their society-substitute, the ‘Economy’, cannot function without the interdependencies they constantly ignore, or portray as some version of themselves, only lacking in aspiration. Schools, hospitals, airlines and other business right now are broken. It’s a direct threat to…/9

…their core beliefs. Ram that point home, relentlessly. Fight them on their own ground, exposing the absurd, deadly paradoxes of their own beliefs. Rather than appealing to some sort of better nature, they’ll just see that as ‘bedwetting’. /end