Another way to unpack the myth of ‘bottom up’ Covid victory. Countries, nations. Today the international…

Another way to unpack the myth of ‘bottom up’ Covid victory. Countries, nations. Today the international community is thought of as made up of nations. But the international community pre-existed nations, who were invented at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. /1 https://t.co/Qz4oOFcwLb

The international created the national, not the other way around. Why this matters is that our nations are currently resisting doing things like fight climate change and pandemics, citing their sovereign rights. But that sovereignty is an international agreement. /2

Just as the national borders the bottom-up libertarians milk for political gain are also international agreements, not sovereign instruments. Modern political belief is upside-down. This matters a lot, for Covid. The idea control of SARS-Cov-2 should be outsourced to…/3

…individuals and their personal responsibility is the same basic belief that led to the Thirty Years’ War, which only the drawing up of sovereignties in 1648 brought to a close. A collective agreement decided who would have which territory, which sovereignty. /4

That’s what public health was invented to do. Using laws to allocate responsibilities and authorities, to defeat pathogens. It’s nonsensical to say these laws violate freedoms, because those freedoms are allocated by the same collective mechanism. Just as it’s nonsensical…/5

…to ask countries to reach international agreements using their sovereignty, when that sovereignty was given to them by international agreement. We always start with a totality, with a universal foundation, like the Holy Roman Empire in 1648, or with the ‘public’ for Covid. /6

All responsibilities and sovereignties are allocated by that totality. Law is written by the public, through its government, for the public. It’s not somebody bossing somebody else around. It’s the same people, in both cases. Only 5 decades of fairy tale political…/7

…libertarianism has led to the nonsense of seeing the ‘State’ as somehow something separate. It’s us, the collective part of us. And all that can defeat a pandemic. Because societies function collectively, and can only be steered collectively. 8/8