The socio-political mathematics of Covid minimisation. Populist politicians have now replaced one model of…
The socio-political mathematics of Covid minimisation.
Populist politicians have now replaced one model of society, with another. And it’s mostly been done with toxic maths. /1 https://t.co/LFWcYa10rN
The idea of a ‘public’ is historically very new. As I’ve Tweeted about many times, invented in the 20th century.
After two world wars. Wars that each killed between 2-3% of the global population, at the time. /2 https://t.co/lyfO5p19qy
The institutions societies created after those catastrophes had the task of re-building broken societies.
To do that they had to re-conceptualise those societies. The old structure of those societies had been removed, by the world wars. /3 https://t.co/v4JxEBoC5j
So those old structures couldn’t lead new societies into existence. The structures were gone.
We had to invent anew what ‘society’ means. And to do that, we invented ‘the public’. /4 https://t.co/dB1EHulyEm
The public as a concept is NOT the same as what today we call ‘the people’. A simple enumeration of everybody living.
‘The people’ is populist maths, Beloved of ‘fascist’ leaders. All fascism is populism. /5
Hitler for example eulogised ‘das Volk’ (the people). He saw the role of the State as only to serve das Volk/the people.
Modern political libertarians say the same thing. When you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas. /6
The public is nothing to do with this populist sleight of hand. A symptom of how successful modern populists are is that maybe the majority of people you ask will say democracy is about ‘the people’ running the country.
It’s why societies are collapsing. /7
The public is an *administrative construct*. It’s an ongoing, continuous *calculation* of the *interdependency* of all people.
That’s what we invented, post-war. Because it was the only thing that worked, recognition of that interdependency. /8
No nebulous rubbish about ‘the people’, that’s what so many millions had just died on the altar of.
The institutions we invented spent the next several decades implementing ‘public’ programs. Based on interdependency. /9
Programs that recognised that the fate of all people is dependent on the fate of every person.
Because they’re all connected. All interdependent. As the saying rightly goes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. /10
It’s not a sentimental or even justice thing. It’s logistics. If you allow even small parts of societies to become dysfunctional, that dysfunction will bring the lot down.
Because it’s all connected. It’s why we started vaccinating widely, for example. /11
Even though most of the diseases we started vaccinating kids against killed very few of them.
But when the public is your model, those deaths are an assault on ALL of us. If you critically injure an arm, you don’t demand it be chopped off because you have a spare. /12
Society as a public is interconnected and interdependent. Almost amusingly, ‘lockdowns’ showed this, and in doing so proved the exact opposite of what opponents of lockdowns say.
Lockdowns disrupted because ‘economies’ are fundamentally interconnected. They’re hypersocial. /13
The libertarian philosophies of the market proponents of economies use are completely decoupled from economic reality.
In libertarian/populist land, lockdowns should have been a nirvana. Finally, populations free of all social activity, shut down. /14
Except it crashed their beloved economies. Proving once and for all that economies are really just societies. Hyper *connected* societies.
‘Supply chains’ are really just social connectedness, utter dependence on our social relationships. /15
The toxic maths of minimisers takes all of this, and tries to replace it with minorities and majorities. Really just voting categories, imported into public administration.
We’ve seen it with Covid. Painted as over, because it’s only killing a minority of people. /16
Record numbers of people, but because a minority, dismissed as insignificant. That’s the death of the whole idea of the public.
And remember again how many died in the world wars? /17 https://t.co/IWAjyAhnHQ
‘Only’ 2-3% of the population. Even less in many countries like Australia, much less. A tiny minority, about 0.5%.
Does that mean the wars were ‘just a sniffle’? That the record amounts of our GDP we spent fighting them was wasted, as opponents now say of Covid lockdowns? /18 https://t.co/CMRZSBEwlZ
You can see how toxic minimiser maths has been in this pandemic, the sociopathic nonsense it’s led to.
By making us think only of absolute numbers, ignoring all of the interdependencies. By replacing a public with marketing concepts of segmentation. /19
Calculations of minority and majority, precisely aligned with projected voting impacts of various actions.
That’s how sick populism is. And how it always becomes fascism, if left to run. Untold numbers will be allowed to die, provided it doesn’t impact popularity/votes. /20
Our own then-PM declared Covid as good as over in Oz, in late-2021, because he had an election he wanted to win in early 2022.
More than 25,000 people are now dead as a direct result of that action. (And he lost the election anyway.) /21
The current State and federal governments won’t touch Covid now, for the same reason. They think it’s a toxic vote-loser.
Think of that, if you’ve lost loved ones to Covid, or they’ve been maimed by it. That it was all because of votes. /22
Those who do that will comfort you by saying that only a minority of Australians have been maimed or killed.
Like that makes it OK. Like the catastrophes of the 20th century never happened, and we learned nothing from them. /23
We’re breaking our societies with this nonsense. By sacrificing ‘the vulnerable’, thinking the rest of us can get on with life as normal.
Except we’re all vulnerable. Because we’re all interconnected. /24
It’s a disgrace to the killing fields of the 20th century, so recent, that we’ve forgotten the lessons we learned there.
We can’t vote out way out of that forgetting. Voting caused the forgetting. /end