This is the Eastern Brown Snake. Lethal. Causes about one death per year. We’re being led to believe that…
This is the Eastern Brown Snake. Lethal. Causes about one death per year.
We’re being led to believe that because a lethal virus isn’t causing huge numbers of deaths, it’s not lethal.
Games of minority and majority. /1 https://t.co/iZ4qSDZQW6
Populist politics won by substituting the idea of a public, with the idea of minorities and majorities. Voting categories. Popularity categories.
Populism. This is what it is. If ‘the majority’ say something, that’s reality. /2
Similarly, something is only a problem, if it’s a problem for the majority. So despite the fact Covid is lethal to quite sizeable numbers of people (record numbers in fact), because it’s not killing the majority of us, it’s classified as a complete non-problem. /3
We also shouldn’t be fooled that the populists who ply this sleight of hand actually believe it.
Take the current conflict in the Middle East. A reactivation of old religious-cultural war. The people who still identify with these religions in Australia are in free fall. /4
Have been for years. Supporters are a clear minority. This is their war. The minority clearly leading the agenda here.
In reality status drives everything in societies. Not the numbers. That’s a con. /5
‘The public’ is NOT, and this is so important, a majority of people. It has nothing whatsoever to do with counting numbers.
That’s how bad faith actors have destroyed the whole concept of the public. The public is also not ‘who wins elections’. /6
That’s another con. The public is independent of who wins an election. It’s an administrative construct, invented in the last 2 centuries, an ongoing continuous calculation of the ‘public good’, for decisions.
Officials do that calculation. It’s their main job. /7
To assess everything that happens in a nation, to see whether the outcome will be the best outcome for everybody.
Not for a majority. For everybody. /8
Any time you see minority and majority thinking, you’re dealing with populism. We’re ’living with’ a pandemic because of populism.
Because the majority aren’t being killed by Covid. (Yet.) This has never been the calculus of public health. /9
None of the vaccinations in the childhood vaccination schedule that has fundamentally transformed our lives was needed to stop a majority of us from dying.
That was never the reason we did it. The pathogens were lethal for SOME. But back then, that just meant lethal. /10
Because we didn’t divide our communities up into majorities and minorities. What was lethal for some was seen as a threat to the entire community.
There was a clear understanding that ‘a chain is only as strong as its weakest link’. /11
It wasn’t that we were more caring or moral. It was that we saw that practically, logistically, if you allow even a minority of people to be impacted, the whole edifice of community will come tumbling down.
Societies are networked. Everything is connected. /12
Populism has destroyed that deep understanding. Now you do whatever you can get away with, whatever you can cobble together a majority for.
Voting did this. It’s how it works. Majorities ‘win’. Elections are destroying us.
/end