‘Living with’ Covid is the privatisation of public health. In cultures that had already privatised transport,…

‘Living with’ Covid is the privatisation of public health. In cultures that had already privatised transport, education, healthcare, jails, water, energy etc. Privatisation had already largely failed in all of those other critical areas of public life. /1

Now infection has been framed as good for us, to avoid the obvious train wreck of a reversal of a century of reducing it in our lives. Because that reduction needed collective, public action. That can’t be allowed, in a privatised anti-State culture. /2

The two nations who led this assault on public health, the US and UK, were both at the time led by aggressive small government libertarian parties. The public health and other medical and scientific professionals who joined this assault as human shields for the politics? /3

Likely this was their political team already, and they pretend the science matches their political views. Which of course it doesn’t, nor does a century of direct action in communities match it. /4

It’d be easy to put one of our modern team sports labels on this shift, like ‘neoliberalism’. It never explains anything, societies don’t run on -isms. They’re just legacy constructs from fields like sociology and political science. /5

But the shift to an anti-State culture, in all areas of life, is really the resurgence of human status games after their suppression post-WW2, in the rebuilding of societies. The shift back to the “I” culture. Only disaster creates ‘we’ cultures. /6 https://t.co/e2kcY4SuLb

The various -isms and ‘political’ movements are just team names in this deeper cultural/social shift. Now you’re more likely to use infectious disease as a platform for various kinds of ‘identity politics’, which are status games. Status = identity, for social animals. /7

At the same time the battle between Church and State for occupation of the top rung of social status hierarchies, that has gone on for centuries, never ended. The weakening of the State by the shift back to status games has opened the door again for various theocracies. /8

Because status hierarchies will be re-formed, the ocean of fighting “I’s” won’t last. The State hierarchy which became dominant post-WW2, that blip of ‘we’, is now in the US for example being replaced by a new monarchical model (Trump), plus various Christian hierarchies. /9

That explains the continued support for Netanyahu’s lethal adventure in Gaza, which is otherwise completely baffling in a modern Western democracy. It’s a Holy War, for some. History never went away. /end