After a spate of populist victories like Bolsonaro in Brazil around 5-10 years ago; fueled by COVID, country after Latin American country are electing leftist governments. Mexico, traditionally pro-US elected a leftist government for the first time in 40 years.
Collective problems, collective solutions.
I wonder whether this will end up being a broader thing. Maybe, as it becomes impossible to ignore the collective nature of our problems, people will finally stop buying the bullshit, update their worldview from the 1960s and accept that we need collective solutions.
I can’t remember a time when the opinion of the PM was this kind of universal scorn. And in this country, that’s saying something. His hands off approach lays bare the absolute limits of our idea of individual freedom. That sort of freedom is a privilege of a time when there weren’t so damned many of us and every single one of us weren’t zipping around the world for business and pleasure like magicians. But this was true two years ago
What’s changed?
What this pandemic has really rammed home to me is that most people (or at least the amount you’d require to win an election) lack either the ability or desire to contemplate things that they know are happening, but aren’t happening to them.
That’s why every privileged fence sitting, sacrifice whinging, theory spouting sovereign citizen has come around the last few weeks. Because now they know five people who have COVID. Before they didn’t know anybody. And they didn’t realise that that was a very good thing.
Yes, current figures are in line with statistical projections from five weeks ago when they were saying “It’s mild. What’s the biggie?”
But as much as we nerds might pray to Sophia the Goddess of Wisdom, that most people five weeks ago could have looked at a projections graph, extracted the numbers, put them in context, grasped the potential scope and severity of their real world effects, imagined what it might FEEL like to not be able to access a test if you were sick, to have a relative treated in the car park of a hospital, projected that feeling out across everyone in the country (including those in less fortunate and more vulnerable circumstances), seen the knock on effects of large numbers of infections, it’s effects on the supply and food chains and finally the creeping compromises in safety like sending sick people back to work given away inch-by-inch as a wave of infections threatened to bring the entire country to a standstill just because everyone got ‘mildly’ sick all at once.
Foresight vs Hindsight
The fact is, most people either cannot or do not want to do that. And fair enough. It’s HARD. Knowing five people with COVID achieves the same thing but it also means thirty people a day die, supermarkets run out of food, police raid a property in west Sydney and find 30,000 RATs. That is the price of our collective lack of imagination.
We craven Gods
The reason why it’s so hard for most people to imagine all of this is very simple. It’s that humility, understanding our human limits and our utter codependence with and on each other are very difficult concepts to grasp when you’ve been told your whole life that you’re a fucking God. And we have.
Most westerners have lived in a theme park for about thirty years. You can know anything, fly anywhere, customise everything, buy anything from anyone, anywhere. For all most of us know about how these things happen, it may as well be magic.
When I lived in the UK I could order something of Amazon Prime and have it arrive the same day. Now just mailing something is an act of faith. And when you’re the one praying, that’s a pretty good sign that you’re not the God.
We’re not Gods. We are part of nature. And as a part of it, we are subordinate to it. And this is the first time it’s been impossible for we craven Gods to ignore.
Are we done being insane yet?
So maybe that’s the way it has to go. Maybe all of this eventually helps transition politics into a more cooperative, altogether saner beast, less steeped in denial and lies.
And I wonder what a world like that would look like. And feel like.
Then I stop wondering. And wonder whether I’m a hopeless optimist.
But I still do wonder.