Something is Very Broken

There's a resignation and disillusionment hitting some Covid-cautious, with some pulling away from larger society, feeling gaslit by it all:

"Other than my job, I have zero desire to interact in public anymore. It's not just the risk of another potentially devastating infection; it's how the curtain has been pulled back exposing a selfish society where so many only care about the injustices that directly affect them."

More comments from that thread mashed together:

"I have no idea what I'd talk about with people who only care about things that directly affect them. We're all connected. . . . The idea that 'greed is good' has infected even those who traditionally have taken jobs to protect others. Public discussions about this are important. . . . The irony is that the injustices are and will impact them; they just don't know, or want to know. . . . I really don't know how we come back from this on a societal level. I cannot look at people the same way ever again. Hell, I can't even look at some extended family the same way again. . . . It appears that most folks are libertarian."

"Reminds me of how you can overwater an orchid, and it'll still look healthy as the roots rot away, and all of a sudden the plant that looked really fine a few days prior wilts and dies rather quick. Our society in normal times was rotten underneath that illusion of ritziness."

And Henry Madison wrote this long, heartfelt thread about the current experience:

"I’m happy to not be a younger worker. My heart is no longer in work or most other related things. The pandemic wasn’t a disruption to normal life, which will now return. No great catastrophes are that. Our lives changed fundamentally post the Spanish Flu and WW1 and WW2. Pre-Covid I like many others could go to work every day with an implicit or sometimes even explicit sense of contributing something to the collective good of society. That provided a sense of purpose, the true source of motivation. 

But Covid revealed how much that was a lie. How much something I knew was happening and had been watching my whole adult life, the gradual dismantling of the whole idea of a collective life, had already fundamentally damaged social operating systems. The fake good times of debt-funded euphoria hid it. That’s how the vandals pulled it off, we would have noticed this change a lot earlier, except we used debt to continuously re-animate a corpse, allowing ourselves to feel that good times would go on forever. Creating such endlessly fun lifestyles. All on the plastic. Whether government or personal debt (the latter the true horror story). Those whose collective lives were being shredded were allowed to feel a part of society by continuously borrowing, to maintain that illusion. 

That’s now all over. The ‘cost of living’ reveals the lie. And for me, the total disregard for my own family in public health work, where my kids can go to schools where literally zero is done to prevent them becoming infected with a novel pandemic pathogen. Like nothing in my experience to that date. The fact some of our leaders, both politically and in health care, to this day still actively promote that dereliction of duty. In some ways that broke me, or at least made me face up to a collapse I’d known in my head was happening already for years. 

I’m a resilient person, I continue to function at high levels in this society. But I no longer feel it the same way, because it isn’t really a society now. I know it’s about looking out for yourself the best you can, because collectively we no longer give a fuck. There is no ‘we’ now, I look here every day at people screaming into the void about why ‘we’ aren’t doing things differently. It is a void, that we is dead. It was a homicide, it was delibertaely destroyed. They’re still doing it, pretending ‘personal responsibility’ for existence is something to celebrate. Rather than throwing most people to the wolves, under narratives about them being ‘leaners’ and ‘vulnerable’ (i.e. losers). It’s the brain-dead populist morons you were glad to be free of when leaving school, now in charge. 

My personal responsibility included the sense of being personally responsible for helping to make the world a collectively better place than when I arrived in it. Not maximising my ‘fun’ or other empty lifestyle aims. I don’t want to live in an episode of the Love Boat. Work feels empty now, stripped of that collective focus, now just a job to earn enough to fund endless, empty cruises and trips, to ‘see the world’. Like existential porn, looking at the world, rather than engaging with it and shaping it. The passion of good works, gone. I’m glad I can soon choose to avoid in some ways this world going through the motions of an old normal that is long gone. I can’t even imagine facing 40 years more of work, as the young now do. With no sense of it meaning anything. Just customers of life now. Hoping they can afford it. 

My own kids are part of that, I’ll do everything I can to help them have some sort of refuge from its worst excesses. Maybe a new, entirely different normal will emerge, as happened after WW2, after decades of war and plague death. But the times have changed. People were hungry then to make a new world, to do big, exciting, collective things. To build public health systems, and schools, and clean water, and put people on the moon, etc. 

Now we actually celebrate doing the opposite. ‘Living your best life’ is seen as some sort of great existential project. Which it might be if it didn’t just mean being a perpetual tourist and lifestyle fetishist. As I Tweet about, the catastrophe may need to be much worse before we’re roused from this idiot slumber. Time and again history shows that to be how actual change happens. Things have to completely collapse. Old status hierarchies have to be decimated, or else they obstruct all change. Generations have to pass on. Progress, one funeral at a time, thank you Planck." 

And then an hour later he added this chilling reminder, 

"In 1928 DH Lawrence wrote ‘A Letter from Germany’. Novelists are necessary to diagnose a zeitgeist. This is more than 10 years before WW2. He knew then what was coming. Compare with our ‘peace-and-production’ fake normality today. 

The glossing over of deep currents. As Lawrence says, ‘Something has happened. Something has happened which has not yet eventuated.’ He knew it was broken, he could sense it. As a novelist he had a much more sophisticated diagnostic toolkit. And this is how 2024 feels, to me. Something has happened. Something that hasn’t yet eventuated. We broke society. We’re desperately repairing the plane while it’s still in flight, but it’s broken."

And then, I read this excellent excerpt from Georg Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant in which he explains the necessary rhetoric for promoting a policy (and winning elections). 

"Framing is about getting language that fits your worldview. It is not just language. The ideas are primary and the language carries those ideas, evokes those ideas. . . . When you hear Orwellian language, note where it is, because it is a guide to where they are vulnerable."

Everything hinges on the narrative of a country like a family, with the right-leaning parties promoting the ideal family in authoritarian terms, with father at the head in charge of it all, protecting the family from the dangerous world and teaching kids a very clear right and wrong, and the left having the more equitable family system, except it's currently divided into factions and completely unfocused, which is why conservative parties keep winning. And it was no accident they attack principles of equity and inclusion, which are at the core of the left's family message. They right-leaning parties have focused their funds on think tanks and writers and advisors who get the language and message and media perfect while the left just rest on fighting the good fight, which isn't working.  

The neoliberal agenda has walked into every corner of the world, head held high, often legit voted into office by people who are encouraged to hear that dad will take care of them. Meanwhile, in Ontario, dad's at the racetrack gambling away the deed for the house. And our schools and hospitals. And nothing is protecting us from the dangers of the world. 

Something is very broken, bigger than Covid or climate change.