The Pandemic Is Showing Us How to Live with Uncertainty
nautil.us
nautil.us
This might also happen if enough people have no money to buy food with, or no place to go to be fed. Not everyone is willing to die quietly of starvation.
Do we trust our state governments (or the Federal one) to be able to prioritize feeding 350M people, or to concern itself with long term business survival?
I fear this more than the disease.
If they managed to feed themselves despite naval blockades and bombings, without the country completely falling apart, I don’t see why we can’t.
Of course, this might mean more agricultural land for vegetables instead of livestock. Changing our behaviour. Make do with less-than-straight carrots. People starting their own vegetable patches on balconies. Not throwing out half the food we buy. Maybe rationing. It might very well suck.
We’re from a cushy world. It will take time to adapt. But in the face of necessity we’ll manage.
The last thing we should do is to prepare (and hope?) for total anarchy. Serves nobody.
I reached this conclusion a few days ago as well. I can't imagine the entire food supply thing having thousands of houses and factories bombed for years and years; and yet it happened. Civilization had a bit of a 'reset', but it was a long way from anarchy and cannibalism.
There's no way this virus is going to be as actually destructive in terms of both life and property; so that makes me optimistic.
There seems to be a large number of people who almost look forward to having their favorite (post-)apocalyptic movie/video-game becoming reality. Let's not pretend like there are not far too many people getting a minor degree of pleasure from thinking about how they will "out-maneuver" their fellow man in some sort of "apocalyptic end-game". The plethora of zombie shows, movies, and games probably does not help with this either.
But, your WWII anecdote inspired me to tell these people: "be more like your grandparents who remained heroic and civilized in the face of a purely chaotic and even evil era."
What exactly is irrational about a kid with 300k in debt and no job hoping that a collapse could lead to a real future for himself and/or his kids?
I moved to essentially a small coastal town to get off the street and back in housing. Being in housing is better than being homeless, but it's hardly been a cakewalk.
So I sometimes have escapist fantasies and it's common for me to fantasize about chucking it all and up and moving to a small coastal town. Then I remember I'm in a small coastal town and I'm not sure how to feel about that.
On the one hand, I guess I've won and I can be spared the expense and hassle of relocating again. On the other hand, there's something distinctly disturbing about achieving your escapist fantasy and then continuity to fantasize about escape, especially when the fantasy is to do exactly what you've already done that hasn't yet put a stop to your desire to escape your current life and all of its attendant problems.
As someone supporting a household with a cumulative 200k of debt, I know what the possibility of a chaotic new future feels like, believe me (and I AM privileged!) I'm specifically talking about the fantasy of blowing away armed marauders with a shotgun. We're on the edge, a job loss would be brutal to us, and I recognize that many have it even worse. I guess I'm pushing back against grim (and I believe largely baseless) cynicism about human nature.
[1]Mind you, I'm talking about the United States. Yemen, Libya, Syria, many other countries graced with the interference of the US and our allies are another subject.
Edited for formatting.
For the start.....everything. No matter how much you're in debt and without a job you're still immesurably better than after actual collapse of the society. Unless your plan really is to establish yourself as some kind of warlord with guns and have others serve you. Which is about as realistic as Mad Max is. There's literally nothing rational about it, not even as a fantasy unless you're 12 and don't understand how the world works and what would actually happen if the societes collapsed in some kind of post apocalyptic scenario.
In times of prosperous peace, most struggle is crazy making pecking order BS. Are you doing better than your neighbor? Who is number one on this list? What does it pay?
During times when the world at large isn't trying to kill us all, hell is other people. Hell is being at the bottom of the heap because society will make sure that's a terrible place to be even if there is no objective reason that it needs to be.
During a real crisis, that crap tends to mostly drop away. Suddenly, people with money are willing to share it with those who have less those with less aren't treated like they must not be trying hard enough and clearly don't deserve better.
We revert to absolute measures rather than relative measures. Instead of "Do I have more or less than other people?" we ask "Did I get what I actually needed today?"
It's very rare for big change that kills off the most awful aspects of our lives to come some big positive change. It's almost always a disaster that leads to such.
Those dystopian fantasies very often include the idea of a sense of community and pulling together in the aftermath that is generally lacking in the lives of most modern people in developed countries. We seem to be unable to imagine creating a sense of community in the face of plenty.
Longing for community seems to be a primary reason to have such fantasies.
Which might be amusing as a thought experiment. But as soon as you need antibiotics or want your shit to magically disappear down a hole in your house, you want to go back.
Needless to say, chances are one gets nastily bludgeoned with rebar over a packet of pasta. Nothing romantic there.
Well, except for the rapes, murders, mass internment, civilian bombing, etc. Its a nice fable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_war_crimes_during_World...
Do you see the problem here?
I'd like to hope that we'd do better this time, considering especially that there is even less basis now, for identifying any segment of the US population as potentially treasonous, than there was then. But that seems like an awfully bold claim to make, in a country that's operating internment camps right now.
As if there are not bad choices and bad actors in all aspects of society at all points in history ...
Many weren't as noble (or identify with organisations that weren't as noble) as they would like to believe.
That's the fable bit.
* everything is possible * looting and pillaging has happened before in lesser times * it doesn't help to be unprepared
I honestly think that if we had a firmer, more coordinated, and less fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants government response and action plan, anarchy would definitely be reigned in and less of a concern in people's minds.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977
From Wikipedia:
"Looting and vandalism were widespread, hitting 31 neighborhoods. Possibly the hardest hit were Crown Heights, where 75 stores on a five-block stretch were looted, and Bushwick, where arson was rampant, with some 25 fires still burning the next morning. At one point, two blocks of Broadway, which separates Bushwick from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, were on fire. Thirty-five blocks of Broadway were destroyed: 134 stores looted, 45 of them set ablaze. Thieves stole 50 new Pontiacs from a Bronx car dealership.[3] In Brooklyn, youths were seen backing up cars to targeted stores, tying ropes around the stores' grates, and using their cars to pull the grates away before looting the store.[3] While 550 police officers were injured in the mayhem, 4,500 looters were arrested."
A lot of people really want to go back to work, despite the risk. Arguably we should send many (but not all) back soon.
The problem of people not having money to buy said products is less far-fetched, but still:
- As other here have pointed out, we've seen worse in our history, and nothing like what you describe played out
- We have so much wealth as a country and it's just a problem of figuring out how to get it to the right people. Yes, there are bumbling idiots making decisions and there are selfish bad-actors still trying to pad their pockets every chance they get. But when the rubber meets the road, this is too big for anyone to simply isolate themselves financially. The 1% are having their assets tank too. Our fates are bound. And when our country somehow manages to get everyone on the same side - even for the wrong reasons - we're really good at doing whatever needs to be done to solve the problem.
Last night I even asked if there was a good time to come and the cashier just said, "there is no good time, the shelves will still be empty".
Meat, Eggs, bottled water are disappearing, its hard not to feel a bit panic.
Even in your case and the other anecdotes people are mentioning here, I'm not convinced it's a supply-side issue. I would guess that in some areas the supply simply isn't bountiful enough to bear the full weight of the extreme preppers. That's a real problem, to be sure, but it's an artificial one and hopefully once it becomes clear that a true famine isn't on the way those people will calm down and stop putting others in needless danger.
So we stop working. However you cannot stop working so much that it causes more damage than that. We cannot and will not stop food production or distribution. This is a voluntary action to save lives, you cannot let it endanger more lives than what it is trying to mitigate.
Pedantically not quite true:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/22/be-careful-spa...
This isn't an xor question. The existence of essentially all businesses is predicated on some degree of baseline social stability. If people in country X aren't able to feed themselves, businesses in country X are probably in deep trouble too.
"Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they don't give you work or bread, take bread." - Emma Goldman
They are grabbing their guns, going out into the world, and shooting and killing animals. Which they then butcher up and store in pieces in their garage freezer and maintain months of food this way. Tasty deer.
Nope. Just wrong. you only have to look at peoples' behaviour in parts of the UK at the weekend to realise that even if some people know the implications of their actions they don't care. The UK has largely degenerated into an "entitled" society, and any veneer of sensibility and fairness has been stripped away with a vengeance. Unfortunately for us, the Prime Minister's advisers seem to think like Prof. Rasmussen and now we're in a dire situation.
this person is a fucking doctor. A DOCTOR. and she cant comprehend the severity of the situation.
All this is explained in Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb, everyone should read it! Please do it now.
It was ok though, because they were going with a scientist and a doctor so they must know what they are doing!
When they got back from the vacation they spent a week going out to the park when they could with the kids.
A week later, the hospital is at 2/3 from max capacity and they're pissing their pants. This doesn't stop them from engaging in academic research for their own interests and assuring the public that all will be fine, though.
Why should people do the right thing when they feel they have nothing in common with their fellow countrymen? It used to be the case that we had a strong shared national culture that enforced certain standards of behaviour, and thus one had a stake in maintaining these standards due to collective reciprocity, but we've been told for decades that said national culture is hateful and outdated and must be destroyed without any decent replacement. I cite Orwell:
'England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.'
'If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible.'
edit: yeah, suspected a dose of uncomfortable truth wouldn't go down easily.
It might be worth considering if maybe you are the one in the wrong here. Could it be that the majority of people disagree with you not because your view is "uncomfortable" but because it's not truth? Your phrasing certainly reads to me like reactionary defensiveness when presented with legitimate criticism of certain aspects of this culture and a refusal to evaluate things from any other point of view than your own.
It's still worth hoping they'll at least consider that downvotes aren't because people hate and fear the secret truth that they are the only one smart enough to see, though.
("Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong.")
Even in middle-age, my ears aren’t so bad that I don’t know a dog whistle when I hear it.
Isn't that exactly the "national culture is hateful and outdated" notion he's talking about?
This sort of cherry picking and sliding definition of terms while pretending to be "just asking some questions", however, is known as sealioning: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Sealioning
I know what a dog-whistle is, I'm asking why you think you know OP is referring to "anti-racist efforts".
> This sort of cherry picking..
What are you referring to as "this"? my comments? I don't see the words you quoted (""just asking some questions").
.. why would that ever be a condition for doing the right thing? What does having a shared culture have to do with having humanity?
I'm not trying to kick off a flamewar but this is hopelessly naive - divide and conquer has been used for thousands of years - just look at Rwanda for a recent dreadful example.
With the UK being a diverse multiracial population it's even more important to attempt to unify everyone around some kind of shared values etc. Otherwise you end up with people living right next door to each other that are mentally living in completely different universes. It should be obvious that this is not an ideal starting point for rallying a population around a unified goal.
The USA used to be seen as particularly successful in absorbing everyone no matter their origins, and giving them a strong identity as American that superceded everything else. Not sure if that's still valid though.
I suspect you're getting downvoted because your argument is based on the idea that Britons have nothing in common with one another. Which is a clearly false supposition. It comes off as either ignorant of the other nations or low-key racist.
"Even the devil can quote Orwell to his purpose" - me.
Care to elaborate? This seems like a personal attack.
> "Even the devil can quote Orwell to his purpose" - me.
Well fair enough, that made me chuckle.
Your post seemed to me mainly composed of
1. some quotes from Orwell
2. a knock against that all-purpose bogeyman "the Left" as an enabler of fascism. Which is funny how often the Left is an enabler of the ultra-right, but the Right never is.
3. and some references to such vague things as shared national culture. Which, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it - a concern with a shared national culture is really top priority with those nasty people the Left enables.
All these abstractions show someone who maybe lives in a world of ideas, and I thought it's funny that Orwell in the same part where he talked about the nasty Left and so forth, also noted this marked characteristic as something that was one of the roots of their problems.
Finally, and I didn't point this out before but I shall now, I doubt that Orwell's Left is the same as today, mortality being what it is, and the cause of personal disaffection from the national culture might not have the same causes as it did in the 20s-40s.
The Left that makes saying "God Save the Queen" unpopular has been replaced by media that makes it old-fashioned and silly (Look at that Silly John Lydon up there, done up like my granny!), and while I know that it is often pleasant to point at the media and say Look, the Left - I think there is just as much reason to point at it and say Look, the Corporations!
Although since saving the Queen has been out of fashion for longer than I've been alive I have to think there may be bonds less nation-state sounding that have been worn through more recently that we could worry about, and whatever those bonds should be, if we were to agree to worry about them being broken I would think it were more reasonable to accuse multinational corporations of destroying them than a powerless political viewpoint. Or, if we were to choose a political viewpoint as the chief source of our woes, then choose one with more power at the moment - such as The Right.
on edit: however I didn't downvote you although your on edit about truth at the end did put it right on the border. Because who really knows what the truth is.
My last word: we should hardly be surprised that the product of a couple of generations of laissez-faire leftist moulding acts as if it doesn't have to listen to authority. This is precisely the intention of said leftism...
"laissez-faire leftist" are two words otherwise seldom heard together.
If so, I don't think Orwell was discussing Parliamentary left and right divisions, but cultural ones. And so in his case "laissez-faire leftist" wouldn't make much sense.
on edit: oops, sorry, I saw it was your last word. So I guess I will never know what it is you're actually talking about.
But no one really seems to care. It’s completely fixable, but even most people I know don’t really care about it or connect that it’s the politicians making shitty zoning and local control laws that drives up the prices so high. Or they buy into the virtue signaling propaganda about affordable housing for those at the very bottom being the only thing we should care about, even though they and everyone they know live in market rate housing and are struggling with the cost.
It's the reason why you're seeing people hoard things from stores: they're worried about being without.
This feeling of uncertainty is a result of the system we live in where, at least in the US, there's barely any safety net.
The vast majority of the population lives precariously, and it's not by choice.
The truth is now officially anyone's guess.