welcome to usaapay.com

2020-

2020-10-11 c
THE COVID-CON I

Together Apart: The Social Distance Backstory

In the midst of outrage at restrictions on our living arrangements, issued by a UK government that has lost its orientation to reality, two questions arise.

The first continues to receive fulsome treatment, at least in non-mainstream media. It is: How can such restrictions be necessary?

The second is less frequently addressed. It is: How can such restrictions be possible?

We have, for months, been mulling over, What makes them do it?

Here, I consider, What makes us take it?

From his isolation bunker, during his quarantine with ‘Covid19,’ prime minister Boris Johnson assured the people of Britain that, after all, there is such a thing as society.

This was to reprise a theme of his predecessor, Margaret Thatcher, who famously said, ‘There is no such thing as society.’

In between Thatcher and Johnson, another Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, successfully ran an election campaign based on his vision of a ‘Big Society.’

Despite the wrangling over its extent, what all three recognize is the adjustable character of this thing we call ‘Society,’ which may be emphasized or, not or expanded or not, because it is a function of kinds of government and not, as we might imagine, a set of grass-roots relations between people living out their lives.

It is true, there have always been societies. But when we refer to ‘Society,’ we refer to a quite particular mode of human relations oriented towards the management of populations.

This management has not trod heavily on those populations. It has not ridden roughshod over them or put their noses to the grindstone. On the contrary, it has worked on and through their very hearts’ desires, rendering those desires explicit and tethering them to strategies for their realization.

The result: an endlessly satisfied populace whose ways of living are available for infinite readjustment, even wholesale suspension.

Our lives are now social lives, and social lives are regulated vertically by abstract concepts and the strategies that apply them, not horizontally between beings in communities.

Our lives are now social lives, and they grow more rigid and more meaningless, and more vulnerable to revision and cancellation, every day. (read more)

______________________

Permission is hereby granted to any and all to copy and paste any entry on this page and convey it electronically along with its URL,
______________________