COVID-19 mocks affluent West's pretensions about untouchability — fuzzy thinking and moral choices

© 2020 Peter Free

 

25 March 2020

 

 

If we forget Life's unavoidable struggles . . .

 

. . . we wind up unconsciously shooting ourselves in the head, while trying to avoid them.

 

 

COVID-19 in the affluent "developed world" is a good example

 

With much of the United States confined to home, much of the work economy is crashing.

 

Let's ignore, for a moment, the medical wisdom of this self-isolation.

 

Let's ask instead:

 

 

Are we appropriately weighting and balancing the comparative societal harms that will result?

 

 

Incomplete weightings — in a highly uncertain situation

 

Saving lives, so far, has been the settled upon policy goal in some of the nation's most populated states.

 

This so, even in light of the highly uncertain nature of the existential (or not) threat that COVID poses.

 

No one has yet has come up with appropriate numbers regarding the extent of the virus's spread, nor its associated (quantified) spectrum of minor to deadly effects. Without such investigation, accurate morbidity and mortality rates are challenging to estimate.

 

In short, no one really knows how bad this pandemic is or is likely to be, when that unknown level of "badness" is balanced against the costs of competing alternatives for dealing with it.

 

It does not help that most of our data-ignorance is due to US Government's complacence and/or deliberately concealing policies.

 

 

With ambiguity in mind

 

A probing look at the COVID-countering measures taken so far, reveals that we seem to be emphasizing protecting everybody from being infected.

 

That policy comes at an economically startling price.

 

The justification for shouldering this cost, at least in the Affluent West, seems to be that every life is precious beyond economic measure.

 

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has, essentially, said as much.

 

 

But is "precious lives" a correct assessment — in the historical experience of the World?

 

No.

 

And we don't usually pretend that it is.

 

Think wars, other epidemics, and all the self-induced societal harms that we do to ourselves every day.

 

On the economic side of the public health balance, poverty kills just as effectively as illness does.

 

Impoverishment generally just drags that suffering out over longer and morally indefensible durations.

 

 

I bring the "comparative evils" issue up now, for good reason

 

When we make mistaken assumptions about Reality's Nature, we tend to come up with solutions that either do not work, or cost society (as a working whole) way too much.

 

The currently accepted idea that we should no longer die "before our time" is nonsense.

 

Many of us always have died young. And, in the foreseeable term, always will.

 

By prevailing global standards, even millions of infectious disease deaths, annually, are not all that appallingly many. That is, if one goes on how easily "we" ignore the undeveloped and mid-developed world's sadly occurring totals of deadly disease.

 

 

Let's consider another morally pertinent example

 

The possibility of early demise is something that American troops live with every day.

 

In startling contrast, the public and its Posturing Leaders generally escape with thinking themselves not potentially subject to any death-inviting duties whatsoever.

 

As a result, the overwhelming majority of Americans seem to think that their lives "should" be un-harassed by untimely death or maiming.

 

We act as if the Real World's grim reaper no longer can, or should, affect us before statistically based life expectancies schedule us to depart.

 

 

Ramifications of this self-entitled mentality

 

Here is a minor, but indicative one.

 

San Jose's skinhead-looking and acting Chief of Police — Eddie Garcia — was on television recently.

 

He visibly reveled in his power to force non-essential businesses to close.

 

He was doing so, so as to enforce the Santa Clara County health department's COVID shut-down order.

 

 

See:

 

KPIX CBS SF Bay Area, San Jose Police Step Up Enforcement of Stay-at-Home Orders, YouTube (20 March 2020)

 

 

It seems to have escaped the Chief's (storm trooper) demeanor that the offending businesses were just trying to survive.

 

The Chief appeared to think their economic reality was less worthy than "medical" reality. When, in fact, those are often identical:

 

 

Too poor for ridiculously priced, poorly coveraged health insurance?

 

Too bad, say the Chief's (and Santa Clara's) avatars.

 

You'll stay closed, anyway.

 

Trump's sending you $1,200.

 

That'll go far.

 

 

Jackbooted Establishment thuggery . . .

 

. . . like (my unfairly picked on) Chief Garcia's — is more likely than not to escalate after this COVID episode.

 

The crisis invites every totalitarian mentality in our stumbling nation to grasp at increasing "its" power.

 

For the good of the people, of course.

 

In addition to killing the US working economy, we are also going to kill off the few bits of Constitutional Freedom that the:

 

 

War on Drugs

 

War on Terror

 

War for Waging Perpetual Wars

 

and

 

War for Making America Safe against Everything except Pandemics

 

 

. . . have already taken away.

 

We are even seeing the beginnings of the new:

 

 

War to Make and Keep Everyone Immortal — Forever and Beyond

 

 

To ensure that we are successful in keeping the public safe

 

We have the American Establishment's uniformed street Schutzstaffel telling us:

 

 

Stay at home, serfs.

 

Or else we will put you — and your small businesses — into The Camps!

 

 

Here's a laugh-inducing inquiry

 

Chief Garcia and Santa Clara County — as well as virtually everyone else in the nation's wide-ranging shut-down effort — are claiming that these closings are necessary to save lives.

 

Okay. Let's follow that logic.

 

Do you see anyone trying to shut down the profiteering American military arms manufacturing business — and its incorporated (also profiteering) Military Industrial Complex — so as to save American troops and their collaterally damaged foreign victims' lives?

 

Lives are lives, aren't they?

 

 

What's the "real" difference between these two examples?

 

Some of the American lives purportedly being saved in San Jose and Santa Clara County — and those that I am proposing saving in my Weapons Manufacturers example — are exactly the same.

 

The only difference being that our fascistically inclined American Government makes an essentially nonsensical distinction between the two.

 

It announces, completely on its own authority, that:

 

 

killing American troops

 

in the bogus name of keeping the rest of us safe

 

from pretendedly "bad foreigners"

 

is a virtue —

 

rather than a death-dispensing-mechanism

 

pretty much akin to today's COVID hazard

 

in its ultimate outcome.

 

 

Just think of the disastrously tumultuous Middle East that American Government created, with that region's now war-shattered, demolished systems of governance:

 

 

Hundreds of thousands of deaths.

 

Even higher numbers of poverty-draped, still living victims.

 

Who spoke (or speaks) for them?

 

 

In the face of the Government's argument that it can kill whomever it wants — on the basis of laughably false national security policy — no one talks about the fact that the Military Arms Industry and its associated Military Industrial Complex are predatorily placed — on purpose — to kill people, Americans included, for profit.

 

 

So . . .

 

If profit is the justifying argument for Government's feeding of the Military Industrial Complex — who is going to make the equivalent legal and moral argument in favor of the billiards establishment that Chief Garcia railed against — for still being open in defiance of Santa Clara County's emergency COVID order?

 

Hmmm?

 

 

Are America's hordes of skinhead-thinking Government types . . .

 

. . . going to be making all our moral decisions from now on?

 

That's a reasonable question.

 

 

Where does justification for this Freedom-crushing come from?

 

Yes, from the idea that we all should live forever.

 

"We" not being (in our deluded minds) subject to any of Nature's natural constraints.

 

Like, say, the one posed by SARS-CoV-2.

 

 

Another term for this self-entitled feeling is . . .

 

. . . moral and spiritual cowardice.

 

"Hubris" also fits.

 

 

Is this cultural decadence?

 

Theoretical physicist, Luboš Motl, just published a piece about the West's decadent attitudes — as those are being exhibited in the economy-crushing responses to COVID-19:

 

 

A large number of Westerners are happy to accept the suicidal shutting down of their economies to try to halt a virus that predominantly causes old and sick people to die just a few weeks or months before they would have anyway.

 

Just as they enthusiastically endorse proclamations such as that there are 46 sexes, not two; that the flatulence of a cow must be reduced to save a polar bear; that millions of migrants from the Third World must be invited to Europe and assumed to be neurosurgeons; and so on.

 

Thousands of businesses are closing and long-term prospects are bleak.

 

Governments are stepping in to pay wages and fund other services.

 

Some governments may default on their debts or resort to printing money, causing soaring inflation.

 

[Many Westerners] . . . . don't accept their dependence on society and the system at all.

 

They don't realise that their moral values, their ‘human rights’, are only available if paid for by prosperous societies.

 

© 2020 Dr. Luboš Motl, Decadent like the late Roman Empire, the West is committing suicide through its irrational response to Covid-19, RT (25 March 2020)

 

 

Good points. Ones that I have peripherally highlighted in my own blurbs.

 

 

I remember poverty

 

Sometimes not eating. No healthcare. Hoping that my body would hold up, under extremely breaking manual labor.

 

Those circumstances lasted many years. I got out, largely by luck and other people's extreme generosity. And in spite of my frequent foolishness.

 

I would not want to go back, even if I were substantially younger.

 

 

Pertinent to this perspective

 

I'm old now. And COVID is somewhat likely to get me. Sooner or later.

 

Even so, I do not want to see the economic system — flawed by corporatist greed, as it currently is — completely crumble away.

 

It makes no societal sense to implement economic disaster, just to benefit predominantly elderly and unfortunately otherwise compromised people.

 

The Good of the Whole should civilization's policy target.

 

Related to the "sense of priorities" theme, some while ago, when COVID came to California, I told my wife — who holds medical power of attorney — not to waste a ventilator on my account.

 

Instead, critical care at that level must go to someone, who is still productive. Someone who has a life ahead.

 

This is a moral question. Even a species survival one. It cannot be dodged.

 

Admittedly, I have somewhat more experience facing death than most. Thus, I know what I'm doing and saying. The Good of the Whole takes precedence. Always.

 

And as Dr. Motl pointed out in his article — in a passage that I did not quote — our ancestors lived short lives and worked hard to create the prosperous civilization that eventually grew up around them.

 

Toss that out, and we're all burned toast.

 

 

The moral? — The labor and small business economy matters

 

It is what civilization is based upon.

 

We should be careful what we throw away. Whether motivated by fear or self-entitlement.