(Don't) Return to Normalcy

What the hell is happening? Overweight shoppers fighting over toilet paper and record-setting drops in the stock market have become a common occurrence. The comfortable American life that we all have grown accustomed to has finally encountered a threat, however temporary. We all know the pandemic will eventually be squashed, a vaccine will be developed in a year or so and the Coronavirus will be of no more concern to the general public than the seasonal flu. But the essential question today, as we look into the future, is what will change? Will anything change?

We all knew this would happen. Everybody knew deep down that eventually, some disaster would come around and change everything. Everything in our artificial landscape has been made with a sense of impermanence; we buy new phones, new cars, new everything, just to have them replaced. While we process food to unnaturally extend its shelf life, we limit a phone’s functionality to a few years. Perhaps this temporary nature of things arose as a coping mechanism. If we truly thought of the modern world as a permanent, unchanging state, if we really thought about how long every plastic bottle and every car tire would last after they were discarded or replaced, if we recognized the relative eternity of these inert, lifeless objects compared to our brief existence, we would probably be petrified with an overwhelming existential crisis. And even these ridiculously long-lived pieces of garbage pale in comparison to the incomprehensible eternity of nature, rock formations created over millions of years that will probably endure for millions more after humans no longer walk the earth (notice how my reference to the extinction of our species is accepted as casually as if I were talking about my dinner plans for tonight, but only as an abstract rhetorical flourish). Ultimately, nature and all of life itself will be smothered by heat death, entropy, and the mind-numbing near-infinity which will persist for trillions upon trillions of years after the death of the last star in the universe.

So on some level, we all accept the inevitability of disaster, or at least some abstract notion of it, but we still failed miserably to do anything about it! After the Ebola outbreak, Bill Gates, undeniably one of the most powerful and influential humans alive, called for preparations to proactively prevent a viral pandemic, one more contagious than Ebola that could bring industrial society to its knees and kill millions, but virtually nothing was done to prepare beyond what was politically convenient. A rational, compelling warning from everyone’s favorite oligarch billionaire fell on deaf ears! And what did we get for it? We got what we deserved: a pandemic, eerily similar to Bill’s prediction. Now, the “leader” of the “free” world is saying that limiting the number of Coronavirus deaths to 100,000 would be a “very good job,” an unprecedented 3 million Americans have lost their jobs, and this isn’t even the worst of it.

This happened because we don’t take the prospect of an international disaster seriously, and maybe it’s because it usually happens “over there;” we accept the notion of “something bad happening to us” in theory, but up until a few weeks ago it was virtually impossible to lucidly imagine this kind of thing actually happening. It doesn’t matter whether we see a crisis on the news or in the movie theater; today, suspension of disbelief is omnipresent to the same extent that news is made to entertain and entertainment is made to inform. Sure, we say, “Oh, look at those poor African children! They need food and water and healthcare, I’ll buy some products with a certain logo or some other bullshit so that some of the proceeds will go to them!” We say, “There’s too much trash in the oceans! I’ll buy those Adidas shoes that are made from ocean plastic!” We recycle. We tweet. We vote. We do everything so we can say that we did it. Everybody should know that on some level, this won’t really do anything, that all of the “small changes” will never really “add up” to anything remotely impactful. But none of these issues are real to us, precisely because nothing is real to us.

I hear people talking about how they “aren’t political,” saying to “stop being contrarian,” denouncing “polarization,” as if a lukewarm, watered-down, apolitical centrism is the pinnacle of enlightenment. Stephen Hawking said in his memoir that “philosophy is dead,” and Joe Biden, the only viable Democratic nominee at this point, is running on two ideas and two ideas only: “Orange man bad,” and “Socialism scary.” Making full use of the theatrics available, I say that this is the thinking that gets people killed. This, as Zizek would say, is ideology in its purest form! To all too many of us, there is nothing on the other side of the wall. We can imagine what’s there; it could be a new, better world, a society without hierarchy, poverty, or coerced labor. Alternatively, it could be a post-cataclysmic, neo-feudalist wasteland. It doesn’t matter, because regardless of how vivid our imaginations are, no matter how much escapist entertainment we consume, most of us are unwitting Fukuyamaists, stuck in today’s homeostasis, deluded into thinking this is the end of progress, unable to imagine the experience of something beyond. Truly, the ultimate form of defeatism is abstract hope, the manner of life which compels us to act without acting, think without thinking, see without seeing, and conjure worlds so imaginary that even the real world becomes artificial.

It’s this sort of running in place that let Coronavirus catch up to us, and we have other, worse things breathing down our necks. Conveniently, this pandemic has made for a fantastic litmus test. Has anyone else noticed that the same people who’ve been downplaying the Coronavirus threat and accuse others of “politicizing” the pandemic are largely the same group that do the exact same thing with climate change? And the celebrities that pay mouth-service to environmental efforts from their multi-million-dollar yachts are the same ones singing “Imagine” by John Lennon on Instagram, as if that’s going to make a difference (and as if John Lennon wasn’t a wife-beating piece of shit). The climate isn’t anywhere near the only problem, but you, the reader, a well-informed intellectual, should be well aware of this, so I don’t see the need to further expound upon the others at this time.

What I do need to say, though, is that we cannot avoid these catastrophes by slowly inching ourselves towards a half-assed goal. We need bold ideas, loud voices, new methods of making ourselves heard! Don’t appeal to moderates, show them why they’re wrong! We can’t regress back to civility at a time like this! So go, make your voice heard, be aggressively skeptical (even with your own ideas), think for yourself, experience real things! Go on a walk in the woods, spend time with people you enjoy being around, read a book that you want to read! Help in the effort against the virus if you can! When this is all over with, when things settle down, all of the dissident voices will scream out in unison for change, louder than ever before. Will you be silent, or will you, for once in your life, actually make yourself heard?