Italy, January-February 2020:
One hundred deaths in two months with an average age of eighty-one years – over sixty million people living here – for Cov-19 (with all due respect for the families of the deceased) and the stock exchanges collapse. People lock themselves in their houses. Economists prophesy the end of the world (of their world, I guess), companies prepare hundreds of letters of dismissal. Possibly with a grim smile.
Italy 2019, same period:
About 12,000 people die for the effects of environmental pollution (70/80000 deaths per year, just in Italy. Thousand more, thousand less).
The stock market grows steadily, the press does not care. People who point at the problem are mocked, called “Gretini” by the newspapers owned by the right parties. Being “Gretini” the fusion of the name “Greta” and “cretini”, that means “Idiots”. The citizens themselves do not care. As if it were the natural price to pay for … what?
To maintain our standard of living, I suppose. (“Our” … or who’s else?) A standard of living based mainly on an unavoidable tribute of blood; it seems. A voluntary tribute? …perhaps.
But also conscious? I would not say so.
Since, who – if not a madman – would put such a mortgage not only on his own future but also on that of the species to which he belongs?
At first glance, it seems completely absurd, instead it is tremendously (and sadly) logical.
Logical, already seen, already said and repeated until nausea.
This “coronavirus” prevents us from consuming that, in the brand-new atheist-agnostic-liberal testament, it is the only true capitalistic sin, in fact. It locks us up in our houses. It may even lead us to reflect over our fragility, the uselessness and emptiness of our existences.
A true crime of lese majesty against the gods of capitalism and their high priests.
Deaths from pollution, on the contrary, are not deaths, they are a statistical indicator. A graph.
A sign that everything is fine, that the production keeps the expected growing rhythms, that the products are bought, disposed, incinerated – not reused, so that they can be bought back by producers-consumers happily sure to be part of a perfect mechanism that will take care of them, from education to disposal.
The only possible way of living.
Systematic destruction of the environment, childhood malformations and young cancer patients are only small side effects of an (in)finite growth fever. Dust that falls from the (short term) graphs of a chemical reaction which is supposed – axiomatically – to continue eternally even though its reagents have long run out.
But, you know, the long run doesn’t exist in capitalist theories.
And speculative abstraction is not a subject of study at Bocconi (most famous liberalist and private university in Italy… but I guess that writing Oxford or Yale would be the same…).
Let someone else take care of it. Certainly not philosophy, because it is not productive – merely a residual superstition, a glimpse in the history of thought; not science, because it does not exist except when it is useful to manipulate the crowds; certainly not religion, unless it still helps to narcotize the masses.
Maybe politics, as long as it can operate without funds, because neo-liberalism asks for streamlining, privatization, reduction and, in any case, to prevent multinationals from paying taxes.
Beside, everyone knows that modern State requires making the provision of a service economically viable – which is a perfect oxymoron passed off as a pub-dogma!
So no prevention, because it is based on hypothetical and abstract dangers without immediate or countable economic returns, no education, unless it is essential, pragmatic and absolutely not speculative; good enough to produce faithful and silent technicians, confident in the divine origin of the formulas they apply and free of doubts about everything else.
And as for medicine … well, in the absence of religion it is definitely a good way to tie the masses: work, keep silent and consume and you will have your dose of multi-coloured pills.
And, perhaps, even a few years of retirement and an average life expectancy that we will decide (rationally, of course) by crossing the dividend graph with that of expenses.
It is clear that I am a nuisance, perhaps, even – God protect us – an out-of-time anarchist; but who knows that the coronavirus does not bring, in addition to a lot of trouble and some mourning, also the shadow of a new thought.
Since, now that you are afraid, who are you going to ask for help?
Do you expect aid coming from the neoliberal gurus, from the servants of the Bilderberg Group or maybe from what remains of a health system that was among the best and most democratic in the world and that survives, between systematic and deliberate cuts and defamations, only thanks to the sacrifice of the few doctors and nurses who, goodness to them, still resist?
(Well, clearly this is valid in Italy and few other nations… if you live in the U.S., probably you already know you can just count on the Second Amendment.)
Good quarantine to everyone.
