Pandemic truths

Two truths at least are certain in this post-pandemic world: 1) Humans have so dominated the world, destroying much of non-human life and systems in the process, that the world has struck back in recoil and seeks to readjust the balance; 2) Human sustenance systems are far too large and unwieldly to be effective and the smaller the system or operation the more efficient, useful, friendly, or supportive.

The first truth is of course the one that the current organizers of the world, the ones who have brought this crisis upon us, do not want to believe. To believe that, they would have to acknowledge that the global-liberal-capitalist-guided environment they have worked centuries – or, to be more precise, 75 years – to create has so damaged the environment that it can no longer function.

It is not merely that we have engineered a world warming so fast, with ancillary die-outs of so many other species and ecosystems, that it has finally caught up to us, the bipedal species that thought it was in charge. It is more, that we have almost eliminated all other species than those that serve us (only less than 5 per ent of the species on earth can be called wild anymore) to the point that the earth needs to seek a way to reestablish a balance. A global pandemic is a simple way to begin that.

Now it is hardly surprising that the Henry Kissingers and other satraps of the present system want to create another worldwide capitalist world, only this time a little more dictatorial than in the past to crush any nasty pandemic that might stand in the way of progress. But the earth is telling us that the capitalist world is using her up, fouling her systems, killing off species useful and needful, and no one species however sapient can be allowed to do that.

It is saying that here we have the one chance to reorder our values, restructure our relationship with nature, create an economic arrangement that does not depend upon using the treasures we call resources as recklessly as we can. The one chance to reposition our species as one among many, and a humble one at that, instead of thinking ourselves superior.

The second truth follows neatly from the first. Clearly all the large systems we have evolved to solve our problems and govern our lives have failed, some most dramatically so. When a crisis hit, no one depended on international institutions to do anything useful – no one even thought the UN should meet! – and all the globalists at once fell upon national governments to save them, ignoring the whole edifice of internationalism cobbled up since World War II.

But as it turned out most of those national systems sputtered and backstepped and went around in circles too, the only partial exceptions being oriental-rooted autocracies in the East. The US dithered for days without any leadership and no one knew whether the medical side or the political side would step up; in the end it was a little bit of both and a lot of neither.

Excerpted from: 'Two Truths from the Pandemic No One Is Mentioning'.

Counterpunch.org