The secret of our capitalist world's functioning is debt, which is just another way of saying that our wealth will have to be paid for by future generations (be it money, depleted resources, dealing with climate breakdown, species extinction, pollution...).
The US debt clock is a scary thing to look at, and more so if you look at the bottom and see that unfunded liabilities, ie those with nothing to back them up, are running at $147,506,000,000,000 ($148 trillion) at the time of writing. By the time you look at the clock, it will be far higher. We have, over decades of neoliberal creed and austerity (what an Orwellian term that is!) built up the sort of debt that in other times would have been the result of war and destruction.
Our economic system is also one that mercilessly pits one person against another, where we see others as competitors for resources (be it money, housing, the latest iPhone...), not as collaborators in a common project and certainly not as allies in order to stand up to the real enemy, the 1%, whose lifestyle is trashing the planet and which purchases power and ensures that our democracies, with their two competing and identical parties, cannot function as such. We live in a permanent state of literal war (all the large Western nations are participating continually in diverse wars in which yesterday's ally is very often today's enemy), and in a metaphorical permanent war as we compete with others and against our very selves, battling against disease or punishing ourselves with arduous workouts on a treadmill.
Our current belligerent vocabulary of fighting the virus, being all in it together (the little people, that is), taking it on the chin, etc provides a fitting metaphor for the huge debt, ie fitting for a war economy. The debt itself in turn requires a continual state of austerity for the 99%, itself a state of war against the poor and the very vulnerable. As your birth will largely determine your level of wealth, or in other words as meritocracy is a lie, the idea that the poor should shoulder almost all austerity is truly gross.
When I was a child I had a funny graphic-novel T-shirt that had an ill-looking man and his girlfriend asking him, "Is it angst, Jim, or too much beer?" Now, we are indeed most of us almost clinically alcoholic, like the inhabitants of the USSR at the moment of its decline, enjoying nothing - literally nothing - as much as sinking wearily onto the sofa with a glass, or bottle, of wine. But angst? - there is no room in our world for artistic or alternative visions. Those who cannot man up and march off to work (no CV-19 problem there) and then hurry home, never interacting with others, whether because of street crime or CV-19, to drink a bottle of wine, those people are today termed mentally ill. They will be ruthlessly medicated with antipsychotic drugs that will make them depressed, mad and bad; or thrown out into the street - either way the contribution they could have made to our overly predatorial and funcional society will have been neutralised.
Today's belligerent words, whether it be "war on terror", "battling cancer" or the "war against the coronavirus", these are all empty concepts, but full of emotion nonetheless. Edward Bernays built on Freud's insights, and created the propaganda industry, what we like to call advertising. We are animals manipulated by our emotions and fear overrides everything. We now, in our CV-19 panic, have a war on death!
The physical War on Terror was called, rather aptly "Shock and Awe", synonyms of what we were supposed to be fighting against, although we were in fact inflicting great harm (and shock and awe) on the planet's poorest people. Those who have cancer and die just haven't "fought" enough, although the problem is their own body, parts of which are removed and taken away in a futile show of making them whole again. And governments fighting against a virus - what does that even mean?
Almost the only ones who are dying in this war are old, infirm people, dying alone, scared witless by the incessant propaganda on TV and by the Star Wars-clad medical personnel around them, intubated, inarticulate and in horrendous loneliness, without so much as a cup of tea and chocolate biscuit to ease their passing. This is what our decadent civilisation has to offer as quality of life: useless, repetitive studies, followed by unmeaningful, precarious, stressful work, followed by illness, followed by painful and terrifying death.
Did the 3,000 years following the Ancient Greeks' ideal of a "good life" lead us to this?
