Page 7 - Issue 14

The bluff of neo-liberalism must be called out

…The coronavirus is an event of a magnitude that
we struggle to grasp, not only because of its
planetary scale, not only because of the speed of
the contamination, but also because institutions
whose titanic power we never previously
questioned have been brought to their knees in a
matter of few weeks. The primitive world of deadly
plagues erupted into the sanitized and advanced
world of nuclear energy, laser surgery and digital
technology. Even in wartime, cinemas and bars
have continued to function, but the normally
bustling cities of Europe have now become eerie
ghost towns, with their residents all in hiding. As
Albert Camus put it, in “The Plague,” “all these
changes were, in one sense, so fantastic and had
been made so precipitately that it wasn’t easy to
regard them as likely to have any permanence.”

From air travel to museums, the pulsating heart of
our civilization has been shut down. Freedom, the
modern value that trumps all others, has been
suspended, and not because of a new tyrant, but
because of fear, the emotion that overrides all
others. The world has become, overnight,
unheimlich – uncanny, emptied of its familiarity. Its
most comforting gestures – shaking of hands,
kissing, hugging, eating with others – have turned
into sources of anxiety and danger.

…Crises foreground existing mental and political
structures, and at the same time they challenge
them. A structure, whether economic or mental), is