A pox on all your houses

This is the same title that I used about fifteen years ago, inside one of my self-published books, to describe my rejection of all the world’s most important ideologies, whether religious or secular. Those that are always being used to justify the rotten behaviour of the tiny coterie of powerful people and their hangers-on, towards all the world’s much more numerous, but considerably less powerful people. In the original version of this proverb, the “pox” was a disease (such as smallpox or chicken pox) that was supposed to be visited upon both sides (or “houses”) of any particularly ridiculous controversy between two equally obnoxious opponents. In my version, it applies especially to such thoroughly atavistic, and inter-related, ideologies as neoliberalism and neofascism, that have become more and more hegemonic with every passing year. Since they were first introduced into the world, together, by the Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), one of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite allies, and his libertarian friends from the US empire (“the Chicago boys”). Thereby signalling an end to the worldwide, anti-fascist entente that had been formed during the Second World War.

With the onset of the current, even more worldwide, coronavirus crisis, the pox that I was referring to during the opening years of this century has stopped being only a metaphor and has become very much a part of reality itself. My original idea was to use that metaphor to also express my disdain for such other once-powerful ideologies as totalitarian communism. During the Cold War (1945-1991), that ideology was supposed to have been promoted by all the ruling bureaucracies of the Soviet bloc, including the USSR (1922-1991) and, at least originally, the PRC (People’s Republic of China). None of those regimes, however, ever practised anything remotely resembling the dictionary definition of what communism is supposed to be all about. So far as I can tell, all of them have now been replaced by governments combining support for the selfsame neoliberalism and neofascism that are also being practised these days by all the governments that used to belong to the former “Western” bloc of nations, led by the same US empire that supported Pinochet. Talk about ideological convergence!

Not only that, but the Chinese regime, which still bears its deliberately misleading title, adopted away back in 1949, has now become the original home of the COVID-19 virus, that was officially recognized as such only a few months ago. The worldwide pandemic most certainly could have been prevented if the Chinese government had really wanted to close down, as some ruling party officials apparently tried to do, all the wild-animal meat-markets that have apparently existed for centuries in the most poverty-stricken regions of that country. People all over the world are now suffering from the effects of that virus, and not just in China, either because they became sick themselves, or because they know someone who was stricken by the disease. The ever-increasing numbers of dead people have been deliberately under-reported in dozens of different countries, the overall number of victims greatly increasing death rates all over the world, especially for older people like myself. Not only directly from the virus itself, but also indirectly through the deliberate, worldwide, negligence of normal treatment of all the other diseases, to make way in the overworked hospitals for those stricken by the pandemic.

Literally billions of people have also had their lives turned upside down as a result of all the efforts at containing the disease, particularly through mass confinement, which has also had a devastating effect on the entire world economy. Dozens of countries have racked up enormous government deficits and greatly increased long-term debt burdens, that will undoubtedly plague millions of younger people’s lives for decades to come. The world’s most vulnerable categories of the population are already suffering more than anyone else, as they always do in every such crisis, with the result that most parts of the world have been set back several decades in their development strategies. Wiping out any of the gains that some of them may have managed to make over the past forty years, in spite of the constantly worsening effects of  neoliberalism and neofascism in almost every country. All in all, the virus has brought with it a major escalation in popular misery in every part of today’s world. Hardly the sort of thing that a self-described “communist” party was supposed to have been bringing about, not only at home but everywhere else as well.

As a result, all those people who want to blame China for having made a monstrous error in its socio-economic policies are entirely justified in so doing, as long as they do not succumb to any of the exotic conspiracy theories about how the Chinese rulers are supposedly using the virus to help them take over control of the entire world. To be sure, they do seem to be trying to take over the world, as soon as possible, but I doubt very much that they would also be dumb enough to try to control something as eminently uncontrollable as a virus. In any case, ultra-stupid leaders of many other countries, such as the one who runs the USA, have recently taken to blaming all of their own problems on the PRC, the “Trumpster” (rhymes with “dumpster”) himself threatening to cut off all ties with China. Which would be exceedingly difficult to do these days, given the fact that almost total reliance on China’s manufacturing industries was, and still is, the central characteristic of the joint neoliberal/neofascist alliance between those two empires, now more than forty years old. That was originally designed not only to get rid of a serious rival, the already declining Soviet empire, once and for all, but more importantly I suppose, to avoid paying “inflated wages” to millions of supposedly “unpatriotic” US workers.

Just as ridiculous as any Trump tweet are all the knee-jerk reactions of ordinary, anti-Chinese racists all over the world, including those here in North America, who stop “Chinese-looking” people in the street every day to berate them, even in some cases to physically attack them, in “retaliation” for what they have supposedly done to the world. Very conveniently refusing to realize that none of those Chinese-looking people outside China, nor for that matter any of the real Chinese people inside China, who do not belong in any way to that country’s very small circle of rulers, can possibly be blamed for doing anything of the sort. In a totalitarian dictatorship, and there are several dozen of them scattered all over the world, every significant act of every citizen falls under the exclusive control of that country’s ruling class, no matter which ideology it is officially supposed to be upholding.

Canadian rock musician Bryan Adams was also taken to task recently for having posted an anti-Chinese rant on social media, using a lot of swear words, for which he has since abundantly apologized. He has nevertheless been denounced by many other social-media addicts as a racist for so doing, as reported in the “Montreal Gazette” (May 13, 2020). Which is true enough on the face of it, just as long as everyone acknowledges, after all, that a straightforward critique of Chinese policy toward so-called “wet markets”, minus any exaggerations and any swear words, is not racist in and of itself. Racism does not include repeating something that most scientists in the world, including most of those in China, believe to be true. It would be just as racist to avoid telling the truth about Chinese policy merely in order to make dictators like Xi Jinping feel good about themselves. Racism, after all, consists just as much in attributing something good to some particular ethnic group, but also something bad to some other group, for any non-scientific reason based on exclusivism.

In Québec, for example, it would be racist to claim that China is solely responsible for all the deaths attributed to COVID-19 in any of our long-term care centres. Rather than pointing out that the virus would not have succeeded in killing off nearly as many thousands of people if succeeding Québec governments had not set up a very dangerous, poorly-run, disgusting system of (non-existent) care based almost exclusively on the profit motive. Not only in the horrendous, privately-run centres but also in the public ones, that were supposed to copy the private system as much as possible by doing everything they could to avoid any cost over-runs or deficits. Thereby turning the social-democratic welfare state into a neoliberal/neofascist state instead. Canada’s federal government also contributed to those deaths by spending a much smaller percentage of money nowadays than they used to be spending a couple of decades ago (twenty percent instead of fifty percent), to help the provinces pay for their ever more expensive health and social services.

In the current crisis, people born since 1965 cannot remember a time when governments were supposed to be kind to ordinary people, and to protect them from the excesses of capitalism, rather than doing exactly the opposite. So those younger people (most of the entire world population nowadays) have a tendency to think that it makes no difference if all the world’s old and sick people, living in long-term “care” centres, are in private or public institutions. They also think the same sort of thing about public or private day-care centres, or public or private schools, and so on. For the simple reason, that since the joint onslaught of neoliberalism and neofascism, most governments tend to treat people under their care just as poorly as any profit-making enterprise ordinarily does.

None of that, however, can be used by the Chinese government to legitimize what seems to be a well-orchestrated campaign inside Canada, as well as inside many other countries, to convince everyone outside China that any time that anyone criticizes the Chinese leadership for any reason at all, those critics are necessarily guilty of racism. Instead, what everyone ought to be doing in this kind of controversy is to honestly try to tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” all the time. Not just in the fake-news fashion that US supporters of Donald Trump are always doing, while pretending to be doing exactly the opposite, but for real this time. Not all criticism of China is necessarily racist, just like not all criticism of Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic; some of it is, and some of it is not, it all depends on what is being said and in what context. Accusing the USA of practising imperialism because of its ultra-domineering behaviour, in many different parts of the world, is every bit as justified as accusing the PRC of also adopting imperialist behaviour. Even if in so doing it has not yet killed quite as many ordinary people (at least outside of China proper) as the USA has in recent decades.

In the same way that there is nothing racist about criticizing Muslim terrorism, or any other kind of religious terrorism, for which the number of dead victims also keeps constantly increasing, even though the number of victims being created by the virus these days may turn out to be a lot greater. Likewise, criticizing fundamentalist Muslim women for wearing religious clothing that deliberately sends an anti-feminist message, promoting what some people call voluntary slavery, is perfectly legitimate, even if the wearing of such clothing is obviously not nearly as violent as terrorist attacks always are. Nor is covering one’s face for atavistic, religious reasons at all the same as covering one’s face for rational, sanitary reasons during a pandemic.

In other words, neofascist behaviour is neofascist behaviour, no matter who does it. Reactionary people who deliberately ignore social distancing nowadays, whether they do it for religious reasons or for ultra-individualist reasons, are not contributing to any worthwhile cause. Criticizing people for such anti-social behaviour ought not to be condemned, it ought to be praised instead, since it is in everyone’s best interest. Let’s get real here. Those who enjoy running around, like some ultra-conservatives in the USA, proclaiming that “We are NOT all in this together”, are making the same kind of mistake (although not always with the same horrible consequences) that the Chinese big-shots made when they refused to shut down those wild-animal meat-markets, in the first place.

A lot of eternally optimistic people are also saying over and over again these days that we humans ought to be taking advantage of the current crisis, which is to say using the pandemic as an opportunity to solve many of our other long-lasting problems once and for all. For example, they want all the world’s governments to join together in promoting much more useful international cooperation than ever before, which would include putting an end to such abominations as the several dozen regional wars still going on in various parts of the world. As well as abandoning racist attitudes toward the ever-increasing numbers of people fleeing particularly devastating forms of imposed deprivation. While at the same time allowing all the world’s governments, even the most impoverished ones, to build up thoroughly adequate, nationalized stocks of appropriate medical equipment for the remainder of this pandemic, as well as for any future ones.

Those optimists, however, never seem to get around to explaining how exactly we are supposed to accomplish such major feats nowadays, not only the ones identified above but also all the other ones. Such as totally reversing the long-lasting trend toward environmental degradation of the natural world, COVID-19 being a particularly devastating consequence of that same degradation. Or reversing the always more horrendously huge income gap between the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor. Do those optimists really believe that all the world’s most important problems really came about by accident and were not actually put into place on purpose by the world’s richest, most powerful and most influential people? Do they genuinely expect such people to just sit idly by in the near future and watch the world’s governments, somehow completely liberated from the neoliberal/neofascist tandem, put into place the exact opposite of what the world’s most powerful people have been trying so hard to accomplish for so long?

It seems to me much more likely that all the world’s most antediluvian leaders, not just the political leaders but those in every other sphere as well, will decide instead to profit from the current world crisis to get rid of any existing vestiges of democracy, or social equality, or feminism, or resistance to racism and imperialism, that still persists in various different places. Why would neofascist governments like the one in Colombia, or neoliberal corporations like Amazon, abandon their tried-and-true strategies from the recent past, in order to adopt completely different policies instead? What’s in it for them? Where is the extremely well-organized, worldwide, afraid-of-nothing, human liberation movement springing up in every possible country, that would be capable of getting rid of so many different kinds of oppressors once and for all? And replacing them with what kind of new world order that would be capable of resisting every possible urge to replace the old oppressors with just another repeat performance of exactly the same sort of thing all over again, as already happened to the world’s only theoretically communist, democratic-socialist and national-liberation movements?

In order to do something really different on our next attempt at changing the world, we have to realize that there is more to being a “good neoliberal/neofascist reactionary” than just the reasons that have so far been listed for all the different kinds of ultra-elitist behaviour. For example, the current worldwide income gap between a very few people now “earning” 100 million US dollars per day, and a very large number of people still earning only one or two dollars per day, was not just caused, as is so often claimed, by extreme greed. In my opinion, all those people who consider themselves to be much more important than others are really searching for the immense shot of dopamine (apparently controlled by the striatum) that comes only from deliberately mistreating as many other human beings as possible, as much as humanly possible, over an extended period of time. In other words, a form of poorly-disguised sadism, on a world scale.

As a result, the deliberately reactionary people operating in the economic sphere of activity (otherwise known as big business) could not have been expected to be satisfied for long by the relatively more limited rates of profit that were available to them back in the “thirty glorious years” (1945-1975), prior to the onslaught of neoliberalism and neofascism. Especially when they were being taxed by dozens of different governments at a much higher level than they have been more recently. They desperately wanted to get back to the rates of all-for-themselves profit that they used to enjoy during the (partly fictitious) “gilded age” of total economic liberalism (laissez-faire) that presumably prevailed throughout the nineteenth century. They were not at all satisfied by the “neomercantilist” expansion of government “interventions” into the capitalist economy, and society, that took place in varying degrees between the 1880s and the 1980s, under the influence of inter-imperialist colonial rivalry, the two world wars, the Great Depression and the most important military interventions of the Cold War (Korea, Vietnam, etc.).

A similar kind of analysis should also be entered into when social scientists try to explain other forms of planned atavism on the part of any other sections of the minuscule minorities that we choose to call “world leaders”, each in its respective sphere of activity. (Which, as all keen observers of society realize, are not at all so neatly separated from every other sphere as those analytical requirements would seem to dictate.) Political leaders of entire countries, for example, are not just interested in extreme political control over their respective societies for reasons of efficiency, or to promote excellence, or any of the other b. s. reasons constantly being offered up by the world’s most successful dictators (the ones who don’t always appear to be dictators). They will use whatever means that different societies make available to them, in order to get into power and to stay in power forever.

In countries using some form of “more-than-one-party on the ballot” electoral system, that could mean manipulating millions of under-educated voters into believing that some particularly stupid elitist individual will help them fight against “the liberal swamp” currently running society. Even when that individual in fact merely represents the swampiest section of the same ruling elite, rather than any genuine alternative. Donald Trump’s neofascist electoral slogan, “Make America great again” (that he borrowed from ultra-right-wing agitator Steve Bannon), also seems to have inspired dozens of other political leaders all over the world, especially in countries that have always avoided copying the USA’s particularly uncertain kind of electoral system. Who are all adopting very similar slogans anyway, such as “Make China great again”, “Make Russia great again”, “Make Iran great again”, “Make Egypt great again”, “Make Hungary great again”, “Make India great again”, “Make Brazil great again”, and so on and so forth, all over the world.

Even most national liberation movements, that initially promised not to hog all the social-development funds in the country exclusively for the people at the top, also ended up instead trying to make Angola, Algeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe and dozens of other such countries “great again”. Every country currently being run by an exceptionally narrow-minded political elite, that does not want to run the risk of sharing power at some point, even with other people very similar to themselves, has found its own version of that Trump slogan quite useful indeed. None of the world’s politicians these days seem the least bit interested in doing anything at all to bring about real social change. Not now, not ever.

To be sure, all the most important chieftains of the world’s most important private enterprises, such as Jeff Bezos from Amazon or Jack Ma from Alibaba (whether or not they are still officially running the giant companies that they initially founded), are at least as elitist and at least as anti-social, as any of the political leaders directly or indirectly referred to in the above list of countries. They all came into power, and managed to stay in power for a very long time, pretty much in the same way as did the Mark Zuckerberg character who was depicted in the movie about Facebook, which is to say without being unduly influenced by any considerations having to do with such “sissy slogans” as “fair play” and “due diligence”. The most successful of those “business politicians” being the ones who, once they have clawed their way to the top, manage to protect their powerful positions by seeking even greater adulation from the world’s ordinary proletarians. Such as playing God by becoming “one of the world’s leading philanthropists”, and giving as much money to their favourite worthy causes as most large governments are capable of giving.

This brings us to all those other world leaders also playing God in the original sense, running all the world’s major religions as a kind of necessary ideological back-up for making sure that billions of people all over the world are tricked into believing that the heavens themselves are requiring them to support their political leaders and their business leaders, simultaneously. Such as the hundreds of millions of evangelical Christians in countries like the USA, adhering to such popular slogans as “God helps those who help themselves”. Which is a kind of pentecostal obfuscation to the effect that it is perfectly okay in everyday life to avoid treating “thy neighbour as thyself”, and to get rich at other people’s expense instead, just so long as one nevertheless believes in the right kind of Christianity and contributes once a week to missionary efforts aimed at spreading “the Word”. Not to forget interpreting certain passages from the Bible literally, such as the one about supporting Israel no matter what, even if the people running that country these days could not possibly represent in any viable way the Israeli people living there back in ancient times.

Every other major religion in this world is also run by the same kind of people, who pick up on dozens of very different kinds of supernatural myths invented hundreds or thousands of years ago in dozens of different cultures, and attempt to use those ancient or medieval myths to direct millions of other people’s lives nowadays. Every ultra-right-wing political orientation, and every voluntary-slave support group for every form of private or state capitalism all over the world, depends on the capacity that religious leaders possess to constantly reinterpret age-old belief systems in creative ways. To make sure that billions of ordinary people can be accused of some form of blasphemy toward Christianity, or Islam, or Judaism, or Hinduism, or Sikhism, or Buddhism, or Confucianism, or Shintoism, or animism, etc., whenever they “stray from the paths of righteousness” and end up refusing to kowtow to their country’s, or their culture’s, designated leaders.

From a moral standpoint at least, all these different kinds of official behaviour could perhaps be seen as a kind of modern, or social application, of the deliberate, “legacy”, slaughtering of the world’s largest mammals. That was apparently carried out by our hunting and gathering ancestors (according to such well-known historians as Yuval Noah Harari), in practically every region gradually occupied by human beings during the first 300 000 years of our existence as a species. From a social point of view, that is to say directed largely against other human beings, it even more closely resembles the attitudes of the various ruling classes that have lorded it over the “inferior” classes (slaves, peasants, artisans, workers and so on), for the past 6000 years, in all the urban-based societies known as “civilizations”. That were gradually set up, in most parts of the world, following the agricultural revolution and, much later on, the industrial revolution, as depicted in such monumental works as Chris Harman’s 728-page reference work, “A people’s history of the world”, published in 1999. In other words, it looks like the sort of organized sadism that I was describing earlier has been going on, although not in such a sophisticated fashion as in more recent periods of history, for quite a long time.

In any case, it seems to me that the world’s most atavistic political, economic and cultural leaders nowadays, promoting such ideologies as neoliberalism and neofascism in various different ways, are certainly the most important people exhibiting anti-social behaviour these days. But they are definitely not the only deplorable people behaving badly in this world, just because they seem to possess an over-active striatum, running amok chasing dopamine fixes all the time, in a particularly determined fashion. There are also quite a large number of other very well-known people chasing fame every bit as obsessively as the top-ranking politicians and the big-shot investors promoting shareholder-rights. This other group includes highly successful singers, actors, artists and players performing in the world’s richest professional sports teams, who spend a great deal more of their time self-promoting than they spend honing their craft. Some of these people also use philanthropy as a particularly useful method of self-aggrandizement, but most of them just sit around pretending to dislike their favourite paparazzi instead.

The exaggerated search for dopamine, at all costs, also applies to dozens of other categories of harmful human behaviour, including self-inflicted harm, which takes place more or less equally in all the different social classes. Such as in the unfortunate cases of extremely obese people, some of them weighing hundreds of kilograms, who keep on shovelling food into their mouths all the time, no matter what the outcome. Or, even more obviously, those other unfortunates who are constantly consuming large quantities of psychotropic drugs (appropriately called “dope”), quite often giving themselves (accidentally or otherwise) a fatal overdose of some toxic substance, or mixture of substances. Drugs like alcohol and tobacco are also over-consumed in huge quantities by many other unfortunate people, in spite of all the publicity about moderation that many public agencies are constantly dishing out.

Self-inflicted harm, however, is definitely not the only kind of sadism practised by people belonging to any one, or to all of the social classes. As has been pointed out recently in hundreds of news reports, the confinement strategies used against the coronavirus have also had the unintended consequence of setting up an ideal situation for particularly violent people, almost all of them male, to beat up, terrorize and otherwise dominate the women in their lives. Sometimes some of those women in the human pecking order will pass on some of that violence to their children as well, or even originate it in some cases, but in most cases it is the ape-men themselves who also beat up on the children.

Many of those dominant males are simultaneously taking advantage of this unforeseen opportunity to engage in sexual sadism as well, even more than they were already doing beforehand. These sexual sadists are probably the category among the various, socially undifferentiated, kinds of rotten behaviour that resembles the most the socially dominant categories previously mentioned. Especially the world’s most important private-capitalist and state-capitalist founders, and practitioners, of neoliberalism and neofascism. In the sense that sexual sadists do not like their victims to participate in any form of (imposed) sexually related desire, but instead insist on mistreating their victims to the greatest degree possible, because that is what gives them by far the greatest pleasure. Domination is much more important to people with a severely over-developed sense of self-worth than is mere exploitation, because it helps them “prove” (at least from their jaundiced point of view) that their victims are much less important than they themselves obviously are, and therefore “deserve” to be dominated and exploited to the nth degree.

This is the kind of overweening elitism that is being promoted whenever establishment organizations focus on the search for what they call “excellence”. For them, promoting excellence does not mean just performing ordinary tasks in an exceptional way. It really means convincing other people not to fight against their oppressors, but instead to join forces with their illustrious leaders and to “solve” all of humanity’s problems by supporting their betters fully. Using consensual conformism and deliberately avoiding critical thinking, except when a truncated form of it can be reserved for the denunciation of “misleading”, anti-elitist ideas.

An excellent example of this sort of thing, during the current coronavirus crisis, is to treat everyone on the front lines of the fight against the virus, such as nurses and orderlies working in long-term care centres, as heroes. Their job, helping older people who have been infected with the virus as well as with such previously existing conditions as diabetes, then becomes not just a job but an outstanding example of devotion and bravery, “in the face of death”, sometimes “making the supreme sacrifice” for their nation. Which means treating those front-line workers in exactly the same way as the millions of actually rather ordinary, conscripted soldiers were treated during and after the Second World War. Who, most of the time, were not heroes at all and in fact survived the war by getting out of the way as often as they could.

It is quite similar in many ways to the Stakhanovite movement that started up in the USSR during the forced industrialization of the 1930s, when a worker called Alexey Stakhanov out-performed his assigned quota of factory work, and was then turned into a model “hero of socialism” by the Soviet regime. In other words, normal, regular work was considered insufficient, and people were encouraged instead to develop (paradoxically) anti-social, anti-union behaviour by deliberately working much harder than everyone else. Thereby making it possible for the regime to completely ignore all its bureaucratic failures by relying on “heroes” to fill the gap between what their system was normally capable of doing (over and above just staying in power), and what their system had to do to ensure group survival. Not to mention simultaneously making all the ordinary workers look like slackers by comparison.

Curiously enough, the over-performance of all these public-relations-created, long-term care-centre heroes in the current crisis, as well as all the war-time soldier heroes and the Soviet worker heroes of days gone by, also has a lot in common with the ultra-individualist philosophy of extreme reactionaries like Ayn Rand. Currently represented in Donald Trump’s USA by such well-known libertarian senators as the conveniently-named Rand Paul. The point being that we are all supposed to be solving the problems created by COVID-19, as well as by the ecological crisis, the economic crisis and the inequality crisis, etc., by adopting heroic ultra-individualism and relying on our favourite “guardian angels” to do whatever is necessary. Including dying off in great numbers if need be, to offset all the problems created by neoliberalism and neofascism over the past several decades.

This false-heroic attitude, relying on someone else’s heroism, is just as much a part of the strategy always being adopted by ultra-elitist individualists in their constantly reiterated tendency to always blame everyone on the bottom of society for everything that is going wrong. “Hit them while they’re down!” means not giving any more public money to “problem people” of all sorts. Such as the chronically poor, those exhibiting the wrong skin colour, especially poor, often non-white, women with way too many children, some of them coming from unknown fathers. Or alcoholics, or the mentally ill, or the chronically unemployed, or those billions of people happening to live in any one of Donald Trump’s “sh—hole countries”, in short anyone caught “forcing polite society” to bail them all out. Which, of course, serves to hide the fact that the top of society is dominated by legions of money-grubbing, tax-evading champions of slavery and, when that is not available, champions of paying the lowest wages possible to their workers. Legions that are dominated at the very tip-top by the leading denizens of the “financial services industry”, located as far away as possible from any social utility. Just the word “social” all by itself makes those excellent people’s skin crawl.

These exceptionally “heroic” ideas all being delivered to the ignorant masses every day by authority figures in government, or by senior bureaucrats in the health and education “industries” and or by the CEOs of large, impersonal corporations, in the kind of double-speak that comes from continually consulting public-relations and communications experts. So that all the world’s most important messages, concerning the COVID crisis and all the other related crises, are always coming at people with real information constantly mixed in with “little white lies”, half-truths, insinuations and conspiratorial scenarios, in an immense jumble of contradictory facts and figures. Each one of those authority figures at the end of the day telling as many fibs as Donald Trump is capable of tweeting in an average night.

In the midst of a pandemic of this importance, one would expect even the world’s most intransigent individualists, at least those at the top, to take a more intelligent approach to what is happening to the world that they own, or at least that they feel they own. The same pro-business conservatives are always arguing that if any private company behaved like any (fictitious) government agency in some particular situation, it would go bankrupt, or its executives would be sent to jail. Curiously, however, the folks from big business have themselves been behaving a lot like the fictitious government agency in that oft-repeated, pro-business argument.

Because they completely ignored all the warnings issued over and over again by the catastrophe experts from the pro-business Davos organization, warning them over the past few years that they should be preparing to deal with upcoming epidemics, and pandemics, in the near future. The same type of warnings were also repeated by the USA’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as by well-informed individuals like Bill Gates. Most of the people at the top nevertheless continued to apply neoliberal, just-in-time strategies for the production of everything, including letting most basic medical equipment be produced exclusively in China. It turns out that the pro-business people are being hoisted on their own petard, having behaved every bit as stupidly as the fictitious government agency in their own anti-government argument!

Not to mention the fact that any discussion about epidemics and pandemics always includes dozens of references to what is known as “herd immunity”, during which human beings act like any other animals by developing, or not developing, sufficient antibodies to provide people with protection against such diseases. Among the world’s most important big-business people, there are quite a few of them who are successful ranchers, who presumably know a thing or two about herd immunity, just by taking care of huge herds of semi-domesticated animals. Those ranchers make a profit out of exploiting those herds not just during every quarter-year (just-in-time) but instead year after year, decade after decade.

If we want to be really cynical about all this, we could therefore presume that the world’s most important big businesses ought to be treating their customers, in this case human beings, at least as well any other large herd of animals. To be sure, capitalism, whether private or state, does indeed seem to be a horrible, inhumane system, but even from a strictly capitalist point of view, one would feel that economically-enlightened, big-time investors would somehow be able to treat their human herds (the rest of us) just well enough that we would not start dying off as quickly as in the current crisis. Or becoming so afraid of dying that we start running around ruining the world economy with “stupid, anti-capitalist” ideas about social distancing. After all, we have to presume that the majority of the world’s big-time investors are not stupid as Donald Trump, whose debts have become larger than his personal fortune, and who therefore needs to remain president of the USA long enough to get his own business ventures back into a profitable situation.