A Mackellar Girls’ (public) School student protesting about her cancelled Yr 10 2022 graduation ceremony, in which she was to be awarded a dance award. The ceremony was cancelled because a number of girls turned up to school with fake nails/manicures, thus violating the uniform code. Our local, regional public high school often experiences multiple lockdowns per week due to extreme violence.
I live in regional Australia and my kid goes to a private, independent school. The entire debate around private schooling in Australia is oriented around urban schools and urban children. This makes sense – most people live in urban areas, so they’re the biggest chunk of the demographic.
I’m a strong proponent of the public school system, but the reality is that where I live, the difference between sending your kid to a public school, and sending them to a private school, is having a teacher in the classroom. Many kids at our local public high school don’t have access to a maths teacher, for instance. I know two teenagers who didn’t have a maths teacher for an entire year (year 9). This actually makes quite a difference to your education, unsurprisingly. Other classes are supervised by teacher aides, but no teachers. The purpose of school teeters towards ‘childcare’ once you remove teachers from the equation.
For ‘gifted’ children the public school offers an online school, hosted in a small, dark computer lab, where the nerds run the gauntlet to slide in the door before getting hammered. For everyone else, there’s no ‘online’ option.
Our local public high school has a unit at the back of the school where children with behavioural problems are housed. This is effectively a lock up. It is known as, ‘the cage’. It holds approximately 90 students, one third of the school’s student body. There’s no teaching going on in there, obviously, but these kids are removed from the rest of the student body.
Half of the high school aged children in our area attend private high schools, compared to about 40% in NSW. Our region is characterised as a low socio-economic area and I would strongly suspect that regional areas would have the highest level of kids at private schools, despite having the least ability to pay the fees.
Our local public high school (one of two in the region) has facilities that put the private schools to shame. Multiple rounds of ‘capital funding announcables’ provide periodic upgrades. The problem of course, is that there aren’t enough staff. Teachers are paid relatively well, but not well enough to subject themselves to endless violence from adult sized children, and certainly not well enough to afford to buy a house in the area. Like everywhere, the housing crisis is acute.
Add to that the reality that many children arrive at high school completely uneducated. And, many of the teachers themselves are poorly educated. This is not their fault – we’re now looking at two generations of under-resourced education. This makes for a really, really tough job. It enrages when I hear politicians shift the blame for poor education outcomes onto teachers. The problems are almost entirely structural. Well-paid. educated and supported teachers can do excellent work.
When I hear smarmy toffs like Jane Caro suggesting that everyone who sends their kid to a private school is a boater-donning wanker, all I see is the staggering privilege of a woman can’t imagine that a public high school with 300 kids might not have a maths teacher for a year or two. Jane Caro sits in her lounge room surrounded by houses that cost upwards of 3 million dollars and sneers at regional parents playing 5k a year for private school fees. If I lived in Warringah I’d send my child to the public high school too. I bet they have a maths teacher.
In many smaller regional areas the Catholic schools specifically provide education services that the government simply won’t. The Catholic archdiocese cross-subsidises regional and remote schools with income from the urban counterparts. In terms of utility, that is, ‘bang for buck’, Catholic schools in remote areas probably provide more educational improvement than any other school in Australia.
Of course, this is deeply problematic – this is the church’s ongoing attempt at inculcating generations of young people into the faith – but it is also motivated by charitable intentions. In a Good Australia, schooling would be completely secular.
Next time…..how Foucault changed my view on chaplaincy (and I’m still a left-wing atheist)
Disclaimer, first up – I’m not a social worker and I don’t know much about training to become one other than knowing it requires a degree. A neighbour is undertaking this degree and informed me that she was required to role-play and pretend to be someone in need of assistance from a social worker, like a homeless person, or perhaps someone who needs to navigate the intersection of aged care and hospital. The aim of the exercise is to present some real-life scenarios and practice techniques for helping people who might be distressed or unable to adequately communicate what they need.
I thought this sounded like a good idea. The students disagreed. They refused on the grounds that it was unethical and potentially harmful to, ‘pretend to be’ something they are not. The teacher accepted their position wholeheartedly and the exercise was abandoned.
The trouble is, social work is about helping people who are almost always different to you. To me, the fact that students refuse to imagine the lives of those less fortunate than themselves represents a triumph of neoliberalism – the celebration of the personalisation of problems. A person who is homeless becomes a “homeless person” – it is an identity, rather than a situation. We know it is now part of their identity because 23 year old social work students refuse to role play, ‘being a homeless person’. They’re not role playing being homeless. They’re role playing being a homeless person.
This conveniently switches the focus from the structural reasons for homelessness, to the homeless person themselves. Everything is oriented around the “homeless person’s” experience of life, obviating the need to examine, discuss or mobilise around the reasons for becoming homeless in the first place.
There are various terms to refer to the cultural shift towards the individual and their identity, and away from the broader structures and institutions of society. Many of these terms have been adopted and bastardised by the far right. We are warned about ‘identitarianism’, where newer identities are dismissed as nothing more than rarefied, gilded narcissism.
In the last week Viktor Orban genially explained this phenomena to a credulous Tucker Carlson, whilst the latter squirmed with delight. In America and the rest of Europe, the focus is on the self. In Hungary, he opined, the central unit of society is self sacrifice to the [Christian] family. We, in the West, are all a bunch of self obsessed cry babies, with no understanding of our broader place in the world, the explicit suggestion being that we should stop supporting Ukraine and all be nicer to Russia because Orban lives next door. Orban’s performance was a master class in populism, playing up accessible, domestic issues (culture war) while ignoring the broader context, (that the US is helping Ukraine to escape from Russia’s control, just like it did with Hungary 50 years ago). Perhaps Orban is hoping for a window-office when Hungary becomes part of Russia again – who knows?
Anyway, my point is that all of these culture wars are nothing more than naked power. Every time someone asserts the terminating clause, ‘I don’t identify as….’ any and all other considerations are rendered null. The idea that one’s personal identity is so sacrosanct it cannot possibly be imagined by another human being has been floating around for a long time, but it’s taken a while for it to realise its full power – the complete sterilisation of political change.
Representing an identity that is not your own opens the door to taking liberties, for sure, and it should not be done lightly. We are right to have championed the views of marginalised perspectives to obtain better insights into how things actually are in the world, and how they differ for different people. However, there’s a point where things get silly – women arguing, for instance, that men cannot be obstetricians (this is a remarkably common position). Men’s and women’s bodies are different in many ways, not just the grosse reproductive stuff. Our organs, endocrine systems, vascular systems……so many things. To suggest that a man cannot be an obstetrician leads us to a place where women cannot ever perform a surgery on men and vice versa. Can we only provide services to people who are exactly like us? Do I need to find a surgeon who is a red head, has working dogs and a motorbike?
Because that’s where this stuff leads. We should always encourage ourselves and others to try to imagine what it is like to walk in someone else’s shoes, to have someone else’s identity. We should listen to others and let it inform our own views. Yes, we might fuck it up, but it’s important to try. The fidelity of identity is the most dangerous game of purity politics.
Are all those YA books about foppish vampires are written by actual teenagers? Or actual vampires?
We are all subject to fanciful narratives that upholster our own sense of self belief. From childhood, we’re told that if we work hard at something we will inevitably improve. Malcolm Gladwell cheerfully informed us of the 10000 hours maxim – that if you spend 10000 hours doing something, you will achieve mastery. What this overlooks is the vastly divergent levels of mastery. Some people, for example, really get the hang of failure.
Mastery can be defined as excellence or competence. Natural or innate talent is the final arbiter of whether we attain excellence or even competence, it is the necessary catalyst for achievement. Almost everyone, however, can put some distance between themselves and their starting point, regardless of their attributes, through simple practice alone.
What we never discuss is the cost.
I am uniquely positioned to observe the myths of mastery. This is because, unlike almost everyone my age, I have never mastered anything, despite applying thousands of hours of effort. I’ve attained some degree of improvement in some things, for sure, but this achievement is infinitesimal. For my entire life, both as a child and an adult, I have taken the orthodox approach – that applying oneself would yield results, and that there would be a linear relationship between the two.
As the years have worn on, I have applied literally thousands of hours to learning languages, sports and music, with breathtakingly unimpressive results. In my 40s I came to realise that perhaps the one thing I am really good at is doggedly working on my latest divertissement in the face of compete failure. The futility of my determination borders on the absurd.
Our culture informs us that this is a laudable thing. Eventually, if we try hard enough, we will improve. Hard work is honourable and productive, an antidote to our presumed feckless moral turpitude. We’re constantly told that we should improve ourselves, but the utility of this – the bang for buck – is discounted or ignored.
There are children at schools across the country who struggle to read. These children are nonetheless forced through the entirety of the school system, humiliated at every turn, constantly cajoled into ‘trying a little harder’ to improve their skills, with minimal results. Time, effort and humiliation are enormous costs, and yet we discount them entirely. We need to think more clearly about counterfactual. What would happen if that kid learned the bare minimum, instead of the theoretical maximum?
I realise of course that there are vast differences in opportunity represented as ‘ability’, and that it is important to ensure that everyone gets a fair shake. Laboriously teaching a young kid to read is important, even if there’s nothing in your mental toolbox but sandwiches, because there might just be more than sandwiches. In other words, your circumstances have an impact on your ability, and the education system should recognise that.
But at some point, usually in the teenage years, it becomes apparent that not everyone is good at everything, and for some, the work involved in a small improvement is simply ludicrous. You can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, but we seem to think there’s something uniquely moral in the attempt, regardless of the amount of time, effort and heartache involved. At the end of the day, the silk purse becomes a polished artefact of one’s hard work, rather than an intrinsically valuable sui generis.
We never talk about giving up, let alone celebrate it. At what point should you give up? In engineering, you would make some kind of cost benefit analysis and make decisions accordingly. In every day life, on the other hand, we give things up with a kind of resignation. We subject ourselves to tech-bro jingoism, we ‘fail upwards’ – which means we’ve also failed to comprehend gravity. We drift away from things, we find other ways to spend our time, we lose interest, we make excuses, we ‘change direction’. We never say things like, ‘I tried really hard to master this, spent thousands of hours on it, and I still suck, therefore, I will stop’.
If there is one upside to the latest iteration of late stage capitalism with its trust-fund babies, lavishly rumpled oligarchs and nickel plated presidents, it is the blatant assertion that effort does not always equal reward. In fact, there is now an entire generation for whom the distance between effort and reward is furnished with the pathos of a Greek tragedy.
My only innate ‘skill’ – stoically pursuing mastery in the face of continued, abject failure – is a representation of the culture in which I grew up, a culture of hard work, self sacrifice etc. etc. As a child I was endlessly told that I was not good at anything, and at best, my sole utility would be eventually realised as compost. This is part of the narrative. You’re supposed to hear this and think – that can’t be right! I will work hard and improve myself! It is folly, a marketing campaign on behalf of the capitalist machine, selling us slightly better images of ourselves and profiting off the effort.
This is not to suggest that everyone is in the same boat. As I said above, I’m not particularly astute, rather, I’m simply in the unique position of being functionally useless at everything, immune to the efforts of studied practice. I suspect that this is actually quite rare – everyone I know is good at something, even if they aren’t an expert. Everyone has at least one thing, usually more, that they find easy, or enjoyable, something they can attain a sense of mastery over. Maybe this will happen to me, but I’ve had a pretty varied life so far, and, as outlined above, I’ve given many things a red-hot go. So far the effort to reward ratio hovers between laughable and pathological.
Mastery, nor self improvement is not the ultimate goal, rather, it is the triumph of a cult of individualism, at once coddled and mined by late capitalism.
The cult of self improvement should be tempered with a frank discussion about the costs of such rampant individualism. As above, I’m bad at everything, but I am generally kind to people, I try hard to help those who are less fortunate, I care about the environment and my community, and I try to be a good parent. These, I think, are overlooked in our headlong rush to worship at the alter of self improvement.
So, my goal for 2024 is to not to embrace failure as a ‘learning experience’, as something personally improving or laudable in itself. It is simply a waste of time. 2024’s motto might be; Fuck This. Find Something Better To Do.
Sometimes, I have to explain things to people. I do this in words, numbers, Greek symbols and dance. The things themselves are not complex. What complicates matters is that most people have had a lifetime of being trained to think about things in a certain way, a kind of scientism-of-everything. We’re all familiar with what this looks like; it’s an internally consistent logic framework where each piece can be related to another. There are heirarchies and eddy currents, inefficiencies and stochastic events, but ultimately, the system is knowable in these terms.
Economics, on the other hand, is merographic rather than nomothetic. It is the cross-fertilisation of an absurdist artwork and a banana.
It’s easy to see how we think it’s a science. Economics likes to tell us that it is reproducible and objective. And it’s scalable. That helps with the illusion.
Let’s talk about the everyone is familiar with – the Philips curve, the hottest thing to come out of Dannevirke since those grey-flecked Norsewear socks.
The Philips curve holds that there is a relationship between wages and unemployment and inflation.
It is intuitively credulous, but does it reliably explain inflation? Indeed, the relationship between wages and prices, if there is one at all is usually overshadowed by confounding factors. But we stick with it. The Reserve Bank of Australia clings to the Philips Curve like a heavily-pilled Stinky-Blankie.
Downtown Dannevirke in the lead-up to the Huia Primary Year Six Swimming Carnival. The influence of the town’s eminent economist, A.W Phillips (1914-1975), is still seen in the opulent grandeur of the town, often called the Monaco of the Ruahines.
In principle the Philips Curve works like this.
We are all familiar with supply and demand. When there is increased demand for goods, the price of the goods goes up. Imagine there’s increased demand for washing machines. The price of washing machines goes up.
Imagine you are the CEO of a big washing machines company. The reason that you charge more for washing machines is because you need to make more washing machines.
You need to employ more workers and buy more materials, like steel and those little plastic display buttons decorated with sanskrit runes that appear to relate to the five different stages of rocks being electrocuted.
Buying more materials to make more washing machines, and buying more workers is a cost. It costs you, the washing machine company, money. And, you’re competing with all the other washing machine companies for materials and workers, so the price of wages goes up.
All the other washing machine companies are doing the same thing because of an increasing in demand for washing machines.
Remember, demand for washing machines is high – the industry cannot supply enough to meet demand. Wages are rising while the industry tries to buy more workers.
At this time, you can charge more for your washing machines, even MORE than it costs to employ workers and buy materials. You’re taking advantage of a shortage. This is profit. Companies have grown attached to it.
So now you’re doing two things; you’re spending more money buying materials and workers BUT you are MORE than offsetting that by charging more for your washing machines. You are making a profit, so that even after you’ve bought all the workers and materials to scale up your washing machine production, you’ve got a healthy profit.
Now, who buys washing machines? People with wages. And if more people have more wages, more money in their pocket, they will want to buy more washing machines. And you know they have more wages in their pocket because the industry os bidding up the wages, as they compete for workers.
So, more wages, or money, is ‘chasing’ more washing machines. You can see how this ends up being a spiral. The demand for washing machines keeps growing because people’s wages keep increasing, and people keep increasing their wages because the washing machine companies are competing for workers.
So, the money that you are being paid ends up being less valuable, because the price of the washing machines keeps increasing in real terms. The price increases just ahead of the increase in wages. Machines get more xxxy. People get paid more but not quite enough so their money is valuable cos shit got more expensive.
There are a few ways of addressing this.
One is to stop wages from increasing. In theory, this will dampen demand, because people won’t have enough money to spend on washing machines. Then the companies will calm down, and the competition for workers will calm down, and wages will stabilise. But it’s unpopular right? Because people are going – hey, I’ve got a serious washing machine addiction to feed. I really need more money. Give me more wages.
Another thing you can do is say, – FOR FUCKSSAKE, YOU DON’T NEED ANOTHER WASHING MACHINE. Instead of spending your money, put it in your bank account. Interest rate rises help encourage people to put their money into a bank account and slow down spending. When the RBA increases the interest rate, it basically means that commercial banks increase their interest rates.
Another way of dealing with this is to say; RIGHT THAT’S IT, WASHING MACHINES CAN COST NO MORE THAN $1500. For fuckssake etc etc.
This is called a price control. This hardly ever happens – it’s used for things like war time shortages to prevent companies from price gauging. In reality what it does is suppress demand by making consumers pay for something through more than just money – like sitting in a queue for hours on end to fill up their car with fuel.
In Australia, we do the first two things. We basically curb spending by increasing interest rates. This means people with savings are more likely to keep their money in the bank and save it (therefore, they’re not driving up the demand of goods) and people with debt spend all their money servicing that debt (paying their mortgage) instead of spending it on washing machines, driving up the demand for washing machines.
We also try to curb wages growth. This has been less effective and as you know there have been a couple of news stories about how there have been wage increases to keep people’s incomes in line with inflation. It’s very unpopular to try to limit wages at a time when people are spending more and more of their household income on servicing debt, like mortgages.
The thing is, the system I explained about is a pretty simple one. Two things – wages and prices are related. Demand goes up, companies pay more for washing machine workers, workers have more money to buy more washing machines, the cost of washing machines increases because demand stays high. Basically your money isn’t worth as much. More dollars chasing less goods. This is the Phillips curve. Wages go up, prices go up, inflation goes up.
Then a boring fart in a navy suit says, “let’s increase interest rates”. Interest rates increase, people start saving money instead of spending it, demand for goods goes goes down, goods get cheaper for consumers but wages also drop, which means people can buy less.
What’s missing here is that there is another thing that feeds into inflation. We already talked about this, but it’s company profits. You remember when I said that the demand for washing machines went up and so did the cost of producing them, because companies were competing for workers and materials? Well, they also charged a premium OVER and ABOVE their increased costs. That is, they new the demand was very high so they gauged. They said – we can basically charge whatever we like, because customers know there is a shortage. At this point, all the washing machine companies started bidding the price of washing machines up based not just on the expected increases in the cost of production (wages, materials) BUT ON THE PERCEPTION OF SHORTAGE ITSELF.
And they pocket those profits. We’ll come back to this.
Let’s talk about shortages. Remember during the pandemic? Remember how there was shortages of goods? People were all staying home and they couldn’t spend their money on travel or eating out, they just wanted to buy more stuff, like Oodies to put in their thermomixes. But the companies couldn’t get workers to produce the Oodies or the thermomixes, because people were all locked down at home. So prices went through the roof, because demand was extremely high. You might be thinking – ah, but if people couldn’t go to work because of lockdowns, then they can’t get paid wages, so they can’t buy lots of shit, so this will naturally dampen demand……..
Except it didn’t because the government provided massive stimulus. Instead of people earning wages, they got given money from the government. And, remember, interest rates were almost zero, so people were spending up BIG, which really drove up demand in the housing sector, but elsewhere too.
What this did was kept demand really high, especially in the areas where people could buy stuff that already existed and didn’t have to be made – like houses but also products too.
To be clear, the normal limit on inflation – that companies respond to increasing demand by paying more money in wages to recruit workers – was gone. Companies weren’t paying wages to workers who in turn would buy their products. Workers were instead being given stimulus money, which drove up demand for goods and created huge shortages because companies couldn’t make enough goods because workers were at home.
So during this period, you’ve shortages, huge demand and free money being tipped into people’s pockets and super low interest rates. All of this drives demand sky high. BUT companies were increasing their prices based on more than just demand. They were basing them on THE PERCEPTION of high demand, consumer expectations. This massively increased their profits. This began during the pandemic and is still happening now. The Australia Institute says,
As of the September quarter of 2022 (most recent data available), Australian businesses increased prices by a total of $160 billion per year over and above their higher expenses for labour, taxes, and other inputs, and over and above profits generated by growth in real economic output
Excess corporate profits account for 69% of additional inflation beyond the RBA’s target. Rising unit labour costs account for just 18% of that inflation
So, the reason that inflation is rising now is because there were shortages during the pandemic. Companies increased their profits because of a huge increase in demand, which was partly fuelled by stimulus, which was money from the government, NOT money that companies paid in wages to employees. The usual limits on inflation – the relationship between wages and spending – wasn’t there because wages were replaced with stimulus.
What this means is that companies were increasing prices over and above the price of producing stuff during the pandemic because of not just real shortages but also the perception of shortages – because ALL their competitors were increasing prices too. It means that goods are more expensive because there is more company profit built into the price.
That government stimulus money went into company profits.
We are still feeling these effects now – prices remained high after the pandemic, and there was an increase in employment, and an increase in wages, but the price of goods was still artificially inflated from this price gouging during the pandemic, and all the stimulus. So, we emerge out of the pandemic, we’ve got good wages to spend, but stuff is already expensive because of increases during the pandemic, and getting more so, because demand is still high. So real wages – what you can actually buy with your money, have decreased. The value of money is decreased. This is inflation.
So now the RBA is having to pull the emergency lever, that is, trying everything it can to get people to stop spending by increasing interest rates again and again.
But the other problem is that Australia has used housing as an investment scheme for a long time – and during the pandemic this increased more and more. remember those zero percent interest rates? That drove up house prices a lot.
So, there are some people who are making lots of money out of this period. People who have money in the bank. People who own property. People with savings. And the people who have money are the people who have money that has come from rents rather than productive or labour. In 2020 There were almost as many households renting in the private rental market as homeowners without a mortgage. People without a mortgage have money coming from wages and they can put it in savings.
These people – think boomers – are still spending, and the more that interest rates go up, the more money they have. They have superannuation funds. They’re not hugely indebted. They have money to spend. And they are driving consumption.
From the Commbank data mid May 2023 – “Spending among the over 55s, by contrast, increased at an above inflation rate over the past year, with CBA customers over the age of 75 boosting their spending by about 13 per cent”.
They are doing the same thing as companies – they are making profit from increased demand, and they are also stimulating demand by keeping some of their houses empty. The rate of house-per capita – that is, the number of dwellings per person – in Australia has never been higher than it is now.
Now, to be clear, this isn’t a case of boomers ruining it for everyone which is why they have to resort to calling their kids to reset the fucking wifi twice a week. Boomers are a big chunk of the economy but not the biggest.
The pandemic also has a role here. There was an increase in demand for housing during the pandemic because there was a 17% increase in ‘new households’. IN other words, a lot of people cracked the shits with each other during the pandemic and got divorced. One household became two.
This doesn’t get talked about much but it had a big increase in demand.
Ok, at the end of this – what’s my point?
My point is that the usual explanation for inflation rises – that wages are rising and there’s a shortage of goods – isn’t a good explanation for why inflation is rising.
Rather, something happened during the pandemic – namely, stimulus and companies increasing their profits because of extreme shortages – that led to sustained higher prices for goods. This means sustained high prices which means real wages are dropping – your pay check buys less stuff. in fact,
Real wages in Australia fell 4.5% in 2022, the largest fall on record
And, on top that, when we increase interest rates we hurt those with debt, mortgages etc., and provide an excuse for landlords to drive up rents, but we don’t dampen consumer demand because it’s still being driven by those who have savings and property.
So – prices for goods remained high AFTER the pandemic but wages didn’t increase enough. this cause a profit-price spiral, where companies are increasing their profits even though they are being forced to pay slightly higher wages AND in theory, demand is declining.
the normal checks and balances provided by the phillips curve got broken by the pandemic, with its increased demand through shortages, and supercharged demand through stimulus rather than wages growth.
What the RBA is doing right now is trying to control the spending of those who have debt – by driving up interest rates people with mortgages have less money to spend.
The final moral of the story is that the wages/price relationship only works if everyone is buying goods using wages. If some people are buying goods with rent or investment money or stimulus cash or shells, then it doesn’t work very well at all. So why are we still obsessed with this curve?
This is poorly thought through, but I just wanted to make some comment on the rise of the therapeutic narrative as a social movement, and its inevitable decline. We’re all of course now extremely well versed in the idea that one’s shortcomings should be pathologised and then adopted into one’s identity. Everyone has ADHD, or is neuro-divergent, or has ‘anxiety’ etc., etc., At least two generations of Australians have compartmentalised their personal banalities into regimes of ‘illness’ all of which intersect with very real social illnesses, like racism or sexism in particular ways, usually as a means by which they can inoculate themselves against criticism that they’re not dismantling them fast enough.
It’s easy to view the pathologisation of personality as a type of neoliberal strategy. It is victim-blaming people for dealing poorly with the exigencies of just-in-time capitalism. I saw this most clearly following our bushfires, where the Federal government sent psychologists instead of builders. Feeling depressed about losing your home? You have a mental illness. We will send psychologists to fix you, because you are the problem, not climate change or the lack of a house.
The pathologisation of personality also represents neoliberalism because it operationalises the idea of the body as a site of consumption. It is another medium through which you might explore and present new and fashionable versions of yourself, an act of branding that follows the herd while importantly, also makes some small contribution towards delineating the herd’s boundaries.
I think the cartography of this stuff is interesting though. Because on the one hand, self-diagnosing oneself with what young people refer to as, ‘mental health’ is one of the most distilled forms of privilege imaginable. Demanding that others make special space for you in the world is a form of power. Hospital cleaners at Westmead have limited ability to make demands based on their own quiver of mental foibles carefully fashioned through hours of sparkly TikTok videos.
As a representation of power that requires nothing more an a smartphone, is unsurprising that pathologised personality has become a game-ified form of social capital for younger people, typically those from wealthy backgrounds but without immediate access to capital themselves. This is no different to the ‘starving artists’ of years gone by, conspicuously celebrating their cultural capital in direct opposition to their economic capital. Bourdieu would be proud. I occasionally read the Artist Profile magazine – a beautiful experience in itself, profiling a selection of predominantly Anglo-Australian artists. It’s gradually becoming a little more diverse, of course, but to make it as a successful artist in this country requires patronage, and usually, this comes in the form of Mummy and Daddy.
This isn’t to say that the artists aren’t talented, or aren’t supporting themselves now, just that it took a lot of years of unpaid practice to ‘get good’, something generally unthinkable to those without a back-up plan of ‘the wee studio apartment at Mum and Dad’s in the Highlands’.
I think what’s interesting now is that people are cracking the shits with this exhausting regime of privilege. It’s clear that making endless, shifting demands to validated at all times and across all contexts is nothing more than land-banking privilege. This is fine when everyone has the surplus time, energy and wealth to indulge this kind of thing, but ultimately, the real victims of privilege, those who experience racism, sexism, classism – they still exist. And the recognition of what all this pathogisation of the self really is – power – is growing rapidly.
I really underestimated how much work two jobs would be. Of course, as with all things, there are busy and quiet times, but when both jobs hit the busy period it gets quite busy indeed. Fortunately, both jobs were contract work, and have now ended, and so I now find myself employed more in line with my proclivities – that is to say – surfing.
I wrote a little while ago about ticks, specifically the the holocyclus species that we have locally. Ticks are the perfect example of a zoonotic clusterfuck – they perfectly illustrate the hubris of modern medical science. Ticks give people diseases in curious, non linear ways, with often ill defined pathologies and vastly different levels of severity. Oh, and some people, like myself, are naturally, genetically immune. The dullards amongst us might suggest that this is something that can be mapped onto my particular ethnicity or bloodgroup, but in the age of ‘identifying’ as various things that one is quite evidently not, I have concluded that the most logical explanation for immunity to alpha-gal allergy and disease is that I am three parts bandicoot.
Bandicoots live here, they are a stalwart of coastal NSW. Bandicoots are common and also, helpfully, really really cute. They have long prehensile noses that they use for spreading diseases around corners. The funny thing is – you never see them. They’re nocturnal, so that doesn’t help, but there are plenty of nocturnal Australian animals that you see all the time, everything from possums to those gamers with those pale, vestigial legs. Unlike the gamers, bandicoots spend a lot of their lives snuffling around in the leaf litter getting things done.
I’ve only seen them a couple of times, but I know there’s heaps of them. Bandicoots are absolutely essential to the life cycle of the paralysis tick. Without bandicoots there would be almost no ticks at all. Yes, ticks live on all sorts of animals, but bandicoots provide the nursery for the ticks. Without them, the numbers drop precipitously. Bandicoots are the only animal that is completely immune to the tick venom -they can literally carry thousands of ticks with no ill effect. And, as I said, they like to hang around in the leaf litter, which is an excellent place to acquire four million of your closest friends.
Paralysis tick – holocyclus
Ticks also like it wet – their eggs and larvae are prone to drying out. Indeed, the only truly effective treatment for tick control is diatomaceous earth – it essentially glues up with the eggs and, to a lesser extent, the larvae, and they dry out. When it’s wet there are more ticks. Usually, winter is a quiet time for ticks locally because our winters are pretty dry but the last two winters have been very wet, and the ticks have been on a rampage.
Currently, we haven’t had any decent rain for about a month – we appear to have returned to a more typical weather pattern, where the winter days are sunny and dry and reasonably warm. I would have expected the tick numbers to drop away to almost nothing however, that’s not the case. The ticks are going crazy this winter.
For the last six months or a couple of local government bodies have been shooting foxes. Foxes eat bandicoots. You can see where this is going. Indeed, there is such a boom in the bandicoot population that areas of suburbia look like they’ve been shelled by the world’s cutest and most poorly organised military (bandicoots leave little holes surrounded by a mound of dirt). Naturally, Australian suburbia has little time for Lawn Assaults, and so the level of consternation is high.
What’s really fascinating though is that there is so little research and information about ticks in south eastern Australia. We know how the mechanisms by which they fuck humans up, but we know surprisingly little about their life cycle and numbers – their ecology. Aside from the statement that bandicoots are important to the life cycle of the ticks, there’s almost nothing that gives any idea of how important. Now, as the bandicoot numbers explode, we’re getting a sense of the impact on tick numbers.
An example – I was talking to a landholder last week who did a cool burn years ago through a patch of Red Gum forest on his property. What returned, after the burn, was a monocrop of needle grass – basically, sharp pointy grass that foxes don’t like. So, the bandicoots were most impressed with the new digs and moved in in their thousands, and the tick numbers increased dramatically.
Coastal Red Gum
The importance bandicoots also helps answer some of the weirdest aspects of ticks – why are there so many in some places, but none nearby? I think it’s got something to do with how suitable the habitat is for bandicoots. Are there dogs around? Is the leaf littler thick enough? Bandicoots are also territorial, so there is an upward limit on how many one might find in an area, but that number is high.
I suppose what I’m most fascinated by is the lack of knowledge about the ecology of ticks. We live in an area where ticks regularly sicken humans and kill dogs (and other mammals) and we really don’t know that much about them.
I enjoy shitting outdoors as much as the next person. Showering? Even better. And, it seems I’m not alone. Living outdoors has taken on cult status in my neighbourhood. It’s so hot right now. The Debbie Downers amongst us refer to this as, ‘the housing crisis’. Fans of this blog might be aware that we lost about 400 houses to bushfires in 2020. Quite naturally, many people assume that this is at the heart of our current situation, where numerous families are living in the local camping ground. The reality is more complicated.
Up to one in four houses in our Shire is an empty holiday rental. Two of the most affected (read; torched) suburbs were predominantly empty suburbs. On the other hand, there many ‘informal’ houses burned. These were dwellings built by ambitious people on bush properties where building was banned due to…….bushfire regulations. These people, uninsured, were left homeless. Indeed, even ‘legitimate’ houses were uninsured – insurance in most of the Shire sits around 4k per annum – well beyond the reach of many working couples with kids. Many people left the area. Some stayed but are living in temporary accomodation on their burned land. Like I said, it’s complicated.
So, who is really homeless in our region, and why? Well, it’s mostly people who were already at the bottom of the housing ladder, living in rental accommodation they could just just afford with a combination of work and welfare. Many of them arrived in our region a few years ago, as prices increased in other areas, like Nowra and Canberra. These families were most vulnerable to a shock.
And, that shock was partly the bushfires, but it had much, much more to do with a nationwide demographic shift that no one talks about; the separation crisis.
…. there was a large 17.1 per cent rise in the number of single person households between 2016 and 2021 Censuses, in part caused by relationship breakdowns and share houses dissolving due to COVID lockdowns. By comparison, there was only a 7.1% increase in single person households between 2011 and 2016 Census.
There has been a massive increase in people forming new households, often with kids. This has an enormous impact on housing availability, and yet it’s something that is hardly ever discussed.
Less important locally, but something that speaks to the broader picture, is the reopening of Australia’s borders to international students, thus reinstating the ‘wealth effect’ for Australia’s property owning class.
The lack of rental housing was temporarily alleviated during the COVID pandemic when international students and workers were restricted from living in Australia. At that time vacancy rates across Sydney reached 4 per cent in May 2020 (and 16.2% in the CBD) and 4.7 per cent in Melbourne.
AHURI Nov 2022
Do you think Australia’s housing stock has increased in line with this graph?
Australia’s universities obtain up to 50% of their funding from international students. It is Australia’s fourth biggest export earner. International students contribute around 39 billion dollars to the Australian economy. As I have said before this is not primarily about selling education. Rather, it is selling residency, and milking as much money out of new residents as possible. Importantly, these tenants do not show up in the current batch of immigration data, which estimates that around half a million people move to Australia each year.
And, obviously, the wealth flows not just to universities, but to property owners, who rent apartments to students, as well as business owners who employ students for their cheap labour, the benefits of which are felt by Australian citizens, who can buy a ridiculously cheap bibimbap. The connections into our domestic economy are myriad, but essentially, international students are another form of economic exchange by which Australia capitalises on the difference between its own currency and that of a (marginally) poorer nation. Whether its buying cheap clothes from Kmart, manufactured offshore, or cheap vegetables harvested by cheap labour in the Riverina.
Most of the controversy and shit-slinging around housing is directed at landlords who house Australian born tenants, leaving the real magnates alone. I’m not an apologist for either, but it’s interesting how this is framed up.
Imagine, if you will, that I am writing the New York Times version of this story, it begins something like this,
After her third spin class was called off, in the middle of winter 2021, Sarah, a middle aged Mom from Smithsville, contacted her doctor. What, she wondered, could her non-binary, vaccinated, and hashtag masked vegan child do about the proliferation of severe allergies in her small private college?
I loathe this kind of writing. It reinforces the most common stereotypes while obliquely suggesting they don’t exist. So, this might not be that interesting to read but I’m not writer.
I’m interested in censorship. And it’s not because I’m an anti vaxxer or a vegan or GOD FORBID, a member of a ‘spin class’. What I’m interested in is the broad shape of debates – how they frame topics for our consumption, and how they change over time. The US is an obvious place to begin this discussion, because, as always, the rules of the game are clearest in the extreme cases.
For instance, this month we’ve been treated to a supposed ‘reckoning’ about vaccines – the ‘revelation’ that they don’t prevent transmission, which supposedly undermines the mandates that were in place in varying forms, across the US.
Sydney 2021 – “We’re not fucked yet”
I’m only realising now how canny NSW (Australia) Health was. In late 2021, when our vaccination drive was in full swing, and most of the state was in lockdown, targets were discussed in daily press conferences. Even that fact that there were press conferences at all was interesting.
The Premier said that the state needed to reach an 80% level of vaccination. Those with a punitive, authoritarian glint in their eye, asked – why not 100%? And the answer was always the same – because the purpose of the vaccine is to prevent our health system becoming overwhelmed, and 80% is what’s needed for that. At the time, the Delta variant was on the loose, and it was, correctly in my view, predicted that in the absence of vaccination, many of our hospitals would become overwhelmed, and the cumulative cost of that would be deaths from Covid AND other ailments. It does not mean that everyone had the same level of risk from Covid. I am vaccinated and I don’t have a problem with it but I felt like I could make an informed choice and others did not. I’ve also had Covid.
When the case numbers dropped precipitously following widespread vaccination, many asked if NSW should pursue an elimination strategy like Victoria. The answer was no – that we should assume Covid would spread, and assume that the protection from infection was short lived. The mRNA vaccines were never meant to be sterilising. This has played out.
In fact, as NSW opened up, case numbers increased drastically and hospitals were under severe strain. The vaccine did prevent the collapse of the health system, I am confident of that. Whether the health system is fit for purpose is another matter…..
And yet, in the US, this narrative operated differently. There was a stronger moralising tone, and more polarisation. And, quite naturally, it leads to an inevitable pendulum swing. In the last couple of weeks people have claimed that the mandates were bullshit because they were predicated on stopping the spread of the disease, and the GOTCHA moment is the acknowledgment from government that they prevent transmission. This kind of thing massively undermines public trust.
In the US, most universities are still requiring healthy young people to get 4th boosters in order to attend campus. It is very difficult to see how this aligns with the information about the risk/benefit profile of the booster shots, especially for males. (Universities in Australia – for overseas readers – have never mandated the vaccine for attendance, although almost all students received it. A fourth booster is not recommended for young people at all)
It’s politics that shifts the narratives about what is the right thing to do. NSW Health made no bones about why there needed to be a certain level of vaccination, and resisted the urge to keep restrictions further than December (when NSW reached the vaccination target). People could moralise all day long, but the truth of it was that NSW Health’s aim was to avoid football fields full of people gasping like stranded Murray River cod. And, importantly, there was no suggestion that more was known about the vaccines that was actually known.
There are some people who did not get vaccinated, and believed they would be fine without it, and they probably will. This was known then, as it is now. It’s the moralising bullshit that goes alongside it that is the dangerous thing. I’ve chosen this example because we see censorship – as in the US model, where complete fealty to a particular narrative was dictated and condoned – as ultimately problematic and divisive. Some elements of the discussion were censored. NSW did a reasonable job of not fucking things up in that regard.
So, let’s let’s look at an example where we don’t do so well; treatment for gender dysphoria. I don’t have skin in this game, but I am interested in how the narrative is shaped, and what the possibly consequences are.
There is a fundamental inconsistency in the way gender care is administered in NSW. Having gender dysphoria is no longer considered to be a medical condition. This is the consequence of lobbying from the trans community. I am not suggesting that is bad – communities should advocate for their needs and they should be listened to. Being transgender is commonly positioned as the ‘same as being gay’ – an incontrovertible fact of life that is not a medical or mental health issue.
Yet, totalising narratives often conflate things that are not the same – for instance, people who are gay are not routinely asking for medical care to change their bodies. Quite the opposite – the history of gay rights has been fighting to get the government and medical establishment to quietly piss off out of their lives, and to get involved when asked (i.e., around health issues that disproportionately affect gay people).
It’s difficult to argue for a medical treatment/body modification for something that is not an illness without getting into some very woolly culturally bound territory about what bodies are supposed to look like. Female circumcision – the complete removal of the clitoris and/or sewing the vagina almost shut – is gender affirming surgery, but the state won’t pay for it. Indeed, in Australia it is criminalised, for both minors and adults.
Another example – until the 1990s in Australia, teenaged girls who were predicted to grow to be taller than 175cm were prescribed DES, a hormone to arrest their growth. DES comes with intergenerational cancer risk – this means, the daughters of some of these women developed reproductive cancers. The cancer risks were known many years before the treatment was stopped. This was also gender affirming care – women should not grow taller than 175cm, because this will make them, ‘unattractive’ to men.
It’s clear that humans are very diverse. There are some people who believe themselves to be, ‘in the wrong body’, and throughout history, this has always been the case. There are 8 million of us, so you can guarantee that whatever experience there is out there, someone’s having it. Obviously though, there’s a diversity. It is most probable that one person’s experience of being transgender may be different to another person’s. This should not come as a surprise, and yet, the totalising narrative of ‘treatment’ conflates all experiences into one.
There is an assumption, for instance, that transitioning is exactly that one is attempting to change one’s body from one gender to another. Medical support is premised on this trajectory. First, you must live as the opposite gender, and convince a psychologist that you are sufficiently aligned with their bimodal model of gender. The, you may begin hormones and progress to surgery. This is still the medical model and it is criticised by many who are subject to this treatment pathway as, ‘gatekeeping’.
Many trans advocates criticise this highly directional model. Some would like to keep their penis (apologies for the blunt language), or perhaps have their breasts removed but not take hormones. Others would like to change their legal status but keep their body as it is. For a few people, transgenderism is a philia – part of a sexual desire/kink, and body modification is an amplification of that. Also, there are some people who cannot be made adequately aware of the consequences of various treatments, in order to give consent.
There is a huge diversity of experiences but the ‘treatment’ pathway is very uniform. Affirm and set the wheels in motion.
Now clearly, there is a difference, I would argue, between a young autistic girl, who is completely socially isolated and spends almost her entire life online in trans-support networks, who cannot see a version of herself as an adult woman who wants to ‘change’ into a boy, and a 30 year old man who has finally realised his desire to change gender. There’s a difference between a 25 year old person who would like to have a mastectomy to alleviate dysphoria but not take hormones.
Our medical system should recognise that everyone is different, and importantly, should be able to ensure that people are adequately aware of the long term consequences of their decisions.
Were the girls who were given growth stunting hormones adequately aware of their long term cancer risk? Were their parents? And, if a teenage girl says she consents to genital circumcision, and her parents consent, why isn’t this legitimate?
What’s interesting to me is the shape of these debates. Two years ago those who raised concerns about the way that gender affirming care was carried out were subject to censure of various kinds. This is now less so, as the consequences are more widely known and felt, and simply, more people undertake this form of medical treatment and the full range of outcomes are realised.
And, as with the ‘tall girls’, social norms around gendered bodies changed. I myself am scraping 6ft, and find the idea that I’d be medicated against tallness deeply offensive. And yet, it was happening to my teenaged peers (unbeknownst to me).
There are other examples where physical or surgical interventions that were once accepted are no longer used to treat dysphoria.
Apotemnophilia is body dysmorphia where a person feels that they must have a limb removed. The treatment for this extremely strong dysphoria, until the 2000s, was surgical removal of limbs. Treatment is now psychological and surgery is effectively banned.
Our current model of care and treatment for dysmorphia is arguably out of step with legal requirements surrounding consent – so called, Gillick competency. It is very difficult for a young woman with painful endometriosis to obtain a hysterectomy, but easier for a young woman to have potentially sterilising gender affirming treatment. Both of these rely on cultural ideas of gender. In the first case, the woman who claims she never wants children is almost always denied bodily autonomy, on the grounds that the medical establishment believes she may want children one day. On the other hand, a teenaged trans person is considered more able to judge the consequences of sterilisation than the young woman. The context is different, absolutely, but the outcome (sterilisation) is the same.
We’re also confronted with the idea that some forms of dysmorphia are more easily considered to be ‘psychiatric’ (such as apotemnophilia or anorexia) whereas others are not; trans identities or female circumcision. If one is modifying one’s body to bring it in line with that they believe a woman should look like, then they are relying on cultural or social ideas of what this is, not ‘psychiatric’ ones. What then, is the difference between female circumcision and other forms of ‘bottom surgery’? At best, this is ethnocentrism.
Again, I’m not arguing one is right and the other is wrong. I tend towards libertarian views on bodily autonomy – you want to get it done, go for it. I support people’s right to enjoy/fuck themselves up in ways that aren’t too exxy on the public purse in the longer term.
But what does signal ‘Royal Commission’ to me, is when the laws are applied differently to one group, especially when those laws are intended to balance autonomy with duty of care. And in this case it is clear to me that the rules around consent for everything from vaccines, to sterilisation, to circumcision, to other forms of gender affirming surgery are applied very much in line with who is seeking treatment, and when.
It’s fascinating watching New Zealand’s Covid journey from New South Wales. There’s the sense of watching a TV series for the second time. Oh, here’s the initial panic episode and the strong and comforting central government. Oh, and the one with the lockdown, I loved that one, people are putting teddies in their windows!
Then there’s the self-congratulatory faux humbleness, (surely New Zealand’s strongest suit), the confident commitment to technocratic, sensible management of crises, the endless positive affirmations of kindness and community mindedness. And then there’s the subsequent inevitable unraveling of aforementioned narrative, as pre-existing cracks in the technocracy are rendered not only visible but festering.
New Zealand is up to the part where Covid illuminates every social faultline; The racism, the hungry kids in garages, the self-aggrandising carpet-baggers, the tragic Facebook warriors and through it all, the monolithic government like a doughty, bristle-lipped governess reminding everyone to be kind and ‘do the right thing’ while nimbly avoiding the service class downstairs.
It turns out the Team of Five Million is actually more of a round-robin arrangement, and no-one’s washing the jerseys.
And here’s where our Antipodean Covid TV series differs. New Zealand’s government assumes the best in people and governs in line with its expectations. New South Wales, which, you might recall, stuttered into life as a penal colony, expects the very worst of its citizens and plans accordingly.
Covid in New South Wales was a very Sydney affair. It hit the eastern suburbs and gathered pace, all lip-gloss and lattes, a beautiful, slick and sweaty shambles. Eventually, it crossed the Opal Line into the sprawling Western suburbs and got seriously on the razzle.
There was a lockdown, for sure, but the Berejiklian government, and NSW Health both seemed to understand one thing; tipping points. That is, once a city reaches a certain size, movement around it will reach a critical mass, a tipping point, even under a lockdown.
And this is where I think the NSW government got serious and decided to try to ‘vaccinate out’ of the outbreak. From the start, even before the rancorous anti-vaxxers really got cracking, NSW made it clear that if you were offered a vaccine you should bloody well take it, and that this was the key to ‘freedom’.
Berejiklian’s management of the pandemic was widely supported. She was decisive and did something stunningly obvious but remarkably clever; she presented the virus as immutable. It would move from one person to another regardless of their family arrangements or how essential their work was. The virus doesn’t care about us, we are its environment.
It might seem obvious but compare this to alternatives.
At the beginning of the first long outbreak in Victoria, workers in Melbourne’s boiler-plate suburbs were diagnosed and ordered to stay home, while other household members continued to attend school and work. This was viewed as reasonable, fair and kind. The reasoning was based on the idea that kids shouldn’t miss out on school, or employees on work. The virus, however, does not care for your feelings or ‘rights’. And so, constraining the movement of some but not others had a punitive feel about it, ‘You caught the virus, but your housemates shouldn’t be punished for it [sotto vocce: but you should]’. It served to further personalise the virus.
And the results of this approach were predictable – further spread of the virus, prolonged restrictions.
Berejiklian knew her people. She knew that most people would get vaccinated, but worried that the final proportion would be too low to ‘end’ the outbreak in NSW. She also knew that the good burghurs (ratbags, all of us) of Sydney would be unmoved by Strawberry Shortcake moralising. And, most importantly, the Berejiklian government wanted to avoid a situation where citizens attempted to pressure one another socially over vaccination. This is an extremely poisonous situation, still evident in many places even now, where people align themselves into pre-existing ‘camps’ and politicise the shit out of vaccination. This is a very, very dangerous game to play.
The NSW government knew perfectly well that most people would get vaccinated with a bit of a push, and that this was preferable to the damage of a prolonged outbreak combined with the social disruption of pitting one ‘group’ against another.
A consummate politician, I have no doubt that Berejiklian herself was also well aware of the Australian media’s thirst for whipping up polarising and dangerous debates.
The government assumed, quite rightly, that people would lose interest in the pandemic once life started to resemble something close to normal. A leader who could make that happen had a lot to gain.
New South Wales had the benefit of watching the pandemic churn its way through similar jurisdictions with lower vaccination rates, and the social consequences of its inevitable politicisation. The wittering pomposity of the middle classes set against the white-hot rage of the disenfranchised, refracted through a prism of ethnic sectarianism that would make the Balkans look frankly vanilla is exactly not what a New South Wales Premier would like for Christmas.
Berejiklian knew that faced with similar circumstances to those overseas, the good people of New South Wales would likely dither over vaccination and ongoing restrictions would fan the embers of pre-exisitng discontents into an inferno. By about mid August, New South Wales had the makings of a nuclear shit-show.
And so the NSW government went hard on its campaign; Get Vaxxed or Get Fucked.
And it worked.
The reason it worked is because it removed the immediate problem – Covid overwhelming the hospital system and people dying as a result. It provided ample opportunity for pissing and moaning about the ‘manufacture of consent’ but the threat was defanged. Suddenly, it seemed, most people couldn’t give much of a toss about Covid, or the vaccine. And many of the ‘social dilemmas’ that were acute at 60% vaccination rate are quite benign at 95%. You might balk at inviting the unvaccinated cousin to Christmas dinner, but no-one’s really going to take it outside. It turned a potentially devastating debate about the social contract into a parlour game for the Twitterati.
To be clear, the New South Wales government forced many people into getting vaccinated, on the basis that it was for the greater good, even if it was unlikely to benefit them personally.
Berejiklian’s Get Vaxxed or Get Fucked campaign was precisely to avoid fostering acrimonious debates about whose individual rights should prevail over the collective, a debate that always taps into the deepest, extant notions of just who has been wronged, like a tongue on an open nerve. No government ever wants to provide the conditions for these kinds of excavations. It bears repeating, there is nothing more corrosive than a deep and searching public discussion over whose individual rights should prevail over the collective. It ferments a kind of toxic grievance-based partisanship that can never, ever end well.
Berejiklian knew that the path to social harmony was not paved with goodwill and community spiritedness (are you listening, NZ?). Rather, it is a gravel road, shellacked with a quick and dirty layer of prosperity and self interest.
I can’t wait to see what Season Four, Covid in Aotearoa brings.
*to be clear, I am not referring to Ms Ardern as a bristle-lipped governess. I use this term to refer to the government of the day, as is clear in the sentence. It infuriates me no end that Ms Ardern has personal attacks made against her, especially given that she is arguably the best Prime Minister New Zealand has had in recent times.
Those who’re anti vaccine mandate, or anti public health lockdown provide the best support for broad scale public health measures; they’re privileged enough to be alive to prosecute their case, in spite of their ability to interpret the dangers of a dead possum in the water tank.
We’re now in the second year of endless arguments about the ‘public’ in ‘public health’, defining once and again, both the ‘precise tragedy’ and the exact dimensions of ‘the commons’. Fighting, time and again, about who has the right to swing their fist and who should move their nose.
Those who’re anti lockdown, or anti vaccine are arguing that there is no such thing as the collective, no sum that is greater than its parts. Many historians have argued that the first governments emerged as a direct response to disease – the need to organise people in accordance with a rationale that was not immediately understood by those on the ground. It required a new thing called ‘trust’.
And it’s in short supply, blah blah, we’ve heard it all before.
But the real question for the ‘freedom warriors’ is what is the endgame? What if SarsCov2 was as fatal as MERS, or smallpox? What if it only killed children? How many ‘warriors’ would support vaccine mandates and lockdowns? None? All? How many would go to their righteous graves? How many would be chastened?
This is the real question. If your answer is ‘never’ then you’ve given up on the collective altogether. For you, personal sovereignty looks like those adults in those religious sects in the US who watch their children die from the most excruciating conditions, because the government, other people, can’t intervene.
And let’s be clear, the next MERS is probably within my lifetime. We will face this question again.
The Mutton Flap 