I think one reason the pandemic has been so successful and why it continues to cause chaos, is not just because of government incompetence and lack of coordinating and changing rules, regulations and goalposts…but is mostly about psyche and culture.

Many people in the West, with their social media on steroids and their virtue signaling hamster-like-wheel-of-rewards for each virtue signal, were programmed and waiting for this pandemic…they didn’t know it was what they needed, but they instinctually ran towards it like moths to the light…to embrace the signaling and the mottos associated with it…stay home…mask up…get xxed…it’s a pandemic of the unexxed…their whole lives were preparing for this moment of Orwellian social media telling them they can’t mention skepticism about the origins theory…or discuss some basic questions about their love of lockdowns and their love of being prevented from travel, the way in which they need fear and the Other (the ones spreading it)…and when fear would wear off they would find a new thing to be concerned about…schools, this or that variant…

It was ready-made for this era. It would not have worked in the 1950s or 1970s because it was globalization and modern technology, especially social media, that helps drive responses…the way they use a random map that is a screenshot of a given time of “community spread” to make their political arguments…the way they divide society…the way they find scapegoats…

It was like they waited their whole lives for it…it’s empowering to the individual whose otherwise meaningless life now takes on importance of shouting at people in a supermarket about a “mask mandate” or posting a photo of a person in public who doesn’t “wear it correctly” or angry about those Others who don’t do as they are told…or who post incessantly about the number of “cases”….they count everyday…nothing else in their life gave them such meaning, nothing else they could count everyday…it’s like adrenaline and endorphins…and people love the short explanations they get that they can pass around via meme and also they were prepared for this or conditioned via medical shows like House, Scrubs, Grey’s Anatomy, etc etc…this idea of turning all of society into their version of a medical discussion…average people with their sudden instant expertise in medical issues and “public health”…and health in itself is a very interesting thing to put into practice as the major political issue of the day…the idea of a “healthy society” compared to a “sick” one and a virus spreading…keeping the “virus out”…the need to close off, shut down, stay home and be online all the time…you couldn’t have had better lockdowns correlated to the power of Google/Amazon/BigTech as they were rolling out new Cloud computing and AI and algorithms designed to funnel poeple into silos to help them buy more online…big profits were driven, a perfect storm of pandemic for a perfect technology that can be leveraged for it, not necessarily in a good way…keep people from traveling, keep them working at home, like in that film Matrix where they are all there working at home in their cacoons…
Perfect.

Societies lacking technology where people couldn’t stay home due to manual labor and such things…pre-modern societies let’s say in some parts of the world…went on as before mostly…sometimes western media would discover them and claim they were quite bad off…but in fact it was the most advanced societies running out of space in hospitals that were continually overwhelmed, surging, waves, flooded, (biblical terms insert here)…
Other things that people are supposed to be fearful of just don’t lend themselves so well to the modern era. Tried “gun violence” and “climate change” but it doesn’t really do it. But this works.

I think we need to think of this era as not so much about what we are told it is about…but about what it is writ large, what the real methodology is regarding society. And that will also get you to the place where you wonder why it is the super wealthy tend to glaze over if you ask tough questions, because Banksy art is selling well, Bezos and Branson are going to space…so it’s not so bad for a small layer of society (for which nothing changed and profits rose)…and it’s not so bad for governments which get to make more rules, and so it’s primarily quite good for some sectors (not tourism though)…and that’s the story.