Sunday
The lock down forced most people to change their routine.
A common routine of the Australian culture, and of many others in the Western world, involved working to produce an income, followed by regular visits to the cinema, cafes, restaurants and bars etc. for relaxation and entertainment. A simple but pleasant life that summed up as economic participation.
The first lock down forced a change to that; subsequent lock downs cemented the enforced alternative routine into place. People stopped going out; many were forced to even stop working. They were forced to adopt a simpler lifestyle (the word ‘force’ is hard to avoid).
For many, the rising prices resulting from the broken supply lines, particularly in the crucial areas of food and energy, mean a more frugal lifestyle is now permanent.
Dictionaries struggle with ‘civilization’. The definitions are vague – clutching-at-straws feeble. As with many other words, that is because of a failure to understand the nature of the concept that the word is supposed to communicate.
What is a civilization? It is nothing more nor less than the order demanded by a complex economy with widespread supply lines.
Lock downs didn’t just shut down the economy, they shut down civilization.
That has created disorder. One can tell a person’s level of sanity by the amount of order they put into a situation. Those who continually create disorder are insane.
Despite the delusions (insanity) of politicians, civilization cannot be restarted from the top down. It can only be restarted the same way that it was built; from the bottom up.
If it can be achieved again, it will, at the least, take many generations of creating new institutions to tidy up the disorder.
I still find it extraordinary that so few people seem to grasp the magnitude of what happened in March of 2020.