I always have a hard time pulling out moments from 2020 that were significant. Whether it was singing people on balconies, clapping for frontline caregivers, or simply taking a dip in the woods. Quarantine videos from Italy offered us a little relief.
These were moments that, in retrospect, were more diverse than singular experiences like 9/11 or the financial crisis in 2008.
Before that, we were mainly preoccupied with ourselves, with our own aches and pains, trivial pleasures and external accumulations, thanks in part to the Thatcher and Reagan eras, in which we sacrificed independence and community, in the fashionably questionable 1980s, for the total commercialization of almost every aspect of life.
What’s in it for us? I don’t see an end yet. The ominous invisible hand of the market is very real. And what happened to “give peace a chance?” Military spending is on the rise, everywhere. And it’s easier to find mass toxic competition than innovative cooperation and democratic economics.
People are spitting into their hands and printing money where ink can be found. A river of money flows into hollow malls; capitalism can do without culture, after all. The community dies out, the individual orders all alone on screens, it’s screen time baby!
Covid-19 is a burning glass of our failures and delusions, it imposes limits on us humans as unteachable narcissists, whether on the ground of the judiciary or because of the clear, unavoidable reality for the good of others.
It was young people who enthusiastically moved into extra-parliamentary politics, every Friday they took care of our planet, so that it would not become even more cluttered, heated and suffocated. They drew a new horizon, they engaged in something bigger than themselves, okay boomers.
Friday’s demonstrations gave hope to focus on other urgent issues: fighting inequality, taking back freedom of the press, ousting autocrats from the “land of unbridled exploiters” and the “master of the unfree internet” whilst offering new, sustainable, global offerings that catapult us into the next century of independence and community.
We should start with truth. It is relational and emerges through dialogue in communicative contexts. It is like facts, only crazier. No one owns truth as a property. No one control its. She wants to be free and because she is female, she is the future.
Whether New Zealand or Finland, both countries with women at the helm, both offer a healthier balance of independence and community. Both countries sail more confidently through troubled waters.
“I think we are in a kind of spiritual war. There are times when humanity must struggle for its own existence, from the soul’s point of view.”
– Billy Corgan via Los Angeles Times
Not everything Billy Corgan, lead singer of the Smashing Pumpkins, says shines, but his music certainly has a place on the grandstand of sonic history, and he hits a spot.
Our material world of meaningless updates has had enough time, life is finite. If we don’t learn anything from this spiritual war, by which I don’t mean uploading our memory to the Internet, building autonomous cars or smart refrigerators, we will remain stuck in a continuous narcissist loop where we keep falling down the well.