Humans are a strange animals that count their subjective success as though it's objective. They think because they have created stuff they think great like religion, agriculture, the internet, ear pods etc, that that makes them great on some cosmic level.
They haven't been able to work out if there is a God but for those who think there is, they have made themselves the apple of that God's eye; A whole Universe created for humans so that you can pray for a parking space when you go Christmas shopping.
This has lead to a subjective arrogance where the humans think they are destroying the planet, a planet that has faced catastophic calamaties for 4.5 billion years despite the fact that humans only invented trousers 700 years ago.
So it came as a shock to them in 2020 when a tiny little virus came along and caused so much trouble. But this virus had timed it's arrival just right. The Coronavius is not one of your alpha diseases like bubonic plague or ebola. But if you are over eighty or stricken with serious health issues it could take you out. In any other period of human history it would have come along and done it's thing, perhaps not noticed by a population who felt lucky making it to sixty.
But this is 2020....not 1820.
And so we come to the unique quality of human arrogance. The great band Fishbone once released an album called 'Give a Monkey a Brain and He'll Swear He's the Centre of the Universe'. This is true.
The viewpoint of every human is outwards. We all do exist at the centre of a Universe that we have created inside our own minds. For all of us space actually spins outwards from our consciousness and we exist in an eternal now where the past and future are constructs that we continually have to make exist in our eternal now. Our experience is spatial and our knowledge is temporal. In that we create our philosophy which essentially organises the spatial and temporal in a way that suits us well. We call this The Truth.
But by 2020 the humans had spent fifty years asking the question 'What is truth'? They never did know what truth is but now they threw their toys out the pram in the realisation after all the stuff they had invented, diseases they had cured, art they had created, they hadn't a clue what it is!
Into that void came all the superstitions, tribalism, bigotrys, dogmas, ideologies, hate and anger that had plagued the humans up to the point where they had invented the trousers. It had been a slow process to cotton on to ways of doing things that benefited them best and it had been a long hard battle. But just as they arrived at a point where more of the population were free, healthy and able to fulfill themselves than ever before, they called all of that into question. Objective morality reared it's ugly head again. Into the void where there was no truth stepped a new agenda and anyone who questioned this was objectively wrong. The question now was who was wearing the trousers and was it fair. Fairness could be attained in two competing ways; either by creating opportunity for everyone (feeding the pig) or controlling the outcomes (weighing the pig). These two positions were no longer seen as two essential voices locked in an ongoing disussion that continually renegotiated the balance, but two positions deemed as objectively evil by the other side.
So into this state of affairs steps the Coronavirus. The humans had something to fight against this; Science, by far their best way of determining truth. But what happens when you have had fifty years of French philosphers shrugging their shoulders and saying 'qu'est-ce que la vérité?' What happens to science then? It gets hobbled thats what! (And the Coronavirus rubs it's little hands together with glee)
It is not the virus that will kill us all but dogma and ideology. The ideology of the free market, or the ideology of Marx, the conspiracy theories or the dogma of identity politics. And it is this that is the disaster that has befallen us in 2020. We don't need positions. We need negotiation.
It is sobering to think that the great killer of the twentieth century was not a virus, but the death camps of Nazi Germany, and of the Marxists regimes in the USSR, China, Cambodia and currently in North Korea. That's 100s of millions of people murdered. The great danger that has emerged in 2020 is not this virus. But the idea that if someones opinion differs from yours then they are objectively wrong, and a rightful recipient of your anger, even when the evidence tells you otherwise.
Have a look at that pic. What DOES the piano really represent?
