After covid. Discussion points
Translation of Dopo il covid-19. Punti per una discussione (Nottetempo, 2020) by Claudia Cicerchia and Francesco Fraioli
I started writing the following pages approximately at the beginning of the quarantine, which the Italian government imposed as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak. A preliminary shorter translation of this paper, published on minima&moralia’s website, was spread throughout the internet in English, Persian and Norwegian. A partial paperback version has been also published on n. 109 of Espoarte. The positive response to this small manifesto, which I hope can be used as a tool for a future common discussion about what the virus is and has been, has driven me to expand on the subject. I would like to thanks Christian Raimo for the initial discussion on the intent and reasons behind this project and Andrea Gessner, editor and friend, for agreeing to publish this small volume.
Turin, March 28th, 2020
When the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of the familiar landscape around them
H.D. Thoreau, Walden
1) In 2017 I published Fragile Umanità (Einaudi), an essay in which I argued that human-kind was on the verge of collapse. I also argued that our ecological niche, our “normal” life, would crumble under the weight of an epidemic, an environmental problem, bad management of our general resources. Homo Sapiens’ fragility was intended in two ways:
conceptually, because we are lacking comprehension of what “human-kind” effectively means, where this concept begins and ends.
objectively, in the sense that we have insufficient knowledge of when human-kind will collapse for having considered progress as a continuous stretch of its limits, challenging the availability of human resources, as well as the planet’s ones.
By ignoring this human fragility in many ways, the majority of human society is attempting to defeat a virus. If we only act on its effects (i.e. virus) and not on its causes (the virus’ conditions of possibility), this effort might fail.
Society today might collapse definitively, or maybe survive by finding a vaccine in a matter of months, or by radically changing its social rules (i.e recurring quarantines). Surviving or collapsing are obviously two very similar outcomes in the light of this situation. If human-kind does actually survive, it will collapse during the next epidemic or ecological crisis. If it does collapse, there theoretically could be an opening to a new cohabitation paradigm for Homo Sapiens and the planet.
2) The prevalent ideas regarding progress, considered obvious up until recently, have been fatal for human-kind. The positions argued by progressive and technological philosophies were able to convince us that Homo Sapiens’ end was far from near. According to these positions, we would have made the planet a fertile pile of technological objects, urbanising the world just by fixing the amount of CO2 emissions and by drinking from reusable bottles to avoid plastic waste.
However, these ideas have actually shaken the equilibrium of a possible dignified life for Homo Sapiens on this planet once and for all. “Back to normal” is an expression commonly used during these times, as if social disgregation, wide-spread poverty, animal exploitation, destruction of the environment, continuous damage to the things of nature and the planet, can be considered a normality we should return to. Only to a small portion of Western humanity, which considered wide-spread well-being for the last fifty years normal, this seemed to be a good place to return to. Instead, this well-being was actually supported by overseas wars, famine, exploitation of up-and-coming countries, brutal destruction of diversity and the suffering of millions of humans around the world.
Uncontrolled development of globalisation and technology has inflicted incurable wounds on the fabric of reality, which have been given names such as Anthropocene and Capitalocene. This has caused a long painful period of adjustment, that we are at the dawn of.
3) We have all reduced every living organism to objects of consumption by adopting different positions of power - this obviously is aimed at those having management power. Animals and biodiversity have primarily become food with the help of science reducing them to mere bodies and using them as inefficient (as we see today) means to develop pharmaceuticals and vaccines. For the same act of considering nature as something outside human-kind, we are surprised that a virus originated from a bat has radically changed our normal way of living.
Social diversity and poverty have been institutionalised. Our world, which by collapsing gives way to the thought that one type of world will end but not the world in general, has avoided investing in things that would have been useful in the current situation: universal healthcare, mandatory ecological awareness, the end of animal exploitation, the end of the idea of the nation-state and local citizenship. Human-kind today finds itself united against nature, which it should have been saving.
Consequences will obviously be difficult to face if the system collapses straightaway as none of us is actually ready to change its life. This could inevitably lead to some sort of natural selection, some sort of new species. It should however be clear, like radical philosophies have suggested for decades, that if the system, even after Covid-19, will try to expand and re-establish itself and promise new periods of economic happiness at the expense of ecology, the final result will not be only some peoples’ pain, but the end of it all. Institutional politics as of today are completely unprepared for this crossroads.
4. No matter when this will happen, if in ten months (improbable) or in 10 years (highly probable), what counts is an immediate collective awareness of the situation, which does not only limit itself to imagining what a new world would look like after quarantines end. What counts is how and to what extent we will be ready to reconstruct and how joyfully we will participate in it. We all know that in case the internet might crash for an overload, the definitive collapse of communication and sociability could lead to an unimaginable revolution.
What I am trying to suggest is that, instead of mimicking what happened in our ordinary lives with Instagram conferences and parties on Facebook and Tik-Tok, we should try to imagine the extraordinary: countryside instead of the city, nature instead of technology, a brief but dignified life instead of a long and undignified one, the end of time-waste and the beginning of using one’s life.
The first real question we should ask now is: who will teach us what to do and who could give this individual such power? Maybe we should all try planting and growing what is happening inside us, seeing as too many of us are incapable of looking out for ourselves without someone pointing out what to do and why to do it.
5) Given that being locked in our homes implies the problem of class inequality among other issues, we know today that nothing will be the same. Change terrorises us, but, paradoxically, it is also true that maybe no one has ever felt so alive as in this very moment. This is a chance to regain time to think, to read, to write, to love, but also to be sad. A time to understand that what made this tragedy possible was what we called “normal life”. It is not important who’s fault it is because blame is widely distributed; what is now relevant is trying to deal with this fragility by comprehending that the exact world we were used to is no more and that a “new species of humans”, as I wrote in Fragile Umanità, could actually be on the horizon. Maybe it is already.
6) In this deafened society we now feel rejected by, only the smallest effort was necessary to obtain virtually anything: food, water, entertainment, the experience of travelling. Instead, what probably awaits us is a world in which each and every one of us will have to build their own destiny in a different way. Will we be fewer people? Possibly. Will we live for a shorter amount of time? This is also possible. Were the ideas of perfection and immortality given by technology a lie? Undoubtedly. Will we have to prepare ourselves to abandon many ordinary ways of spending our time to achieve more realistic goals? I fear this is the case. Will we have to reconsider our freedom of movement? This is, in a certain sense, the most undoubtable aspect in the aftermath of Covid-19.
During the next few days and months the situation could worsen: if science does not find a cure immediately, being locked in our homes could generate frustration, domestic murders, self-inflicted violence, alienation, mood and personality disorders. While I am here writing these pages, some of these possible consequences are already taking place extensively. All the skeletons we put in our closets, hoping that our “busy schedule” would save us, will now suddenly come out. We will have to be strong, work to change the way we act and think. We will have to understand that we are not the ones planning reality, but reality is planning us.
7. These few pages are a simplification of ideas already developed by those philosophers considered a minority for years. This way of thinking challenges technological enthusiasm and the myth that the future will always be better than the past.
Humanity, now fragile like never before, can enter a new evolutionary phase, thinking itself as one, in unison, with no ethnicity or nations, with no divisions or egoisms. Did we have a world made of comfort and certainties? Yes, but it was also a world full of wars, violence, murders, massacres of biodiversity… surely not the “normal world” which we think we can go back to. This is not to say that for some of us it was not a world of comfort, but a first step could be understanding that it was not “normal”.
8. The addiction to being pragmatic has been stronger than freedom, which is the only important aspiration for a species like ours. We will leave our homes but certainly not to hop on crowded tramlines and work for twelve hours a day, because that world, fortunately enough, will sooner or later collapse. We have naively thought we had an immense power over nature, power which was actually taking us towards self-destruction. Now, the question is: how many other ways of going about the world are there? This short reflection is an approximation of crucial topics that would deserve pages upon pages. The future of Homo Sapiens is more similar to its most remote past than it is to the ideologies that had filled our false certainties.
I could be wrong, it might be Covid-25 and not Covid-19 that will give us this “chance”, but the time to reflect and prepare ourselves to what we have here been talking about is limited. Let’s start now.
9. For a long time we have underestimated the necessity of a reflection on universal income, a centralised government, a real global humanitarian act. We have ignored this by hiding in the trenches of neoliberalism, fooled by the idea of an eternal development of the driving force of capitalism. Not to mention the technological philosophies convinced that all limits could be overcome or, sooner or later, demolished. More in-depth, ideologies which promote a “return to normality” are meant for individuals who are unprepared to comprehend what is happening to our society and our planet during the last decades. It is clear that complex western societies have permitted semi-liberties that were before unimaginable, extremely comfortable ways of life and cures to illnesses that were once incurable. It is also true that many of these benefits were only for the ones at the top of the social pyramid and that they existed as a result of violence brought upon a massive amount of invisible individuals. The question is: do we want to construct a common alliance seeing how we feel the same in facing a common enemy? The individuals that are not apt for complex types of reasoning could react violently, with wrath and pain to all the consequences this change will have on their lives. A similar reaction is the one had when facing the diagnosis of a certain illness, in which we confuse the inevitable – “death will arrive shortly”– with the hope – “I still have so much that I would like to do''. We either have to start considering Covid-19 as terminal illness or otherwise, we risk leaving the house, giving the final blow to our collectiveness and as a consequence perish without having the time to mourn.
10) The global organisation is already preparing alternative models to the previous one, as we can read in papers published by US most prestigious universities. Some examples of this preparation are some of the apps projected to trace our movements - even while limiting our personal freedom- intermittent quarantines, the end of the previous sociability in favour of a world made of masks and precautions. Although these are all alternative models, they do not scratch the anthropocentric one in any way, nonetheless.
Either intellectuals prepare themselves to a bold reaction to this alleged inevitable state of affairs, or in a few years time, the damage will be permanent.
Alternatively, there is a need for a new model that underlines it is time to rethink our relationship with the environment and other living species – also looking out for their health and that of the ecosystems – and become “post-humans”. This means becoming a species that has evolved not in its physical features, but in its behaviour, in its intellectual paradigms and relationships with the environment. A species that avoid stomping on others’ lives, which is different in its eating habits, ecological relationships with the planet and numerous other aspects.
11. The real hidden theme of all this is social conflict. Keeping people at home while making many others even poorer in favour of the sacredness of life does work, but the question is: how much can this go on for? (not too long, probably). This next conflict will be unsettling as, for example, there already are age-based freedom regimes. The line of conflict must be drawn not on the basis of “how to keep living as we had before, albeit in a different context”, but instead on “how to think a different context not to live how we did before”. People that are willing to speak up about these complications on a political level will have to spread awareness that in “the world before,” stress, false occupations, non-paid labour, the sublimations of wishes, unemployment, the distance between parents and their children, illnesses linked to an urban lifestyle, did not guarantee a perfect life, but a habitual one. Covid-19 first and foremost troubles our routine; it is absolutely crucial to create a new praxis starting from new ideals. This can be done and is also the central argument for those who will want to run a business or an innovative type of economy.
12. Most reactions, also amongst some of my esteemed colleagues, sway between criticism of the society of control to a general overview of the pandemic and a nostalgic expression of what will never be the same. We can see a clear depiction of philosophy’s great inability, when separated from its originary practice that is its being in the world (which is also its form of art), to give answers on what is truly new and destabilising using different tools. Decades of closing philosophy in academic dynamics such as, on the one hand, abstruse and unreadable publications, and on the other one, oversimplified papers, has brought about the present situation, in which some contemporary intellectuals fail to grasp what taking care of oneself actually means.
Handing over the cure of the soul to psychology or theology has led us to understand the superiority of some “eastern” approaches, seen in practices like meditation. This practice has taken us to consider, for example, the possibility of a metaphorical movement, despite the absence of external space. Not to mention how China, lacking democratic values, has better managed the pandemic (obeying and hiding are the two values with which China did not only act better but also in advance against Covid-19). Without a new compass, given by a long personal and collective self-analysis, to guide us through this transformation, we risk worse consequences than Covid-19. Philosophy too, if it wants to survive, will have to return to its classical roots, where the distinction between theory and practice was impossible.
13. Spirituality, especially if caged in religious paradigms, finds itself in serious danger: however, as Nietzsche recalls in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, it is not God’s fault, but of his killers. Believing he will save us by destroying all his creation is naive and is only possible thanks to a narrow idea of God as exclusively of the human species. If the planet is thriving during our imprisonment, that means that God too benefits from this breathing. It has never been this simple to believe in God, contrary to what we would intuitively think. One must be aware that it is absurd to “think we can be healthy in a sickened world”, as our pope has shown us by celebrating a suggestive mass in an empty St. Peter’s square in Rome.
14. The narrative following Covid-19 will not be one of a joyous majority that is happy to be “reborn”, but that of a minority that will prove we are living in a manifestation of the third law of thermodynamics, for which at each action corresponds an equal and opposite reaction. From the last fifty years of indiscriminate exploitation of the planet’s resources, what has followed is what some call a “state of exception”, despite its being a completely normal and consequential state. Every time a force is applied to a body, another body is exerting it. If our aggression has applied a force to dominate the planet, Earth now applies a force that is equal and opposite. In the exertion of a force, two bodies are always involved, the action does not happen in one direction, but it is a reciprocal influence. It’s not the virus versus us or vice versa: there are two directly proportionate forces that now urge to be separated.
15. The type of rebellion that will need to follow this situation is not a “classic” one, but a Darwinian evolutionary adaptation. It is about attempting to go at the same pace with respect to the incompatibility between unrelentless progress and the fragility of living bodies. Many experts, however, feared this for a long time but had the “hope” that “the children of our children'' would live Covid-19: unfortunately this happened to us and, thus, our children. The epicentre of this revolution will be, for this reason, evolutive, not political. Obviously, to the common man, who was stupidly ignored by philosophy, the results seem disastrous (especially for those who were forced to give up certain comforts). When an antiviral or a vaccine will maybe be found in eighteen months or so, an open window towards the old ways will insert itself into the picture. The point is that this window should not be used as a way to pass on that nothing really happened, but it should be used to transform everything. Initially, the dissatisfaction will be enormous. However, as we have been able to close ourselves off in our homes to save our lives, are we sure that we will not be able to change the paradigm of our existence? In turn, save our lives and the one of others? It is all about hoping to actually and truly improve ourselves.
16. The case that Covid-19 brought about is the first real international and planetary revolution in history. It is often stupidly compared to a war, while it is actually a collective infirmity. The measures taken by various nations, characterised by intermittent announcements on what to do, prove that politicians are just buying time against an extremely complex and difficult phenomenon to handle. What refinancing and getting into debt does not take into consideration is the debate around currencies and single economies. Establishing a planetary and common table that comes up with common strategies has now become urgent. Buying warships and bomber aircrafts, upgrading the web and implementing walls, thinking that the war was internal to Homo Sapiens and its stupid categories (ethnic groups, nations etc.), were not spending money wisely. We now find out that we were unprepared to fight for life all along. We can be hopeful without being naive. Is imagining a different world so far-fetched?
17. These pages are not intended to be part of a manifesto against technology in general, despite an initial reading might suggest otherwise. On the contrary, these are pages against the use of that technology we thought would help us overcome any limit. Every inch of our technological abilities will be needed to communicate, to analyse facts, limit suffering, increase medical progress, imagine a real (and not only formal) society. A society that does not alienate, that guarantees a global education to non-violence, feminism and ecology. As a consequence of Covid-19, many behaviours and cultures may be unjustly flattened. It is about suggesting the most logical consequence of what is going on, but in turn, it is not wishing that everybody act the same way. What will follow is not an umpteenth world, rather, what David Lewis called “philosophers’ paradise”, the existence of infinite possible worlds.
18. How long the pandemic will go on for will define a clear segment on our temporal line, dividing it into two. There is a before and there will be an after. However, it is clear that “this had to happen sooner or later”. With respect to the awareness about the topics we have talked about here, a probable outcome is that China and the US will develop a vaccine they will keep for themselves to redesign the global geopolitical network. However, after an initial phase of mass psychosis, the vaccine waiting-time could result in the creation of new and unthought realities that are not so far-fetched. Put in more technical terms, all this is not only metaphysically possible, as it has always been, but also statistically possible. We have been drugged by the needs of contemporary society: I have seen people in despair, hoping that controlling our data would make us go back to normality. Was it normality if we were simply “drunkards hanging on a stake”? All of this is simply tragic and comic at the same time. The same data and profit used to speculate on these weaknesses could now be used as a means to feed the hungry, cure the poor and rebuild what we have destroyed. However, this is something no one seems to consider yet.
19. Reputable philosophers like Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou have reflected on Covid-19 through an extension of their consolidated thoughts. An approach that surely needs to be brought to the discussion, as it tends not to consider this situation as a totally new one. Both Agamben and Badiou, for example, stress the tragedy of schools and universities being closed (which all of us hope will re-open soon). What schools though? The same ones that have educated us to abstract knowledge by marginalising manual professions? The same ones that have not taught us how to cultivate and build? The same ones convinced that, during the end of the world, translating ancient Greek is more important than cultivating a vegetable garden? Either we rethink scholastic and university education towards rediscovering human fragility or, otherwise, opening or closing these institutions will be all the same.
20. Regarding a strategy that is consequential to the points touched in these pages, the only aspect that is certain is that the idea that “everything is going to be fine” is swept away. We not only have to count the dead but the living too. Future babies will know nothing about the world they have been conceived in. We have the chance either to make them live in an ugly copy of the previous world or build a new model where we will not be pressured into telling them how beautiful running through nature was, but make them live that nature for themselves. Let us reduce Co2 emission to a minimum, stop eating animals, let us globalise not through economy but through ethics, reconsider the countryside and nature. We start now, with shyness, in admitting that there is a deep link between the destruction of the ecosystem and the spread of epidemics. Even here and now in our homes, we realise that many of the things we considered unthinkable were not that at all. “Enthusiasm for ‘progress’”, as Theodore Kaczynski (the American terrorist and mathematician known as the “Unabomber”) called it, “is a phenomenon peculiar to the modern form of society, and it seems not to have existed prior to the 17th century or thereabouts.” We can do without it: we can try to be enthusiastic towards life as such. This is not the “naked life” discussed by philosophy for decades: maybe coronavirus shows us that something beyond the dichotomy exists and that we do not even have the necessary semantics to talk about it.
21. The situation is surely not simple. Is it money? Is it status? No one thinks of humanity as not having civilisation but thinks of humanity as using fear, as often it has, to create profoundly different ways of life: a new social Pangea. The central nucleus of society, made up of culture and ingenuity in living, is only defended if aspiration for power will stop its own eternal march, thanks to the awareness that anyone could die instantly. Once again it will be the awareness of death to save life. By not having freedom in the technical sense - control over any aspect of life and death - we are no longer used to the possibility of choosing how to live or die. Spending time in our homes, locked up amongst piles of material goods, we may finally learn that the acquisition of things will not save our lives. Once again, the point to get across is to free ourselves of the idea that time is something to be “spent”. It is instead Derek Jarman’s garden saving idea. Cultivating and being cultivated.
22. The key to this reasoning could be “balance”. We have been used to living in an unbalanced society where, year by year, things tend to “get better” (new models of this and that etc.). Today we have data showing incompatibility between this eternal search for the “new” and the hope that the planet as a whole will not counteract. There is a need to postulate a “balanced” society where progress develops horizontally, in which we will not produce anything new, but cultivate already existing things (with the exception of some medical practices or education), guaranteeing the most dignified life possible to everyone. If only we can eliminate the vast conglomerate of artificial processes with which we saturate our abstract power, two phases would follow. An initial phase of pain for having lost infinite progress’s illusory beauty, a second one in which we become aware of the ways of living that we had ignored. It follows that no one wants to admit that this is happening in our homes: in this very moment, we are realising that no one, in a world dominated by the command of progress, knew how beautiful it was to simply live. However, we could tackle several problems in a more reasonable and less utopian way by considering an economy that will not impoverish anyone and spread universal income.
23. As already mentioned, the point of the matter is evolutive: we could be the “new species” of Hominidae. However, Homo Sapiens’ deconstructive process did not occur intentionally, but because of an external agent. The fact that we are not superior to nature, that we are vulnerable, that we do not hold a central place amongst the things of the world, are all elements that we have gained in the course of this emergency. The point now is to understand whether during the constructive phase we consciously want to work and “generate” a potentially new species - what I call the contemporary post-human -, consequence of an even more potential speciation. In this sense, planning is an essential part of speciation: architects and designers, philosophers and scientists, doctors and farmers, artists and artisans are all called to action in designing what will gradually become the future world. Quite recently (Jan. 2020) Guggenheim Museum in New York has announced Rem Koolhaas visionary exhibition dedicated to the countryside, as a space for future projects and life. This is one of the several possible examples to understand how we are all involved in this challenge. There are two options: one in which emergencies will become continuous throughout the course of our future, as Alessandro Baricco has written on Repubblica (March 26th, 2020), another in which we give a chance to a world without emergencies. This means giving a chance to a world that distances itself from the idea of progress which has driven us for the last fifty years.
24. Our next mission is not the world that will exist but the one that is already here. We need to save it, finally understanding that we actually need to save ourselves (the planet will likely survive us). Let us stop considering ecological and animalist, anarchist and post-humanist theories as useless and scaremongering. As Raffaele Alberto Ventura has noted, “it would be a mistake to consider this epidemic as a natural phenomenon: on the contrary, it has been social from the beginning. Such a simple microorganism would not have been able to do what it did without the help of those infrastructures – such as modes of transport, hospitals, institutions and the media – that the system has made available” (not, March 27th, 2020). What Ventura acutely understands is the end of the division between nature and culture in these articulated processes. The price to pay for the luminous world we live in - a world that has also managed to generate ethics and important radical movements - is the source of rapidly-spread tragedies that were easily marginalised beforehand, as Covid-19 shows us. We live rapidly because we die quickly.
25. Humans are to Covid-19 like the dinosaurs were to the Ice Age; contemporary post-human is the species that follows Homo Sapiens. One of the possible answers worth considering comes from Alain Badiou: “we give credit to verifiable truths given by science and perspectives founded by new politics, by local analysis and by its strategic objective, while being confined.” Once again, I think that we fear the idea of a final earthquake, which Slavoj Zizek claims with epic radicality, that Covid-19 is mostly an acronym that described the end of neoliberalism as we know it. These pages, far from being pessimist, attempt to give a breath of fresh air to optimism, hoping that after-Covid issues can be managed through a long-term rational plan and by putting long-ignored problems into question. Any middle-class tendency to stigmatise animalists’ and ecologists’ concerns as exaggerated cannot be rationally defended anymore. This present time of somewhat forced break from our everyday life is the set-up to post-human existence which, willing or not, awaits every one of us. In the end, shallow ecology reforms - such as reconversion of industrial systems - were more complex to put in action than the total revolution Covid-19 (unfortunately) opened up. The only way to change the background theme of the dominant system is peacefully and radically at the same time. Pre-pandemic half-measures will surely be taken after a vaccine and before the next crisis (maybe the definitive one). Therefore, the time to take action is the one that follows this current state of affairs, which will appear as a small parenthesis of normality.
26. All-encompassing revolutions such as the crisis opened by Covid-19 are always marked by a fear to lose one’s life, which is also the fear of potentially negative and unpredictable consequences. On this matter, what is left to do is hope that the damage done is not so severe to the point that humanity and human dignity will collapse along with the system. This fear could be alleviated by the evidence of people being confined at home without their habitual harmful drugs and their vices, feeling their head explode: this demonstrates that fear was inside us all along and that neglecting it was never the right solution. During these days some people are starting to courageously relate life loss (the reason for which we stay at home) to that of one’s freedom and dignity (what happened to us as a consequence of staying home). What if freedom will be valued more than losing one’s life? What if after Covid-19 living will suddenly become more important than surviving? Sooner or later, even if society has completely numbed with respect to death, we are all destined to it. Are we sure that this very long but empty life for which we have been fighting is more valuable than an intensely brief one? The one who’s writing, like everybody else, does not want to die. However, honestly, surviving does not seem so different compared to the opposite instance.
27. No, medicine and science will not resolve the situation. Maybe mathematics could help, but the point remains radically philosophical: opening the world and sacrificing life? Closing everything and remoulding the notion of freedom? Intermittently opening-up and discriminating against the weak? All these things are not medical notions but conceptual, philosophical positions. Certain deeply embedded values in our society might have to be called into question. Directly or not, they will contribute to a social and intellectual discussion. For what concerns the main mass media and education issues, the real work-bench for the future could be changing and renovating the already established values. We have no idea of the monstrosity that can follow the Covid-19 emergency, if we continue to fuel the expansion of this structure, regardless of this forced break. We might need to endorse a society in which social needs like sex or love will become secondary, given that the possibility of meeting others could depend on specific health conditions. We have always thought that primitives were powerless against threats such as diseases. However, today we are in the same situation, realising that, differently from the past, we are completely incapable of even accepting the risk of illness and death because they have practically disappeared from our horizon. It is nobody’s actual fault but it is education’s, intertwined with the system we are submitted to. Additionally, the current threats are mostly constructed or indirectly caused by humans themselves, as Covid-19 shows. Here is why today, unprepared to live as well as to die, we are disappointed, humiliated, full of a rage that we cannot bring upon anyone.
28. This brief piece should be read as an attempt to start a dialogue with the readers and not as a dogmatic response to such an emergency. It will obviously be necessary to hit the current system at its core. To hit the system where it hurts the most means organising radical workgroups, acting against its further expansion. Such work should aim at raising awareness about what we could lose while remembering we have not lost yet. With direct and brutal realism let us consider capitalism as shot dead by Covid-19. The organisation of a new outlook towards the future will not be built on the rubble of the past but on a slow recovery of real goals.