What We've Learned on Resiliency and Societal Loss
And why the war metaphor for COVID may be more apt than we thought
Well, I had another column planned for this week, but to aptly quote Trotsky, whose demise was infamously after falling afoul of Stalin:
You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
So we are living with a massive ground war in Europe again. An outcome that was never supposed to be possible and I have to say it’s left me quite despondent. I mentioned it in last weeks note but I have to say now that war has been provoked, I hope those that did so and those that are invading a country in a war of aggression feel the full blowback of the hell on earth they are unleashing. While I am trying to dealing with following the events compulsively, taking a step back to reflect is definitely helpful.
Also means I’m writing this at the last minute, I think that means I’m a real writer now. So I apologize if things aren’t sourced as to my normal standard Which is to say, minimal sourcing, though I’m happy to back up any of my factual claims.
Anyway, all of this week’s news dovetails with another idea that I found very interesting recently. I suppose before going any further, anything related to this week and things going forward is going to be pretty grim and it’s already the convergence of two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse (pestilence and war), so if you want a light hearted distraction, maybe hold off until next week.
Anyway, back to the main idea, a very interesting question at the end of a recent episode of The Remnant podcast with Jonah Goldberg featuring Lyman Stone, an economist and demographer, regarding his takeaways from the overall situation of the world after two years of Covid.
The answer struck me and I’ve been marinating on it for a few weeks and the last 7 days have really clarified it for me. Anyway, Mr. Stone responded (at 57:26):
To me it’s [covid] suggestive that … valuation on preventing lost life is perhaps not as high in the Western countries as one might thing. In contra, you can look at, say, China, or a lot of the Asian countries, and you can see an extraordinary paranoia that any Covid death is unacceptable
It’s really a quite extraordinary insight into the world, especially as we are once again finding ourselves in a conflict of free versus unfree civilizations what does that mean if (and now unfortunately when) these points come into conflict.
The events of the last week have been could not have coincided with the point that was made better.
To start out, we are witnessing a full on information war playing out in media around the world. And in that campaign, Ukraine is unquestionably the victor. The reasoning is quite simple, because their strategy is to broadcast what’s happening as widely as possible. Now, we need to remember that they are just as interested in shaping a narrative as the Russian side, so take things with a couple lumps of salt, especially fantastical and unverified tales like the “Ghost of Kyiv”.
On the Russian side of the conflict, they are obsessed with playing a narrative right out of 1984. Though considering Orwell took quite a bit of inspiration from Oceania from the USSR, seems fitting for a country led by a man who was literally at the interface of the KGB and the Stasi. But anyway, things like “denazifying” a country of its Jewish president while bombing Babi Yar where the Holocaust really got underway or using mobile crematoria to hide the true body count just shows that actually being able to present real facts can help.
I’m not going to keep harping on this war. I’m not an expert — My first post was about how I fear the idea of becoming one, too — and far more people are covering it far better than me.
But this seems obvious to me that there is a subtext in this about China and Taiwan that is quickly become just regular text. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is clearly watching these events to help gauge their idea of moving militarily across the Straits of Taiwan to reunify China. And I think this conversation is a big factor in motivation that is often overlooked.
People often look at the headline numbers of China’s massive population, but look at how much pain they are willing to endure for a disease that mostly kills elderly people. I’m certainly not a covid minimalist, but the fact is I think many people’s risk calculation would be different if it normally stole decades of life rather than taking less than a decade on average.1 So how can we think that the population would be okay with sending healthy young men off to die? Especially in a country where so many are only children.
Meanwhile, places that are able to have free and open debate about real costs and benefits from disease control or war have populations that have bought into the social contract and, as we are seeing in Ukraine, quite willing to put their life on the line for it.
So maybe it’s my inherent contrarianism, but I certainly hope that the current conflict is a last gasp of showing just how much direct conflict cannot achieve what the authoritarians want. We don’t live in a world where the tanks can roll into Budapest or the Prague Spring put down with little consequence anymore. I just hope that the right lessons are taken away and that the multi-polar world isn’t as multi-polar as we thought.
I think this is the sort of context of Martin Luther King, Jr. Saying “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” It was said in the face of ongoing extraordinary difficulty but with an optimism that the future would be better. We should remember that collective hoping going forward and understand we will take our lumps along the way, but it’s no reason to stop
Personal News
On the canine front there isn’t much news other than that a 40 kg dog has suddenly decided to be sly and walk up for a pet while sitting and then, somehow in a move that can only be described as ‘brutish subtlety’ is able to get on your lap before you know what has happened in an effort to get more snuggles. It’s quite an incredible sight.
I am now also officially Spanish. I just have no documentation of that fact. In what was probably the most apt metaphor for such a bureaucratic country, I managed to go through a 6 year long process for the official naturalization and then be funneled through a single file line to be asked to promise my loyalty to Spain by a judge who spoke at a speed that seemed to indicate occupying a millisecond more of his time than strictly necessary was a personal affront, the documents will be in the mail in a month a half and have a nice day. I don’t know that I’ve ever had such an anti-climactic experience in my life.