<
https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/09/19/pandemic-nihilism-social-murder-and-the-banality-of-evil/>
"Every day in the pandemic, many people’s lives end, and others are made
irrevocably worse.
These daily losses matter inestimably at a human level, yet they do not matter
in any meaningful way at all to the public and private institutions that govern
our lives. Our suffering is inconsequential to the machinery of power and to
those who compose and operate that machinery. This has been the case all along,
but in this phase of the pandemic, our suffering has been nihilistically recast
as not just inconsequential, but inevitable by the administration and the
voices it has cultivated as its proxies. Consider, for example, White House
Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s remarks during President Biden’s July 2022
COVID-19 infection: “As we have said, almost everyone is going to get COVID.”
The nihilism that the Biden administration displays is both convenient and
necessary for the personnel who help intensify the avoidable harms of the
pandemic, which amount to what Friedrich Engels called social murder. The goal
of much of the administration’s policy is to depoliticize those harms, so as
not to face any responsibility for them. There appear to be no built-in limits
on what the administration will attempt to achieve this goal: anyone waiting
for officials’ consciences to kick in should prepare for a long, hard winter.
To that end, the government officials, employers, and middle managers helping
to cause preventable harms exhibit a variant of what Hannah Arendt called the
banality of evil: a willful thoughtlessness and lack of imagination cultivated
by the demands of bureaucracy and pursuit of professional success — they are
people with “no motives at all” other than looking out for professional
advancement. Institutions select for officials who are capable of the
appearance of sincerity in doing what they’re told and of rationalizing
uncomfortable orders. The more time people spend in such positions, the better
they get at these mental operations, and the sincerity becomes more than just
appearance."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: September 22, 2022
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-72322225
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
