Or maybe we learnt that there’s no common good.
Look at how money flows (and flew right after WW2 and kept flowing) and concentrates at a certain section of pyramid - yes even in developed countries, in fact especially there.
On the other hand, go look into the history of cannon fodder soldiers from colonies in both of the “great” wars of the West and look at what happened to those nations right after and even until now. In fact somewhere told “tough luck, we still feel like keeping you enslaved little more”.
Well that’d happening inside nation's now. Differently - the name could be exploitation or something else.
I think the world has finally had enough of recorded history to learn the exact “common and communal good”!
A century ago, old people would have made sacrifices so that young people could live their lives. Baby boomers are too self absorbed for that, far too selfish. I gave them two months, which is more than I should have. Give an inch and they'll try to take a mile. If it wasn't for the pushback we'd all still be isolating to make baby boomers feel safe.
Just like arguments to “think of the children” are almost never made by children themselves.
From what I remember it was the boomers who were the loudest voices against “shelter in place” during the pandemic. Young people were the ones happily following what ever order the authorities demanded.
Success was quite the moving target back then and to be cranky that two weeks lead to two years drastically underestimates the difficulty of the problem. Paxlovid, Boosters, knowledge on how to treat AND THE FACT that the ones that were susceptible are DEAD... (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...)
Your take on it is tone deaf and lacking in empathy.
There’s emergent behavior that came out of well known scientific behavior in trying to contain a global phenomenon that we didn’t fully understand when it hit.
But with the 'rona it wasn't presented as such; there was a clear propaganda push from some corners telling people that their freedoms were being taken away, that they were suffering, etc.
People’s freedoms were, literally, being taken away. Whether the extent to which freedoms were curtailed was worth the extent to which doing so helped slow the spread of the virus is a subjective question that reasonable people can debate. It’s unfair to dismiss either side of that debate as “propaganda”.
Sitting around at home is much better than dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. How people did not see beyond this is beyond comprehension. What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months?
Yes, obviously, but that wasn't the choice. It was probabilistic: sitting around at home vs. some chance of dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection.
> What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months?
Everything? I don't know if I even understand the question. Why do you think people don't like going to prison for example?
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EDIT to explain further:
Let me give a hypothetical extreme example. Now I'm not claiming that the tradeoff in the case of COVID is this lopsided, but I'm just trying to illustrate the framework for thinking about these kinds of question. Imagine you are given two options:
OPTION A: You go to prison for 10 years. Separately, much later, you die at age 83.
OPTION B: You don't go to prison. There's a 99% chance that nothing happens (you stil dies at 83). There's a 1% chance that you die a year earlier, at 82.
In this extreme example, obviously, everyone would pick Option B.
Because of our self-preservation instinct, we don't like to think about the fact that we're inevitably going to die someday, so human moral intuition tends to think of saving a life as having infinite value. But that's not the case: the point of this reductio ad absurdum is that there is no such thing as saving a life, only extending it for some finite amount of time.
If you make V people's lives worse by W% for X time, to extend Y people's lives by Z time, whether it is "worth it" depends on the values of all the variables involved. Reasonable people can debate whether this was the case for the Covid lockdowns, and that is properly a political question, not a scientific one (though science can help inform it).
You wouldn’t have a picnic in the middle of a forest fire, just like you shouldn’t go out into some me-first in the middle of a pandemic. If you did, you’re going suffer consequences and use up resources of those that were caught up by a accident. Both can wait.
This Kantian mindset has to go.
Firstly, there is the issue of hindsight bias. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had limited knowledge about the potential impact of the virus. Our understanding was primarily based on previous outbreaks like SARS and MERS, which had mortality rates as high as 50%, and alarming outbreaks on cruise ships and in apartment complexes which suggested fast spread of the virus through contaminated surfaces as well as through the air. The rapid global spread of the virus, facilitated by increased air travel, compounded these concerns.
Authorities were acutely aware that regions with less advanced healthcare systems would be particularly vulnerable. Even in countries with robust healthcare infrastructures, there was a significant risk that ICU units could be overwhelmed by the influx of severely ill COVID-19 patients requiring extended duration intensive care, with high-flow oxygen therapy often followed by intubation and a prolonged period of induced coma. This situation threatened to reduce the availability of intensive care for other critical cases.
Moreover, there was an initial shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) and oxygen supplies, exemplified by the oxygen shortages in India.
Finally, there was a real concern about the emergence of more lethal variants of the virus, particularly given the rapidly increasing number of infections and the vulnerability of immunocompromised individuals as potential incubators for new variants.
All these factors contributed to fears of a devastating societal and economic impact, as seen in the mass migrations of unemployed individuals in India returning to their hometowns and villages to support their families.
In my opinion, these considerations underscore why many measures taken during the pandemic were deemed necessary at the time.
How much runway do you think the average service industry business has?
How much runway do you think the people it employs has?
My favorite Chinese buffet is now an armed forces recruiting center. The adjacent movie theater is unoccupied. I can go on.
I'm not saying it should have been business as usual but to ignore that many parties lost big because of what was done is to be misleading at best.
we lack the ability to make sacrifices for the communal good.