In many ways all our realisations during this time of horror are just a single, vast realisation: we have no systems to protect us; we only have systems that protect themselves as systems. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/25/exclusive-big-pharma-rejected-eu-plan-to-fast-track-vaccines-in-2017?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

This is why it’s such a terrifying moment. Even underneath all our professed cynicism, we still deeply believed that our major institutions and mechanisms of power, for all their faults, would take care of us.

I think this is because, over the last few years, social and political discourse, by fixating on spurious ideas of reason and good sense, and becoming ever more obsessed with process, edged the very idea of care and compassion into the realm of the naively idealistic.

Always we were told that we had to be practical, that we had to be realistic, that there was no place either for pie in the sky dreaming or serious discussions about inequality because they were too disruptive and would ultimately be fruitless.

And all the while, systems which were supposedly designed to inform us, to advocate for us, to step in and help us, simply shored up their own political and financial power and social capital.

Now we’re aghast. How could we have ended up with such a broken care system; such a patently self-serving and morally repugnant government; such a hopelessly unprepared crisis response?

Because the whole project has been to limit our imagination of both the best and the worst that was possible, to shrink the entire discussion to a series of micro-debates about process, tradition, and economics that entirely excludes any basic moral and ethical debate...

...or any wider conceptualising of what kind of world we want to live in and what kind of world we want to avoid.