Zen Politics

One week of social distancing has passed, and the trends are already clear. As more and more countries go into isolation to fight the coronavirus pandemic and the global economy heads heavily for a Depression, people everywhere are beginning to see the true faults in our global economic system.

The United States is going to become the second Italy with already a near overwhelmed medical system, far too few tests for infection skewing official figures, and a president that perfectly embodies the philosophy of our current global corporatocratic capitalist system: profits over people. There have already been at least two other American politicians and one news outlet, as of the time of this writing, that brought up the question of whether or not society should sacrifice those who are at the highest risk of death from the virus, in order to salvage the economy. This is how otherwise good people in corporate settings are made complicit in crimes, in order to safeguard rising profits for the corporation. The cases are many throughout history, but now our current health crisis is bringing this toxicity to the highest levels of government: the leader of the free world.

Beyond the visible physical health crisis facing us, there are more invisible health crises that are intersecting, and those are of the collective mental illnesses that are and will be made worse by this and the other crises of our current status quo. From the traumatized from personal experiences to the trauma from past crises and economic downturns, the mental illness pandemic will swiftly follow, if it hasn’t begun already. Lockdowns will surely claim more lives than this virus itself, if we don’t massively expand the resources we can provide to those who are struggling the most.

The fact is that this isn’t the first and it won’t be the last time we’re faced with a pandemic. Next time, we may not be so fortunate to have such low death rates. Also, despite the numbers, at least as of this writing, this isn’t even the most lethal virus to have infected civilization, nor is it the most lethal element of modern civilization overall. Particulate pollution on its own kills an estimated 9 million people globally a year. It’s also the reason why the climate crisis isn’t as dire as it could be, as that particulate pollution reflects quite a bit of the Sun’s energy back into space. That crisis is waiting for us, this is just our dress rehearsal for what is to come.

Despite all of this, the coronavirus pandemic is proving to be an extremely potent test of our global systems, and all of the skeletons are coming out. Virtually every government in the developed world, regardless of its political ideology, is currently being forced into adopting far-left policies, in order to safeguard the health and well-being of its citizens in an environment where our current economic system simply grinds to a halt. Socialist advocates of everything from universal basic income to universal healthcare to minimum wage and social assistance are being vindicated all at once. Masses of people, now out of jobs, from low and medium income jobs to small businesses are becoming radicalized, as the class struggle is even showing its face between tenants and landlords, mortgage payers and banks.

It’s becoming painfully clear already, and this trend will continue, that we have built a house of cards that only serves us when there’s relative environmental stability, and even then the inequalities are grotesque. The corporate capitalist system simply can’t function in times of crisis, and it’s a form of capitalism that is slowly divorcing from democracies and flourishing fastest in totalitarian states like China. This trend will also continue, if the left continues to fail to provide any economic alternatives.

The good news is that there has always been an alternative to the corporatocracy model for quite some time, although we seem to have forgotten it exists. In a time when we need to be more and more united and co-operative on a national and international level, this is the perfect time for us to create those very co-operative institutions and companies that would be much more resilient and dynamic than anything the corporate form can offer. From the social to the economic and in every other sense, co-operatives have been historically proven to perform, and should be the backbone of every free democratic economy. It’s truly the only alternative to the current corporatocracies that are currently proving so completely inadequate, when we need them to function for our best benefit.

It’s time that we ask and correctly answer some very important questions. We’re globally in a place where to expect to return “back to normal” or to “business as usual” is de facto Utopian and delusional. We’d only be repeating history, and we simply don’t have the time or the luxury to have another shot at this.

We need to learn our lessons now, or the much larger crises that await us, once this pandemic is over, will prove to be the real apocalypse of our civilization.