Yes, Je est un autre is become a collective and communal assertion: we are …
Or, if it remain a matter of me it still maintains and expects the collective endorsement of too, it is poised or it poses on the edge of common recognition, which is ours in general, which it assumes to make such good moral sense that you’d be a complete troll idiot not to recognise the righteousness of the numbers–and dissent.
But the sense of moral outrage is endlessly manipulable as Trump shows even when showing his small hands hamfistedly engaged in this sleight or slight.
We might ask, together, and unifying in our common moral outrage for or against, how does it hold up, the trick, when we can see how it is done, and how badly; how do they get away with it?
Should we think of them as the better magicians for it? Or of ourselves as the stupider? Dumb, and so on.
Who is behind the assumption of these positions if not us? Is it the fear of being left out–a real fear–that, by the speed of communication in the age of the interweb, is retrojected to precede the impulse on which each of us acts? Is this what pushes?–the statistical impasse in which not to recognise ourselves (with the other or others) is to deny our identity, to deny that with which we identify?
The big fear expressed by government in New Zealand over its handling of COVID-19 has been that the virus is in the community. Of course this is xenophobic. But we can sacrifice the bad meaning of fear of foreign agents for the good meaning, which is that those agents are not people. They are barely even life as we know it, but parasitical on life, not travellers, so much, not tourists,
but viral, which means foreign and subhuman…
…however: dissent in general does not exist…
except in society.
Society exists to protect us from community. What an outrageous claim!
But how many times have you heard, a number so large it is statistically absolute, I know my community…
And: In my community this would never happen…
But that it does.
It does with increasing, and statistically verifiable, frequency.
What in our communities would never happen is happening in and to our society all the time. Which is what I would suggest is the virtue of society.
Not virtual society. That’s just dumb. But the reason why our social media empower the limited cognitive bubbles and lowest common denominators (ah, the old language!) of communities. Not societies.
(Media is of course also a misnomer: since what are called social media are privately owned commercial platforms.)
Societies should be set up to deal with an influx of foreigners, viral and other, and not be part of the setup in which social infrastructures, nonvirtual, are stretched to the limit by that kind of dissent from community which is foreign, viral and other.
Didn’t we all always know the end would be an inside job? Like me.
Leave a Reply