It’s now the third week of the local Coronavirus lockdown here in Israel, and while Israel has not been not hit as hard as other places, namely Italy, Spain, and the USA, the story that unfolds shows that our true society is not covered by the glam of advertising and business-as-usual jet trips.
For the past 150 years or so, we’ve been living in mostly a capitalist democratic culture, or at least that’s what we thought we were doing, or told. Despite the fact that up until a few weeks ago we could order practically anything off of eBay, Amazon, or AliExpress, it looks like our entire production capability is really just for crap we don’t really need that is good at only one thing: sucking up our money.
Hospitals across the planet are starved of basic necessities such as masks and disinfectants. Not only that, but we have learned that simple devices that are designed to keep our loved ones alive in times of crisis are prohibitively expensive for hospitals because of capitalism.
One such example is a plastic ventilator that hospitals in the US would pay on a regular basis $11,000, but about a week ago, when the crisis in the US began to grow and these plastic parts started to become scarce, a few good men simply used a 3D printer to reproduce the same product for no more than $1 a pop.
If our society were directed towards building a better world for everyone and for our children, then this story would go about telling now how these 3D printed plans were quickly distributed over the Internet, and how a bunch more good men with 3D printers at their disposal started printing these ventilators near their local hospitals to assist in alleviating the shortage, saving millions and maybe billions of dollars for said hospitals to purchase new beds, build new hospital wings, and increase staff capacity to quickly and efficiently fight the onslaught of the coronavirus.
Instead, the people who went viral (not a common term anymore, I guess) with the story of 3D printed ventilator parts are being sued by the company that owns the rights for said ventilator parts.
The blueprints for the parts might be out there; in any case ,they’re not difficult to design, but hospitals around the planet are not being assisted by hoards of 3D-printing aficionados, and instead are continuing to pay 1,000,000% for these and other parts.
If we’re talking about hospitals, let’s quickly mention the case of building new ones.In late January, while the rest of the world was just beginning to joke at the Chinese for eating bats (as if eating cows or chickens that grow in their own feces to abnormally unhealthy and oversized dimensions is somehow more cultured), the Chinese people realized that this was far from being a joke, and, at the expenses of potentially over-reacting, began constructing hospitals all over the infection epicenters, using the same techniques they used to build a 57-storey skyscraper in 19 days.
They constructed more than 10 hospitals in less than two weeks, and they weren’t field hospitals with tents and gravels. Oh no, these are fully functional modern hospitals with proper air conditioning, ventilation, quarantine wards, and operating rooms. These hospitals were vital and helped the Chinese stop the spread almost entirely, and as of writing these lines in late March, most of those hospitals have been decommissioned, and some are already dismantled.
Looking at the US at this time, late March, with the number of infected in the US blowing past the number of infected in China, the Americans are only now beginning to impose lockdowns throughout the country.
If our society was geared towards a better overall experience of life for everyone, then this story would tell you about how the Americans are now taking in their sick into their brand new hospitals they’ve managed to build over the last two months using the same techniques the Chinese employed and are on a course to stop the viral progress of the coronavirus in its tracks in the upcoming weeks, only slightly behind the Chinese people. Instead, the American hospitals are charging individuals upwards of $1,000 for a coronavirus test. Reports are coming in of overflowing hospitals across major urban hubs across the entire nation. Emergency staff are overwhelmed and extremely understaffed, crying out for more equipment, raw materials, beds, to the extent that American doctors are seen in photos around the globe wearing trash bags as protective medical equipment.
It seems that the more capitalistic an area is, the harder the virus is affecting it. It looks like the virus is showing us the ugly underbelly, the true face of our modern 2020 society: a sick and twisted culture, which feeds on everyone to provide to a small few who got lucky in one way or another.
The wealthier the nation is, the harder this crisis hits. How are we different from the authoritarian nations that amassed wealth at the top of the ruling class by robbing the rest of the population? We are not. The system that we hail as the modern capitalist-socialist-democracy is flawed, and it’s being abused by the few who amassed enough capital and power to ever stiffen the fabric of our society, the legal and economic systems, to continue generating more wealth and power for themselves.
While the ruled class, roughly 99.9% of the global population is either being obviously oppressed in authoritarian regimes, or oppressed by commercial advertising and false-information spreading, hidden beneath the surface, influencing our representatives in our democratic establishments.
One could point at the marvellous economies of Northern Europe to showcase the potential of the capitalist-socialist-democracies that can be, while I’ll argue that the predatory forces that prey on the consumers of most of the world simply don’t need to fight as hard everywhere else, so these areas remain relatively true to their title of democratic socialist capitalist nations. It’s not because these nations are doing something different, something better, than the rest of us, it’s simply because the capitalist predators are not interested in them enough to actually invoke the same tactics used elsewhere. Like a lion that has the option of a young gazelle over a prairie dog, as long as the gazelle is an option there’s no need for the lion to prey on the prairie dogs.
This crisis reveals to us what some of us were trying to show everyone else throughout the past several decades. It shows us that the system in which we’re supporting daily by going to work, paying taxes, and choosing representatives, is inherently so flawed that while we’re in the most abundant period of our civilization, people are dying simply because our nations are geared toward satisfying the select few in exactly the way they desire. They’re not geared towards making our lives better, easier, more pleasant during the first-known post-scarcity era.
Production and manufacturing have become so cheap that we can all afford to work only several days a year while still maintaining our unhealthy consumption rates. Technology has advanced so much that nearly 99% of the working-age population is employed by unnecessary and outdated industries, doing nothing more than pushing papers around, or in modern terms, forwarding emails back and forth.
We can do better. We deserve better. And we shouldn’t let go of the power that each and every individual has because we’re simply tought so. What we were tought was obsolete the moment we were tought it, and what our children learn is simply no longer relevant to any of their day-to-day lives.
Our society as it stands now is obsolete. By clinging to the system that we built in good faith, that was quickly exploited and thoroughly abused, we simply deprive ourselves of the personal wealth we each bring to our culture. Giving it away to someone else who wears a corporate mask that you have no relation to, despite the lies those corporations tell.
A new system is to be built, a modern, just, fair, and advanced system that isn’t hindered by the legacy created long before our advanced technology changed every single aspect of our lives.
The power taken from the people will return to the people.
