Between danger and opportunity

            Richard Forster¹

    The plague is among us, approaching stealthily and invisibly, transgressing borders, shattering into a thousand pieces the agreements of countries that believed their hyper-commodified protocols would guarantee a world economic order capable of expanding wealth and growth for a privileged few. And they ended up discovering, bewildered and terrified, that the inequality that this same system had spread throughout the world would return to them, in the form of a virus, the equality of contagion, fragility, and death. A strange paradox of our era, which had normalized brutal social differences, the enormous gap between rich and poor nations, which plundered entire continents in the name of civilization and progress, which transformed the logic of profitability into a sacrosanct value, reducing all spheres of life to commodities whose importance was to be measured by their “market value.” Equality in the face of a viral spread that knows no ideological differences and recognizes no borders that discriminate between citizens of the developed world and impoverished undocumented migrants drowning in the Mediterranean. Fear in the opulent Italy of the North, fear in a Neapolitan migrant neighborhood, fear in Merkel's Germany as it begins to review its "fiscal orthodoxy," fear in a Spain too inclined toward consumerism, fear in booming Seoul, which, through cinema, shows us the reality of inequality, fear on planes packed with tourists rushing back to their countries of origin before all borders close, fear on luxurious ocean liners whose passengers discover, bewildered yet still retaining their first-class privileges, what it means to become an outcast and be refused entry to any port. Fear has made us more equal and, through those strange twists of history, opens the possibility of rethinking our way of life. An opportunity in the midst of darkness and uncertainty.

     The virus is invisible, propelled by any cough at any moment, boarding airplanes, sneaking into theaters, mingling in the embraces of dancing bodies, circulating with absolute freedom beyond all controls in a world that supposedly had everything under control (facial recognition, cameras in every corner of even the smallest cities, clicks that end up in algorithms capable of capturing what we don't know about ourselves and directing our behavior even though we feel like masters of our own freedom, surveillance everywhere as a supposed guarantee of our security...). Disordered order, disarmed surveillance, transparency shrouded in a fog of doubts and uncertainties that fuel the fear of the unknown. A last desperate refuge in the miraculous capacity of science and technology that takes too long to arrive, and time is running out, increasing fragility and uncertainty. Fundamental myths of our contemporary imagination are collapsing spectacularly along with the spread of the pandemic. Who protects us now that the State has been shrunk with the acquiescence of the very same people who now demand that our leaders take responsibility for repairing what they themselves dismantled? What can we say to a society that believed in the bliss of the market and its opportunities, of meritocracy and its pyramids built on “individual effort and competition among the best,” of a capitalism that promised only the infinite multiplication of consumption while irreversibly damaging the biosphere? How can we escape the autism of an all-encompassing narcissism that has taken root within us, only to discover that we get nowhere in isolation? How can we heal souls devoured by the moral self-employment that has turned each individual into a kind of self-sufficient monad? Questions that, perhaps, will illuminate the viral darkness with a different light. The dialectic of a tragedy that reminds us, every now and then, that “where danger grows, so too does that which saves.”

     Standing on the brink of disaster, we are compelled to make a sharp turn if we don't want everything to end in catastrophe. It is, perhaps, though not without guarantees, the arrival of an opportunity to examine the ills of a self-destructive system. Through a strange paradox of the dialectic of life and death, the smallest, the infinitesimal, that which was at the origin of life and will continue to be when we are gone—bacteria and their derivatives, including viruses and their mutant adaptations—are telling us that we have gone beyond all limits in our transformative and predatory zeal. That life continues its course while we humans ask ourselves what we have done wrong. The time to act, to dramatically change course in our mad, consumerist, and egocentric race, is today, now. Tomorrow is a distant and unattainable horizon if we are not capable of building another way of doing things and of living with ourselves and with nature. Beyond financialized capitalism and its paraphernalia of blind productivism and selfish profitability that only offers prosperity to 20% of humanity while that prosperity multiplies the misery of billions and the destruction of the environment.

     A system that promised the endless production of goods and perpetual enjoyment in the form of a market freed from any state control and predatory of its greatest object of hatred: the "welfare state," a cursed instrument against which they have been battling for forty years, devastating healthcare systems and cornering the state until it has become merely the custodian of their nefarious financial dealings. A crusade that has lasted four decades and has not only gutted the social welfare state but has also ravaged daily life, fragmenting it into a thousand pieces and multiplying individualistic and selfish behaviors to the point of exhaustion. Exhaustion of a gigantic delusion manipulated by large media corporations that have managed to transform the idea and practice of the welfare state into the equivalent of populism, demagoguery, authoritarianism, waste, and the capture of freedom. An ideology, neoliberalism, sustained by the mystification of the market, which was and is responsible for the dismantling of social assistance, the consequences of which we can painfully verify when the coronavirus overwhelms and collapses public health systems that are underfunded and weakened by widespread commodification.

     One day, we discover that the masks fall away and that the consequences of the lies take the form of abandonment, exposure, and the inability to face the arrival of the plague. Once again, and without taking any responsibility, the voices that once demanded less government now demand that the government save them. Gone are the days of questioning the "Doña Rosas" of that ineffable journalist who poisoned the minds of millions of television viewers during the golden, neoliberal years of the 1980s and 1990s, and who found so many disciples in today's sensationalist media and the Macri administration's destructive policies. That same Doña Rosa who is now dying globally because there is no social security and hospitals have been plundered by the privatizing, market-driven logic that has turned healthcare into just another commodity. The coronavirus has awakened us from our decades-long slumber, from our absurd abandonment of the welfare state, from the idiocy that infected a significant portion of global society under the siren song of the market economy, entrepreneurship, and private competition. We still have time, even as we navigate days and weeks of anxiety, fear, pain, and suffering, to rebuild our social fabric, but only if we shatter the brutal lie of neoliberal capitalism by relentlessly examining our innermost selves, the values ​​that dominated us and contributed to multiplying the disaster in the form of a fantasy world whose architecture resembled a gigantic shopping mall.

     We believed that we could live, if we were part of the privileged few, in a greenhouse. Protected from the harsh climate, from global warming, from growing poverty, from violence, and from the plagues that decimated the world's poor and hungry. The greenhouse shattered into a thousand pieces, not by the force of a humanity in rebellion, but by the arrival of infinitesimal and invisible organisms capable of penetrating every crevice of a disarmed and disjointed society that some time ago decided to live under the banner of "every man for himself." The virus brutally reminded us that this, too, is an insolent chimera, another fantasy of an annihilating system.

     Because neoliberalism, and we will never tire of saying it, is much more than the financialization of capitalism, its zombie-like moment in which it has put on autopilot, taking us directly toward the consummation of catastrophe; neoliberalism has sustained and expanded thanks to a profound and colossal capture of subjectivities. Values, forms of sensibility, social practices, customs, and common sense have been permeated and rewritten by the economization of all spheres of life. And it is within a fragmented and desocialized society that the power of the virus seeps in, at a dizzying speed that leaves us stunned, and its capacity to infect our lives. Faced with a return of the monstrous reality, when certainties collapse and dominant narratives no longer serve to soothe our anguish, we are compelled to rebuild old and new practices that had been displaced by a system of hyper-competitive and individualistic competition: to reconstruct the commons, the realm of solidarity and recognition. To revitalize the public sphere and the State as guarantors of a genuine principle of democratic equality and to wrest from the insatiable appetite of neoliberal capitalism the right to free, quality public healthcare. To learn, in turn, from this pandemic that reveals the limitations of an economic and technological order that not only deepens inequalities but has also created the conditions for the increasingly inexorable degradation of our home, Earth. A virus that tests us as a society and as human beings who need to relearn how to care for ourselves and the life around us, allowing us to continue dreaming of a future.

1- Argentine philosopher, member of President Alberto Fernández's Advisory Council. Article published in the newspaper Página 12.

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[+] Thinking about the pandemic