For this week's @abundance.tribe question QOTW I'm taking 'humanity' as the British Population, and how they've responded to the 'big event' of the year - Covid 19, otherwise it's too broad for me to discuss in a timely fashion!
I think the biggest lesson I've learnt about 'British People' is really a reinforcement of something I already suspected, now I know it, and that lesson is this:
People in general are not prepared to take responsibility for systems level management, they are not prepared to get involved in trying to understand or influence (let alone create) macro economic and global political issues, debates, decisions or systems.
They would rather defer responsibility for the running of the system and the dealing with crises, such as Covid-19, to those in formal positions of political and economic power and the 'experts' those people employ while the public en masse retreat into their private worlds and distract themselves with trivialities.
The British public, I believe, has long had this attitude, since at least the onset of Postmodernity in the 1980s.
This process of 'privatisation' has been a gradual drip-drip descent and it largely explains why people have been so willing to accept Lockdown - their private lives, away from the public realm, are where they feel comfortable, so Lockdown wasn't really that much of a burden for most people.
And even less of a burden when you can 'have fun with it' via Zoom.
Meanwhile dealing with the crisis is left to a small handful of incompetents...
As the masses retreat further into their private lives this leaves a relatively small handful of averagely intelligent, elite educated people (mainly men) to shape the political and economic system, and respond to global dynamics, and this elite runs that system in their own interests, for the most part leaving the masses to deal with the fall-out themselves.
All of that support around Furlough wasn't primarily about the individuals, it was about protecting the system, the shit of economic turmoil has been passed down for the people to deal with over the coming years, and to the next generations to deal with decades to come.
How this has affected me...
Well it's made me want to hang around in the UK even less than previously. Brexit started this off, and I've been reading recently about how there's been a 'Brain Drain to Europe' as a result.
Now I'm going the same way. In two weeks I'm leaving this country, and I doubt if i'll ever call it home again.
The plan is to go and live off-grid in Portugal, simply and sustainably and start building a new system, as detached from this current one as possible.
NB - this has always been my long term plan, it's just that Covid-19 and the public's pathetic response to it has given me even more impetus to get cracking with it!
Someone's got to do it.