Empowerment in the COVID Era
As with general mass ignorance of economics, the nature of POWER itself is also overlooked. While these two are mostly discrete and separate elements, they DO overlap on a Venn diagram where their smaller and smaller intersections contribute to mass ignorance of the frames of reference influencing all human existence on the planet.
It’s much like the silent intersection of science and economics in the COVID era. I have not yet heard from a trained virologist with an economics degree explain to me the outcome of lockdowns on the greater public good. To say that science is the only good in what has become a global POLITICAL issue is the same as, effectively, saying that destroying vast swaths of businesses and business sectors via lockdowns is the only matter of issue. There are human elements and economic elements at play in the “discussion” of the COVID world, they eventually intersect in their own Venn diagram, and neither should be ignored, although it seems people choose politicians to speak for them on matters unconcerned with the intersection of public health and economics at large.
Additionally, PSYCHOLOGY and SOCIOLOGY are largely put aside in the POLITICAL discussion of lockdowns. Suicide rates due to isolation, unemployment, and homelessness are untouched topics by the trained LAWYERS in government who are also neither ECONOMISTS nor VIROLOGISTS.
Complexity abounds in the COVID world, but needless to say, the right types of people are not being honest wherever politics are involved. I’d love to see an economist, a virologist, a psychologist, and a sociologist — all unconnected to politics — sit down to discuss solutions in a room far from the lawyers of D.C. But we don’t get to see those discussions because they would illuminate the nature of power covertly governing all human lives and, frankly, looting the Treasury.
Broadly, there are five types of power: Force power, Stealth power, Artificial power, Real power, and Staying power. There are obviously subsets of each, but just as most Americans have widespread ignorance of the effects of economics on their ability to continuing living in a developed, 1st world nation, there’s does not exist ANY school that teaches about the nature of power currently or through time. Power is not even considered much of a field of study … even in the schools of philosophy … because to be ignorant about the complexities of power keeps the masses depowered where Power (generally speaking) needs the masses to remain in order to simply define itself by having an opposite.
We are now in a place where arguing with a screen about the unfairness of federal spending bills from inside an apartment without basic human touch is seen and promoted as empowerment.
Is it really?
Where is YOUR power and what in the world does that word even mean?
Perhaps one should focus on the acquisition of multiple frames of reference as long as we’re just sitting around pushing political points into discussions that span the fields of medicine, economics, psychology, sociology, and yes … lawyers.
