While the world is somewhere between the first and the last stage of a new pandemic, most interesting effects are societal response and economical significance. While I do not care much for China’s manufacturing ability and personally out of the 90% trash produced I will miss really just a few. To be frank, I really do want to see a world where cheap plastic goods will disappear, much to the philistine consumer’s shock. No bags at the supermarket, sugar drinks and gum recede as supplies begin to run low. Maybe large part of smartphone and TV products will also become rare goods — that would feel like the Fifties all over again.
Maybe that recess of production and international transit will bring us back to that golden age our parents and grandparents striven for — which we could never before reach, because of all affluence and layers of unavoidable technical overcomplications. New 80s will give way to the 50s and someday to new 60s. We will have a chance to throw our boulders at the uniformed people. Many will realize that pillar holding our society has crumbled beyond any repair, and taking loan after a loan to insure it will not save us in the end game.
Maybe new virus can hasten the disruption already seeded by discovery of electricity — energy that does not necessarily destroy its origin. As the oil demand will plummet, it will have only one application left — that is, the original — being the fuel of war. But will future oil wars have any meaning? When oil and power will stop equating, what will the militarymen do? And what warlords will do, when their only treasure becomes obsolete, valueless artifact? I have no idea, but I think we will move to the next era once the dollar and oil barrels become obsolete and find their rest on the graveyard of the things past. My prayers are, weapons, soldiers, clergyman and propagandists will also follow suit after the loss of their true blood.
Back from the fantasy land — hopefully this recession will change re-distribution of wealth. People raised in affluent societies may faint at the notion of recession, yet halted factories and at least temporal decline of corporative growth is just what the humankind and the earth require. In that case, all the panic will be for the best.
Does that mean that in the future, we’ll see new make-believe pandemics, made up by individuals who think like I do, made unverifiable by the global-wide resonating of unintelligent propaganda machines? Sure hope we do! Until then, take care — and produce good wealth out of what you have at hand.
P.S. only buy used