It is clear by now, that the Covid-19 virus is here to stay. There is no “beating it” there is only “live with it”.
This was actually clear from the first introduction of the various lockdown measures worldwide. The majority of people liked to believe that we were “fighting the virus”, but government experts around the world stressed all along that the lockdown measures aimed only at “flattening the curve”.
The experts also knew, that this would come at an economic price.
When a couple of years from now we look back at 2020, I think we will be amazed by the economic hardship we brought on ourselves to battle the unbeatable. With open eyes we accepted the bankruptcy of hundreds of thousands of companies which threw millions of people out of work and into spiraling personal debt traps. Economically comfortable politicians kicked ordinary people with ordinary lives into a free fall that was more devastating than the prospect of getting the virus.
How come it was so easy for governments to brake the economy and what took them so long to shift the foot from the brake to the speeder by the time when it was clear they had sacrificed too much to save overburdening the hospitals?
I believe the keyword is sacrifice.
Human beings are religious people. Basic religious concepts is in our nature as deep as our instincts, it is not something, we have learned. If we sacrifice, we will get. We can throw a human being into a volcano to keep it from erupting. We can set out to kill our own son because God has requested it.
And there is a scale to it. The bigger the sacrifice the bigger the benefit. When a chicken on the alter is not enough, we slaughter an ox.
We need to understand this as a major reason why the masses around the world accepted the destruction of their lives at the hands of their own governments because they saw it as each their personal sacrifice on the alter of appeasing the monster.
There you also have the hesitation of the humans in power to move the foot 20 cm to the right and hit the floor. Something deep down in their human nature objects to this. This is the opposite of sacrifice, could it be a sin?
And how would the people react, if they found out that the sacrifice had been in vain? How can we prevent them from blaming it on the priests, who brought this misery on them?
