Control and the illusion of it.

 I’m reading this:

 The Case for Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good (also known as: Shop Class as Soul Craft).

by Matthew Crawford (Author) https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003TSDNCM?ref_=k4w_ss_details_rh

As recommended by someone on Neal Ashers Facebook page or in the Space Opera Group page on Facebook. Its one of those everyone should read it books. He’s cut through quite a bit of the smoke and mirrors of modern life to expose some really quite subtle but disturbing changes in our thinking and the way we have been manipulated into feeling we have more control/agency over our lives than we actually do, or it seems actually want (Agency by the way … the new word for control). The sense of agency people believe they have is as much a factor of unconscious training by marketeers, as governments imposing rules. 

During this exceptional time government has used a massive lever to exert control over the many to save the few (fine in the early days). Now we find that control over the many is not to preserve the few, but to protect the many from the few.  Rather than managing the exceptions, the rule is being managed.

I’m going clarify that, by saying that in majority Muslim/Indian/Pakistani communities there are large reservoirs of virus. Because there are shabby working conditions (thinks sweatshops), intergenerational living as default; not as the media would have you believe because of poverty as an exclusive cause. I’ve lived cheek by jowl with this community as its grown in east London, Grandfathers and fathers keep a tight rein on the younger generation to preserve certain desirable traits in their children (especially daughters). This means they all live in one-house/one-street where maximum control can be exerted. I sold my house in Eastham to a three-generation family composed exactly as described above. It was a big house and sold for a lot of money … poverty wasn’t the issue, Newham had some of the highest Covid rates in the UK).

My feeling is that Boris wants to take the reins off and is being cautioned not to by people who are either arse-covering in the extreme, or who are trying to lever society post-pandemic into structural social change.

I also feel that people are lazy and looking for an easy life. The book above suggests the same.

We are in a really difficult position because we have allowed the loony-left PC-Woke brigade to have far too much talk time, because it’s easy to monetize outrage on the back of some of their proselytization’s. Subsequently by the law of unintended consequences we have convinced ourselves that we should all accommodate the lowest common denominator, rather than setting the lowest common denominator aside and managing it in isolation.

The fear of causing offence or creating rifts in social cohesion means that the government is afraid to single out pockets of communities that are acting as reservoirs of Covid. And the longer the situation with Covid restrictions go on, the more habituated people will become to being controlled, which feeds into greater ease with which to exert control (a virtuous circle for those who seek control).

From various perspectives, what I have said could be easily construed as racist and bigoted and overly simplified when you look at the world-view beyond Covid, to climate change, the environment ect. However, therein lies another of the problems, conflation, and cause and effect and the discrimination of those causes from effects, and people not being able to distinguish from one from the other. And there are people far brighter than us with agendas and resources who can muddy the waters and are doing so, to exert control in many and various ways.

I suspect the net effect will actually be less control in the end, as individual factions turn away from government and voices that disagree, and the social-fault-lines of old are just being re-configured. And until those new fault lines fully establish (the new normal … the next normal), it will all feel very uncomfortable for everyone regardless of anyone’s personal position.