WHERE THERE IS HOPE30/01/21
Let me bombard you with this claim; to survive coronavirus one must learn to think away from oneself.
For political and economic developments, social quality must be tangible and objective. We are not talking about gloss fabrication that dilutes in the tide of opinions, but practical objectives that endures good feelings and experience.
Well, well-being is a social quality expressed by a good feeling; a by-product of positive development. I know some people get a good feeling from negative developments imposed upon others, but that's more like ideology in its extreme especially when social issues are fired as political weapons!
It doesn't suggest politics and economic progress to transmit a contagious fashion although coronavirus is the only trend thriving in our time. What the media decides is public opinion and we are settled with a negative view.
Who can feel good about the state of Housing, or Climate Change and Renewable Energy in our local perspective is fairly depressing. But compare our lot to the rest of the world, New Zealand ranks highly among optimistic travellers even ex-pats are queuing up for a place.
From here, it's fairly obvious that the media favours political opinions of issues usually promoting right wing views of their owners. It reads Housing as static and giving rise to Homelessness; Climate Change as uneconomic and not depleting economic resources!
If you can extract the political undertone; Housing is the major driver of the local economy. You cannot have both satisfactory housing supply and economic growth at same time. For economic growth, there must be a population of those seeking houses to provide a demand. And among those are rich investors, overseas prospectors and own local poor who have made up the homeless sector.
The rich, comparative relativity and the poor are factors in maintaining the high cost of housing that's producing economic growth.
Manufacturing is a major contributor to economic growth. But as we all know, mass production use up a lot of natural resources only to be replaced by industrial waste. While manufacturing producers are using up raw resource, nothing grows on bare land that has become the source of landslide and flooding during wet seasons. And again, those who cannot afford to migrate become refugees in their own land.
For rich investors to make a return, there must be an available population of consumers usually driven by addictions. But the vicious cycle must follow that the want for a new toy creates the demand for reproduction. And while there is nothing wrong with the old car or phone, the trend is contagious.
And so our world is now divided by two spheres; one of healthy rich investors and the other of sickly poor consumers. Well, coronavirus had nothing to do with it but it looks like coronavirus is cleaning up the mess left behind by economic developments. How many among the coronavirus deaths are from the poor sectors?
It shows a natural tendency towards that way but a disclosing fact that Capitalism and it's economic system is now overwhelmed by its own consequences. The system in place is now turning upon itself. It has produced more addictions, mental health and un-sustaining escalation of social consequences. The economic system gives rise to death.
So if addiction becomes an instinctual desire, then making a profit is blind to the social consequences. Who cares about the homeless when there's more money to be made! Who cares about depletion and extinction when there's goods to be manufactured? Who cares about the dead?
For political and economic developments, social quality must be tangible and objective. For anything that can be seen must be tangible. And that suggests economic development is without sight of social quality. What does that say about the economic means of sustaining a life speaks for a linear development in place.
I have written about linear material development that is restricted to a single unit caught in the loop of deterioration. We are by nature formed of three parts; mind, body and soul. But the system sustaining our survival only provides for our physical needs or needs of the body. And so we grow materially lopsided and have failed to develop and therefore see the social and spiritual sides of ourselves.
Is the coronavirus a metaphorical flood beyond the boundaries of the material instigating an upward strive for the sake of survival? We cannot dig further down to hide ourselves; there is nowhere else to go.
Striving upon the boundaries of the material means learning to see beyond one's own. It is learning to understand other people; their race, culture, belief, gender, age, economic standards and so on.
Surely if we adopt an individual approach to the coronavirus, then we might unintentionally cause it to spread more. But if we try to learn how our neighbours live, then we might have a community approach to contain it.