The Lessons We Should Have Learned in 2021 — But Didn’t
Why 2021 Was a Bitter, Brutal Welcome to the Age of Civilizational Fragility
umair haque

Dec 27 

How do you think history will remember 2021? I think it’ll say something like this. It was a year of unlearned lessons. The age of civilisation fragility had dawned — and the year 2021 gave humanity a portrait of how it would respond to crises greater even than the pandemic which had swept the globe. That portrait? It wasn’t a kind one.

What we’ve experienced in 2021 predicts how our societies and world will respond to threats like climate change, mass extinction, and ecological collapse — socially, culturally, economically, politically. Sadly, we didn’t do nearly well enough, because here we are, still desperately trying to fight Covid, and mostly losing.

By the beginning of the year, history will say, something remarkable had happened. The first vaccines against Covid had been created — with breathtaking speed. Science had risen to its challenge nobly and fiercely. And then, well, the ugly facts of human power, the bitter truths of human affairs began to intercede.

The next thing history will record is bafflement. Because by the end of 2021, the world still wasn’t vaccinated. Why wasn’t this humanity’s priority, history will wonder? What could possibly have been more important than vaccinating the planet and stopping new waves of Covid from breaking and cresting? Why was the world still being plunged into crisis a full year after Covid vaccines had been created, with a new, mutated strain called Omicron? Why was it barely half vaccinated, even then?

History will record this as our civilisation’s first great failure. Perhaps the first of many to come. To understand why what we’ve experienced in 2021 predicts the future of civilisation fragility, consider, in turn, how we responded to Covid, socially, politically, culturally, and economically. Science may have risen to the challenge beautifully, nobly, and swiftly — but it was the only one. The rest of our institutions and systems and even populaces, sadly, did not.

What happened as Covid hit? Let’s begin with the social effects. A significant proportion of the population were revealed as dangerous, malevolent idiots. Idiots in the classical Greek sense of the word, which invented it: people only capable of thinking about themselves. People went into denial — Covid was a hoax. They retreated into fanaticism and superstition. They miseducated themselves with conspiracy theories. And as a result, they refused to take vaccines. This effect was most pronounced in hyper-individualistic societies like America and Britain. In America, about 30% of the population refuses to this day to take a vaccine Still, “vaccine hesitancy” was a global phenomenon.

The effects were incredibly pernicious. Societies turned against each other, instead of uniting to fight the pandemic. Societies which were truly united were by far the exception — places like “Team” New Zealand. Much of the rest was plagued by the issue that a significant chunk of the population abjured and rejected the very gift that science had nobly, furiously created for it. They were too busy taking horse tranquillizers, or believing moronic Facebook propaganda that said vaccines came with (LOL) 5G chips in them, or even more bizarre and backwards things.

Because societies had turned against themselves, instead of uniting to fight the pandemic, the pandemic wasn’t defeated.

Imagine what all that says for climate change. Mass extinction. Ecological collapse. If Covid provoked this level of denialism and fanaticism and idiocy, imagine what those will do. People throughout 2021 were busy denying Covid existed while they were literally suffocating to death of it in ICUs. Now imagine how they’ll deny more abstract phenomena like climate change and ecological collapse. How much more bizarre and backwards the conspiracy theories and fanaticisms they’ll cling to.

Why did people retreat into denial — enough people, anyways, to cost us to lose the war against Covid, since we were so busy fighting them, we couldn’t fight the virus? Because they wanted life to “go on as usual.” This approach and attitude was exemplified, again, by America and Britain. In Britain, especially, Boris Johnson’s merry band of incompetents locked down far too late — for fear of offending the 30 or 40% of fanatics in society. The result? Europe’s, and one of the world’s, highest death rates. And there Britain still is, basking in denial about everything from Brexit to Covid. It hasn’t learned a thing.

Life will not “go on as usual.” We have come to the end of an age. In a small way — the age of industrial capitalism. There’s not much left to deplete and abuse and exploit — not enough, anyways, for our way of life to continue without pandemic and megafire and megatyphoon and mass extinction. And in a big way, too: this is the end of the Long Age of Violence, of a human order based on hierarchy, dominance, and power, ranked by violence. Now we cooperate, or we die. But did anyone much learn that lesson in 2021?

So societies were fighting themselves, instead of the virus. Covid hawks pitted against Covid doves. The Covid hawks said, this will be bad, we must fight the virus. The Covid doves, instead, said, let us go on as usual, the virus? Who cares! We don’t need to wear masks or distance or even take vaccines. Just yesterday, a number of American Red States announced state subsidies for people who won’t take vaccines. Think of how flatly insane that is. But also think of how it obviously means that America can’t defeat Covid, because it’s fighting itself. It is literally economically subsidising the virus in Red States. Now imagine how hard it’s going to be to defeat subsidies for things like fossil fuels and deforestation and dirty water and energy and fast fashion and industrialised agriculture. See what I mean by lessons unlearned?

The next thing that happened in 2021, after societies turned on themselves, was even uglier, though. Nobody much remembers this, but the Covid vaccines — science’s great gift to humanity — were created by women and immigrant minorities. The Oxford vaccine, by Dame Prof Sarah Gilbert. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, by a Turkish immigrant couple, Dr. Özlem Türeci and Dr. Ugur Sahin. The Moderna vaccine was created thanks largely to research done at the University of Pennsylvania by Hungarian immigrant Dr Katalin Kariko.

Now, that’s not to score points. It’s to help you understand what happened next. Power appropriated the vaccines. Many of the creators — like Dame Prof Gilbert — had pledged to give them away for free. But then human affairs intervened. Power did what it does. It simply…took the vaccines. They were “licensed.” Oxford’s vaccine was given to AstraZeneca, BioNTech’s to Pfizer, and so forth. Why? The answer is what the answer always is, sadly. Money. At the urging of billionaires like Bill Gates, the vaccines which were developed as public goods were privatized.

Bill Gates, by the way, is still out there saying the pandemic’s going to end in a year. Which is what he said last year. SadLOL?

Anyone with a basic understanding of economics knew what was going to happen. When you privatise a public good, it gets undersupplied, and held in deliberate conditions of artificial scarcity. Because, well, now it’s private. Think of how disastrous things like energy grid privatisations have been, even in places that vehemently supported them, like Texas. You never privatise public goods — at least if improving people’s lives is what you’re after.

Politics failed, and it failed on a mega-scale, in other words. This privatisation of vaccines was supported by every rich country. America, Canada, Europe. They all blocked repeated efforts by the poorer world to simply produce vaccines. But aren’t vaccines for everyone? They should be, if you’re sane. But instead, the politicians of the rich world handed Big Pharma a license to make one of history’s greatest fortunes — on the back of research it didn’t even do, research funded by the public.

What an astonishing, jaw-dropping failure, history will say. Because what happened next was, like I said, obvious. The world didn’t get vaccinated. The pandemic raged on. To this day, a year later, the world is still nowhere near fully vaccinated. How far away is it?

Just 48% of the world was “fully” vaccinated one year later, by the beginning of 2022. That might sound impressive, but it wasn’t and isn’t. Why not? Because that pace was too slow to prevent new variants emerging which change the definition of “fully vaccinated” themselves. By 2022, the definition of “fully vaccinated” was three shots, or maybe four, and on that score, the world was barely even 10% “fully vaccinated.” So would the world ever be fully vaccinated, if globally, vaccination was so slow that people keep needing more shots faster than they could ever get them?

The pace of vaccinations was too slow, so new variants like Omicron emerged — and it was going to keep happening, given this failed political economy, which had privatized vaccines for profit, not given them away for free, and no, please remember, those profits are not “earned,” the public funded that research. The world was losing the war against Covid — and worse, it didn’t even know it.

Now consider what that political failure means for larger threats like climate change and ecological collapse and mass extinction. Let’s imagine that some bright genius, like tomorrow’s Dr Kariko invents the equivalent of a vaccine — a magic bullet that can actually solve the problem. Power tells us that it’s going to get in the way. That magic bullet — let’s imagine it’s clean energy, or something that can revitalise species going extinct, or reduce dramatic increases global temperatures without obvious crazy plans like blocking the sun — it doesn’t really matter what it is so much. What we know now is that instead of being treated like the true public good it will be, it’ll be privatized.

It’ll be “licensed” to the biggest lobbiest, probably, who’ll invent some fake rationale for it to be privatized — like Pharma did with vaccines, like “only we can manufacture them,” while factories are idle globally. And the mega-corporation to whom that magic bullet is licensed will do exactly what Big Pharma did with vaccines with it — it will keep it in conditions of artificial scarcity, exploit it for maximum profit, and roll it out far too slowly for the problem it was created to solve to ever be solved.

Let me make that concrete. Imagine that tomorrow’s Dr Kariko invents a household green battery that can provide clean, cheap power for everyone on planet earth. I know, I know, just ignore physics for a second and pretend. What happens next? What happened with vaccines probably does. Power appropriates and privatises it. It takes it, licenses it to some mega-corporation, like, God help us all, Google or Amazon. And instead of simply giving away at cost to every single on planet earth, so we might be able to stop global warming dead in its tracks, Googazon needs to earn a profit of 500%, so it underproduces it, and overcharges for it.

Climate change isn’t stopped, it just keeps rolling. A whole lot like Covid.

Let me crystallise that. The political economy of Covid is a mega-failure. A true civilisation scale failure. We’ve had Covid vaccines for a year, and instead of using them to vaccinate the world, here we are, plunged into chaos by Omicron all over again, even if it’s “milder.” Meanwhile, because we didn’t vaccinate enough people globally fast enough, the entire definition of “fully vaccinated” changed to three or four shots. We are running to stand still, and losing the race. The political economy of privatising public goods — the neoliberal slash American approach to civilizational fragility — doesn’t solve the problem, it only worsens it.

And yet because that is what is in power — failed, greedy, hopelessly venal elites — who has power, appropriation and privatization are what’s going to happen most likely with no matter what is invented or created to help stop climate change or mass extinction or ecological collapse, just like vaccines were. Therefore, we are in a profound civilizational trap. Our political economy cannot solve the problems it creates, because even it’s “solutions” — like privatising vaccines — only make the problem worse to begin with.

Finally comes the cultural level of failure. Most people probably don’t give two hoots about the above. This is distinct from the social problem. That’s about the 30 or 40% of our societies who are die-hard morons, literally, as in, they would literally risk death over taking a vaccines, and deny Covid exists even as they suffocated to death of it. Good luck getting these people out of the way of climate change or ecological collapse. Good luck getting them to change their behaviours or attitudes one iota.

But I’m not talking about them now. I’m talking about the average good liberal. The ones, like in America, who think they’re compassionate and educated and civilized and worldly. They’ll be the first people to defend the failed political economy of Covid. They’ll give you a thousand reasons why privatising vaccines was a “good idea” — without knowing that all of them are false, because they don’t actually know any of the facts. They’ll tell you, for example, that pharmaceutical companies “invented the vaccines” (wrong, wrong, wrong) or that “they can’t be manufactured anywhere else” (wrong) or that “It’d stop innovation” (wrong, the vaccines themselves being created by researchers are proof of that, in fact) or that “It’d crash the economy” (wrong, the economy is not the stock market). I could go on endlessly.

The point is that 2021 revealed there were two kinds of Covidiots. The first kind we all know, the malevolent fools who won’t take vaccines, because they think they’re Zarathustra by way of Rascal Flatts. The second, though, is less widely known — the good liberal who supports the very political economy which stopped the world from getting vaccines, thus making us all run a losing race where the definition of “fully vaccinated” is increasing faster than we’re vaccinating people to begin with. This second kind of Covidiot? They’re the bros at every bar in Manhattan and Washington DC and parts of London, and they’ll tell you angrily, smarmily, self-righteously, why the world shouldn’t have vaccines. And they’ll think of themselves as civilized people for it.

History will remember both kinds of Covidiots, and it may judge the second — the liberal — as more dangerous than the first, the conservative. Because the truth is there are a lot more of them, and they’re the reason the world isn’t getting vaccines. 30% of people in a society not taking vaccines is a lot less of a problem than 80% of the entire world not getting them fast enough. The liberal approach to Covid, globally, is causing far more damage than the conservative problem of denialism and fanaticism locally.

In other words, we haven’t developed the norms yet we need. Even in “intelligent” and “smart” company, the idea of vaccinating the world is “controversial,” because on this point, liberals are just as idiotic as conservatives. Conservatives don’t want to vaccinate themselves. Liberals don’t want to vaccinate billions of people. Which is worse?

Now extend that to larger threats like climate change and ecological collapse and mass extinction. You can already see this one playing out. Pick a bar in Manhattan or DC or LA or some other liberal bastion. Find a bro. Ask them what they think about the above. You’ll quickly get a lecture about how “carbon pricing” and “market mechanisms” and “free enterprise” and “private initiative” and “climate deals” will fix the problem. They’ll smile smarmily over their artisanal whiskey, and toast the “free market.” Meanwhile, on planet earth, decades of this approach have only yielded disaster. It obviously isn’t working — but liberals have never met a fact they didn’t try to avoid.

In that respect, their denial is no different that conservatives. Conservatives deny the problem exists. Liberals deny the solution isn’t working. So, again, what’s the difference?

Extend that just a little, and you can easily see how liberals are going to natter and dither and present each other charts for the next few decades, while the planet keeps on melting, burning, and flooding into oblivion. Because while conservatives appear incapable of understanding that there are incredibly serious and urgent problems we face as a civilization which could easily kill us all, or at least hundreds of millions of us, liberals appear totally incapable of understanding that solutions have to work in the real world, not just in academic slash corporate mathematical fantasy worlds, or they are not really solutions at all. Which one is worse, denying the problem exists, or denying that the solution isn’t working? And does it even matter, because we’re running out of time?

Those are the lessons we didn’t learn in 2021. I can sum them all up this way. We came face to face with how fragile this thing called civilization really is. How it can all easily fade to black. And instead of coming together to really protect, nurture, and defend it? We found ourselves at each others’ throats, instead of having each others’ backs. Our societies were so busy fighting each other, they couldn’t fight the virus. People fled into every flavour of stupidity and idiocy, from selfishness to greed to fanaticism to denialism. Politics, riven by this infighting, paralysed, while no one was looking, instead seized the opportunity to privatise the vaccine, and handed it to big money. Power intervened in human affairs, as it always does, and squandered the gift science and reason had given humanity.

Conservatives and liberals found common ground, even though neither knew it — one denying the problem existed, the other denying the solution had failed. And in all this, the idiocy didn’t grow any less, it only hardened. People demanded a “return to normal,” instead of saying, “hey, maybe we should take care of the problem so it goes away.” They had grown selfish and hard and cruel and stupid. They were now thinking only of themselves, lost in nostalgia for a life that would never come back.

Because this was the beginning of the age of civilizational fragility. 2021? It was just a warm-up, a gentle introduction, to how fragile civilisation really is. How quickly town squares can empty and economies crash and societies turn on themselves, riven by idiocy, how dim even wise men can be and how selfishness and greed and colossal stupidity is never more than a mere inch away corroding from even the most educated and intelligent soul. And yet worse, much worse, was to come. If all that — stupidity, extremism, political failure, cultural ignorance, social infighting — was what happened in 2021, what was going to happen as humanity met truer and graver challenges, from climate change to ecological collapse to mass extinction? Those tendencies would likely only grow and harden.

Let me now summarize the the lesson — of 2021. Conservatives denied the vaccine to themselves. Liberals denied it to a world of billions. Which form of aggressive stupidity was worse? Was the stupidity in fact worse than the pandemic itself, being the very factor which prolonged it seemingly without end? And would that fatal stupidity be the inescapable template by which humanity was to fail at larger problems imminently headed its way?

2021 was a bad year. Not just because it was a bad year, my friends. But because it showed us some terrible truths about ourselves. It shamed us as a civilisation and as a human race. We squandered a gift, and retreated into stupidity and selfishness and greed, in the name of self-preservation, frightened by the hounds of ruin. What does that make us, if not idiots? Were the liberals, clinging to their failed solutions, really any better than the conservatives, with their denial of the problem?

2021 was, above all, a year which shamed us. We squandered a gift. We wasted time. And we went backwards, instead of forwards, trapped in little bubbles of fear, hate, greed, and selfishness, which is just where our elites have always wanted us, because divided that way, we are nothing more than appetite and rage, easy to control, pliable, manipulable to the bitter end of self-destruction.

But have we learned the lesson yet?

Umair
December 2021