Da generation

"the most insidious question of all would emerge into the foreground: whether science can furnish goals of action after it has proved that it can take such goals away and annihilate them; and then experimentation would be in order that would allow every kind of heroism to find satisfaction -- centuries of experimentation that might eclipse all the great projects and sacrifices of history to date. So far, science has not yet built its cyclopic buildings; but the time for that, too, will come.
[...]
Countless things that humanity acquired in earlier stages, but so feebly and embryonically that nobody could perceive this acquisition, suddenly emerge into the light much later -- perhaps after centuries; meanwhile they have become strong and ripe. Some ages seem to lack altogether some talent or some virtue, as certain individuals  do, too. But just wait for their children and grandchildren, if you have time to wait that long: they bring to light what was hidden in their grandfathers and what their grandfathers themselves did not suspect. Often the son already betrays his father -- and the father understands himself better after he has a son."

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science



So... what can we learn from the COVID-19 pandemic?

For one thing, naked apes can survive just fine without physical contact with each other, but they insist on it nonetheless to the point of rioting, and should be put down like the vermin they are when they do so.

For another, our "dependence" on fossil fuels is at least 25-30% psychological, a fabrication of capitalist overproduction, advertising, planned obsolescence and mindless competition. One of the first big pieces of news as quarantine measures went in place was the price of oil dropping to the point where oil companies couldn't give their shit away. Mind you, transportation has not ceased. Food and other necessary or useful products are still being delivered from the fields to your fat moronic mouth every day. Much of the populace is still commuting to work. All we've decreased is the casual abuse of fossil fuels by every insignificant pissant overgrown monkey on the planet. "People" are no longer driving to the next town over for dinner every night, no longer driving half an hour for a walk in the park or to run on a treadmill at the gym, no longer driving three hours to see some idiotic sports match or concert they could just as easily watch at home, no longer burning jet fuel to travel around the planet every six months on vacation. This is everything we should have stopped doing half a century ago. Our society did not need to grind to a halt to decrease carbon emissions. We just needed to stop billions of degenerate subsentient apes from frivolously squandering this wasteful and destructive resource for their every imbecilic whim. But we didn't. And now it's too late. We've doomed ourselves, not for the sake of any dire need or threat, but for the entertainment of vermin.

There's something still more important which I would hope a particular segment of the population might learn from our panicked and ineffectual struggle against the sniffles. Teenagers might acquire the simple understanding that the world is real. Each generation can think back to at least one defining event delineating its adolescent years from the previous. In the '90s we grew up in the shadow of the Soviet collapse. In the 2000s Americans grew up in the wake of the World Trade Center bombings and everyone felt the sting of the tech boom's end. In the 2010s it was the global recession caused by real estate speculation. For you, teenagers of the '20s, this pandemic is the event you will all remember for the rest of your lives, the masks, the isolation, the alternating panic and recklessness, and lucky you: it's different from all the others.
It's real.
COVID-19 is a physical agent. It exists. You can put it under a microscope and multiply it in a tissue culture. It spreads across the physical landscape by physical means in objectively measurable timeframes. Do you realize how rare this is?

For the two previous generations, millennials and my tail-end GenX-ers, the disasters which framed our growing understanding of the world were entirely human fabrications: corporate greed leaving the populace homeless, superstitious primitives flying planes into buildings, megalomaniacal dictators devouring the world in first, second and third courses. The coronavirus pandemic, regardless of the human stupidity which has aided its spread and prevented prompt treatment, exists. It's a physical fact. Virions exist, infect and replicate, regardless of whether you believe in them or not. The virus cannot be bargained with, prayed to, talked down, seduced, intimidated; it's unimpressed by your black privilege or white pride and most importantly could not possibly give a single solitary shit about the personal pronouns you invent for yourself!

Let this mark the end of the snowflake generation.
For sixty years or so, the better parts, the urbane, modern sectors of western culture have increasingly fallen under the dominion of postmodernism, a fanatical denial of objective reality, feeding a metastatic proliferation of self-serving rhetorical constructs marketing narcissism to gays, to blacks, to indians, to women, to vegetarians, to self-styled psychics, to anyone at all who might be in the market for a platform for self-righteous posturing. The intelligentsia abdicated its leadership role in curating public discourse in favor of knuckling under to anti-scientific false equivalence, nodding along with every new wave of superstition and self-declared moral superiority. This has culminated, over the past two decades, in a generation so disjointed from reality that they're willing to deny the existence of even their own genitals, who imagine they're combating racism and sexism by glorifying and demonizing one sex or race over the other, who have given up studying the sciences to understand the world but demand absolute rulership of it by virtue of their social "science" degrees. A generation which instead of rebelling against authority took their parents' most self-righteous, vapid posturing up to eleven. The first generation to decrease in IQ. Millennials. Generation Facebook. Snowflakes. Hypocrites. Delusional, ignorant narcissists. Degenerates.

Is it too much to hope that the next generation might rebel against the previous by adopting realism and science in the face of millennials' proselytism and social constructionism? Will they rebel against anti-intellectualism? Will they be able to face the world in all its ugliness and seek real solutions instead of rhetorical cop-outs and fleeting self-promotion? Will these masked, socially distanced children finally grow up able to see through emotional manipulation and embrace cold, objective reason?

Probably not. The de-evolution of the human ape has gained too much momentum, and the destruction of the ecosystem will precipitate its fall. The social structures of the 21st century have so far aped all too faithfully those of the beginning of the 20th, with strict, facetious faux-Victorian politeness both promoting and masking the rise of fascism. Our entire species is on its way to WW3 and then into the gutter.

But if anything could reverse that, it's the COVID-19 pandemic... for the simple reason that it's real.