Maybe it also depend on how the aftermath of those 2y of covid will play out, if there will be credible investigations on the proportionality of the measures and judicial or at least political consequences for the people who decided to implement them, if we will be back to normal as if nothing had happened with those 2y not even mentioned in 10y, or if instead narrative is that the west was saved by its visionary leaders and great pharmaceutical sector, so let’s do more of the same, just to be ready, you know. As you said in the bounded distrust analysis, the times they are a-changin, and the old rules no longer apply. 2y ago i would have agreed. Now i feel a lot of sympathy to those truckers from the other side of the atlantic, because the option 3 is not a parody, it’s on the table, clearly.
Grégory Lielens
A small meta comment: i almost never look at Twitter, i think it’s mostly a journalist echo chamber and that i will probably not like what I see if I look. Zvi you bring me there with your links, and it’s much much worse than I though (except for E Musk. Maybe i should think more highly of him than my usual take on current tech giants) I don’t know if i should be angry you increased my contact with this mouth of madness, or be thankfull and admirative you manage to swim into it to extract stuff ;-)
I think you are right, but zvi included this in his “wet ground causes rain” that you notice in any article about something you really are an expert on (either because it’s your professional /scientific field, or, and to me it’s often more enlightening and more brutal, because you or one of your close ones are part of the story). This indeed has always been the case. What is new is that you start to feel the narrative in the sources themselves, it’s percolating down to experts (Mediatic ones first, which makes sense because media are their peers more than other experts, and you red lines are often about losing your pant in front of your peers) and to science journals (oped, summaries, then abstracts and conclusions and finaly (but i think we are not quite there) article cores. I think things are really changing: direct sources are more and more available to the public… But simultaneously get less and less trustworthy. Which means being close to sources is no longer a less strenuous alternative to building your own reality model and do a lot of cross checking… Maybe it also means reality becomes less relevant and narrative more relevant to decision making and personal success in more and more cases (more often and for more people), which i find super frightening...
Indeed. That’s why covid end game is so important. It will signicantly affect what liberal democracy really means (which is very much what governments can go away with, plus relative strenght of various other power centers). This continuously change, but sometimes much more rapidly, like after sep 11, or during those last 2 covid years. I hate the direction of most of these changes since 30y (berlin wall falls...), and those last 2y are especially bad.