[A new concept: after years of reading G.K. Chesterton's newspaper columns, I have really come to like the format. There is something interesting about seeing an essayist with a broad variety of interests comment in real time on things as they come up, whether general events or politics or religion or literature or life. This is not true of most modern newspaper columns, which are short and narrowly focused on partisan politics. With this in mind, I have set myself the task of writing a weekly "column" in which I comment on whatever the hell I want, with very little editing, and while limiting myself in length (c. 2000-3000 words) and complexity. I make no claims whatsoever that these "essays" will be even a hundredth as interesting as Chesterton's.]
The End of the Armistice
Prices are high, cost of living through the roof, inflation peaking, workers desperate for steady employment and higher wages, businesses desperate for labor, productivity down, resignations endemic, corporate profits through the roof, traditional sectors of the economy being hollowed out and replaced by new, creative forms of gambling and get-rich-quick schemes, reports of new, localized but increasingly apocalyptic conflicts appear daily on the news, there are rumblings of labor strikes and even revolution, and many people seem to find it impossible to do the most basic things.
What year is it? 1920.
At the beginning of the event known colloquially as "the Pandemic" (much as people in 1920 spoke colloquially of "the War"), I made a few observations and predictions which I have had no cause to retract:
1) That the Pandemic was the most significant global event since the World Wars, precisely because it was an event affected almost everyone, in every stratum of society throughout the world, immediately and extremely.
2) That in predicting how society and individuals would respond and react to the Pandemic, we should look to the World Wars.
3) That therefore the period after the Pandemic, like the periods after both Wars, would be marked by significant societal and political and international instability.
4) In particular, I believed that the immediate impact of Pandemic conditions would lead to an increase in stress and stress-related behaviors, a sense of personal and global instability a la "anything can happen," and therefore to simultaneous and staggered increases in both extreme risk-averse behavior and extreme risk-prone behavior. That is, faced with the knowledge that Events with extreme personal and global effects can happen apart from normal, societally- and intellectually-approved calculations and systems, people would spend a significant period of time oscillating between an irrational desire to flee from all dangers, and an equally irrational desire to risk anything and everything since they're probably doomed anyway. And the result of both of these impulses would be social and political instability.
