Social Distancing Was Supposed to Be Forever

By April 2020, two months into the lockdowns, eminent Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben had put his finger on a point that was bugging many of us.

• He observed that the purpose of "social distancing" - really just a euphemism for confinement - was not intended merely as a temporary measure but a new structure for society itself.
• Thinking it through, and deciding to speak out, he wrote that "I do not believe that a community based on social distancing is humanly and politically liveable."
• Canetti defined the crowd as the thing upon which power is founded through the inversion of the fear of being touched
• A crowd that is formed through a prohibition, where "a large number of people together refuse to continue to do what, till then, they had done singly"
• Social distancing measures and panic have created a mass that is, so to speak, inverted and composed of individuals who are keeping themselves at any cost at a distance

https://brownstone.org/articles/social-distancing-was-supposed-to-be-forever/