Return to the One and the Many

Nietzsche wrote what would have been his first book had he published it -- it was later released as Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks -- around 1873. The basic point of the book was that the pre-Socratics: Thales, Heraclitus, Anaximander, Permenides, Zeno, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, I think that's it -- contained within them all the important questions of philosophy, later to be built out by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Foremost amongst them was the relationship between the One and the Many: is Being unified or fragmented? And, indeed, so much of the dynamics of human history have flowed out of a consideration of this question and how different societies have decided to treat it.

Take COVID policy for instance. The question of whether the interests of individuals or the collective should be prioritized -- and indeed how they should be prioritized, what those interests actually are: primarily preservation of life in the present [liberals] or also economic activity which draws in the past and the future by protecting existing livelihoods [conservatives]-- has been the fulcrum of debate.

China presents a very interesting instance of this debate. China's zero COVID policy has seemingly and paradoxically been a radical fetishization of the interests of the individual (let as few Chinese die as possible, fuck all else). This is particularly odd for a society which has had very few qualms about squishing individual lives in a wide variety of contexts (Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, Three Gorges Dam, Xinjiang, harvesting organs from Falun Gong, female infanticide...) The fact that Zero COVID policy so neatly dovetails with the top down control desired by Xi Jinping in particular and the Party more broadly seems not incidental. After all, if they really cared about protecting people's lives, and the problem is that too few old people have been vaccinated, well, they've had time to work on that. They could have gone to Pfizer, Moderna, J&J and procured a lot of vaccine by now.

I think that we have to view the liberty-prioritizing behavior of the Western Right in this context. They see the vaccine mandates as an analog to Xi Jinping. Hence the cultural resonance of things like "A Gray State." (Google it)