No risk society is not possible: we are at risk every day – awake or asleep. In this regard, what is the ultimate goal of the governments during the COVID-19 pandemic when they put aside all the rights apart from the right to live, making that very life miserable?
Authorities all around the world are stating that life and health security are the highest priorities. But then how can the neglect towards the collateral damage done to the lives and health of millions of people around the globe by “the measures” be explained?
When the governments say that their highest priority is to save their countries from COVID-19, the basic question should be: is it to not let the (mass) deaths happen or not to let the health system fail during a pandemic?
If it is to avoid mass deaths, then the governments are on the fundamentally wrong path: deaths from alcohol, tobacco, artificial food, other infectious diseases as well as from suicides due to the measures are not claimed to be avoided. Also, a government is not a human to act upon emotion. It is a mechanism that has to calculate the benefits and damages of its decisions. In this regard, the accepted argument for the governments could be – the measures are there to avoid mass deaths at once for the sake of the economy. But with whole branches of the economy getting bankrupt due to the measures, it is not a valid argument.
If we consider the possibility that the authorities are trying their best to avoid failure of the health system, it is because they bear responsibility exactly for that – it is in the governments’ infrastructure, and they are responsible for it. But do they have the right to unconstitutionally put aside the liberties of people and to let the economy drown in order to save the health system? What is the calculated benefit here? Or, what are the authorities afraid of? Or did we ask for it when electing politicians who formed the government? Or do we ask for it now? The answer is: we do. The governments see that we are so scared that we endorse their “new-normal politics”. They can only be so confident in their calculations if they know – the majority of people support it, and they will abuse it over and over again until most of the people will not want it anymore. But by then it will be too late to push back.
