When measures are taken disproportionately, it's a sign that they are not effective means to an end. When the perception of the goal is flawed, and the understanding of reality has lost relevance, it leads to a failure in finding efficient and appropriate means. And when thinking becomes fixed while the world has changed - a paradigmatic crisis arrives. So what do we actually do, in practice, when methods don't work? More of the same - and a lot of it. So we don't feel there was something we could have done but didn't (for example, think)
How should we have dealt with the coronavirus? First of all, we must understand that the virus is not (just) a problem - but an opportunity. The virus was created from a mismatch and contradiction that has been developing between the way the world actually operates today - as a network - and the ossified way in which we control and organize the world - hierarchically. A hierarchical control and command system has neither the speed nor the flexibility to respond to network changes and exponential spread, and therefore sooner (preferably) or later it will break in confronting them. Thus, the American presidency will break in the face of a viral president, and academia will break in the face of fake-truth on Facebook, and eventually, nations will break in the face of social networks and the dominance of the Internet. The more ossified the hierarchical structure - the faster it will break. And in the case of the virus, the state establishment proves magnificent ossification - associating it with the age of dinosaurs.
Life today is conducted on the network, in the virtual world. But by force of inertia - life continues to be conducted outside, in hierarchical institutions and hierarchical perceptions. In order to eliminate the contradiction between praxis and perception, shock treatment is sometimes needed. Eventually, the hierarchical state, which controls in a top-down tree-like pyramid form, will be replaced by a flatter network state, which is much more efficient in data processing, decision making, and control and command systems - just as the brain is more efficient than bureaucracy. Today, a virus (and any viral spread) is much more efficient than any control and command mechanism we have, but in a different architecture - the tables will turn. Other institutions in life, such as work and learning, should have long ago transitioned to a network format - and the virus is the opportunity for this.
A state establishment that understands this would have declared a sweeping transition to work and learning from home, from the last student to the last office, and used the crisis to implement a necessary systemic change, which requires a phase transition, and is therefore impossible in normal times. There is no reason for people to travel for shopping and not order deliveries to their homes in normal times - the network is simply built the opposite way. When everyone orders food home - shipping overheads become more efficient than maintaining supermarkets everywhere, and shopping becomes mail. The biggest challenge today, economically, infrastructurally and even environmentally, falling on the shoulders of states, is the desire to continue living in the old structure, while networking centralizes everything. This creates an unbearable load on physical centers, and the collapse of all physical infrastructures under impossible loads, in chronic - and unsolvable - transportation, housing and education crises.
If everyone travels to the network center in the morning and returns in the evening to all parts of the network - the transportation network cannot help but collapse, and housing prices cannot help but skyrocket. If one needs to physically arrive at school - we will always receive education at a low level, without choice and without competition, and without personal adaptation. One needs to live in the center to study at Thelma Yellin [Translator's note: a prestigious arts high school in Tel Aviv], and only those who come to Tel Aviv will have access to work in leading companies. The physical world is not built like a network, and even if we pave countless lanes and build dense towers to the sky - the contradiction between the network structure and the physical structure will always lead infrastructures to rapid saturation. Therefore, real leadership would have used the crisis for the most important change - structural change. Because a break is preferable to shattering (this is actually the alternative).
There is no reason why office work throughout the country should not be done from home, except for conceptual fixation. The computerized tools for this existed yesterday. The same goes for learning (whether in remote lessons or in tutorials and games and dedicated media). The fear of losing control over employees or students does not take into account the efficiency of computerized control systems, whose monitoring capabilities and data analysis far exceed any human control. The human need for society and human connections should be sharply separated from functional connections - for the benefit of both sides. School and youth movement have completely separate functions - and those who don't waste two hours every day in traffic jams can devote more time to friends (and books - which are other people in text form). The loss of output and productivity in today's society that stems from wasting time and resources on maintaining connections in the physical space instead of the spiritual space - is inconceivable. In the future, people will not understand why people physically traveled to the office, school or shopping. Why companies had to set up insanely expensive buildings, on precious real estate, just so people could sit all day in front of a computer identical to the one they have at home, after wasting countless nerves and pollution on traffic lights and honking?
Any far-sighted leader would have understood this, and waited for an opportune moment to make the shift - and take the system out of its physical fixation in favor of a more virtual and spiritual existence (which anyway characterizes the progress of humanity since time immemorial - the brain is also a more networked organ than the body, and therein lies its advantage). But apparently we don't need this. We Jews have long since disconnected from physical existence to existence in language itself - and our politicians are the politicians of the tongue. Our Prime Minister presents, speaks, declares, incites, mocks, spreads rumors, condemns, recommends, or instructs for action (as opposed to executing) - and his greatest achievements are speeches or declarations (his or others'). Thus, the perception has been fixed in the public that saying is more important than doing, and that if we speak at the UN we are showing them, and that effective treatment of the virus is a collection of speeches on television. And so we will pay the full price of a revolution but gain nothing and return to exactly the same situation. Bibi is the ultimate politician of Wittgensteinian philosophy of language: his words are tools for his work, and their use is their meaning, and he is the best player - in the language game. What a pity that his intellectual ability is poor (let whoever has ever heard an intellectual insight from him vote! Not to mention an original idea), and that his ability to make a conceptual paradigm shift is nil, and therefore we are stuck in infantile discourse. Don't sneeze!
A reasonable country, which is not just a country of public relations, would have acted more correctly even within the hierarchical paradigm, and would have raised within a minute an application that must be installed, and which reports continuously on every movement, requires every citizen to report in it on temperature measurements twice a day, on every cough and health change, and also on every person they met (and also tracks other parameters that would have been found to be effective...) - and fines those who do not do so (everyone understands money). Then it would have whitened the information and distributed it to a large group of brilliant researchers who would have competed in building prediction models (this is a classic machine learning problem - and the solution would have improved all the time, and quickly). Thus it would have used this data for focused carrier tests and focused removal instructions per person and location immediately through the application, which would have created a firewall between carriers and the rest of the population. As every network company (or intelligence organization) knows - the key is massive data collection and network mapping, and only in this way can one try to hierarchically overcome distributed and contagious network phenomena (terrorism for example). But such data exists in China - the backwater country. And in our country there are excuses - and all kinds of fever.
Part 3 - Corona as a Sabbatical Year: A World That Is All Long