Redefining what is possible

Artificial barriers to progress have been rapidly destroyed — now it’s up to us to walk forward together

The impossible has become possible in just a matter of days. What we were told could not be done is now being done times a thousand. And it is being done by the very same people who said it could not be done. How so? What’s changed? And why were we lied to?

The limits on what we can and can’t currently do are physical. We can’t harness the power of nuclear fusion because we have yet to develop the technology to do so. We can’t teleport, we can’t time travel and we can’t bring dinosaurs back to life. Assuming we’d want to do any of these things, which is perhaps a different debate, physical barriers currently make them impossible.

But why do millions of people go hungry every day? Why do so many children not receive an education? Why does anyone lack access to clean water? Why do people still die from preventable diseases? Why are there rough sleepers? And why are we cooking the planet?

We grow enough food to feed everyone, we have the ability to educate all our children, to supply clean water, to provide basic healthcare and to put a roof over everyone’s head. And yet we do not do these things. The barriers that stop us are not physical — they’re political. It is a political choice to allow people to starve to death, to die from diseases that other people never worry about dying from, and to deny children the education that would lift them out of poverty.

Politicians and governments are able to maintain this immoral status quo because they have created an artificial reality. They say the poor deserve to be poor. They say our societal problems are caused by “outsiders” who want to cause us harm. And they say we should trust our wealthy rulers, who wield great wisdom and will do what’s “in the national interest”. This charade has been going on for decades. The lies have gone uncorrected. The truth has been obscured.

But now there is no hiding place. In just one month, the artificial parameters — the deceptions and the lies that have kept us cocooned and controlled— have been blown apart. Because we are fighting a disease that, at present, we lack the physical ability to cure, politicians have been forced to do things that they previously claimed were impossible. In doing so, they have demonstrated that the pain and the suffering so many people endured before this pandemic was, in fact, entirely avoidable. It has been exposed as a political choice, rather than something we lacked the physical ability to overcome.

New hospitals have been built and beds provided in rapid time, rough sleepers have been found shelter, debts have been forgiven, evictions have been banned, and an almost limitless supply of money has been miraculously found to save people’s jobs — as well as their lives. The politicians enacting these policies now are the same ones who told us a decade ago that sacrifices would have to be made, that public services must be cut, and that the poor and vulnerable in our society would have to suffer to help rebuild the economy. Faced with the actual physical barrier of an incurable and highly transmissible disease, those same politicians have acted very differently.

What does this mean for our future? There will of course be an attempt to restore the status quo once this disease has finally been overcome. The lies will get deeper and more twisted. Civil liberties will be undermined and threatened. But, unlike when other crises have threatened to upend it, the pretences that propped up the old regime have already been exposed.

Politicians will have to conjure up some new and absurd justifications for throwing homeless people back on to the streets, for continuing to devalue and underpay key workers, and for allowing anyone to go hungry ever again. Climate change can no longer be dismissed as “too expensive” to solve, decent housing can no longer be treated as luxury rather than necessity, and people who work jobs that are crucial to the functioning of society can no longer be disregarded.

That’s not to say that our rulers won’t try to continue screwing us over. But the road to ruin is nowhere near as smooth as it once was. A progressive, prosperous future for us all is now more attainable than it’s ever been. So let’s seize it.