In a real emergency, what is required is that focus — personal and communal — shift rapidly to accommodate the tears in the fictions that preceded or catalyzed it. That starts with admitting the fictions that previously prevailed, and moving, individually and collectively, beyond them.

Our societies are deeply layered fictions. At present, the common people are paying the wrong forms of attention to the wrong aspects of all that is presently going on. Partly, this is due to the fantasy that ‘things will (or worse ‘should’) just go back to normal’. They won’t. Normal was a lie to begin with.

This is common, historically.

So, unfortunately, are the results.