Commentary
By April 2020, two months into the lockdowns, eminent Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben had put his finger on a point that was bugging many of us. He observed that the purpose of “social distancing”—really just a euphemism for confinement—was not intended merely as a temporary measure but a new structure for society itself.
Thinking it through, and deciding to speak out, he wrote that “I do not believe that a community based on ‘social distancing’ is humanly and politically liveable.”
He cited Elias Canetti’s 1960 book “Crowds and Power,” summarizing it as follows:
“Canetti, in his masterpiece Crowds and Power, defines the crowd as the thing upon which power is founded through the inversion of the fear of being touched. While people generally dread being touched by strangers, and while all of the distances they institute around themselves are born of this fear, the crowd is the only setting in which this fear is overthrown.”…