re: Do people really grasp how dystopian this really is?

Government never uses a crisis to give itself more power without giving it back. Look at the “patriot” act. We are all safer cause deep state can watch every fricking thing we do.

You have really big words in your title and post that I don’t really understand what the frick you just said

I grasp it. It’s fricked.

But I also understand taking preemptive measures to get a killer virus under control. Problem is, there hasn’t been a clear definition of “under control” besides “flatten the curve.” Flattening the curve doesn’t really explain how we are able to go back to normal. Once we lift the lockdown ordinances, doesn’t the curve spike immediately?

And what if we don’t get a vaccine? What if the death toll starts to really rise to Spanish Flu numbers?

Do we find ourselves in a 12 Monkeys situation where all humans are locked up and a totalitarian sub-government enacts harsher and harsher measures while searching for a cure that never comes?

All supported by those in fear of contracting the virus?

All of this would have been fantasy a few weeks ago, but did anyone really believe we’d be this far down the rabbit hole this quickly?

We'd have been better off just letting it take it's course. If it kills 100k, 500k, 1 million, whatever, in a month or 10 months does it really matter.

That's all this flattening the curve is doing is spreading it out.

But muh hospitals. Don't care. Most that go on vents are dying anyway.

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Spoken like someone with no real involvement. No responsibility for any decisions. Just a fat arse bitching from his armchair.

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You;re projecting.

We've had dystopian conditions for some time. Mass surveillance, the militarization of police, and mass corruption on all levels. But dystopian literature imagined the conditions much differently than they've played out in real life. I would argue that the literary reference colored our perceptions of what we expected a "dystopia" to be.

In Zamyatin's We, we get a relatively harmonious situation, that in retrospect, seems almost unhuman. The reason for that literary decision was to take great pains on contrasting it with the "Benefactor" and the Green Wall that separated nature from man. In Blade Runner or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, we see an obvious dystopian environment that is imagined to be the anti-thesis of banal. The skyscrapers are beyond our sight, and technology in that world allows humans to do things they've never done before. It imagines a world where corporate interest drives innovation, but also separates man from himself, and ultimately questions what it means to be a human. In Marquez's Autumn of the Patriach, the dictatorship is described as endless, yet the dictator himself is a prisoner of his own commands. In 1984, the Party takes up an all-knowing position, taking advantage of a human's social desire to maintain control, and strip humanity away from the characters.

One of the big overarching themes of dystopian literature is the efficiency of the state, either implied or explicit, in getting the subjects to do what they want. The reality of human interactions is that no government, not even totalitarian ones (like the Nazis, who history portrays as efficient when they were not) can impose its singular will on people without pushback.

I think we see that here, but this situation begs the question of whether the environment is a dystopian conception. It is in the self-interest of all governments to protect their citizens from a threat, as in this instance a virus that spreads through airborne droplet transmission is no different than any other invader, but what we will have to reckon with is whether the response was worth the price. That isn't an Orwellian discussion. It's a pragmatic one. Even then, I don't see efficiency. I see governments acting in the fog of war attempting to do what they can despite limited information. That's not an excuse for any overreach or possible further actions, but a description of the reality of how the virus spread.

But overreach has already occurred, with Orban in Hungary consolidating power through emergency measures, China reacting to the virus while downplaying it at the same time, and places like Russia pretending it isn't affecting its populace. In contrast, the US response is much less striking.

I am right there with you and shocked just how many people were like "that's just the way it is" and its " for the greater good" etc. People just fell in line.

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What disturbed me the most is the domino effect of overreaction.

It's like once a few countries or organizations began doing it, most of the others fell in line almost immediately knee jerk.

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There’s a good Freakanomics podcast about this. When “conventional wisdom” says do A, most people will do A even if data tells them that B is a better choice. The social penalty for losing or being wrong when you follow the masses is much, much less than being wrong when you buck the trend.

They used soccer goalies/penalty kicks as an example, but going for it on 4th down would be another good one.

Imagine this same overreach and Hillary was President. I doubt the Democrats would ever give back their new authority.