Category: Health Emergency

The “social distancing” causes, among other things, the rethinking of purchase habits. It is not just a matter of stop spending to survive the current economic crisis. The point is changing priorities and attitude towards objectively useless goods, regardless of the perceived “needs”.

“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities,” Oscar Wilde wrote not long ago, but this age is hopefully over. Living secluded shows that our belongings are mostly sufficient to meet daily needs. The absence of social opportunities makes it useless flashing the latest smartphone. The need to work remotely focuses attention on the tools that allow us to do it better, more than on other “compulsive shopping” distractions. We realize first-hand, in other words, how much the superfluous weighs in our lives and how much and what we can do with fewer things. Continue reading “COVID-19, consumers and advertising”

This article published by an American information blog is interesting because it shows how national interests lead to “biased” conclusions.

Indeed, as the author of the article points out, the “generosity” of China towards Italy is far from disinterested, but from here to hypothesize that China has even first promoted the contagion by pushing Italians to hug the Italy-resident Chinese and then send aid to strengthen control over our country there is a huge logical and factual gap.

Although the Italian Government is not proving to be in its finest hours, it is fractiously “questionable” to say that

It wasn’t chance. It wasn’t age. It wasn’t overall health, and it wasn’t the good-hearted nature of the Italian people that caused the virus to ravage their nation. It was a leadership who are now under the thumb of the Chinese government.

The entire focus of this analysis is the relationship between “bad Chinese” and “Italians sold by the Government to the foreign powers”. Still, it fails to evaluate the outcomes of the USA strategic choices based on “disengagement” from the EU and the adoption of aggressive behaviours – such as customs duties – towards Countries like Italy which are (still) allies of America, but of which America is no longer.

If the concern that China may take advantage of Italy’s miserable economic and political conditions should rightly be exposed, it should also be made clear that this has been – or will be – possible also thanks to the American administration’s “disengagement” from the European and Italian scenarios.

To look at the issue from a philosophical perspective: when somebody creates a void, he cannot complain if someone else fills it.

Power, like Nature, is haunted by horror vacui.