The mistake is to think that this form of personal responsibility can be replaced.
This is very true. I have also noted a great many people who didn't have to substantially change their habits during lockdown, because they avoided the proscribed activity as a matter of course anyway. While these folks didn't suffer changes in their day to day lives to the degree many of us did, I think it would be a mistake for them to think that made the lockdowns acceptable.
The problem for them is it could go the other way, and people could be ordered to assemble instead of avoid assembling, which they would find substantially disruptive. The problem is that personal authority over our sociality has been usurped, and regardless of whether one finds it uncomfortable to be highly sociable or not, it is critically vital that one themselves determine the degree of sociality they undertake, that such authority not be seized by overlords.
It is basically the power to corral the herd that husbandmen have over barnyard animals, and no human person should suffer being merely livestock.
Even if being corralled in the feedlot isn't troubling, the chute to the slaughterhouse surely will be.
Be well
Very true. An apt example of reversal of the image.
Although we both know that the opposite case, the order to assemble, is unlikely to happen. I think that, as you say, it would probably not have come about at all if very many people had not already lived an isolated life and fundamentally preferred such a life to sociability.
Some proudly publish that they have a "social phobia", with a palpable attitude that makes everyone who reads or hears such statements feel that there has long been social acceptance about it. Like saying that you "have an allergy".
Therefore, 2020 is an extreme expression of what has already been palpable and accepted in us humans long before this time, isn't it?
I can even understand why it is that people isolate themselves, are lonely or choose such a lonely life.
In a way, I have gone through such a process of distancing myself, even though I think it goes against my nature.
But who knows, it's very difficult to give yourself answers with simple cause and effect. Because, on the other hand, I think that I have entered an age anyway where I no longer have the quantity of relationships that I had when I was younger.
Probably the strangest and scariest thing for me is that we humans can exist in completely parallel worlds. Where the perception is suddenly so different from the other that you can hardly comprehend it.
Thank you, be well too.