In a more just world, more people would know about Dr Surprise Matekere, or Shami, as I knew her long ago, when we were fellow medical students and then junior doctors at the United Bulawayo Hospitals.
In a more just world, the poor, rural communities she served would not have been so poor, or so in need of her generosity, nor the generosity of others like her. Moreover, our primary imperative, our outworking of conatus or the will to persevere, is a striving to be on the winning side of the ruthless, governing calculus. We are driven, it seems to me, by the impulse to consume others. He correctly points to the present negative consequences of the post deployment of incorrect language and concepts in the justification of terrible policy.
Instructive as that is, I think Operation Sovereign Borders is even more illuminating. Consider all the death and suffering that we, in Australia, were collectively willing to countenance to ensure that the risk of being eaten remained beyond our shores, externalized.
Hence, signatories acquire both: a share in domination; as well as the power to fail to understand their part in that same domination. That ability to fail to see those one consumes, to imagine oneself morally upright with clean hands, demands the expenditure of a great deal of power, Nietzsche tells us. In practical terms, this means that we can critique and protest cruelty enacted on our behalf, all the while enjoying its benefits.
The obvious parallels are between national and state boundaries. Today in Queensland, what will be in New South Wales will be β people will be locked down, vaccinated, or not; numbers will go up and down; elected officials will stay or go β so long as we are not locked down, and continue to receive all our goods and services. Having been convinced that our wellbeing is tied to the exclusion of the former, it was a small hop, skip and a jump to accepting the same argument regarding the latter.
