It is not a normal or inevitable thing.

Here is my comment on something one of my fellow substackers wrote. It is so good I think I should post it. Find the article it responds to here.
Wildfire almost has it right here. The thing to understand about “collective amnesia” is that it is not something natural. The normal thing in humans is to learn from experiences, adjust behavior, and continue from there.
Those stones in Japan telling people not to build beyond the danger point; someone put them there. They would be a relic of a time in Japan when government was about governing. It was not about stupidizing the population so as to let pathocracy do what it wants.
Likewise, in the covid times, the minority of governments on earth which were actually about governing were able to effectively exclude the virus for a long time. At the same time, some fake governments on the planet seemed actually determined to spread the virus. One by one, honest governments have been forced to give up on exclusion and to try to control covid as well as possible within their borders.
The cause of the “collective Amnesia” in western countries is not merely incapable governments who want to hide their failure by hoping everyone will just forget or take the pandemic as a normal state. There are quasi governmental and extra governmental groups, who exist only because of weak and non democratic government, who have interests in this amnesia. These groups have developed very powerful perception management machines.
Most countries now have covid at least partly under control. What prevents an elimination of the virus is the reservoir and breeder of new variants which has developed in the western countries. Here all attempts to control transmission of the virus have been frustrated by these perception management machines.
What is different in the countries where covid is under control is that there are no massive campaigns to convince people that it is over, to prevent changes in behavior which are not in the interests of oligarchies. For example, in many of these countries, people just go around wearing masks, with no one ‘mandating’ them. People simply changed their behavior based on experience.
The current problem in China seems to be that since covid has been kept out, people have not learned to habitually act in different ways. The government there seems to have decided that people will simply have to go through this phase and learn to manage transmission without anyone ordering them to. Local governments will also have to learn how to manage in the new reality.
To reiterate, what has been blocking collective learning in the west, and especially in the Excited States of America, are the thought control machines, plural. In some places, including much of Canada, the ‘fight the virus, but only in ineffective ways’ propaganda line has predominated. In the States, it is now the ‘problem never really existed’ line which has prevailed.
The former is from the globalists, who want to reduce the population and economy, and increase control through undemocratic governments. The latter comes from libertarian oligarchy which wants to replace public government with private government. They see infinite economic expansion as realistic, the population as their cattle herd, disease as a way of culling the ‘economically unjustified’ population, public health as a waste of money, and the solution to covid as forcing people ‘back to work’.
There seems to be no way to crack this destructive machine. The solution will come when covid inevitably leads to a breakdown of society and the economy, as most of the population becomes too ill to work. This will come in conjunction with the other lunacies of the western oligarchies.
To conclude, collective learning will begin to be activated when we have proper governments, and the pathocracy with its collective amnesia machine is ended.