"It's stupid. And it's stupid because every generation in our country for more than a lifetime has been asked to sacrifice something for the safety of their fellow man -- get shot, fight Nazis... all that anyone's being asked here is to get a shot in the arm and put on a mask. Grow up. Get something done."
Everyone wants to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Today's Western world is so decadent, that people are desperately reaching to the point of hilarity for some sort of cause that they can cling to. This is what has led to Cultural Marxism, and Hollywood people equating the importance and heroism of the Normandy Landing with getting the clot shot.
Ironically, one of the key lessons of World War II resulted in the Nuremberg Trials. I guess Mr. Clooney isn't familiar with that one.
It's sort of like this "cloud migration" project I'm steeped in at work. We reached a point with computers back in the early naughts, where they did everything they needed to do: they were supporting "ecommerce" and letting people do their taxes. But in true "landfill economy" style, all of these highly paid IT engineers had to do something with their time to ensure job security-- so now we're making systems almost unsupportably complicated, to create a one percent better ecommerce experience, centralized on the servers of evil multi-billion dollar corporations.
In my daily work, I raise the stock price of a global conglomerate by a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of one percent. Yet they are willing to pay me a six figure income, just to get that miniscule return. "Landfill economy". One of the few observations which Marx got right. Or how about, "the bureaucracy needs to grow to support the growing needs of the bureaucracy."
Same thing with cars: they reached their zenith in the early naughts: they were reliable, didn't pollute anymore, got great gas mileage, and were safe. How then to continue selling new cars? "Landfill economy": start filling them with dorky, distracting "gadgets" and ridiculous "features" which no one asked for. Move the "pollution" goal post to include plant food (carbon dioxide).
Society as a whole operates this way: American was veritably racism-free, as my entire generation was raised to be color blind, to the point where I didn't even notice Obozo was black until it was explicitly pointed out to me. Now? Race and what we don't have in common is all anyone even talks about anymore: regression.
All things follow the same curve: raw, then polished, then perfected-- then tinkered with and destroyed, because rather than move on to something else, people chase the "diminishing return" curve until the changes become counter-productive, whereafter "the thing" actually regresses.
In my personal life, I wrote this blog with like thirty lines of PHP in a weekend, in October of 2007. I haven't touched the code since-- because it works, and it does exactly what I need it to do! It was "perfected"-- I moved on to other things.
Where society needs to go is towards localization: you can still have division of labor benefits, but where IT equipment and other pieces of technology are designed to function locally, and where they can be delivered to local communities, which can then be increasingly self-sufficient-- sort of like how the Enterprise in "Star Trek" delivers high-tech farming equipment to colony planets.
My blog was local to me-- so I reaped the productivity benefits of no longer needing to constantly "enhance" it, directly; whereas today, centralization means that the giant corporations "collectively" see the productivity benefits, while supply-and-demand driven wage labor prices fail to keep pace with central bank-induced (another centralization!) inflation.