"In a society that respects science, expertise confers power.... Illegitimate political power can be disguised as expertise...."

"In late February, [Italian philosopher Giorgio] Agamben began... to criticize the 'techno-medical despotism' that the Italian government was putting in place through quarantines and closings.... The emergency declared by public-health experts replaces the discredited narrative of 'national security experts' as a pretext for withdrawing rights and privacy from citizens. 'Biosecurity' now serves as a reason for governments to rule in terms of 'worst-case scenarios.' This means there is no level of cases or deaths below which locking down an entire nation of 60 million becomes unreasonable. Many European governments, including Italy’s, have developed national contact tracing apps that allow them to track their citizens using cellphones.... [The term 'social distancing']... 'appeared simultaneously around the world as if it had been prepared in advance.'... His point is that social distancing is at least as much a political measure as a public health one, realized so easily because it has been pushed for by powerful forces....  'For fear of getting sick,' Mr. Agamben writes, 'Italians are ready to sacrifice practically everything — their normal living conditions, their social relations, their jobs, right down to their friendships, their loves, their religious and political convictions.' In fact, 'the threshold that separates humanity from barbarism has been crossed,' Mr. Agamben continues, and the proof is in Italians’ treatment of their dead. 'How could we have accepted, in the name of a risk that we couldn’t even quantify, not only that the people who are dear to us, and human beings more generally, should have to die alone but also — and this is something that had never happened before in all of history from Antigone to today — that their corpses should be burned without a funeral?'"

From "Meet the Philosopher Who Is Trying to Explain the Pandemic/Giorgio Agamben criticizes the “techno-medical despotism” of quarantines and closings" by Christopher Caldwell

Agamben uses the word inoperosità  — which translates to idleness —to refer to "instances of common customs or historic institutions getting emptied out of their long-held meanings... that can generate new systems of belief and new dangers." We imagine that we are hanging back from a life to which we can return, but we will never go there again. Something new is coming into being.