"The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing." Ayn Rand had identified the fact in 1943, through The Fountainhead's Howard Roark. How much greater the orgy today. How much higher the mountain of the sacrificed.
The pandemic has provided a perfect stage and setting for the altruists, for those animated and driven by altruism's standard of morality. The pandemic is practically a heaven-sent opportunity to demand and justify the sacrifice of anyone and anything to "the greater good"
-- for as long as those being sacrificed can bear it, to the extent they can bear it -- and beyond, past the point of any bearability. To the altruist, no sacrifice is too great and all sacrifice is justifiable, if made to the chosen god.
The strangulation and suffocation of ten thousand businesses on the altar of the Greater Good, hundreds of thousands of livelihoods -- it's all expected, demanded -- passingly sad and unfortunate perhaps, but required yet, at the end of the day,
if it means the possibility of saving even one more life from the virus. Ask an altruist what rate of Covid mortality would be acceptable to him before he would stop approving and supporting the enforcement of further sacrifice. If he's honest, he'll tell you zero.
By the time we've reached zero, he'll have found a new altar, or will have returned to an old one.
From yesterday's @sfchronicle article on Yelp's estimate that at least 2,000 businesses have closed permanently in the Bay Area alone -- so far. "An orgy of self-sacrifice" indeed. sfchronicle.com/business/artic… 
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