But for those at the top of the social pecking order, narcissism mutates, not into loss, not into something you have at least partly to relinquish, but into an accursed gift, one that too easily leads to violence. No human, however powerful, is spared confrontation with the limits of their own power, with those realms, in the words of Hannah Arendt, "in which man cannot change and cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy".

Arendt was writing in the 50s about the forms of murderous totalitarianism that had spread over the Earth, but her prescient words are no less relevant now, when dictatorships are on the rise, we face the destruction of the planet, black men are being shot on the streets of the US, and the rates of death from austerity, rampant inequality and impoverishment are increasing by the day. When the pandemic started to break across the globe at the end of 2019, it soon became clear that one of its most striking features would be the way it accentuates the racial and economic fault lines of the world – from the fact that black, Asian and minority ethnic citizens in the UK are four times more likely than white people to die of Covid-19, to the killing of George Floyd which, mid-pandemic, repeated and underscored a historic context of violence. Nor did it seem to occur to any of the (mainly) men in power that the mantra to stay home and save lives in fact threatened the lives of women subject to domestic violence who were now trapped inside their homes; under lockdown the rate of such violence has soared.

Who decides what is called out as violence? Who determines the forms of violence we are allowed, and permit ourselves, to see? Not naming violence – its often undercover path of destruction, its random disposal of the bodies it needs and does not need – is one of the ways that capitalism has always preserved and perpetuated itself.

In one of her sharpest insights and most trenchant ripostes, socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg cautioned against the charge that the 1905 Russian Revolution had spilt blood by pointing out that the level of suffering was nothing compared with the indiscriminate, mostly unremarked, cutting down of lives by the brute machinery of capital that had flourished up to then. "Abroad the picture created of the Russian Revolution is that of an enormous blood-bath, with all the unspeakable suffering of the people without a single ray of light," she stated at a rally in Mannheim in 1906. "The suffering during the revolution is a mere nothing compared to what the Russian people had to put up with before the revolution under so-called quiet conditions."