Lessons from Coronavirus
If there is anything that the Coronavirus pandemic taught us, it is that neither the humanity nor its leaders do not have the intent or intelligence to place our survival above the likes of economic progress or industrial development. According to Darwinian evolution theory, humans are said to have evolved by the policy of survival of the fittest. According to Yuval Noah Harari in his book “Sapiens”, humans have prioritized survival over being happy as a civilization and hence, we are all surviving, and not necessarily living, over the decades following evolution. Following the breadcrumbs of either of the above-mentioned theories, we are to be supposed to have a good response strategy to this virus making sure that more people are not at risk.
This response strategy would follow the lines of immediately working on a cure and finding one, and in the non-occurrence of the before mentioned other-worldly scenario, the strategy would be to keep humans safe, read every human life, until a cure is found. However, nations, having economies at a position where they are too big to fail have opted for a strategy that kills (some) people and benefits the economy, by allowing the country to resume businesses under the thinly veiled argument of benefitting small businesses.
And we are now seeing this because we as a humanity have failed to achieve equality in the most fundamental sense. While we are still trying to bridge gaps between rich-poor, white-black, developed and under-developed nations, we have been brought begging to our knees by a virus no one knows the origin of neither the cure as I write this. And now, to accommodate the needs of all people in the world, we are currently re-opening nations. Yes, I agree that this allows everyone a chance to feed their families, but I feel bad that they are given a chance to do this at the risk of their own lives.
This argument, in conjunction with the disregard of the educated society, is making us run the doomed race to survive at all costs. We have failed, not only as nations, when they do not protect us but also as humans, when we do not protect ourselves and our fellow humans. We have some protesting lockdowns citing the inconvenience of closed salons and others self-administering pills reducing the temperature of the body and by-passing the corona-virus screening at airports. How would a country benefit by asking their citizens to not perform their essential day-to-day activities is something I guess they never have asked themselves.
This does not just highlight different divides we as humanity have achieved over the years. It proves to us as to how commonplace the divides have become. The divide, in terms of meat-industry, was thought to be against animals, but thanks to this pandemic, it can also be observed as to how the odds were always stacked against the not-haves, largely benefitting the one-percenters. People were astonished to see their role-models fighting for re-opening of the economy and rightly so, they were more astonished to understand that they were all well-fed, free-will assuming lab rats in an experiment called economy.
While Spanish Flu flew under the radar unnoticed for a long time because of the then-ongoing World War I (1914–1918), COVID-19 made its arrival public almost after China had many casualties. Yet, thanks to secrecy on one side of the coin and negligence on the other, nations of the world have been greatly affected after heavily downsizing the impact of this novel virus.
We are not ready nor will we be ready for any pandemic, or just any other unfortunate circumstance which happens to plague countries, and if you are thinking that the governments that you or your neighbor have voted and elected are going to prioritize your life above the economy of your country, you will not only be proven wrong but also will be dead-disappointed. If you are unlucky, you will also be dead.
Endless emphasis on economic growth, and not human satisfaction nor human life, was always leading us to this exact point of time where we can all stare at the dysfunction of the world.
This manifestation of mass-passivity towards COVID-19 and the inability of the leaders who are charged with tackling it would be the same passivity which will eventually lead us towards extinction caused by environmental change. And this mass-passivity is not a collective term but clumps of individual-level passivity staring dimly at us wondering how we all fell in the perpetual loop of the never-ending economy game, each trying to build his/her empires whilst collectively disregarding the state of the world we are building them upon.
While consumerism camouflaged as Instagram pictures and mind-boggling marketing masquerading as Google/Facebook ads spoon-feed you meaningless indulgence immediately after the many waves of the coronavirus, we can all collectively ignore the mistakes which threaten the existence of this and the future generations and start living normal lives, have haircuts and strive for perfect bodies.
As in this article, it is indeed true that we care about everything that is happening around us. It is just that we do not have the time to act upon it. And the next time we buckle ourselves up, we will all be fighting for very little, to begin with.
