The Deeper, Longer Disease
By Kathi Vian, Distinguished Fellow, Institute for the Future
Time is not on our side. Once I thought the future was a safe place. I believed that by thinking ourselves into that safe place, by imagining possible, plausible alternative futures, we could guide ourselves to the kind of future we want. But the future is suddenly now. And it’s not safe.
Just three months ago, we at Institute for the Future undertook a fast-track project to create alternative scenarios for a post-pandemic world. A growth scenario that somehow managed, through massive debt accumulation, to drive a long, slow economic recovery in which capitalists could continue to aggregate wealth. A transformation scenario in which contact tracing technology might restructure society into germ pods that transcend today’s social and racial boundaries but create new red-line communities based on health. A constraint scenario where social solidarity could emerge from an acceptance of limits to growth and an embrace of a new deal grounded in mutualism and new forms of collective ownership. And a collapse scenario: a militarized showdown on the streets of America.
Today, just three months later, we’re throwing out the alternative scenarios. We are already looking collapse in the eye. Events we imagined might occur three years from now, five years from now, are playing out in a few months. It’s not that we didn’t anticipate the events unfolding today. We just couldn’t write them down fast enough to stay ahead of them.
Lesson: as fast as Covid-19 has spread through the world population, a deeper underlying disease — or perhaps we could call it a syndrome of co-infections — is careening through our body politic, assaulting our collective futures at scales we literally can’t imagine. We can’t imagine collapse at this scale. And that’s the problem.
What’s revealed: A sick herd
When a large disturbance shakes a complex system, the weakest parts of the system collapse first. Just as the novel coronavirus first showed up in the most vulnerable people in our society — the old, the sick, the working poor and racially oppressed — it has also taken aim at the widespread frailties in our social, economic, and political institutions. It has made their fragility painfully visible. It has set collapse in motion.
Start with the broken health care system. This was the first symptom. It wasn’t just the lack of preparedness, the missing tests and PPE. Already before Covid-19 flooded our ERs and ICUs with patients gasping for air, our hospitals and medical clinics were dying under the weight of top-heavy corporatization, turning doctors and health care workers into the medical equivalent of gig workers. Already before the virus, access to care was skewed to favor those most likely to be healthy: white people in corporate jobs with good (if expensive) health care benefits. Conversely, even before we tallied the Covid-19 cases, health outcomes were poorer for people of color. Disproportionate death was not new to the pandemic.
And then there’s economic inequality. Low-wage workers have been steadily growing as a percentage of the workforce, but even among low-wage workers, low has a decidedly different meaning for people of color: on average, workers of color have consistently made about a third less than white workers over the past five decades. With the arrival of the virus on the scene, these low-wage workers were deemed essential, often frontline workers. But they called themselves sacrificial workers as they were routinely exposed in hospitals, nursing homes, meat packing plants, and Amazon warehouses. For non-essential workers, unemployment soared, but it soared higher — nearly 25% higher — for Blacks and Latinx workers. Meanwhile, consumers accrued debt that provided the interest engine for economic growth at the top.
And racial injustice. The white majority of Americans has been steadily declining as a percentage of the overall population for several decades now, with ever more dangerous attempts to hold on to their political and cultural power. In the name of public safety, police forces target black communities, supported by policies that put African Americans in for-profit prisons at rates unseen anywhere else in the world (and exposing them in undue numbers to viral outbreaks). People of color have been subjugated with fear of these forces of public safety. They’ve been called terrorists when they contest their disempowerment. Without explicit racial quarantines, the United States has begun, slowly under cover of token inclusiveness, to look more like apartheid South Africa, where America once joined the world in imposing economic sanctions.
Political division is its own ill.
In just a few short years, the anti-government forces in the United States have effectively deconstructed much of the working infrastructure of the federal government, creating not only a leadership vacuum but also a functional vacuum that has made our country the frontrunner in Covid-19 cases and deaths. State governments struggle to cooperate (or compete) in efforts to contain a virus that knows no state boundaries, all the while watching their budgets crater. Meanwhile, in their government offices they confront armed protestors objecting to masks (and do nothing to stop them) while state police in riot gear suit up to contain race protests on the street. Blue vs. Red narratives shift from a way to count the voting patterns of states to armed conflicts in cities across the country as these divisions are inflamed by rhetoric and Molotov cocktails. White supremacist, authoritarian, and anti-government factions organize the ranks of police unions, local militias, and even elected officials at a scale we haven’t yet recognized.
Another underlying weakness: supply chain brittleness. The problems of keeping goods flowing during a pandemic may seem banal compared to the life-and-death battles people are fighting in our hospitals, with double-digit unemployment nipping at their heels and racial discrimination literally assaulting our citizens. Yet supply chains are the food, fuel, and medicine that keep these same people fed and alive — or destine them to death and disease when they fail. The highly engineered logistics of global trade have been revealed to be overly efficient and lacking in any real resilience, any ability to quickly reconfigure themselves to meet new and urgent demands. And the future, even assuming we solve the problems of public health, economic inequality, and racial injustice, looks as fragile as the planet. Meanwhile, climate change is set to release new waves of misery on this infrastructure of survival.
Finally, a desperately fragile social fabric. Documenting the past several decades, repeated studies have shown a decline in social trust, a deterioration of civic discourse, and ultimately a loss of the kind of civility that binds a society together. These patterns cross geographic borders and cultures and have been linked to everything from the rise of digital society to the growth of corruption, and ultimately economic inequalities that create fierce competition while disadvantaging entire communities. Weaving through these apparent causes is the disruption of the long-standing social, educational, and cultural institutions — public spaces, public universities, and publicly supported museums, for example — that have been sources of cohesion in the past. These threads of the social fabric, the threads that could restore our social, economic, and political systems to wholeness and health, are grievously frayed.
We are, then, not just sick individuals, fighting for our breath on ventilators or on the street. We’re a sick herd. Which is a much harder problem to solve, a deeper disease to heal.
Transformation: The illusive vaccine
So where do we begin? If the future is no longer a safe place, if time is not on our side and system collapse is not just one of many possible futures but the imminent reality of the present moment, what role does foresight and futures thinking have to play in our response to the pandemic, to civil conflagration, to an economy that’s not been designed for the health of the very people who keep it running?
Let’s start by acknowledging that there’s no “back to normal” future now. There’s no business-as-usual growth scenario. Any such vision of the future tips quickly toward constraint, whether limits are imposed by external conditions, such as a persistent pandemic and climate change, or by internal constraints, such as the growing use of force and fear to keep a sacrificial labor force of essential workers in check.
Among the archetypal scenarios — growth, collapse, constraint, and transformation — only transformation remains as a viable option. But transformational futures are hard. Hard to imagine a world reinvented. Perhaps even harder to implement that vision. As in the search for a vaccine against Covid-19, we must not only discover the pathways to reconfigure the basic DNA of our human systems — to address the disease at its roots — we must develop the social, economic, and political pathways to assure the vaccine’s adoption at scale.
At scale, the task of anticipating transformation is daunting but not impossible. We need to begin by building a scaffold for massively many people to envision change across multiple complex systems. Think of it as a citizen science project to map the genome of our future: the core components of change, out of which we’ll construct our transformational vaccines. We need a living library of actions — social, economic, political, and healthful — that can express our 21st century lives in ways we haven’t yet imagined.
This scaffolding will come first from hundreds of people on the frontlines, whether it’s the frontlines of the pandemic response or civil protest or scientific discovery. It will come from cross-system conversations among activists and active thinkers, bringing together the voices that need to be heard to create transformational change. Imagine the generative power of a conversation among, for example, an advocate for the #8toAbolition policies to end police violence, talking with a San Francisco doctor who hosts an audio diary project for Covid-19 health care workers, side by side with a disinformation expert exploring cognitive immunity and a microbial sociologist who has built a global epidemic risk tracker. These cross-system, cross-domain conversations may be formally facilitated or they may be informal and ad hoc. They may take place online or in masked, face-to-face encounters. They may use structured toolkits or simple but compelling questions that serve as prompts for practical imagination.
What is the focus of these conversations?
The focus is the present moment. We’re looking for the right-now actions, the novel exploits that will add up to a new social contract over the coming decades. Out of these right-now actions of frontliners, we’ll collectively construct a library of the genetic material of the future. And out of this genetic material, we can begin to construct visions of transformation that can vaccinate our sick herd against the deep disease that is disabling us today — and hopefully inaugurate a future that is once again a safe place for everyone.
Institute for the Future is a non-profit futures organization that is currently curating conversations about post-pandemic, post-collapse futures through two projects: #Imaginable and After the Pandemic: Writing the Stories of the Future.
