Covid-19 shows us who we are, and who we should become

The virus is showing us a much needed, brutally honest mirror. As it is always with medicine, we can’t treat a disease properly before we have the correct diagnosis.

So far we have been dealing with the symptoms - different crisis situations, recurring, historic vicious cycles, focusing on how egotistically politicians, celebrities, famous sports personalities behave - but we never actually faced the root cause.

Now the virus is showing us how self-serving, individualistic, self-justifying we all are, how much we are all ready to succeed, survive at the expense of others both individually and nationally.

Of course there are the usual heros from health professionals, and other public servants, there are the usual, highlighted personal, dramatic, heroic stories the media likes so much. Yes we can also behave like that in unique circumstances, under pressure.

But that doesn’t change the fact that in general our inherent nature is totally selfish, egotistic, subjective, and this is why Humanity as a species was already heading for a global meltdown even before the pandemic.

The problem is that with this nature we are incompatible with our globally interconnected evolutionary circumstances, we are incompatible with the need to become mutually responsible for one another as we are all sitting on the same, sinking global boat.

I hope we won’t look away this time because we don’t like what we see in the mirror, I hope we don’t try immediately to justify ourselves and keep pointing fingers at others, at certain politicians, at certain people as culprits, ignoring the negative, egotistic virus that’s in all of us.

If we all accept what the pandemic shows us about ourselves, then we will be able to start correcting, upgrading our original “software” through the right education.

Then we won’t just solve this present problem much faster, but together, through mutually responsible, mutually complementing cooperation - above and against our instinctive reflexes, inclinations - we will be able to prevent future, even worse global calamities.