Covid-19: Was our life truly so good before, that we need to rush back to it ASAP?

Many people suggest that governments are overreacting with their present lockdown policies causing unnecessary damage to the economy, bringing on hardship, loss of income, unemployment to people that could have been prevented with different measures.

I tell you what my problem is with what they say. Their opinion assumes that without the pandemic things were going well and politicians with their decisions to implement forceful restrictions pulled the plug on a perfectly well functioning socio-economic system which was providing the livelihood for all.

But we all know that this is not true. The present socio-economic system — which is based on unnatural, excessive overproduction, overconsumption, artificially generated “aggregate demand” forcing people to produce and consume things they do not need, cannot actually afford — was already in perpetual crisis, or we could say on life support.

We were heading for a global meltdown, much greater than 2008 anyway, through growing unemployment (especially youth), unsustainable geopolitical conflicts promising global wars, trade wars, oil price wars, social breakdown due to increasing inequality, antibiotic resistance threatening with much worse pandemic scenarios (we must not forget that this virus in most countries had a relatively mild outcome, with or without draconian restrictions, mostly taking the life of those who were already suffering from multiple medical problems).

People were not living well, even if according to our present measurements they were not classified “poor”, as depression, substance abuse, loneliness, the breakdown of the family were the true “plagues” hurting us all over the world. And we have been consistently destroying the natural environment which is now showing a remarkable capacity to re-balance itself as Humans are locked inside, remaining idle.

If anything the pandemic is showing, that what we are going to lose through the subsequent crisis is the excess, the rubbish we simply do not need for a good, healthy, modern life.

Will people lose their jobs in the billions? Yes. Will there be a hardship? Yes. But the virus simply brought forward the inevitable. The question is how we will deal with the billions becoming unemployed and having day to day difficulties.

We can’t go back to where we were before as that was not good, it was leading towards inevitable self-destruction. We need to build something better to take care of people through an appropriate, purposeful and practical education, that can prepare us to rebuild Human society on better foundations, based on mutually responsible mutually complementing cooperation (instead of the ruthless, exclusive competition, succeeding, surviving at the expense of each other) and on modern, natural, Human necessities and available resources.

And this is the most important point, “to take care of people”, not to take care of markets, financial, business interests, election campaigns, the only things that motivate present politicians and their paymasters.

I am neither a liberal nor a communist, I am not religious and don’t believe in mysticism.

I am a “realist”, more precisely an empirical scientist of Nature. And Nature’s system operates on unbending, iron laws which we cannot continue to break because we consider ourselves “outside, above” the system and want to exploit everything we can regardless of the consequences.

Either we learn how to follow the laws of Nature that sustain balance and homeostasis — which laws also bind us in the closed, integral, interdependent natural system we live in — or we will continue our downward spiral with or without this virus or other global catastrophes waiting for us.