Is the corona virus panic going to lead to a global crisis similar to the credit crunch of 2007–2008?

For example, according to an article in The Guardian in New Zealand the government already started warning people yesterday that the aftermath of the pandemic will be “quantum greater” than the shock of the 2008 crisis in terms of businesses collapsing, unemployment, and it is completely unknown if we can expect even partial recovery from that.

And the NZ government is not alone with their opinions, all kinds of task teams, committees, urgent, virtual G20 meetings are convened as the panic about the economic, financial collapse will soon overtake the panic about the virus.

There is nothing surprising about this. We have never truly recovered from the 2008 crisis, as it was not a crisis but the announcement that our present socio-economic system is not viable, not sustainable.

What we called “recovery” was pumping mostly inflated, virtual money into a dying system, performing constant cosmetic surgery on a corpse so to speak.

The Covid-19 will deal the final, lethal blow to this system, stopping all the lies and illusions about our proud, “modern” lifestyle the West already got sick of, the developing countries still blindly trying to chase, causing even more problems to everybody with the overproduction, overconsumption by at once trying to offer the “Western lifestyle” to a third or half of the Human population.

Of course, they had, have every right to do so, since especially after the Cold War ended everybody heard nothing else that the “Western values”, the excessive “shop till drop”, “retail therapy” economy, the incessant, celebrity lead lifestyle, copying blindly everything that the rich and famous do, wear, say, offer is the ultimate Human existence.

Although a few people had been making noise, warning, activating others, it took this invisible virus to tell us that “the King has no clothes” to such an extent that most of us actually started to notice _ even only a few days, weeks into isolation — that indeed we have been living a completely pointless, harmful, inhumane life!

For the sake of material possessions, services, pleasures we do not even remember when, how why we brought we sacrificed our health, families and the natural environment our life depends on.

The virus with the present freeze in our previous life gives us an extraordinary opportunity. We are like a seemingly, inevitably dying patient that is suddenly awakened from a coma a few minutes before certain death to offer the patient an experimental drug that can save the patient’s life. It is bitter medicine, to begin with, still, it can offer a way out of the seemingly inevitable!

This bitter but effective medicine is the understanding that we can’t survive on our own, against one another, at the expense of each other as we tried so far. But we can survive together as a single species — like any other species in Nature — as only together, by building mutually responsible and mutually complementing connections, cooperation can we solve problems and survive in Nature’s fully integrated and interdependent system.

I imagine there will quite a few people who will choose death rather than connect to others as a result of the instinctive, egotistic, individualistic pride hidden in all of us. And all our lives we have been educating to compete ruthlessly, exclusively, to be better, greater, stronger than others, to save, protect our self-esteem, individuality at all cost.

So what would you choose?!