My greatest fear after the pandemic

My biggest fear in relation to the state after the Covid-19 pandemic is that we blindly return to the life we lived before.

On one hand, it is understandable, since this is the life we know, this kind of excessive, selfish, narcissistic life fits our inherently egotistic, exploitative nature. Thus the incessant brainwash through media, marketing, and peer pressure simply nudges us towards what we want to anyway. Consume, more and more until the last drop, even if there is no tomorrow.

The problem is that actually there is truly no tomorrow if we continue like this.

Even before the pandemic, we were already en route to a global meltdown that could have been triggered by multiple different causes (climate change, economic/financial crisis, water shortage, trade/oil price/proxy ears/geopolitical conflicts progressing into real, global wars, pandemics due to antibiotic overuse, violent societal breakdown due to inequality, racism, political extremism growing…) in multiple different locations.

All the Covid-19 infection did was giving up a unique pause, thinking time, a chance to change course. This looks like a once in a lifetime opportunity for our generation to avoid the usual civilization-ending explosion all previous civilizations went through, only 70–80 years after the last such explosion.

It is true that change is difficult, we resent it vehemently even when we know towards what to change. And this time we do not have another ideology, the possible system we can think of with our usual, inherently self-serving, self-justifying mind, since we have already used all egotistic, subjective methods, philosophies, ideologies and their combinations, and we failed in all of them. Our egotistic Human development has exhausted itself.

Thus we would need to start a completely new Human development which we have no experience with, no precedence of, we do not even have a Human template for it.

This new course of development requires fundamental self-changes, a complete shift in how we relate to each other, how we interconnect, cooperate. Our problem-solving ability and collective survival depend on us accepting on ourselves Nature’s template, its selfless, mutually responsible, and mutually complementing integration which from our egotistic point of view seems impossible, unacceptable.

Still, with the right, purposeful and practical educational method — which operates by positive motivation, drawing interested people willingly, through their free choice without coercion — we could assemble a small environment of pioneers, people who already understand, see that our survival acutely depends, hinges on changing ourselves, our Human system. Then with the help of such people — if they reach the necessary, so-called “critical mass” — Humanity can be rescued while the general society continues its sleepwalk towards total collapse.

My fear is that everybody will blindly return to the “old life” and we won’t have the crucially necessary “critical mass” of people who can safeguard our continuing Human survival!