Covid-19, Economy, and the Perception of Reality

In a previous text, I wrote that with the Covid-19 pandemic science is increasingly spoken of, as if it were an article of faith. This attitude grew along with the utilitarian fantasy that the only function of medicine is to provide certainties, including quick vaccines and infallible medicines -- the so-called game-changers.

The problem is that this immediacy does not exist in the real world. Scientific research requires time, reflection and patience, things that are not exactly abundant in our societies.

On the other hand, scientific knowledge should not be taken for granted, as we can learn from this beautiful phrase by Karl Popper: "Knowledge consists in the search for truth -- in the search for true and explanatory theories. It is not the search for certainty. To err is human. All human knowledge is fallible and therefore uncertain”.

The same applies to the behavior of leaders. The public's fascination with histrionic and demagogic leaders has always existed, along with the willingness to submit to them, and then start to execrate them without however abandoning this attraction. Human history is full of examples of insane and profoundly ignorant leaders. The reader can produce, without much effort, his own list of examples.

Meanwhile populations keep increasing, and so do their illusions and beliefs. There has always been controversy over the role of wars and epidemics as regulators of population growth, but one thing is beyond doubt: for thinkers and writers like Jonathan Swift, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley and Michel Houellebecq, among many others, the idiots are in the majority. For its part, psychiatry has already noticed that maniacs live long and have, as the commonplace says, an iron health.

Furthermore, many people demonstrate that they do not know what is happening and are always looking for those who say they know. Elias Canetti, among others, showed that the larger the human group the greater its credulity, aggressiveness, irrationality and manipulability. In turn, Elinor Ostrom demonstrated that there is a scale, a size of  human community beyond which the intelligence and rationality of its components begin to decrease.

Given that perception is always subjective, reality is always composed of the myths we have built about it. Many authors have already said that humanity's greatest crisis is a crisis of perception: people do not realize what happens and, what is worse, do not realize that they do not. As a result, they see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear, because self-deception and the loss of contact with reality are always present.

And so human beings create bubbles of reality, in which they take refuge and build up their mythologies. These are exposed through what used to be called "speeches" and today it is fashionable to call "narratives". Many of them are nothing more than escapist tactics, ways of manifesting the ease with which we lose contact with reality.

They are pathologies of storytelling, in the sense that they define areas of protection and convenience. Walter Lippmann, in his book Public opinion (1922), already warned of the fact that men create pseudo-realities and strongly believe in them. He suggested that the history of the human species is the story of the resulting misperceptions and mistaken beliefs. This is the origin of what we nowadays call fake news and post-truths.

Edgar Morin said that intellectual comfort and habit abhor the messages that bother them. The well-known and ancient Arab proverb says that the dogs bark and the caravan passes. Today, with the Covid-19 pandemic, it can be said that the narratives clash and the number of deaths increases.  

That is why we need more effective measures that reflect the complexity of the world. What is being done is correct according to the Newtonian-Cartesian model and is, of course, accepted by minds shaped by this paradigm, which was established in the 17th century. 

With this mindset, still prevalent today, the measures underway worldwide are the only possible ones. So do their results. They would even be sufficient if the world hadn’t changed so much since then. But it has changed. 

We must abandon the naivety (or arrogance) of imagining that we are separate from nature and can completely control it. We need to get out of the Socratic / Aristotelian model, of reductionism and relativism, recognize the interdependencies of living beings and question the limitations of binary logic and the early systems thinking.

It is necessary to abandon the use of expressions such as "high complexity" to designate procedures that actually are of high technical complication and low inclusion of the non-mechanical dimension of the human beings. We need to understand what is complexity, how to deal with it and, above all, improve our perception of the world, as it was its insufficiency that left us in the situation we are in.

We must understand that the economy is important, but that it is essential that we are mentally better oriented to produce and run it. In short, we need to think differently.

In the meantime, we can only suffer the consequences of our contempt for thought, especially the unorthodox ways of thinking. It remains to be seen whether most people will be able to understand all this.

During the pandemic, some things became clear: when the economy ebbs away, nature flourishes; the Earth, temporarily free from human predation, breathes and is purified. The air and the oceans turn cleaner. When the economy recovers, however, nature will again be devastated.

Apparently, these are mutually exclusive situations -- but only when thought with the mindset that prevails today. The economic development versus environmental integrity dilemma exists because our mechanistic mind is not able to solve it properly. In other words: to reconcile life and economics, the complexity of the biosphere must be included in the equation.

One reason for this inability to reconcile is that the dominant economic systems, regardless of the ideology on which they are based, ignore the reality of the world and put theoretically built scenarios in its place. If the real world were taken into account, the costs of environmental devastation would be included in the prices of products and services. But in that case everything would be too expensive and therefore bad for business.

This is the situation in which we live. The mechanical mind ended up placing the biosphere (which obviously include the human beings) outside the economic processes, which in the end seems to suggest two things: a) evil is stronger (or more economically convenient) than good; b) death is stronger than life. 

But it is obvious that it is not necessary to extinguish human beings so that nature is less ravaged and can live with the economy. Reducing the size of population would be a potentially effective measure, but, as it is known, it has been hampered by misinterpretations and misguided arguments. Basically it is a question of scale -- and of  intelligence, which seems to be what we lack most.

The Covid-19 pandemic is expected to bring profound changes to human societies and their economy. Perhaps we will learn something from it and from other pandemics that, according to experts, will come sooner or later. In fact, if we continue to conduct our societies with the usual mentality (linear, anthropocentric, quantitative and negationist of diversity and uncertainty), the "new normal", of which so much is talked about, will not be new or much less normal.

For all these reasons, we need to develop better ways of understanding human nature, as the education we have seems to be no longer sufficient to do so. As Russian writer Anton Tchekhov said, "the university develops all capabilities, including stupidity".

Tips for further reading

ELINOR OSTROM, Governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 

ELIAS CANETTI, Crowds and power (W & N: 2000).  

HUMBERTO MARIOTTI; CRISTINA ZAUHY, The challenge of uncertainty: today's culture, artificial intelligence, and the need for complex thinking (Amazon Books, 2019). 

MIA GOSSELIN, Homo sapiens, a problematic species: an essay in philosophical anthropology (New York: University Press of America, 2015).  

ROLAND BARTHES, Mythologies (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991).

WALTER LIPPMANN, Public opinion (Dancing Unicorn Books, 2016).