Vaccine or Conscience… humanity's last chance to choose one!

Your cute Christmas elf does not come from Santa’s warm and rustic factory at the North Pole, but is probably mass-produced with harsh chemicals, from declining resources, maybe even by unprotected child labor. Not cute at all. We are so often too busy to see that we are creating the ripple effects, all the time – either positive or negative ripples emanating from us and through our decisions, transactions and choices... (Hutchins & Storm, 2019).

As we come close to bidding goodbye to probably the most eventful year in the lifetimes for many of us, we are brimming with hope and excitement with the new Covid vaccine already being rolled out in several parts of the world. Living room discussions, social media and political discourse are dominated by the arrival of a silver bullet that will signal the end of the world’s troubles.

While I have great respect for the scientific community that has worked exceptionally hard over the last few months to come out with a significant medical breakthrough in record time, I also feel that the relentless search for a vaccine to accomplish the end of the world's troubles is just a sign of our short-termed, selfish and narcissistic attitude that has dominated the human species resulting in the troubled world we have inherited and what we will be leaving behind for our future generations. Claiming the vaccine to bring an end to a year that has seen an unprecedented upheaval touching every aspect of our lives is an indication of treating symptoms and not the causes of a deeper malaise that unfortunately has become endemic to all of us.

In the last 100 years, the amount of damage we, as a race, have inflicted on the planet, on peoples and on our personal selves is more severe than what was done in the previous 2000 years.

Deluded by greed, power and self-gratification, humans have evolved to be led by thinking that is increasingly linear, reductionist and short-term. We are in the middle of the sixth great extinction on this planet where lives are disappearing at a rate higher than ever before. More than 500 species of land animals are likely to be lost within twenty years (Earth.org). The Amazon lost around 17% of its forest in the last 50 years due to cattle ranching (WWF) - the forest that supports precious life is itself converted for meat production, which is a major source of greenhouse gas emission, in-turn creating a domino effect of devastation. Global warming has led to some of the worst wildfires, floods, droughts and storms in the last one year and we continue to emit more than 50 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere every year. 25,000 people die from hunger every day (UN Chronicle) when food wastage in the US accounts for 30-40% of the food supply (USDA). Crony capitalism has overshadowed humanity. Developing countries have seen significant economic strides and technological advancements in the last two decades; India produced one Dollar-billionaire every two days in 2018 (OXFAM), but the country struggles with systemic failures in social equity and disregard of human rights.

Consciously or unconsciously, each and every one of us is indulgent in this house of cards of perpetrating destruction as long as it serves to satisfy our short-term gratification. We need to be examining the edge of our own conscience. The decisions, transactions and choices that we make in our lives have come to be way too selfish and momentary emanating from our inability to appreciate interconnections in the larger system we exist in. This has happened due to deep divisions we have created between matter, life and mind; or what Ken Wilber would call physiosphere, biosphere and noosphere respectively.

COVID has shaken the world. But should it really?

We all saw it coming. Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 movie Contagion had eerie similarities with what we have witnessed in 2020. In his 2015 Ted Talk, Bill Gates point-blank 'informed' us that “if anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it is most likely to be a highly infectious virus” and that “we’re not ready”. Despite the fact that we saw it coming, what were we doing? We continued to produce more technology at the cost of nature to manage our houses when they become too warm or too cold, consume more canned foods so that we can save time to direct it in business districts, buy fashion inconsiderate of where it comes from, invest in needless wars to establish our perceived influence over territory, and subjugate or even eradicate voices that differ from our political and religious ideologies. Talking about the next pandemic was not sexy enough… and here we are!

When I looked for the silver lining in the obscure COVID cloud, I realized that this was probably the opportunity for us to look inward, introspect and connect with our own being.

With Covid we witnessed that everything is connected to everything else – the importance of social connections, service and sharing, emotional anchorage and information democratization began to dominate the narrative. However, soon it became evident that it is difficult for us to elevate ourselves from a linear bifurcated worldview based on deceit and compromise of values. Consider what the New York Times reported when the US president was on war-footing to find a vaccine: “Betting that a vaccine would secure his reelection, he [Donald Trump] waged both public and private campaigns to speed the process”. Was this really about saving lives? In the developed world, a grave public health crisis metamorphosized into a financial one where buy-outs, rescue packages and labour market restructuring occupied both political and economic mind-space paving the way for several large financial institutions profiteering from the situation. Currently, we see some of the richest nations stockpiling the vaccine depriving some of the poorest. Forbes reported that the US paycheck protection program that was meant to help struggling small businesses actually benefitted those with the best relationships instead. Several Covid-related financial scams are coming to light. Katy Worobec, MD of the trade body UK Finance, said: “During this pandemic we have seen criminals using sophisticated methods to callously exploit people's financial concerns to trick them into giving away their money or information". This is all happening at the backdrop of some of the most disturbing events in the world stage. Race relations in the lowest ebb in the US busting myths of equality in the eye of the law-protectors, the worst humanitarian crisis in Armenia and Azerbaijan over a piece of land, the most gruesome murders in France in the name of religion, chilling kidnapping of hundreds of school children in Nigeria, and dirty police-caste nexus in the largest state of India to cover up the rape and murder of woman considered to be from the 'lower-caste'.

Covid will end with our concerted efforts, but the next 'virus' will come soon.

This leads me to the fundamental question that I want to address through this article, i.e. is a vaccine the solution to the world's problems? The world rising up-in-arms for episodic events to solve a problem and dissolving back into the endemic malaise, not to say that we were out of that malaise, is a classic example of humanity’s ignorance of the bigger picture of the creation of a better more sustainable world but focus on band-aids to heal bruises. There will be several 'Covids' for which we will have several 'vaccines', but what we need is a reevaluation of our conscience. The biggest lesson that 2020 can teach us is that the institutions and structures that have engulfed us in the last decades need to be abandoned and we need to radically change how we think and act, and what we believe to be true. There is no vaccine for the same; what we need is a shift in conscience. Knowingly and/or unknowingly we have found ourselves in a situation where each one of us is entangled in a complex web of networks that in some way or other produces effects that are undesirable and unwanted although they may seem to benefit us in the short-term. Every smartphone we use is lit up with rare earth metals at the cost of grave environmental damage in China or gruesome human rights abuses in Congo; the price of every time we smile after getting a discount on a pair of jeans in the high-street is probably paid by child labor in Bangladesh (a country that has paid the highest price for climate change despite being one of the lowest contributors to greenhouse gases); every time we devour an avocado in North America or the UK, we probably are depriving a huge number of rural Chileans of potable water. How often have we come to think about our own role in this perennial dance of doom?

We need a profound shift from linear thinking to systems thinking.

A shift in conscience involves our ability to appreciate what the Hindu concept of satkaryavada, found in the Samkhya - the oldest known script of philosophy, propounds. Satkaryavada simply means that the ‘effect pre-existing in the cause’. Satkaryavada transcends the cause-effect duality and lets us realize that our experience of the world is nothing but the sum-total of our own acts. What we experience as the flower is a result of the seed we would have sown ourselves somewhere at some time. This deep thought, if understood in the right light, can bring about a tsunamic shift in our moral compass. It can let us move from a liner reductionist worldview to one that is systemic and integral. Interconnections within and between the physiosphere, biosphere and noosphere. In the same vein, the Samkhya propounds the profound concept of the self as the involution of the cosmos and the cosmos as the projection of the self – the microcosm and the macrocosm respectively. The Samkhya calls these the atman and the brahman respectively (loosely interpreted). The Samkhya philosophy can serve as a sharp mirror to us as we approach the end of 2020 and anticipate the clock to strike at midnight for 2021. This will involve asking ourselves tough questions, answers for many of which we will not find easily. But that’s okay.

What we do need to realize however is that this is probably our last chance as human beings to set the course of our future.

If Covid cannot do that, what will? We need to focus on creating a social order that is based on 'organization of experiences' and not 'organization of production', as the Russian systems thinker, Alexander Bogdanov, would put it. Organization of experience lends the monistic perspective to appreciate self-organization of life, matter and nature and consider ourselves as an integral web of our experiences. Therefore, we cannot exploit 'others'; we can only exploit 'us'. As we begin our countdown to 2021, do we really want to go back to the eyewash of what we believe is the 'normal'? Is 'post-Covid' even desirable in the presence of a 'vaccine' and in the absence of our 'conscience'?

What we need is not a 'vaccine', but to critically examine the edge of our conscience. Covid has given humanity our last chance. The choice is in our hands.

Cautiously… Happy responsible festivities and a peaceful 2021!