Are we doomed ?

A Belgian top official said recently in relation to COVID-19 that we did all we could given what we knew. In just one sentence, you can simply notice the immense FAILURE that characterizes the crisis response, not only in Belgium but globally. It’s not only a failure of politics or policies but a failure as a human being at different scale namely individual, regional, national and global levels. The problem we are currently facing goes beyond what we have or what we know.

The humankind has achieved a tremendous progress recently, by progress I mean technological progress. Our lives have become more connected than ever, both physically and virtually. Our choices have become endless. Our liberty has become freer from classical ideologies or religions. In developed countries, we can basically do whatever we want when we want. We can have a business lunch in a Nepalese restaurant while working for a global organisation and next plan summer holidays to see Machu Picchu and all this while being virtually connected 24/7. We become masters in doing so. The generation Z couldn’t even believe what life was back in the 80’s or 90’s.

Unfortunately this has a cost; a very deep fragility that has been building below the surface. It’s an individual fragility, a community fragility, an economic fragility and most importantly an institutional fragility which suddenly come into light when a major stress or shock happens. My theory behind this fragility is as follow: “while we achieved an unprecedented technological progress our mindset has not evolved accordingly, in some cases it even decayed”

The world has always been complex and uncertain. The ancients have developed survival heuristics that helped perpetuate human genes and spread them across the globe. Sometimes even through great achievement. And this without really knowing the mechanics behind anything from engineering, to biology, agriculture and beyond. Some of these heuristics have been passed on to countless generations through ideologies and religions. 

The world today is far more complex and uncertain than ever before. In the process an important fragility has been building, survival heuristics have been replaced by “knowledge” fuelled by “science” and this is where the Belgian top official statement comes into play. It’s not only a health crisis that we are facing today, it’s a very deep crisis of our inability to handle the complexity and uncertainly of our world. It’s a widespread phenomenon whose consequences are currently exploding. We can’t even stay put to save lives. We have to go abroad to enjoy holidays, something that didn’t even exist in the most part of the human existence.

It’s a failure to cope with thing we don’t know or we don’t know yet. Our mental models have not been trained to handle this. Collectively, as a small group or an institution the problem is even more compounded and produces frightening responses. We think the world is linear and that knowledge is everything, it’s NOT and the COVID-19 is here to teach us important lessons: The world is non-linear, full of second-order effects, knowledge is a flow not a stock (subject to change), unknowns are far more important and dangerous than knowns and science is the rigor not the outcomes. Responding to the current crisis SHOULD go beyond what we have, what we know or what we are. It requires boldness, authenticity but most importantly moving away from the dependency on the path that got us here.