You Never Can Tell

My Mother's Wisdom & Other Sagas

My mother was relatively uneducated. She left school at the age of eleven to go into domestic service. But she was shrewd, not on any account to be underestimated. She would come out with the quaintest of pronouncements.

One favorite turn of phrase of hers, after listening to the nightly news on the wireless, was: There. What did I say. You never can tell. I suspect I took on that oft-repeated statement as something of a challenge when shaping my current career as a futurist. We will always live with the unknown and, quite probably, the unknowable. But some things you just know will happen. Not always, but sometimes, you just can tell.

Take the current pandemic, for example. It has been on my radar for some years. We saw it coming. Not necessarily this year of course - only supremely confident fools would predict precisely when such entangled patterns were likely to converge into a material event of any consequence. There is too much ambiguity and volatility to risk taking on such a burden.

But the blend of globalization, an increasingly nomadic population of around 7.8 billion, and modern disease vectors, were always going to create conditions in which viruses can flourish. It many respects the current pandemic is a foreseeable consequence of the world we have created - shaped by our sense of exceptionalism and the notion that we are somehow separate from, and superior to, other species.

What I do find alarming is the unwarranted finger-pointing when we have all been spooked by events. SARS-CoV-2 is not a new virus. We have known about it for some considerable time. A SARS-coronavirus detection technology was patented in the US in November 2003. Scientists have been warning us about a global pandemic on this scale for many years. Yet we find ourselves totally unprepared - socially, emotionally, economically, and politically.

In some respects what we are now living through is a false crisis. In Australia the annual flu epidemic will kill far more people than COVID-19. Do not misunderstand me. I am not treating this pandemic casually, or retreating from an acceptance that large numbers of people are dying. This is certainly a crisis for the elderly, especially those with weak immune systems, and with pre-existing respiratory and cardiac conditions. But not for most people.

Or at least - it didn't need to be! We are held captive in a particular narrative - a story shaped by rates of infection, morbidity rates, and the total number of deaths. This dominant narrative, in which we are now trapped, the way governments have chosen to tell the story, generating anxiety and fear even if that was not their intention, and the draconian regimes they now feel obliged to impose, without a shred of evidence they know what they are doing, was always disconcertingly reckless.

Regrettably these tactics also closely resemble the criteria listed in the Biderman Chart of Coercion, a tool designed to validate and explain the coercive methods of stress manipulation and mind control used by organizations like the CIA to torture prisoners of war - methods that go along way to shed light on domestic abuse too. In both instances, physical control is hardly ever achieved without cooperation from the victim. The most effective way to gain that kind of cooperation is through subversive manipulation of the mind and feelings of the victim, who then becomes a psychological, as well as a physical, captor.

I am not implying that government officials are deliberately using tactics like social isolation, mask wearing, mental exhaustion, and the threat of fines for non-compliance with the law, as an excuse for ramping up the nascent totalitarian tendencies to be seen in many present-day democracies. I do not give credit to anyone planning evil to that extent. But I am stating unequivocally that the emotional and psychological consequences will be severe - most likely leaving a stain on the way we choose to treat each other in the future.

Officials have decided to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut and society has become totally compliant in the face of such directives. A different understanding of available scientific data might have led to alternative responses. For example, if we had targeted those most likely to contract the disease, and safeguarded them in the ways we are now using to protect the entire community, we could have avoided potentially devastating social and economic penalties in the years ahead.

Even now we could be heading for a global depression similar to that experienced during the 1930's. The conditions today are very different of course. That does not mean we should not be concerned.

Many countries were already in the grip of a high street retail recession before the pandemic. Current reactions to the virus are making matters far worse than they needed to be. For example, unemployment is going to skyrocket, made worse as further automation of the workplace kicks in. Numerous businesses will lack sufficient resources to recover from the downturn in commercial activity. Public healthcare systems will be pushed to the limit. While for vulnerable people already living on the edge, the rounds of enforced restrictions, self-quarantine and social isolation will cause more mental health issues. Cases of domestic violence, too, are set to soar.

So a global economic downturn well into the first half of 2021 is almost unavoidable. Much depends now on how we weather our exit from the storm. By that I am not referring to the number of infections, so much as the havoc and uncertainty the virus, along with the various treatments we are racing to discover, will continue to cause.

Not all is doom and gloom of course. There are changes in the air that could benefit all of us. We can expect a clean-out of the economy together with far greater financial prudence. At the same time we are seeing clearly how capital markets must be in service to the public interest - not the other way around. Perhaps COVID-19 will accelerate the trend to place societal health and wellbeing ahead of corporate profits and individual affluence. One outcome of that might be the ability just to lead simpler, happier, more fulfilling lives.

A far more intriguing factor is also beginning to surface. It concerns the overall quality of life. When people see the result of their activities up close it becomes exceedingly difficult to tell them to go back into their box - to persuade them to resume a life less desirable. Catching a glimpse of the fish returning to clear waters in the canals of Venice is already provoking local council discussions about how this situation can be preserved without damaging the local economy. Likewise, the citizens of Wuhan are breathing fresh air, seeing blue skies and unfiltered sunshine, for the first time in perhaps a decade.

A return to the old smokestack industries cannot be assumed with public feelings running so high. The shift to renewable energy will happen faster now. On a more practical level we are certainly going to see a huge increase in the numbers of people wanting to work from home rather than making the daily commute into the city - and all the transportation, environmental and health hazards associated with that practice. Some large companies known to me have already decided not to renew leases on many of their large, currently empty, city premises.

That decision, of course, has the potential to totally shift our planning priorities regarding the city centre with its myriad centralized activities and attractions. Outer-suburban and regional living could assume far greater prominence - attracting unprecedented investment in regional and country centres, and leaving the industrial image of city-as-machine to be reinvented.

Tools enabling us to work from home are readily available. Myths concerning the need for city-based cathedrals of commerce, and the social activities they deliver, have been laid to rest as more and more businesses discover they can do without them. Rules and routines we thought indispensable have been shown to be arbitrary. We also have proof at last that working from home can be far more productive, especially for women who do most of the unpaid caring and domestic work in our society and are not financially rewarded for that.

For a while we can expect to see the occasional surge from some people wanting to return to work in the city office. But that urge will quickly wane as neighbourhood co-working spaces are built, issues concerning team training, employee monitoring, and social factors are resolved, and online platforms become more sophisticated with the use of virtual and augmented reality not too far off.

As we recover our senses, and life begins to return to something approaching an enhanced normality, we will see a shift to greener, cleaner means of production, as well as a far deeper appreciation of nature as an integral part of how we manage the economy, rather than as something external and separate from it.

One final thought. This pandemic is not unprecedented. The H1N1 pandemic of 1918 (the so-called  Spanish flu) infected around 500 million people, a quarter of the population, and killed anywhere between 17 million to 50 million. Some estimates put it as high as 100 million. But even the deadliest of pandemics give us a chance to hit the ontological reset button and to set our civilization on a different course. Incidentally, that is not what is meant when organizations like the World Economic Forum use that or similar terms.

The Black Death in 14th century Europe eventually led to the realization that if more people could read and write the loss of life could have been far less. The notion of universal literacy was arguably the single most important factor to usher in the Industrial Revolution centuries later. Spanish flu, too, allowed us to see the wisdom of having a social welfare safety net in place for the most vulnerable people in the community.

So all plagues bring gifts in their wake - if we are open to seeing them. Today's pandemic is inviting us to reconfigure and reframe the relationships we have - not only with each other, but also with life-critical systems like agriculture, for example, as the spectre of factory farming with its mechanization, widespread use of chemicals and drugs, and market concentration, is put under the microscope.  

From time to time most futurists cast their glance away from the spotlight and into the shadows to see what exists on the periphery of our awareness. It is my belief that the great pestilence we have been promised in the future is just as likely to come from unfamiliar pathogens locked away for centuries under Tibetan glaciers and released by the melting ice caused by a heating climate.

That could happen at any time now. And that outbreak will be unprecedented. But let's not wait until then to find out, exclaiming in feigned surprise: There! What did I say. You never can tell...