We are now living through an era of fundamental uncertainty. People are dying and it is a major test of our society’s structures. Some of them might even break badly. Maybe some of them have already.
In this uncertain and scary time, the vast majority of post corona articles are of course focused on risks. An example is Yuval Harari’s article in FT: The World After Coronavirus which is an important read.
The reason for this overload of articles concerned with risks and uncertainties is of course that we are ”programmed” by evolution to pick up, produce and convey threatening scenarios about situations we need to avoid.
But this programming may also be a major weakness. When our minds are overloaded with scenarios heavily emphasising uncertainties and risks it alters how we perceive the world. It causes us to change our behaviour to react with more suspicion and fear of things around us.
This has a number of negative consequences:
First, judging by history this dramatically increases the risk that we will turn against each other.
Second, it makes important cooperation between countries and regions more difficult. This is already having very negative consequences for how we as a species will handle the Corona crisis.
Third, it will delay the shift to the coming rebuilding phase. When the worst problems of the pandemic will be over, we know we will rebuild our world. If we fall victims to our amygdalas we might find ourselves in a severe and global conflict which will delay that shift much longer than necessary.
Can we avoid this?
We need to feed ourselves positive scenarios
One important piece of the puzzle is to fight back against our tendencies to gravitate towards and spread the negative scenarios. Instead, we need to consciously balance our input and feed ourselves positive post corona scenarios that encourage us to cooperate rather than to fight.
There are already some positive post corona scenarios out there. But we need more!
Futurist Mattias Horx’s post The Post Corona World– a RE-gnosis – begins with :
Let’s imagine a situation in autumn, let’s say in September 2020. We are sitting in a street cafe in a big city. It is warm and people are walking down the pavements again…
Another positive post corona scenario is Pandemics: Lessons Looking Back From 2050 by futurist Hazel Henderson and physicist Fritjof Capra. In the post, they envision a future when we learnt our lesson.
As we move into the second half of our twenty-first century, we can finally make sense of the origin and impact of the coronavirus that struck the world in 2020 from an evolutionary systemic perspective…
I really recommend that you read these.
And maybe we can make a deal that we try to read at least one positive post corona article for each focusing on the risks?
To make this possible maybe we could to create an archive of positive post corona scenarios besides the flood of good news that David Byrne’s Reasons to be Cheerful provides?
Do you find more positive post corona scenarios please add them to this list be sending them as comments to this post.
- The Post Corona World – by futurist Mattias Horx
- Pandemics: Lessons Looking Back From 2050 – by futurist Hazel Henderson and physicist Fritjof Capra