The COVID-19 Pandemic: We Sink or Swim Together

If there is one thing the world is learning rapidly, it is that tackling the global COVID-19 pandemic  requires acting collectively to manage a collective problem. This has been a lesson that humanity has long resisted as it has stubbornly clung to outworn habits of nationalism and competition fueled by all sorts of fear such as fear of the “other” or fear of insufficient resources.

Over the years, circumstances have afforded us ample opportunity to learn the importance of collective action. We have confronted a number of growing global crises that endanger our peace and security. Climate change, migration, the growing extremes of wealth and poverty, and nuclear proliferation rank high among them. And yet, despite the severity of these crises, we have been unwilling to give up our old maladaptive habits of focusing on our self interest, both on the individual and national levels. We have stubbornly refused to admit that the advantage of the part can only be ensured by guaranteeing the advantage of the whole, and that we are all better off when our primary loyalty is to the human race as a whole. We have failed to understand that if we are to thrive as individuals and nations we must ensure that all nations and all peoples can thrive.

Now, however, the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus is giving us a unique and unprecedented opportunity to learn this lesson quickly. Indeed, we are being given a crash course in the truth of the oneness of humanity and its inextricable interdependence and in the need for collective action. The stakes are high — it's do or die for many. We  can and are learning this lesson, albeit slowly: Whether at the city, county, state, national, or international levels, we are being painfully forced to learn this lesson, kicking and screaming as we go.  

The good news is that our self-destructive behaviors — including excessive focus on nationalism, xenophobia, and racism — are simply long-standing habits, and habits can be changed. Renowned historian Arnold Toynbee, writing in the second half of the 20th century, concluded that the global community must change its habits if it were to survive. He went on to predict that it would ultimately do so, but only when confronted by an existential crisis — which he believed would be precipitated by the atom bomb. He theorized that, once confronted with such a crisis, humanity would rapidly shed its old habits — albeit reluctantly — and embrace new ones, including the recognition that we need some form of world government with the authority to ensure humanity’s collective interests.

The COVID-19 pandemic is demonstrating one of the areas in which we must have mechanisms of global governance — including collective decision-making and enforcement — to protect the world community against global pandemics. In this regard, we are gradually becoming conscious that we need to engage in collective action, collaboration, and coordination on a scale never seen before. We are learning this at different levels — within countries, such as the U.S., where it is becoming apparent that our response is a patchwork one, depending on which city or state we live in. We are also learning this at the regional level: The European Union is beginning to grasp that there needs to be far more coordination at the regional level to take steps protecting the citizens of the EU. To this end, the EU has taken initial steps such as closing the EU's common borders. And we are beginning to learn this at the global level where organizations like the World Health Organization have been trying to get nations to act but lack the authority to pass binding regulations that governments would have to follow, let alone the ability to enforce their recommendations.

It is time to ratchet up our learning. Just as the virus is spreading exponentially, so too must our awareness of the oneness of humanity and of our inextricable interconnectedness grow, resulting in the acknowledgment that it is time to build a new system of global governance fit for the 21st century and beyond.

The awareness we need is perfectly summed up by the following analogy offered a number of years ago by Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.  He observed that there had been a time not long ago when the nations of the world were like self-contained boats sailing on the sea of international life. Each boat had its own captain and crew, and the main purpose of the international order was to create rules that ensured that the movements of these boats were coordinated to avoid accidents. However, time has moved on. Our current reality is completely different. Given the unprecedented degree of our interconnectedness, our situation could more aptly be described as that of a ship consisting of 193 cabins, each representing a nation state. The problem is that, while each cabin has its own captain and crew dedicated to maintaining order within that cabin and serving it, the ship as a whole lacks both captain and crew.  

What we may well ask, are the concrete implications of this analogy? The first is that in a time of global crisis, such as the world faces with the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no one at the helm of our ship capable of steering us clear in the stormy and turbulent seas. Nor do we have hands on deck dedicated to the collective good — the business of saving the ship as a whole  — rather than the narrow well-being of the members of one or other of the cabins onboard. The second is that the principles and rules by which the inhabitants in one cabin govern themselves could actually prove detrimental to people in other cabins and could cause the ship as a whole to sink. It is not hard to recognize how this plays out in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic where actions taken by one national government such as restricting the export of medical supplies would detrimentally impact the citizens of other nations. 

For humanity to survive and thrive all this must change. We must quickly craft new global decision-making institutions that have the authority to pass binding regulations to protect us all in certain narrow spheres where the only solution lies in collective action. We also need global enforcement mechanisms to ensure that all nations comply with these collective rules.

We Owe it To Ourselves to Elect Honest and Trustworthy Leaders

The accelerating spread of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, brings with it some valuable lessons and opportunities for growth. We are learning firsthand the dangers of putting up with leaders who are dishonest and untruthful and who are more concerned with their own interests, whether political, personal, or financial, than the interests of the people they represent. We are becoming more deeply aware that truthfulness and trustworthiness are no longer qualities that are merely desirable in our leaders. Rather, they are essential and non-negotiable criteria of electability, as our very lives depend on them.  

COVID-19 is affording us the opportunity to witness firsthand the disastrous ramifications of a culture of obfuscation, concealment, and outright lying that has become endemic to our social and political lives worldwide. In the midst of this public health crisis, the inability to trust what our leaders tell us can prove fatal. If we find our leaders have downplayed the severity of the contagion as occurred in China, Iran, and currently in the United States, why should we believe them when they tell us that it is time for drastic measures such as quarantine? Similarly, if our leaders have misled us regarding the availability of medical equipment such as masks, ventilators, and hospital beds, we are more likely to believe rumors and to discard instructions not to hoard materials, such as masks, that must be reserved for our health workers — our first line of defense.  

Even when it comes to the likely economic fallout from the coronavirus infection, our past experience with health crises indicates that only one third of the economic impact is attributable directly to the crisis, for example as a result of death, inability to go to work, and reduced production. By contrast, as Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund explains in a recent interview on the PBS News Hour, a whopping two thirds of the economic impact is due to loss of confidence and uncertainty. Leaders have the responsibility to bolster our confidence by being open, transparent, and truthful; at the very least they must refrain from behavior that exacerbates any existing uncertainty and confusion or contributes to loss of confidence.

The good news is that if we don't like the state our world is in, we are not stuck with it, nor are we doomed to repeat the habits and patterns of the past if they no longer serve us. We have the opportunity to make different and more empowering choices that will eventually change our social reality. We could begin by demanding that candidates for political leadership be known for their qualities of honesty, truthfulness, and consequent trustworthiness, which we know are so crucial to our wellbeing and security. We should prioritize such qualities over platforms and promises, many of which are often left unfulfilled. 

If we are to be successful in electing leaders worthy of our trust, we must first be willing to continually hone our ability to investigate the truth without prior prejudices or conceptions. In other words, we must refuse to abdicate our responsibility to discern the truth by blindly believing everything we are told regardless of the reliability of the source.  

Having adopted this new mindset, we must examine the motives, record of service, and demonstrated qualities of the candidates. In the digital age, such information is relatively easy to ascertain. It is not hard to glean information about a person's past dealings, both in matters of family and business. If a candidate has shown themselves to be incapable of being faithful to their spouse, the one person they have sworn to love and cherish all their lives, why would we expect them to treat us, the unknown masses any differently? It doesn't make sense to assume that, once in office, they would miraculously transform their character and demonstrate a high degree of loyalty to their electorate. Maybe they will, but chances are they won’t. The same holds true for those who have demonstrated their untrustworthiness in business dealings. If they have been in the habit of cheating, lying, and fraudulently dealing with their business partners, vendors, or customers, why would we have any expectation that they would behave differently once they are in positions of power and subject to greater temptation of larger rewards? It is similarly easy to ascertain a person's motives based on their record of service: Have they been more interested in advancing their own ego and interests or have they consistently demonstrated that they put the interests of their communities above their own?

In sum, our experience with the coronavirus, while painful, is also providing us a rich opportunity to build a more peaceful and secure world. If we start by recognizing that we have the power to make different, more constructive choices by honing our individual ability to investigate the truth for ourselves and by demanding that our leaders possess the qualities of honesty and trustworthiness, we will have taken some crucial strides toward such a peaceful and secure world. 

The Coronavirus: Looming Disaster or Golden Opportunity?

Over the past year there has been no shortage of looming disasters that pose a serious threat to humanity including uncontrollable wild fires and forest fires precipitated by climate change, and the dangers of an accidental plunge into nuclear war as a result of miscalculation and brinksmanship.  The recent outbreak of a novel coronavirus, known as COVID-19, is now likely to become the pandemic that we have been fearing for some time. Although much is still unknown about the virus, what experts do know is that it is extremely contagious, like the infamous 1918 Spanish flu that infected approximately one third of the world's population and killed between 20 and 50 million people, and that the new virus' likely mortality rate is 1% to 3% of those infected. While the threat to human life is already engendering fear and anxiety, knock-on impacts to the global economy are likely to be just as severe. To contain the virus borders are being closed, flights canceled, whole towns locked down, factories and schools closed, and sporting, entertainment, trade-show, and other large events canceled. In a world as interconnected as ours is, such restrictions disrupt manufacturing and retail supply chains, with the dual effect of threatening access to supplies and potentially causing a global recession.

It is no wonder that our typical response is either to feel fearful, helpless, apathetic, and sink into despair or to feel angry, frustrated, and quick to blame someone else -- the people of some other country, health officials, or even our neighbors and friends who unwittingly carry the infection and expose the rest of us to it. While such reactions are understandable given the level of risk associated with the spread of the coranavirus, and the many uncertainties that accompany its spread, in reality both reactions are destructive and do not serve us. Moreoever, when we feel helpless or angry and blame others, our perceptions of the options available to us tend to be blinkered. When we need to be most creative and energetic in crafting constructive responses and solutions, we become apathetic, depressed, and anxious. We also become more prone to a fight-or-flight response and to conflict with others. All of these emotions ultimately lead either to inaction, delayed or half-baked action with too little done, too late, or to endless blame-games that, in the end, also do not help us meet the challenges at hand.

What if instead of viewing these same events, including the spreading coronavirus, as looming disasters, we were to view them as a supreme opportunity for humanity to finally learn to communicate in a spirit of goodwill and transparency, and to cooperate and collaborate on finding workable solutions that benefit us all? What if instead of viewing other nations and their actions as enemies and threats, we viewed them as indispensable and valuable allies with whom to join forces in the fight against a global threat? Commentators like David Ignatius of the Washington Post and experts like the editors of Nature Medicine are starting to suggest that the coronavirus presents us with a unique opportunity to do just this. For this to happen we need to change our perspective on social reality from seeing disparate nations each concerned exclusively and foremost with its own well-being to seeing a single global organism, a single global community that is interconnected in much the same way that the limbs and organs of the human body are connected. Just as it would be nonsensical and futile for the liver to claim that it was not concerned about the health of the kidneys because it was focused first and foremost upon its own well-being, and just as the heart could never be truly healthy in a body where the lungs were riddled with disease, so, too, is it nonsensical and futile for individual countries and social groups to claim and act solely or even primarily without regard for the consequences and benefits to other countries and groups. What if we understood that the only way to guarantee the well-being and health of any one of our nations requires ensuring the well-being of all nations? Such a shift in perspective would reveal new ways of organizing our global community, of decision-making and behavior that open up new and effective pathways to addressing the seemingly intractable challenges of our time.  

Such a shift in perspective requires both awareness and acceptance of the reality of our unprecedented interconnectedness as a global community of nations and of the imperative to act together collaboratively in order to solve collective challenges. It also requires us to acknowledge that we have the power to make different, more empowering choices. I will elaborate further on these thoughts in subsequent weekly blogposts that are part of a new series about indispensable mindsets and habits that will bring us the global peace we so dearly want.  Please stay tuned.