These last weeks there have been a lot of talk about exit strategies, changes to the system and the life after corona.
A summary of demands and issues arising during the Covid-19 pandemic.
This Covid-19 pandemic seems like the kind of force that could or is destabilizing the entire world order.
Production chains break, leaving the west without any means of continuing to grow their economies. China is therefore realizing their central place in the world economy through their role as the number one producer of any primary good in the world. A profound realization that the world economy made when china first stepped into quarantine while Europe didn’t even have any cases of the Covid-19 virus. The outsourcing to china, that once made Europe to the richest continent in the world turned out to be a double edged sword and China now stands with unprecedented leverage over the world.
Continuing this trend, the now essential workers all around the world had a similar epiphany about their role in society. Risking their own health and safety and with it the health and safety of their families, the demands for higher pay for essential workers rose as-well.
They too, like China, realized that the the world doesn’t work if they don’t either.
The rich CEO of a bank can’t buy their groceries without a cashier, or even the political elite needs medical professionals to take care of their parents or even themselves when they go to elderly care.
Facing concerns like this all over the world the governments all around the world are trying to come up with a solution for this shifting order.
Since Covid-19 basically switched the power and showed the system relevant people for who they really are, thinking of a new utopian society structure has become one of the new favourite past times of journalist and politicians.
Especially environmental activists are having a big moment right now, since for the first time in modern history the world actually mostly stopped using fossil fuel, leading to a historic low point of the oil price actually falling to below 0.
Now we realize that change is immediate.
We see how Fish have returned to the canals in Venice, how in Northeast India you can see the Himalaya, how the air pollution is every city on the planet has become less and less overt and we see how the economy plummets when bottom level workers don’t go to work.
The global pandemic that has been arguably caused by our incredibly capitalistic and globalized world has brought just those values to a halt and under very close inspection.
The self designed doomsday-machine has come to a rapid but only temporary stop and everyone is discussing if we should continue or leave it.
Groups such as the ones above, call for a reordering of values.
This was not the first truly global crisis and will for sure not be the last.
In choosing to be connected we chose to combine all our strengths and all our weaknesses and it seems that we are just experiencing for one of the first times the extent of those weaknesses.
With we I am deliberately referring to us in the western countries.
It is obvious that we see this crisis now as so critical because it is the first time that such a situation has actually reached Western Europe and North America. Ebola, Sars or even the war in the Middle East or in the Balkans are all Situations that for the people living in them were catastrophic in nature and that have been caused, if only in part by the truly globalized world we live in.
Europe and North America have a history of interfering and influencing in Events all over the world, with often catastrophic consequences for those others involved.
But now since the System that was always destroying existences all over the world, has finally caught up with its inventor, we, for the first time also start to panic, although our panic might be far too late.
These coming weeks and months will decide how we move on, not just as Europeans or Americans, but as world-society as a whole.
Because if there is one lesson in this for western society, it is that our world order was always destructive towards people or life on the other end of the globe. Because until now it seems that we had our eyes closed to this seemingly obvious phenomenon.
Felix Heinzel