As the pandemic rages through the world and people are locked down they are looking online for answers. The more they look though, the more confused they get as we may be getting a shortage of respirators but rest assured, there is no shortage online for global economy, bio warfare, pandemic math & 5G 'experts'. When things were going really well as was the case from 2008 to 2020 it was difficult to agree on what the main weaknesses of our western civilization were, but now, whether we agree on them or not they are starting to directly impact our lives.

We will need to fix them in the foreseeable future.

We are really bad at math

Even after 2 months and a zillion of articles and news on the matter, most people still struggle to understand basic math concepts such as an exponentially rising number of infected/dead people. You've probably seen many tables comparing the number of dead people from Covid-19 to the number of cancer deaths. If you still don't get it then feel free to message me for an explanation.

We have lost trust in the official institutions

The official institutions have been losing the trust of people for many years now. I would put the blame as always on both sides due to many reasons such as lack of modern communication from the instutions as well as certain laziness from the side of people to do the hard work of policing and pushing the institutions in the right direction.

We are really, really bad at risk management

Up until 2020 everybody that was not living under a rock realised our civilization was investing huge amounts of finances and attention to the climate change global risk. This caused us to grossly underestimate other global risks such as pandemics (Bill Gates warned us in 2015), nuclear meltdown, solar flares and asteroid impact (Neil Degrasse Tyson keeps warning us). Did you know that just recently in 1859 there was a solar storm that melted telegraphs? The solar storm of 2012 almost turned the 2012 prophecies into reality as it passed the earth by only 9 days.

If that were to happen today we would be back in the stone-age with no resemblance to modern life as we know it.

We are really, really bad at science in general

Could be all the TV shows and movies with fake physics and easy solutions that always come at the right time while the hero saves the day. Could be that understanding the world through science & math is MUCH HARDER than watching youtube videos of your favourite conspiracy theorist.

This crisis has served as oil to the fire of conspiracy theory. Did you know that millions of people believe the earth is flat? Did you know that people like David Icke are now claiming there is no virus, it is all a hoax so the new world order can lock you down and centralise power and also that there is a clear connection between 5G and the virus? Youtube had to delete one of his videos because people starting setting 5G towers on fire in the UK. Now Icke considers the deletion as proof he was right all along.

Full discolosure: I spent years researching the metaphysical realms, even wrote a book on the matter (message me if you want it for free). I also researched the claims of people like David Icke. What I realised was, while there is some truth to the fact the elite of the world act in a coordinated way based on a certain blueprint they had created and lobby politicians (why wouldn't they) the vast majority of conspiracies are plain wrong, provably by science and outright silly.

My favourite silly one is that Bill Gates confessed that he is trying to lower the population in Africa by giving vaccines to their children.. so ergo, vaccines must be deadly and he is Satan himself murdering little children, right? Actually, science & statistics tells us that if you lower the mortality of children, parents don't need to make so many kids to ensure at least some survive = less population growth.

Our western liberal system is proving less efficient than the eastern ones

We have to honestly ask ourselves, why the role-models (until 2020) of progress, science and liberalism such as France, Spain, Italy, USA are hit the hardest? Why are Eastern countries such as South Korea, Singapore, Czech Republic, Slovakia handling the crisis much, much better with much less deadly cases?

Maybe our role-models are no longer compatible with the needs of our future life. Maybe they need to change. Maybe we need to stop blindly trying to imitate their inefficient systems.

The conspiracy theorists will tell you that 'they' did this on purpose so that they can change the liberal system of the west. Even if 'they' existed and even if 'they' really did it, which they didn't btw as scientists have proven the natural origin of this virus.

The fact sill remains, our system is inefficient against such threats and is becoming incompatible with the globalisation of the world. Maybe, just maybe, 'they' realised we are a sitting duck and this is 'their' way of waking us up with a relatively undeadly pathogen. Maybe 'they' is just nature asking us to make a change if we want to still live here.

We will come out of this stronger than before

Going forward, the main take-away from this crisis is that we are asked to change. Whether this is a natural or man-made threat is irrelevant at this point. We can no longer keep going assuming that just because we have cell phones and gadgets that the difficulties humanity has experienced in the past no longer concern us.

We need to ask the tough questions whether our western institutional/educational/political system is still compatible with the growing requirements of the modern globalized world and how it needs to change in order to remain competitive with countries like China. We also need to re-prioritize our risk management strategies. I am pretty sure we will invest heavily in anti-pandemic measures but what about the next solar flare, what about the next asteroid, what about all the other underestimated risks? At the end of the day, this is a choice we as a collective need to make. Whether we descend into conspirative barbarism or we push our system to evolve to one driven by science & informed public.

I have no doubt that eventually the winner will be the latter one, I just hope we will get there rather sooner than later.