1 year COVID-19 – Ready for year 2?
Change . Has felt last year Much has changed – and yet so much has remained the same. About a year ago, a new global pandemic took our breath away and turned our usual paradigms and functionalities upside down. Do you still remember? What kind of observations have we been able to see from mid-March or have we heard statements from our fellow human beings? Was it the shock, for example, because “normal everyday life” suddenly came to a standstill? The panic, including the associated panic buying, that certain familiar and everyday items may no longer be available tomorrow? The hope that everything will pass quickly, that I won’t lose a lot and that Papa State will sort it out? The desire, for recovery just briefly press the world pause button and then simply continue as before with the play button? Was it here and there maybe ignorance and healthy egoism, more like the “supermarket motto”: “The main thing is that I have my toilet paper and my spaghetti – unfortunately I can’t take care of all the others!”
Or, from the opposite perspective, was it also the initial and perhaps exuberant feeling of solidarity in the family, among friends and in society, to fight together against an invisible enemy? To say “hello” to your (older) neighbors or relatives again and to dedicate yourself to these social values? Maybe doing something good for someone again and showing humanity? Put emotional intelligence in the foreground? To stop for a moment, to take a breather, to look around, to break the spiral of daily activity at high speed and just to hear the silence? To bring traditional values such as family or belonging back into focus at least once, in addition to career aspirations or self-fulfillment? To deal with yourself – including strengths and your own shortcomings?
Anniversary . And now after a year? How strong is the cohesion currently and how sustainable is it for the future? Have we long since fallen back into the old routine? Are those who kept our systems working more burned out than ever? How many losers from the crisis do we already see, how many will there still be when we take stock? Have we drawn any lessons from the experience?
Truth . Do I have a memory with one or the other statement?
awakened in you, a nod or resistance provoked? Certainly there is something of everything with us all. This is logically and systemically designed. The dynamics can be nicely described using the pendulum principle with a thread pendulum. What we have exhausted, partially overdriven and so overdriven on the side of “more, faster, higher and further forever” since the post-war period for around 70 decades, has suddenly turned out to be on the other side. Braked from 100% acceleration with 100% negative acceleration. We certainly needed that because we were sometimes at our limits. The change of perspective with the chance to experience and contemplate the other and almost unknown – the deceleration. However, according to the pendulum principle, at the end of the swing radius the pendulum would swing in the other direction again, ie we accelerate again. We are beginning to feel that. This is of course & necessary. It is physically like that. As one put it so aptly in English: “What goes up, must come down“. The sober question remains: Have we reached the “down” final before the next stable “up” is possible? I dare to say, unfortunately, not for a long time. We are in the braking process on a rapid decline, but probably not yet standing still or colliding on the ground for a new stable upswing. I may be wrong!
A swallow doesn’t make a summer. A major problem in understanding the complexities of our current time in two-dimensional thinking, the xy-axis is due to the missing third dimension / z-axis, namely the time course. Multi-dimensionality is needed for changes if they are massive and should take place sustainably in the sense of a transformation triggered by a paradigm shift. We initiated the initial impetus for the process with the “first Covid19 wave”. It is difficult or even impossible for each individual to grasp what / when / how / for what / where / from whom led to this happening. Hence, it is legitimate that all theories from conspiracy to rebellion of earth for exploitation hold out. However, anyone who now thinks after about a year that everything will soon be solved with vaccines or drugs and that it will go back to “old normality” is leaving out three-dimensionality and is probably wrong.
We will certainly find many trouble spots in the next 3-5 years, such as B. political, economic, social instability and upheaval, social hotspots because companies that can no longer ensure their survival without financial support close and the associated loss of “old jobs”, debt traps & bankruptcies, wealth and low purchasing power or poverty , Economic downturn, mental and physical illness as a result of the crisis situation, and the like. We have come to the end of the last economic cycle. But at the same time it is the chance to start with new paradigms in business and society for the next decades. Just like we can experience it in spring. In order for new leaves and flowers to grow and flourish on the branches, the old ones had to die off and fall off. We cannot simply rewrite the laws of nature and physics just because it is convenient for all of us.
What now? Well, where is the realignment challenge? One could summarize it with the statement that it is now important to find a target corridor where this pendulum can move agile back and forth to a healthy extent, i.e. can swing in a controlled manner to a certain extent. This movement is necessary so that the solid can liquefy, become malleable and realignable, and the overall system can ultimately stabilize again in the long term. But it will not be straight and stable in the years to come. Because at the beginning of the process, the crucial question arises: what to align?
We are all asked now. A Chinese saying goes: “Only when you let go do you have both hands free again.” So as a society, as local and global economic areas or according to what you want to cluster the overall system, we have to consider which of our previously known paradigms we will still consider valid in the future, which we have overridden, and thus no longer want to pursue what is added, what falls away. It will not work without technological progress – but there are also ethical limits here. It will not work without digitization, but a transparent person who is exposed to data abuse will not be a desirable goal. We have to perform and give so that we can get something back. “A social thousands without a contribution” will not be a long-term goal, because everyone can and can or wants to give something. Maximum profit orientation at the expense of the poorest cannot be a desirable future-oriented model, but optimization of results must be an issue in order to be able to survive in the long term. Ecological will be a core issue, but the enemy will not be the existing economic system.
And the sun rises again and again . It will probably take some time before the extreme swing of the pendulum has settled in a humanly acceptable and socially acceptable corridor, and thus stability for a continuous acceleration in a new direction is made possible. So, let’s get ready for year 2 of the transformation and let us draw strength, energy and wisdom from what we have all already mastered – and what is still to come. Tension will remain.
It will now be up to all of us to evaluate, activate and strengthen our strengths and our own resources. Not only the speed, but also the endurance and resilience. We have a marathon ahead of us that will be exhausting. We will try, innovate, be successful, but also fail. Hope and doubt, be happy and angry. Confirmed in success, frustrated with failure. But we have no alternative but to continue through this valley of tears. Backwards as a possible direction however, it is not an available option.
Got to the dog . Payday . Above all, however, we will all have to show our colors on a few points. Some things will have to be put to the test in terms of functionality, feasibility and usefulness, because we have probably gotten wrong or lied to one or the other!
Regardless of which topic I take up here as an example, it would only be a so-called drop in the bucket in the sum of the challenges and core topics that I have already addressed selectively. And all topics are polarizing at the moment. A typical sign of instability in phases of change. One thing must be said in advance: humans do not defend themselves against change per se, but humans defend themselves against being changed! The observable difference lies in the so-called activity tilt between I want to change something, but I do not want to be passively changed by a third party. A current classic here would be the discussion on the subject of “Compulsory vaccination and vaccine choice.”
The hallmark of transformation is that what already exists is destroyed and reassembled in a new or different way. This applies to both classically organized functioning in society, such as working time models, as well as the values of people in society, such as social justice, as well as the control of this society, such as democracy in politics. If something changes on one of the three pillars, something must also change on the other two pillars, otherwise the system would be unstable. So most people know that unfortunately, or sometimes happily, nothing is forever, but much is intended for the long term. But when the time has come and you can clearly see that what has been tried and tested is no longer functional, then you have to take responsibility for it and seize the opportunity for change. Guilt & Atonement may be religiously established, but usually does not lead to further development.
So if you take an exemplary “EU” topic in the course of the COVID-19 system crisis from a given occasion, you can currently see successes but also massive failures at the macro-political level, for example. The question arises as to whether the EU, as it was envisaged in the 1980s, has reached its system limits and the limits of its functioning. Functionally, an EU cannot be compared to an American state. That would be like comparing apples with oranges. Conversely, however, it does not mean that everything is bad and the system did not work. Maybe it is poorly organized or poorly oriented / guided due to the new challenges, or the values are no longer correct. A nice quote from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg expresses the necessity of retail very nicely: “I don’t know whether it will get better if it is different. But it has to be different if it is to get better.” It takes awareness and courage. So if neither uniform provisions, such as in the case of travel-free in the EU in times of COVID-19, cannot be resolved jointly, if joint vaccine orders and associated order plans do not hold, if not all members are seen as equal, etc., then inevitably remains the question of whether the common goal and commitment is still right. If not, then it is time to interrupt, pause, realign, start again. There are many more solutions than problems. One only needs to identify the root causes and drivers of the problem. If – and this is a tried and tested stance in times of crisis – a state is closer to / more important than its own people than a constructed union, then the union can only function if it is rigidly governed and all individual states are “overrult”. But this power is not legitimized to her. Here the USA works differently in its functional order. Therefore the question that has to be asked is: Can and should one continue to maintain what was supposedly the best model at the time, is there still the commitment and participation of all towards a common overarching goal and are the people still working accordingly or not? If not, then either the system has to be reorganized, the values have to be redefined together or the managers have to be swapped. Or the goal and the orientation have to be realigned. Something that we believe in and that will offer added value in the future, because then most of them will be worth working on. Perhaps, however, the EEC idea from 1957 is sufficient as a basis to strengthen Europe-wide cooperation where there are actually common interests, and to give the individual nation states more individual design options where they are necessary in times of crisis. Maybe the EU model fits, but maybe it is (felt) worthless for some because of suboptimal organization and cooperation?
Maybe it just needs more integrity again on all political, social and economic levels with the ideas of long-term, sustainable competence, optimization and efficiency, instead of quick profit maxims and careerism. Possibly is the key to a future worth living again more recognition and appreciation for the individual individual, so that they can voluntarily join together socially, instead of externally controlled big data, clustering and monitoring. Of course, this also means more personal responsibility for the individual and socially acceptable ethical values. This is also significantly more inconvenient for one or the other than external control. Nevertheless, we are all society and the economy and must therefore find our way through and out of the systemic crisis together.
Actually, everything has always been there, so in fact everything comes back in a different form at the long end. In the end everything will probably be all right, and if it is not yet good, it is not the end … So let’s go to year two to actively help shape the change for the future wherever possible and persevere!
