How coronavirus is leading to some harsh awakening

Human behaviour has shown an altricial manner that makes its actions and reactions more animalistic than those one would expect of mankind. Animals are more precocial, independent from birth, but we have ascribed greater intelligence and brilliance to man, whom we assume will be conditioned into performing at much higher levels of being than other creatures.

But assumptions, like comparisons, are odious and mere hypotheses. If our behavior does not rise above that of the animals, we are hardly living up to that greater intelligence and brilliance or to the meaning of what it is to be human.

It is society that conditions man, that leaves a lasting imprint on the markings that form the brain from which our impulses, our reflexes, our reactions, and our humanity stems. Unlike animals that come wired to function from birth with minimal external support, we are dependent on those we come from and the society that we come into.

Jaundiced by greed and deviousness, maimed by a malignant covetous selfishness, conditioned to care and provide only for self and next of kin, we have been reduced to a people of truculent invidiousness who are at odds with our own species. Families, class, groups, orders, brackets, tiers, types, ranks and kinds—these dictate how we behave, whom we respect, admire, look up to, love and relate to, and how we raise our kids.

Our merciless hard-heartedness, our abhorrence of someone different, our jealousy of the differently abled, our castigation of those with other viewpoints, our retribution and retaliation against those who worship differently or choose not to, our execration of those who speak another language, wear different clothes, and pray with rituals incongruent to ours, have reduced us into hateful creatures that have shaken the planet beyond what it can handle.

Where once we had visionary statesmen leading us to live lives that were inclusive, accepting, bigger than any one group or ism, we now have politicians dividing us into every faction that is possible, with nothing but election and quick wins as their drive.

Covid-19 is telling us that the world is exhausted, it has had enough, that there is little left for us to destroy. The earth is telling us to awaken and fast. To rise above our parochial comforts, to look at the world as a whole, to see the planet for what it is. It’s as if the earth we home on, the land, the seas, the creatures—the water we drink and the air we breathe—all are telling us to see how they are one and that we too need to awaken to that reality where we see our shared humanity before we see our individuality.

(Courtesy of Mail Today)

Also read: The road ahead from the lockdown