Hope For The Post Pandemic World: Old Paradigm Solutions Won’t Fix New Paradigm Problems

The economy is going to need to be restarted from scratch; what an opportunity! For decades we’ve been listening to naysayers and complainers, now is the time for radical pragmatists.

Frightened of systemic change, we’ve heard that addressing the climate crisis is too expensive, that sufficient social programs to lift the next generation out of hopelessness are unaffordable and unfair on hard workers, that we don’t have the money to fix damage to infrastructure, that the housing and pension systems are crushing millennials but it’s not politically expedient to address. Our short-term political cycles have undermined visionary leadership, we’ve had to ignore the slow creeping timebombs in favor of what plays well at the voting booths. Well 2020 has blown those concerns into the waste bin of history and systemic change is upon us whether we like it or not!

An Editorial Board Opinion from the Financial Times of London heralds the opportunity this has bestowed upon us for a totally new financial system to support a more just social contract.

The job of the successful leader in this climate is to reimagine what is possible, what is desirable, and engage our motivations towards a visionary future that we are prepared to work hard for. Our job as citizens is to make use of this time, thankful for those who are working hard to keep us alive. We must honor their sacrifices by co-creating solutions for the new paradigm in a new mindset.

Our Psychological Contract With Work

Firstly, what does it mean to work? We’ve developed a very psychologically unhealthy contract with work; we see it as our identity. We use work as our excuse for inequality in wealth and we’ve forgotten that it is a proxy, not an outcome for many of us. Across the world, at the individual level, people either have too much work or too little, those with 70 hour salaries feeling successful and stable compared with those who do 70 hour gigs, or who can’t find any work at all. Actually there are few winners as we sacrifice health for wealth and weekends for working. We’ve counted economic output as equal to human value and we’ve lost respect for the arts, for staring out of windows, for spending time with our neighbors, for appreciating each other as “human beings” not “human doings.” What folly! And how the inflation of our occupational prowess has led to the discrimination of disabled people, family carers, parenting. Through work we have competed and compared in favour of the collaboration and cooperation we now need.

Since my company has been on lockdown, we’ve continued to deliver a core service, and, thanks to the U.K. government this is survivable. But my long hours and commuting time have dropped and I now have a daily walk with my whole family and the dog. I am cooking with my children. I am taking time to talk to my relatives on the phone, we are even playing a silly game with the kids’ cousins called “the Daily Challenge.”

Perhaps it is time for us all to have an awakening about our psychological engagement with work, and split it more evenly, more fairly, so that we all work a more even week and take a more even pay.

Our Social Contract With Our Governments And Neighbours.

“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” the famous JFK quote, has never been more resonant. As we cry out for decisive, communicative leadership and a big state response to prevent financial and healthcare ruin, the quid pro quo becomes clear. I recently found out that Margaret Thatcher’s famous quote about there being “no such thing as Society” was taken out of context. What she actually said was as follows: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.” I think what she’s saying is that society isn’t an entity, it requires membership. It’s up to all of us to create a sense of belonging. The transactional process of “taxes-in-services-out” cannot replace human connection, yet restricting services does not draw neighbourly spirit to fill the gap, as a decade of failed austerity policies have proved. Neither left wing structuralism nor right wing agency has created sustainable communities: we need both. How encouraging then, to note, that within 24 hours of the U.K. government asking for 250,000 volunteers to support the health crisis, half a million had applied. How reassuring to see the plethora of local community groups that have sprung up to distribute food, medicine and human contact. This pandemic might see the tipping point for Medicare for All in the U.S., for improvements to sickness benefits for workers and an end to precarious work. It could see an increased respect and understanding for those who deliver the hard work that we’re now relying on, and an acknowledgement of the power of flexible working/education for disabled people. It could see us reengage in our neighborhoods. If society is a construct, let’s construct it better. Yes, with formal wealth redistribution structures but also with the willingness for inclusion, trust and empathy.

Our Contract With The Earth

The climate crisis has seemed so big, and so tall, for so long, that we have been frozen into inertia. What if right now is the window of opportunity to remake the economy sustainably with the planet? Isn’t it curious to note that the same urgent measures required to protect human life during the current crisis are what is also required to slow the effects of global warming?

If we all stop hurtling and careering through life consuming and making and busying our individualized lives, we won’t need the same levels of exponential growth that have been destroying the fabric of our natural world. We’re all a little more familiar with exponential growth curves now - we can apply this understanding to “far away” concepts like population control, food supply, tipping points for temperature increases. Let’s start the conversation about the rebuild now, like Roosevelt and Churchill as they planned the reconstruction of Europe as early as 1941.We could focus the inter-governmental stimuli on Green Technologies, remake commerce in terms of carbon efficiency and intrinsic human value. We can restart travel with decarbonization at the core of the stimulus packages, we can reimagine work to require less unnecessary commuting. The developing world is going to suffer in biblical proportions through 2020 and beyond as a result of our failures to acknowledge the interdependence of our species. We owe the whole world a new start, we who are fortunate in this mess have a deep moral obligation to rebuild with global solidarity.

Calling On The Neuro-Unusual To Rethink The Norm

Fringe thinking like Universal Basic Income has been turned into mainstream government policy overnight; my recommendation for those interested is to read up on Modern Monetary Theory for insights into how the economy might be behaving in a few years. There is no doubt that we are living in the paradigm shift of the century and perhaps only the first pandemic; the incremental changes we have made with the IT revolution, with globalization, with worldwide social justice have received a lightning bolt injection of energy which could destroy or reinvigorate. We have a few short months in which we can re-write the course of history from a slow but sure demise to an inclusive, sustainable, responsible future. Only fools would attempt to reconstruct our former inglorious economic structures.

Currency in visioning the future now belongs to the unusual, atypical unique idea generators. People have compared the pandemic crisis to the Second World War, which gave painful birth to the European Social Security nets. I think it’s more like the Plagues of the 14^th/15^th centuries, which broke down the hegemony of cruel religions and ushered in the Renaissance. Now is the time for specialist thinkers–radicalism becomes pragmatic when all the rules have been broken anyway.