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What the pandemic has exposed in our societies (3)

  When discussing the group of people that has been most affected by the pandemic, women and children are usually mentioned. In this post, I will explain why the pandemic has just exposed how bad our societies were treating them and making their life difficult. With it, I hope there can be a change in our collective behaviour and appreciate the key importance they have for the survival of mankind: without them, we become extinct, like the dinosaurs. As a woman, you can do everything Through the centuries, men have tyrannised women, negating them the most basic rights and treating them more or less like merchandise. In many societies women were valued in terms of cattle (four goats, two camels) and were subject to all type of abuses. It has taken a lot of effort and blood to our Western societies to put women equal to men and it is not until very recently that we have achieved that. Two examples: voting rights for women were shamingly introduced in the XXth century in Europe (in oth
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What the pandemic has exposed in our societies (2)

Let’s continue with the discussion of the traits in Western societies that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought into the light. An important factor to understand the global response to the pandemic refers to the way we collectively handle the information available to us through the internet. And I must admit that the outcome is not promising… A controlled tsunami of information When the internet technology was open to the public, around thirty years ago, it was seen as a vehicle to share information around the world, contributing to make our societies wiser and more intelligent. It is hard to argue against the fact that the internet is making available an unprecedented amount of information: for example, the opening time of a grocery in Würzburg, the price of house in Comillas or an article on the role of ghosts and witches in Shakespearean tragedies. That is particularly stunning when we compare it with the situation some centuries ago, where books and oral communication were the o
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What the pandemic has exposed of our societies (1)

After an initial entry describing some basic aspects of viruses and two entries on how our society was when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, it is time to look a bit deeper into some of the vulnerabilities in our societies that the pandemic has brought to life. The previous entries were looking at the past, while here I intend to add some ideas on how to re-define our lives once the pandemic is over. For today, we will get started with selfishness, something I touched upon slightly in the previous entry of this blog. From selfies to selfishness One of the main words added to our vocabulary in the last years has been “selfie”, intended to define a photo taken of oneself with our own mobile phone. It should be placed in a special location or while we are doing something particularly interesting. In many cases, the selfie is uploaded to social media to show others our achievement. Unfortunately, too often the selfie is more important than the experience itself. For instance, it is
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Shift of values in society

After discussing a bit where we were in March 2020, now it is time to go through a silent, continuous, albeit immense, change experienced by our societies in the last decades. It is important to understand this change to be able to analyse the global response to the pandemic outbreak. Politicians as a mirror of society At the time the COVID-19 outbreak surprised the world, we had some political leaders that one could have never expected to be there (except the creators of The Simpsons). There was a generalised feeling that the people in charge were not prepared to respond to the challenge. [1] In politics, there is always a balance between the satisfaction to do something to have a better society (i.e., to do the right thing) and the own interest in getting re-elected to remain in power. In the last years, there seems to have been a shift towards the latter (power is addictive), and re-election has become the main objective of many politicians. That leads to a situation where “qu
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Where we were in March 2020

After the first entry introduced some basic notions on how viruses work and emerge, I want to start talking in this entry about where we were, collectively, in March 2020. I am sure that, when times goes by, we will all remember what we were doing when the COVID-19 hit us, in the same way that most of us remember what we were doing on September 11 2001 (in my case, I was doing some examinations for a job). Collectively, as mankind, we were in a very fragile situation, like the pandemic showed us. I focus here on taking things for granted, leaving for a future post the issue of the shift in values in society and public health and education. Taking things for granted In the evolution of our society over the last decades, we collectively developed a thinking where many things were taken for granted, making us less aware of the effort necessary to keep them working and moving us towards the fulfilling of our own personal needs exclusively. We got used to having our consumption needs
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The virus that changed it all

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines a virus as follows: [1] any of a large group of submicroscopic infectious agents that are usually regarded as nonliving extremely complex molecules, that typically contain a protein coat surrounding an RNA or DNA core of genetic material but no semipermeable membrane, that are capable of growth and multiplication only in living cells, and that cause various important diseases in humans, animals, and plants. The definition is in itself complex, starting with the fact there is no consensus as to whether a virus is a living being or not. The structure of a virus is quite simple: a protein surrounding a core with genetic material. Full stop. But even that simple configuration is able to cause important harm to other living beings. Since January 2020, the whole world is upside down thanks to one of these viruses, a coronavirus known as COVID-19. In a series of entries in this blog, I will discuss, quoting Weezer, how “the world has turned and lef
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