7 April
2021
We, the People: Humanity and Our Entangled Future through the Global COVID-19 Pandemic
Editor's Note
As I have opined before, I keep hoping that a global challenge, such as this pandemic. Thus far, many nations have not even accomplished national unity, much less regional or global. There are of course reasons for this, the primary being the repeated disinformation on one hand and the distrust of government on the other. This distrust may have been earned and reasonable, or it may have been overblown for political reasons. In the United States, there has been a long-range plan to “dumb down” the citizenry and to encourage distrust of science, expertise, and even reason. Long before the pandemic, it was common to hear “everything is a matter of opinion.” In other words, there is no shared verifiable reality and my opinion is better (not “as good”) than any expert. In fact, anyone who disagrees with “me” is wrong. So it is not just that everyone’s opinion has equal value, but that in the absence of an agreed-upon, verifiable reality, personal belief rules. This latter shift is critical because it not only reflects the nurtured destruction of science and reason but a broad normalization of individual primacy that is central to a narcissistic world orientation. This may point to the attraction of many to Donald Trump.
