Pandemic of the Mind
If you follow the news closely[1], you would be excused for thinking that the whole world is going to hell in a handbasket since all we read about is grave danger. While we shouldn’t ignore this (i.e. wear your mask and stop licking door handles), the truth is that there have always been threats around us. In fact, the norm throughout all of human history has been to live under constant existential threat.
Forty years ago, everyone was extremely aware of this reality. People say goodbye to their families before going about their day not knowing whether they would ever see them again. It was the height of the Cold War, when the USA and USSR were both paranoid that the other would attempt a first strike but, incredibly, instead of opting for dialogue, both sides put their efforts into a nuclear arms race that saw them holding well over FIFTY THOUSAND nuclear weapons[2] and led to one of the most on-the-nose acronyms ever: Mutual Assured Destruction.
And yet somehow[3], just when it seemed the world was fated to be turned into glass, the leaders of both countries, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, agreed to meet (in Switzerland, where else?). Needless to say, it was a tense affair. The first day of the summit did not start well, with each side making accusations and demands while covering their ears and not listening to anything the other had to say (yup, politics and playgrounds have been pretty much the same throughout history).
Eventually, everyone got tired of repeating “We have to protect ourselves because you guys are crazy and dangerous” over and over again and they decided to take a break. It was then that things began to change. Who knows why, perhaps it was the Swiss cheese & chocolate, but both leaders decided to go for a stroll by the lake together, just the two of them. After walking for a while they came up to a cabin and went inside to rest for a bit.
When we consider how many individual dominos had to line up perfectly for those two men to meet, it’s quite miraculous that it happened at all. Reagan had had three close shaves with death, almost getting strangled by a chimp while filming in 1951, being shot during his first year in power in 1981 (the only US President to survive an assassination attempt) and then undergoing cancer surgery in 1985, just a few months before the summit. Meanwhile, Gorbachev benefitted from precisely the opposite fate; he was nowhere near the top job when Reagan became president, but in the space of 28 months three successive Soviet leaders died (Brezhnev from a heart attack in 1982, Andropov from kidney disease in 1984 and Chernenko from heart failure in 1985), and he eventually arrived in power just as Reagan was starting his second term.
While sitting in front of the fireplace, Reagan asked Gorbachev “Listen, if the United States were attacked by aliens, would you come to our help?”
“Well, of course we would”
“I feel the same way towards you!”
From that moment, the atmosphere between the two men changed completely. They had suddenly found a common ground on which to build a friendship and when they returned to the summit both delegations remarked on their chemistry, smiles and relaxed attitude toward each other. The summit ended with a joint statement acknowledging that a nuclear war could never be won and must never be fought and a pledge to negotiate a treaty that would reduce nuclear arsenals by half and eventually paved the way to ending the Cold War.
Although for us this may seem as the most sensible and logical outcome, in those days it was far from certain. Back in the 1980s, people thought that nuclear war was inevitable, a matter of when rather than if, and it’s not hard to see why; at the time both superpowers were hopelessly entangled in a vicious cycle of lack of communication, which caused them to deeply distrust each other, which heightened their fear, which led them to accelerate their arms race, which made it imperative to keep everything top secret, and so on… Indeed, both the population and their politicians demanded a tougher stance, rather than dialogue. In such an environment, a different pair of leaders would have probably made very different decisions.
As we mentioned at the beginning, both our current situation and the Cold War were times when the predominant emotion in the world has been fear.
Fear has an evolutionary purpose, to trigger a Fight or Flight response in order to save our lives. During the pandemic, we have seen many examples of these two instinctive reactions, particularly at the beginning, when people ignored the logical advice of health authorities by either trying to Fight (i.e. not wearing a mask, refusing to take it seriously and continuing to gather until forced to quarantine, etc) or take Flight (i.e. travelling from hotspots to more remote locations and carrying the disease with them, hoarding provisions and causing shortages, etc).
But it’s important to realise that nowadays we live in a far more complex world than the one our ancestors evolved in and where, more often than not, those are not appropriate responses. In fact, they are the exact opposite of what is usually required; a calm and thoughtful approach. We should all try to remember this and not let blind fear guide our actions. This pandemic is already bad enough on the body, we shouldn’t let it affect the mind as well.
[1] You shouldn’t, they’re like Dementors, they feed on our negative emotions.
[2] Now seriously, that’s about two missiles for every single city, town and tiny village in each country, what the fuck were they thinking?! I mean, once your enemy knows that you absolutely CAN kill him, what’s the point of showing him how much more damage you can inflict past that point? “Well, we’ve ensured that we can turn their entire nation to ash, but let’s just make a few thousand extra bombs to show them we’re really serious”. It’s so unbelievably retarded…
[3] I’m guessing it had something to do with the multiple nuclear close calls due to misunderstandings, freak accidents, human, machine and even animal errors.
Originally published at http://pandemicponderings.wordpress.com on June 10, 2020.
