Our System Based on Exciting the Primal Fears in Our Brains has Failed Us

“We hold these truths to be self-evident. . .”

I Entered Covid-Time Pre-Stressed, Pre-Isolated, Pre-Triggered

I entered the Covid pandemic already stressed, isolated, and suffering. I had just returned to the country a year prior. I was unemployed for most of the year before Covid hit.

I was already suffering multiple hits to my well-being, my confidence, and my sense of belonging when, as it looks to me, the entire world decided in unison to join me in isolation and emotional instability.

I had effectively been quarantined for 6 years before we were ordered inside by our governments.

Living in the middle of the Saudi Arabian desert with no reason to leave my assigned personal space, I had grown accustomed to not having any contact with others after the workday was through. I had grown accustomed to delivery food. I had gotten used to extreme isolation and loneliness.

If we had had our wits about us when the pandemic started, I could have been a very valuable resource to teach us how to cope with what we all were about to endure. I could have and would have gladly offered my insights into a world, my world, that everyone was entering.

I could have warned you about the weight gain, the suicidal thoughts, the deep depression, the wild swings of emotion, all of the feelings that come with being cut-off from the rest of the human race.

I could have told you about the mental issues that would most certainly arise, preparing you for your own dark night of the soul. But our collective ego would not allow us to ask for help.

People, especially people in groups, don’t think of creative solutions to complicated problems.

Also, Americans don’t value life experience that happened outside of America. It’s as though if it didn’t happen in America, then it doesn’t count as life experience. Thus, a close-minded stubborn country convinced of its own superiority misses out on a vast amount of useful knowledge and wisdom.

America chose to stubbornly wander blindly into the dark instead of giving deference and respect to those who had traversed this path before them. We retreated into following the uninformed base fearful gut reactions of morons instead of planning and believing in those with experience and expertise.

Two years later, we are still reacting like pre-programmed hypnotized zombies.

Too many of us adamantly refuse to use our brains. Brains that could and should be used to find a way out of the challenge we have been presented.

Now, three years back in America, and two years into the pandemic, it looks to me as though a majority of the population has retreated into themselves, lashing out in every direction to anyone who they perceive is challenging their internally constructed worldview.

It is a fearful reaction based on the need for survival. It manifests as extreme selfishness, no empathy for any other person, and an excuse to justify any cruelty towards another person. It’s as if we are in competition for a limited resource called life. Trust is dead. Empathy is dead. The higher functions of our brains are paralyzed, unable to operate under such conditions.

Depending on our instinctual primal reactions makes us look for enemies instead of friends.

A problem that media and social media has only exacerbated. Our brains focus on and find dangers instead of safety and solutions.

We become more isolated, more selfish, more intolerant of others, more mistrusting, less likely to work together, and more likely to prolong and deepen the pain, suffering and loss of everyone, including ourselves. This is not a way forward out of the pandemic.

Our only option for moving forward is the exact opposite. We must become more community-minded. We must become more caring, more empathetic towards the suffering of others, and extend trust even when it hasn’t been earned. This is the only way to calm people who have to succumb to fear and selfishness. This is the only way to awaken their own higher brain functions.

Our gut reaction has been to retreat into isolation, fear, and promotion of selfishness for survival.

This is a trap of our base primal fear. This will not lead us out of the pandemic. What will lead us out is coming together, working together, and holding onto our trust in each other, allowing our higher brain functions and our ability to cooperate to get us out of this.

Innovation, creativity, and intelligence spring up from minds that are relaxed and confident, not from those that are closed off, fearful, and protective.

Two years into this pandemic I can confidently say that reacting with our basest instincts and giving in to our fear has failed us.

Doing more of the same will only contribute to the other pandemics of mental health issues and suicide, losing more of the minds most capable of helping us through these trying times if we were to try a new approach.

This is more than a biological crisis; it is a spiritual crisis as well.

The pandemic has already brought out the worst in us, let’s see what happens when we allow the best of ourselves into the world as well. We need to maintain respect for each other and acknowledge that each and every one of us is also living through this. Even in isolation, we are not isolated.

Demand the impossible of yourself. Extend care to those you believe do not deserve your care. Practice tolerance to those who you feel has somehow wronged you. Show patience even with those who have shown no patience towards others.

Even in this pandemic, you will never understand what another person is going through. In our current system, we never allow each other the time to tell our stories. We don’t allow time for grief or to process loss.

Our external assumptions and judgments of other people rise as we rely on our primal fearful instincts. These assumptions and judgments are nearly always wrong. No one can tell what is going on in another person’s life, or what they are going through by looking at them, or through one interaction in a public space, a snapshot of a fragment of time.

We cannot return to the old normal. The old normal has been destroyed.

It has collapsed under the weight of its own illusion, falsehood, and unsustainable ideology. We came to that realization as soon as we uttered the words “essential worker” at the beginning of this pandemic.

There is no question in my mind that party politics, the hierarchy created by the inequality of wealth distribution, a corrupt mass media, and a surveillance state disguised as friendly but dumbed-down social media has utterly failed us.

If we don’t thoughtfully create a new normal we are destined to fall into fascism as that is the form of government that our primal fears desire.

Another illusion. A false sense of security. Everyone loses. This new normal needs to overwhelmingly drown out those voices of fear and negativity leading us towards dystopia.

I will not tell you what that new normal is as it needs to be a collaboration. A collection of the best ideas that civilization has come up with to date without influence from monied powers, corporate influence, or those based on any ideology that seeks to divide us.

The very existence of anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers shows us that this pandemic has broken its biological boundaries. Therefore our situation requires more than vaccines and treatments of the Covid virus. We also need to address the mistrust that has arisen from a system that profits from our division.