Trend Report 104- The Coronavirus Pandemic May End Up Being A Blessing For Humanity

In our ever accelerating times, keeping ahead of the latest breaking news and trends from the world’s of fashion, music, film, art, tech, activism, is a time consuming daily challenge. Sure the information is all out there, but it is a time consuming ordeal to scan all the necessary sources. As Darwin said survival depends on how quickly you can adapt.

The future belongs to those who prepare today.

I absolutely accept the extreme gravity of the coronavirus and of our prime need as a connected global society to move hard and fast to get on top of it, with a major focus on doing everything to protect and help those who are most vulnerable – the elderly, and those with pre-existing health conditions. And as a society we need to try and come together to try and survive the individual and economic pain that is surely ahead.

The Corona Virus is a terrible challenge for our world, but may present an awakening for human kind. After we get through the devastation, I have a strange feeling it may well end up being a great blessing. Yep, that’s right, I have a prediction for you. Not only may the Covid-19 Plague end up being a blessing, but so will Donald Trump, and I will explain why in detail here.

Now let’s start with the Covid-19 matter. One of my fellow futurists who I respect is Dutch trends forecaster Li Edelkoort and she has a provocative outlook on Covid-19,

“I think we should be very grateful for the virus because it might be the reason we survive as a species.”

And I tend to agree.

Speaking at Design Indaba, a conference in Cape Town last week, the celebrated 69-year old design industry advisor pictured Covid-19 as a sobering force that will temper our consumerist appetites and jet-setting habits.

“The virus will slow down everything,” Edelkoort notes.“We will see an arrest in the making of consumer goods. That is terrible and wonderful because we need to stop producing at such a pace. We need to change our behaviour to save the environment. It’s almost as if the virus is an amazing grace for the planet.”

Our fascination for zombie apocalypse scenarios is played out weekly in our cinemas and streaming services. Climate consciousness and real, but affective change is perpetually stymied by media obfuscation and powerful elites solely focussed on their own enrichment.

‘World’s richest 1% get 82% of the wealth’, says Oxfam. And the gap continues to widen every year. This is not sustainable, and something has to change. But what will the catalyst be that actions this? So many elements of our prevailing capitalist system are failing us, and the inevitable collapse is not far off.

Ironically I have a 30-year career as a marketer, but for a long time now I have believed that blindly clinging to the capitalist system would eventually doom our species. The endless cycle of boom and bust, wars and famine, overconsumption, climate damage, and inequities between have’s and have nots would eventually destroy both us and our planet. And in order to survive we were going to need to urgently move to a more cohesive global system of resources allocation and governance. One that prioritised inclusion and global cooperation over personal greed.

In fact, the model has been well documented. It is called ‘The Resource Based Economy’. It is the system we need to survive, and later in this Podcast I will talk a bit on it. You can read all about it at TheVenusProject.com .

So how might Donald Trump be of help with this global awakening you may ask? I know it sounds far fetched, but bear with me.

So much of the world is messed up today and I can think of no better example than Donald Trump’s ridiculous presidency. I first became acquainted with ‘The Donald’ many years ago when I lived in New York City. He was a standing joke amongst pretty much all New Yorkers. And when he became President, I pondered to friends, that whilst he could pretend to be a leader, like he pretended to be a successful entrepreneur on his reality TV series, when faced with a true National or Global disaster like a war (or a lethal pandemic), America and the world would soon see how woefully fake and useless he would be. And post Mueller report, impeachment etc here we are.

What’s wrong with Trump? His MAGA fans might ask. Well let’s see hmmm, Trump is fundamentally unfit—intellectually, morally, temperamentally, and psychologically—for office. For me, that is the paramount consideration in electing any leader, in part because at some point it’s reasonable to expect that a president will face an unexpected crisis—and at that point, the president’s judgment and discernment, his character and leadership ability, will really matter. And that was what I wondered when I first heard of him being elected.

Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint himself with most issues, let alone master them. No major presidential candidate has ever been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his ineptitude. Trump is the poster child for all that is wrong with our failed capitalist system. Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe. To me the prospect of Donald Trump as commander in chief tasked with leading through a disaster had always sent a chill down my spine, and I kind of wondered if he would have to.

It took until the second half of Trump’s first term, but the crisis has arrived in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s hard to name a president who has been as overwhelmed by a crisis as the coronavirus has overwhelmed Donald Trump.

The president and his administration are responsible for grave, costly errors, most especially the epic manufacturing failures in diagnostic testing, the decision to test too few people, the delay in expanding testing to labs outside the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, and problems in the supply chain. These mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they created a false sense of security. What we now know is that the coronavirus silently spread for several weeks, without us being aware of it and while we were doing nothing to stop it. Containment and mitigation efforts could have significantly slowed its spread at an early, critical point, but we frittered away that opportunity.

Jeremy Konyndyk, who helped oversee the international response to Ebola during the Obama administration and is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told  The Washington Post.

“To the extent that there’s someone to blame here, the blame is on poor, chaotic management from the White House and failure to acknowledge the big picture.”

Yet in some respects, the avalanche of false information from the president has been most alarming of all. It’s been one rockslide after another, the likes of which we have never seen. Day after day after day he brazenly denied reality, in an effort to blunt the economic and political harm he faced. But Trump is in the process of discovering that he can’t spin or tweet his way out of a pandemic. There is no one who can do to the coronavirus what Attorney General William Barr did to the Mueller report: lie about it and get away with it.

Taken together, this is a massive failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarising figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious.

“The US nation is recognising this, treating him as a bystander as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president,” – Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times.

So how does a global tragedy that causes massive human and economic suffering help us? Well as I have said for several years now, it was going to take a global existential threat for there to be a global awakening, that we have an urgent need to move away from the destructive system we have now. I thought it might have come from a nuclear armageddon, or an asteroid strike that devastated our planet and killed billions of people. But a global pandemic may be what does it. If we get lucky I believe that humankind may emerge from this health crisis as a more cohesive and conscientious species, one that values the collective over the individual, and how we are all connected.

We need to find new values and a new system of allocating resources rather than capitalism’s profit and greed. A more collective and inclusive society where all lives are given equal worth, as opposed to the way they are now. Values of collective betterment, simple experience, friendship. Just as you see the trope on Star Trek. And it might not only turn the world around for the better, it may help our species survive.

Just like Paul Keating famously remarked, “This is the recession we had to have”.  Maybe this Covid-19 global pandemic might just be grave enough to be the global disaster we had to have to finally realise how things are run and resources are allocated, to know we need to shift to another system or fail as a species. Which leads me back to my view on the future, and the shift to a Star Trek-styled post capitalism system known as “Global Holistic Solution: Resource Based Economy” And I will now read from their Website so you can see why I believe this.

“Global problems faced by mankind today are impacting individuals and nations rapidly. Climate change, famine, war, epidemics of deadly diseases and environmental pollution contribute to the long list of global challenges we, as humans, need to promptly address before an eventual catastrophe swiftly becomes inevitable.

Regardless of political philosophy, religious beliefs, or social customs, all socio-economic systems ultimately depend upon natural resources, such as clean air and water, arable land, and the necessary technology and personnel to maintain a high standard of living.

Modern society has access to highly advanced technologies and can make available food, clothing, housing, medical care, a relevant educational system, and develop a limitless supply of renewable, non-contaminating energy such as geothermal, solar, wind and tidal.

It is now possible to have everyone on Earth enjoy a very high standard of living with all of the amenities that a prosperous civilization can provide. This can be accomplished through the intelligent and humane application of science and technology.

Individuals and interest groups are governed by laws that demand maximum profit where possible. These laws are inherent in the monetary system prevalent in most countries today – capitalism. The basic principles of capitalism demand exponential growth at all cost causing financial cataclysms such as the 1929s Great Depression in the United States and the recent financial crisis of 2007-08.

We are separated by borders and beliefs which make it impossible for us to arrive at relevant solutions while being divided ideologically. Most of our problems today are technical but we are still looking for solutions through political means. We need to accept that eliminating these global threats requires the employment of methodologies rather than personal opinions.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
~ Albert Einstein

The Venus Project proposes a holistic approach with a global socio-economic system that utilizes the most current technological and scientific advances to provide the highest possible living standard for all people on Earth. The proposed system is called Resource Based Economy. The term and meaning was coined by Jacque Fresco, the founder of The Venus Project.

In a Resource Based Economy all goods and services are available to all people without the need for means of exchange such as money, credits, barter or any other means. For this to be achieved all resources must be declared as the common heritage of all Earth’s inhabitants. Equipped with the latest scientific and technological marvels mankind could reach extremely high productivity levels and create abundance of resources.”

A Global Resource-based economy is our inevitable future, should we wish to survive. I for one am hoping this current global pandemic may help us realise we need to ditch capitalism and put it in place before we destroy ourselves.