Coronavirus — western democracies showing arrogant ineptness — a spiritual lesson?

© 2020 Peter Free

 

15 March 2020

 

 

United States finally got off its behind cheeks . . .

 

. . . regarding this year's coronavirus pandemic.

 

Way too late, of course.

 

Just like Europe.

 

 

Culturally curious, is Western somnolence

 

After China gave us a two to three months lead — for coming up with sensible plans to slow down the spread of the pandemic — one has to wonder why Western Hemisphere democracies have been so disastrously slow to awaken.

 

 

A Spanish infectious disease specialist in Madrid . . .

 

. . . Spain itself having been overrun with COVID-19, has a likely answer.

 

When asked by an interviewer:

 

 

Have you been sinned by overconfidence?

 

 

Dr. Santiago Moreno replied:

 

 

Yes, I believe that nobody thought, and I include myself among them, that this could acquire the dimensions it has taken in a country like ours.

 

© 2020 Oriol Güell, We have sinned from overconfidence. No one thought about this, El País (13 March 2020)

 

 

Bruno Maçães, writing in Quillette . . .

 

. . . interpreted Dr. Güell's statement this way:

 

 

People in Europe still think of China as a developing country.

 

When news started to arrive of the outbreak in Wuhan, they imagined filthy Chinese markets and hospitals, they thought of the spitting and the lack of doctors, and they trembled.

 

They feared for the Chinese people, not for themselves.

 

This perception explains why, as mainstream opinion lambasted China for mismanaging the outbreak, there was remarkably little concern that the mismanagement could have consequences for Europe and other parts of the developed world.

 

There was effectively no planning or preparation.

 

© 2020 Bruno Maçães, Conceit and Contagion: How the Virus Shocked Europe, Quillette (14 March 2020)

 

 

Could Maçães' cultural hypothesis be accurate?

 

Perhaps.

 

The West's brain-dead snooze, regarding COVID-19, certainly seems due to cultural or race-based arrogance.

 

Those of us who recognize the depth and breadth of China's (historically uniquely rapid) rise to modernity, knew that China was also closer to the forefront, not the tail, of epidemiological control — once its leaders (also laggardly) recognized the zoonotic threat facing their nation.

 

Through at least two months of China's subsequently comprehensive epidemic control efforts — and with even more foresight-filled endeavors being daily exhibited in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea — Europe and the United States continued to sleep.

 

Only two days ago — after seeing "white people" in Europe getting clobbered — did the United States exhibit small signs of opening its own incomprehensibly closed eyes.

 

 

The moral? — Thinking that one is "hot shit" — just invites the Metaphorical Tiger to chew one's ass

 

This SARS-CoV-2 pandemic illustrates how Stupidity characterizes humanity better than Smarts.

 

Even when our behinds are on the line, it is exceedingly difficult to wake us up.

 

The figurative lesson from this mess should be — to daily and diligently keep asking ourselves:

 

 

Where am I foolishly asleep, plain stupid or self-destructively arrogant?

 

 

Humility is a reliable friend under most circumstances.

 

The fact that we preponderantly discard humility in favor of narcissism and displays of overweening self-confidence in the United States — says something about the spiritually severed moorings of our culture.