It's summer time, holidays are in full swing and people are relaxing after a very stressful period and exhausting years. I think it’s a good time to slowly turn our attention to the psychological and societal impacts, which we endured during the covid years, and try to understand it.
I have by my self finally manage to find time and dive into the interesting book from Canadian-American psychologist Steven Pinker called The Language Instinct. In the book there is many valuable and novel information about our language and how we communicate. We do it automatically every day, when we talk with others, read signs, listen to music, broadcasting, radio and even now, as you read this article you are engaging brain to decrypt and understand the written form of communication.
When we deal with communication, we have to understand that there are different forms of communication. The most basic and primitive form is images. The hieroglyph symbols. Everyone can understand the meaning of pictures, if they already saw the symbol before or interact with it. The advanced form of communication is then speech and written text. In this higher form of communication, we don't use visual images but words either written or pronounced and the receiver needs to understand or have knowledge of the language to decode the message which we are trying to communicate with him.
To decode or understand the message we have to be able to translate abstract words into some real picture which we have either seen or have in our brain stored as knowledge. That’s the alpha-omega of any story telling or descriptive text. The word “church” can be interpreted in many ways, but most people will imagine some kind of “religion building”. If we expand the word to “catholic majestic church” the image will be more clear. And if we want to precisely define what kind of church is it, then we use the unique name “St. Maria Church in Bermo”.
Now, as we all been subjected to many false stories told during covid and got bombarded with nonsensical claims, we need to use words and define some common ground, how to deal with the psychological effects which someone imposed on us in effort to deprogram our inner compass. Mainly to get rid of the idea that the virus was deadly, we all going to die tomorrow, or that it was all just some random accident.
To help with that, I will use this Tweet which gained almost 2 millions of views on X and try to categorize the areas to be able to focus on them or propose some solution.
The List of Problems
Let’s now start with the original Tweet and I will comment or try to categorize where we stand in each of the areas.
The current list contain this topics:
The Broken Social Contract
The Division Politics
The Hunger Games
The Health Problems
The Moral / Economical Impact
The Tweet there describe the observation, which many have noticed, and that's the decline in quality of everything. That’s absolutely true and the reasons for that might be the inflation, money printing and broken social contract.
The Broken Social Contract
What we mean by this is that someone break the social norms, which were before taken for granted. We can include under this category the covid encouraged behavior, where family excluded family members for their vaccination status, the disputed with friends over politics (covid was political side), the business destruction, constant lying, gaslighting, schools closure, the silencing of people for their opinions, persecuting others and ignoring calling for help.
To clarify why this social contract was broken, we need to understand that the social contract was already weakened before, and the main driver was the social media and smartphones. I would even say, that social contract was replaced with Internet morale. More important is how it will look on social media and in smartphone than what the real picture or reality is.
The main motivator for this was the broad audience, which was encouraging others to participate in the group behavior. This could work, but I would say, it has backfired, and now social media users are mostly addicted, depressed, suicidal and isolated.
With the steps to reduce the social addiction, we might discover, that the previous social contract was better suitable for normal working society.
Next category which we can identify from the responses might be the political aim of these problems.
The Division Politics
As some people noticed, the problem didn't start during covid, but only manifested how much division was already between society.
We have already observed, that the Covid Operation might be directly aimed to get rid of Trump and organized with help of secret service.
The other theme in this topic is the absence of accountability.
We can notice, that even now not many people are familiar with mechanisms, how it happened or who might do that.
But yes, it was around the world and precisely coordinated.
The opinions still differ as the division is big in society. That might be the main problem, that over the political lens people will not accept that there might be some problem in society.
The Hunger Games
With the advent of Broken Social Contract, Division Politics, Absence of Accountability some might correctly come to the conclusion, that “we are now everyone for him self”.
I would even said, it’s correct feeling when you were expelled from society or persecuted, you truly were left to die by the rest of society. The lack of empathy here is also one of the correct points.
The Health Problems
Another topic which is mentioned is health problems. This is linked to vaccine injuries, psychological problem and impact of covid lockdowns. No, the virus by itself didn't do any of this damage.
The Moral / Economical Impact
Someone said that “recession” is mostly moral decline of society. And he was right, the impact of money printing and destroyed business is now being reflected on the moral and motivation factors in society.
The division of society to “non-essential” and “essential” also took it toll on people mental health, psyche and weakened their belief in social contract.
So that’s it, five categories where we now struggle most.
The Broken Social Contract
The Division Politics
The Hunger Games
The Health Problems
The Moral / Economical Impact
In my opinion, the eras mainly overlap themselves in many aspects. The reason why this mostly happen is that people started to fight between each other as encouraged by the division politics.
If they wouldn't be so full of anger, hatred and stubborn in regard to acceptance of some other opinions, probably nothing of this would ever happen. Politics is bad, but people don't have to act like that. Human people do mistakes, but you should be able to tolerate other person with different opinion than is yours, that’s kind of basis of modern society.
Fascinating framework. Many of us have changed in myriad ways. If you haven't changed, something might be wrong with you!