Saints and viruses are not to be married

 

It was the beginning of the Pandemic and people were getting familiar with the new lockdown normal. A protestant pastor had the bold idea to protect his community by praying for the safety of every single parishioner. He took his commitment seriously and not a single day passed by without his earnest prayers that were meant to protect the faithful believers (i.e., modern Israel) amid this Egyptian-like plague. He envisioned the possibility that all members of his church will be spared, and none will get infected. The first few weeks went by successfully and his optimism grew accordingly. But in less than a year he not only had to abandon his initial plan, but had to perform several CORONA funerals.

         Liberated after the first lockdown, some people flocked to the church to find spiritual consolation. Fully masked, they respectfully attended the open-air religious service separated from their neighbors by two meters of wind and fresh air. At the end of the Mass the crowd piously lined up to receive the Holy Communion. But Communion was served with one and the same silver spoon as the officiating priest believed that the Blessed Sacraments are at odds with all viruses. After this event got some attention from the press, the Orthodox Church publicly apologized and officially renounced the practice.       

A rabbi from Israel openly declared that CORONA represents God’s curse designed to punish the LGBT or gay community. But a few months later, the same rabbi carelessly scratched his nose during a prayer meeting and inadvertently got crowned by millions of viruses. Was this a sign from God that he was part of the invisible LGBT community? I don’t know about that, but I know for sure that it couldn’t be a shorter way to rapidly gain him an international, super-star like mockery fame.

After the vaccine roll-over started, a prominent Romanian Orthodox priest claimed to hold a superior solution: his daily communion has the power to protect him (and everyone else) beyond the effectiveness of any human-made vaccine. However - and here I want to abruptly change to course of the argument - there is no evidence (scientific or otherwise) that a symbol is able to repel a virus, even if that symbol is invested with multiple sacred meanings. As far as I know, any symbol, including religious ones, gets to be just a symbol and throughout time it continues to have the same or an evolving meaning, depending on what various generations decided to ascribe to it. The fallacy comes from clumsily mingling two different levels of analyses in a desperate effort to marry them and force them to take the same wedding picture as bride and groom. But saints and viruses are not to be married. Religious symbols are meant to offer hope, to mold our inner life and boost our motivation for altruism, to positively impact emotions and stimulate gratitude, to talk to our meaning-making and symbolic being that our physical bodies were designed to entertain. Viruses on the other hand couldn’t care less about the symbols we use to grace our churches with or to part-take in religious rituals. All they care about are the biological conditions that allow them to multiply and strive as a species and all they fear are the physical barriers that hinder their progress. Do you see why they are the worst candidates for getting married, and why they don’t like kissing each other? Forcing them to sleep in the same bad will only increase the chance of procreating monsters that that will abate us from getting a straight picture of both our spiritual traditions and our physical world.

Saints and viruses are not to be married not because they are consanguineously related as distant cousins. On the contrary, they are not to be married because they emerged from radically different worlds and house radically different underlying mechanisms, rules, laws and values under their shelters. This doesn’t mean that they have never met, or never touched hands. They did! For example, it is well accepted in psychology that our mind or spirit can influence our body; that generally hopeful people tend to have a stronger immune systems; that adding an extra religious motivation (i.e., considering our bodies as the temple of the Holy Spirit) can effectively contribute to adopting and maintaining healthy behaviors by making us more responsible. But the psycho-somatic relationship is just one of the myriad of influences meant to either strain or uplift our bodies, and not an invincible protective wall against viruses or other foreign invaders. The belief that God reigns in the heavenly realms, lovingly watching and protecting his flock could be helpful and inspiring. But beyond a certain point it can get dirty and entangled in the mud of unrealistic illusions. And our heartfelt wishes expressed in prayers - whether desperate, hopeful, faithful, or casual - are rather dependent on the uncontrollable Will of the Almighty that most of the time gets so sovereign and mysterious that remains impenetrable for our humble minds. That’s why I think saints and viruses are rather distant friends whose spheres of influence only partially overlap; they are acquaintances with different interests and orientations in life, not long time husband and wife. That’s why saints and viruses should neither get married nor be granted a resounding divorce, because their friendly, nonsexual hand-shake represents the mutually fulfilling relationship they both long for.       

Although the spiritual and transcendent values are placed high above and up on the vertical axis while the earthly human ones are placed below and beneath on the horizontal axis, this mere positioning shouldn’t deceive us when it comes to their jurisdiction. The distance between the two spheres resembles rather the haven–earth dichotomy than the dominance of one over the other. Didn’t you ever had the unmistakable impression that transcendent values are placed so high in the sky that they cannot remotely control the earthly details of our below and beneath horizontal axis? Didn’t you ardently wished and prayed for something as if your life depended on it, only to find the circumstances turned in the opposite direction? I did, and it was tremendously frustrating to see that my spiritual efforts to do something (like remote-controlling the mundane events from post of my horizontal axes) appear futile, that the earth seems to be guided by different laws than the haven, that the natural world appears only partially connected to the transcendent. The relationship between the two seems so different from the one cherished by the pinions and cogwheels of a mechanical clock or the gears of a car, where the turns of one wheel are proportionally spinning the other parts in an intimate and coherent move. The relationship seems rather like the loose interactions among the disparate parts of a complex system where discrepant movements and offbeats sometimes play a synchronicity game in a charming and mysterious tango. I am currently and concurrently watching and playing this intriguing tournament, observing in amazement the convoluted mosaic of multiplex movements. But at least for the moment, I am reticent to sail the boat of building fervent generalizations on the narrow basis of singular events. I also trained myself to delay the sweet gratification of manufacturing and erecting immediate theories about how the world works on the basis of my transcendent values and aspirations. I have found enough reasons to believe that saints and viruses are actually only distant, nonsexual friends who enjoy a rather platonic relationship. That’s how they naturally fit together, enjoying fundamentally different jurisdictions. However, their worlds seem to partially and occasionally overlap, and the meeting happens when they decide to respectfully shake hand in spite of the pandemic recommendation to abstain from it or use only the elbow bump.  

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Life as an attitude 2.0 - My ACT love affaire

 

Last April (04.2020) I had a new “revelation” about the importance of attitudes in life, and I illustrated it with a couple of examples from music, from high quality television shows, and I finally left the readers with a bunch of rhetorical questions about their perspectives toward the multiple facets of the fresh CORONA crises and its impact on our global village (see here The value of attitudes). The truth is that I have always enjoyed witnessing life and its challenges as they unfold, infusing curiosity on my perspectives, and stealing fresh looks from things and people when I wasn’t bored, depressed or anxious. I see life as a tremendously complex show worth attending to, and I was willing to pay a good price in order to have a premium perspective whenever I could afford the associated costs. A bald-bold guy I "meet" through his books during my early 20’s - Stephen Covey – persuaded me that attitudes matter, that having an overall perspective is key in getting oriented in life, that personal and professional evolution could be improved by chosen attitudes that are centered around principles and values. Both psychology and my own Christian spiritual tradition stressed the importance of adopting the “right vantage point”, so I wasn’t completely new to the LIFE AS AN ATTITUDE approach. In fact I coded and recoded my first version (i.e., version 1.0) for more than 20 years by now.

Although I was somehow familiar with the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) paradigm, I didn’t really grasp it’s gist from just reading books or even from the in-depth intellectual exploration needed for preparing scientific papers. Therefore, this spring I decided to immerse myself in these waters by taking an online ACT course for psychologists. I thought it would be cool to have another bald-bold guy - Steven Hayes this time - magically appear on my big (almost life size) screen that dominates the space of my home office. Several hundred dollars and a few clicks away I could spend some quality time with him in the comfort of my Romanian home. One of the best parts was the non-conflicting schedules between our busy calendars, as we could have longer or shorter meetings whenever I was able to treat myself with a few ACT training hours. His presence, genuineness, flexible and complex approach, sound scientific base, playful attitudes and valued life perspective reached me with an irresistible and seductive force. I was mesmerized, enchanted, uplifted, and energized by the wealth of implications resulting from just our attitudes-perspectives. How we relate to the universe - be it the internal universe of entangled emotions and thoughts, or the external universe of people, objects, and planets – appeared to me in a fresh new light. The infinite space of consciousness resulted from playfully dancing between different attitudes pushed me in the liberated state of following my values. I irreversibly felt in love with ACT, so much so that I totally embrace it, I wanted to make it my own, to add it to my lifestyle menu so that it will continue to enrich me in the future. Then I realized I was kind of fused with these ideas, so I decided to look at them from different perspectives, to take a break, to allow myself some reflection space. But the post-reflection return was equally liberating, as I found myself in a space where I could not only decide what kind of relationship I want to entertain with ACT, but most importantly, what kind of relationship I want to cultivate with my values, how I can be present in my life, and how I can engage with it guided by what I deem to be important. I don’t know how things will unfold in the future, but my ACT experience certainly enriched my lifestyle menu and upgraded my LIFE AS AN ATTITUDE approach to its 2.0 brand new version. Although the basic components have been successfully installed, there is a long way until they will completely mature and until I will feel comfortable enough with them around because they ended up being impregnated by my personal color palette. However, in my reckless enthusiasm, I started imparting presence, diffusion, and acceptance around; encouraging others in exploring their values, in transcending their conceptualized self, and in engaging with what matters from their newfound and flexible dance of multiple perspectives.               

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Life as a complex unfolding of overlapping and sometimes contradictory events

 It’s May 1^st and a while ago the cherry tree in front of my window decided to beautify the garden with hundreds of white, blossomed flowers. By watching it’s enthusiasm for the sunshine you can hardly resist the contagious hope that naturally spreads through its discrete scent. A simple, even absent-minded look towards it could be enough to make you imagine the sap’s hidden joy for invigorating the branches with a new, springtime spirit. However, this year I got to admire the blossomed cherry tree on my way to and from the sky slopes where a handful of passionate skiers continue to take shameless advantage of the surviving snow layers generously bestowed upon us in March and April. Just 15 kilometers away winter seems to reign, despite the sun’s insistence to chase it out. The slopes are not frozen, but there is an unmistakable snow-touch all around the mountain. 

         Last October a friend of mine had an unwanted encounter with a tiny CORONA-virus that forced him to visit the limits of life, to contemplate existence from one of its no-coming-back borders. Looking directly into the void of his possible nonexistence he hanged on for a few days, his body connected with an oxygen mask. During several sleepless nights he came to appreciate not only the value of our taken-for-granted oxygen, but also the value of being intentional and really present. From the simplest, mostly unnoticed details like admiring a tree or a town building that happen to end up on our retina, to the inexpressible need to deeply connect with family members, to reshaping some behaviors so that they match his newly discovered values – he reemerged to life with a different perspective. This uninvited detour that occasioned a personal look into the final nonexistence made him burst back to life with an outrageous courage to exist. At first he wasn’t sure what to make of it, but gradually he managed to process his experience and started to gracefully taste the juicy core of a valued life, becoming a wiser, more loving human being. 

         But CORONA was merciless with others, leaving some families dismantled. Hopeless feelings, disbelief and disorientation hit hard as emotional, practical and financial imbalance is struggled with on a daily basis. Black becomes the dominant emotion engulfing the internal world for weeks and months at a time. Looking around nothing seems to be quite as it used to. Looking around we see other infected victims who manage to recover, while others don’t, leaving behind a never-to-be-filled void. In this bleak, difficult to bear context, one of my courageous friends - who lost her partner to CORONA - gathered her strengths to join a wedding ceremony, the first major event attended without her husband.  

         About two thousand years ago twelve regular Jews followed a strange new teacher who managed to ignite their motivation by sketching in front of their hopes a different, more humane spirituality. At some point they initiated what they imagined to be the most successful presidential campaign of all times, if only He had accepted their offer. Not only He dismissed the idea on the spot discouraging them to ever attempt such insane initiatives, but a couple of years down the road He was arrested, unfairly convicted and killed by the current establishment. Their hopes sank abruptly, absorbed by the endless black hole of the Master’s irreversible death. Three days later the hopeless, grieved and disoriented disciples had the most extraordinary revelation when encountering their resurrected Master and touching His scarred wounds with their fingers. Hope followed despair, and life followed death in the most amazing and unexpected juxtaposition in history.

         The events briefly sketched above have few similarities, but maybe what makes them stand together and not snap apart is that all of them are part of life. Sometimes contradictory events take place in a similar or very close space-time with similar or even the same actors. Paradoxical events overlap or juxtapose in a complex and intricate web design. Spring overlaps with winter and the sunny sky overlaps with the rain. A detour close to the no-coming-back border of death sparks a shameless reemergence to a fuller, more fulfilled life. Tearfully looking at the past after the loss of a partner overlaps with joyfully looking at the future as a new couple celebrates their wedding. The death of their Master that sank the disciples’ hopes in the endless pit of despair occasioned the most stunning resurrection in history. Life itself can be seen as a complex unfolding of contradictory events, overlapping or juxtaposed, a zigzag intertwine of paradoxes with unending stops and beginnings. As adult human being we only get to decide whether we want to be part of it, and present in it, or not. Deciding for the secure noninvolvement gets us closer to the nonexistence and the death we already fear. Deciding for the risky and real life involvement could be both painful and glorious, both heartbreaking and fulfilling. We would like to cross out “painful” and “heartbreaking” and to keep only “glorious” and “fulfilling.” But that is not our choice! We only get to decide whether we want to embrace life – with its overlapping contradictions, with its pains AND glories – or not. All the rest is up to God.          

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The cacophonies of human cognition: A psychologist’s perspective on cognitive distortions

 

The CORONA crisis – and in fact any other personal or collective crisis for that matter - represents a golden opportunity to notice the disintegrated dance and numerous circus parades animated by human cacophonies and misinterpretations. As humans we have an innate tendency towards distortions, we like them so much, we embrace them to such an extent that they become engrained into and indistinguishable from our nature. Humanity has always entertained a deep connection with cognitive distortions, so deep that we have identified our beings, our lives, our careers, our friends and even our family with them. We are made of flash and blood, neurons and synapses, not of 0 vs. 1 dichotomies. We get animated by emotions, remember or misremember past events, and tend to use personal experiences when interpreting new situations. Which is fine up to a certain point; but the results of our interpretations end up to be, well, idiosyncratic, how else? The mere fact that some of you started skeptical about my abrupt and critical assertions on the ubiquity of cognitive distortions, on the frailty of human interpretations, and on the sheer popularity of various cognitive cacophonies we all easily embrace (and sometimes refuse to let go) only prove that there is some grain of truth in my approach.    

         False beliefs or subjective undeserved trust in unsupported conclusions (the ancient name used for what we now label as cognitive distortions) represents actually quite an old and unresolved issue for humanity. I’ll only briefly mention a few hints that greater minds than mine alluded to during the recorded history. Observing the world and how humans behave in it Aristotle noticed that: "The ignorant strongly affirms his convictions, the scholar doubts his conclusions, and the wise man (the philosopher) reflects on what he sees." Confucius, four centuries BC, believed that "True knowledge comes from knowing the dimension of your ignorance." Charles Bukowski mentioned that the problem with our world is that intelligent people are full of doubts, and others… are full of confidence. You see, the same undeserved trust in unsupported conclusions was noticed long before humans invented the word psychology or came up with more objective methods designed to test apart the truth from the untruth. Nowadays we use the evolving and complex scientific methods for that purpose, and we partially succeeded to put aside some unsupported ideas about us as humans and about our world. But unfortunately, science cannot remove our appetite for cognitive cacophonies that only scream wilder in uncertain situations.  

Underestimating the danger of getting infected with CORONA and/or its possible consequences for your health could be equally damaging as it is overestimating them and being constantly anxious and on guard. Other cognitive cacophonies we uses more often than intended are: jumping to conclusions, disqualify the positives, thinking in black and white terms, mislabeling, expecting to live in a just world (fairness fallacy), to have total control of our life (control fallacies), to exert real change on others (change fallacies), while our decisions are biased (or primed) by unrelated anchors, by recently activated memories, by aversion loss, by the framing of the problem at hand. I’m not going to enter into much detail here regarding each cognitive distortion, but if you are interested I can provide some references.[1] Daniel Kahneman, a well-known professor from Princeton University who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics (2002), released a book where he analyses our thinking processes: Thinking fast and slow. Here he mentions that even experts in their field entertain cognitive biases and make errors (which Kahneman finds to be funny). And that’s because subjective confidence, which is closely related to the probability of being correct, is not a judgment, but an emotion. If the explanation or story we made up in our minds seems well-articulated and coherent we can’t help but feel positive about it (it feels right!) and we ascertain higher scores for its confidence. But the problem is that we can come up with coherent stories out of very little information that is in fact unreliable. And the quality of the story (its credibility!) depends little on the quality and quantity of the basic information used to construe it. So we can be confident of our conclusions having little reasons to support this, because confidence represents an unreliable sensor for trusting anything. And if this story about subjective confidence as an emotion is not enough, I could add another argument that relates to how our memory works. It was proven that when we think of past events we don’t just retrieve the information from memory (as a video tape would do), but we rather reconstruct it from the raw materials that are the most accessible for us at that moment, and our reconstructions are, obviously, not accurate. You don’t have to believe me for that thesis, just read Daniel Schacter’s book The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. And just as another example, neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin described memory as "a puzzle with many missing pieces. We rarely retrieve all the pieces and our brains fill in the missing information with creative guesses, based on experience and patterns of matching. This lead to many unfortunate missrecollections, often accompanied by the stubborn belief that we are recalling accurately. We cling to this missrememberings, storing them to our memory bank incorrectly, and then retrieve them in a still-incorrect form and with a stronger (misplaced) sense of certainty that they are accurate" (see Successful aging Ch. 2 Memory and the sense of "you", p. 33)

So these cacophonic distortions seem to have been part-and-parcel of human cognitive processes long before I was born and will probably continue to be so long after I will stop typing about them. Any attempt to correct-them-all and to be totally-free is such an impossible endeavor that even perfectionistic champions, with little to no tolerance for their ambiguity, end up exhausted and finally surrender to their continuous attacks. That’s because attempts to get free-of-ALL-cognitive-distortions are simply vain and futile. We are not entirely helpless in this fight, that’s true; and we can mend a few cacophonies here and there. We can identify our most common cognitive distortions and try to decatastrophize them, we can differentiate facts from opinions or hypothesis (and eventually test our hypothesis), we can be skeptical about our own conclusions, we can learn to discern and rely on scientific evidence (and not on subjective confidence), and we can understand how culture, education, religion and experience have shaped our world-view. But compared to the sheer number of distortions assaulting us on a daily basis, it’s like one gun-man fighting an entire battalion of Chinese army. If the gun-man is motivated and smart enough, he can put down a few caporals. But the continuous nature of the fight (i.e., our incessant cognitive processes) makes his job unsustainable. While on duty, the gun-man has to eat, sleep, talk to his friends, make love, raise his children, buy groceries, satisfy his hobbies, enjoy the weekend, and go on vacations. Not to mention his frequent attention slips and long boredom intervals while actively watching. And any breaches are immediately speculated by one or more of the cunny cacophonic soldiers or caporals who risk their lives to sneak in and do their filthy job. In time, these soldiers (and sometimes even generals) end up moving inside and having a permanent residence in our minds. That’s how cognitive distortions got so ingrained in the myriad of information processes entertained daily by our brains, representing such a core part of our imperfect cognitions that the only way we can stop-them-all is to stop our thinking process all together. Somber as it may be, if we were to preserve our cognitive functions we have no choice but to accept their less-than-perfect functionality as an inescapable fact of life, and get on with it.  

 

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[1] Cognitive distortions: when your brain lies to you - here you have a written description of some cognitive biases and some solutions, and 30 cognitive biases and psychological misjudgments - here you could watch a more comprehensive list of cognitive biases released at the beginning of the CORONA pandemic

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Assuming responsibility

Irony represents a powerful weapon, especially when handled with dexterity. After three month of daily extensive media coverage on the imminent CORONA threat, even senior journalist’s highest frustration tolerance limit crashes under Trump’s invulnerability illusions. Yesterday Anderson Cooper reported that experts from the University of Washington estimated about 200.000 US deaths caused by CORONA until October 1. Despite this dire situation some high profile politicians behave as if their gaze got tired of following the invisible virus. Actually one of Trump’s recent spontaneous remarks was: “If we stop testing right now (for CORONA-virus) we will have very few cases, if any...” Such out-of-sight-out-of-mind approach prompted Cooper to ironically wonder whether Trump have surpassed the object permanence stage of development that normal 2 year olds are proudly acquiring. And his answer was that “the president perhaps hasn’t reach that stage (i.e., of object permanence), not at least when it comes to a virus that have claimed 116,000 deaths” only in the US. This biting sarcasm was meant to expose and corrode the president’s “twisted logic”, his failure to grasp the good warning signals testing are meant to bring, and his intention of hiding CORONA under the rug. But is Anderson Cooper’s strategy effective?

     At the beginning of March many tourists had definite plans to relax on various Cruise Ships. For example an Australian couple bought tickets for a local cruise around New Zealand. Despite the depressing CORONA news they supposed it would be safe to embark on their long awaited journey as the authorities approved the trip, the tourist agency seemed ok with it and they were not actually going towards China. If anything was not ok the organizers should announce us, they lightly reasoned, relaying for their go ahead decision on the organizers’ responsibility. However, after just a few days it became obvious that relying solely on Cruise’s responsibility was actually a bad strategy. During the cozy events enjoyed by everyone in the first half of the trip CORONA insidiously rolled up her sleeves and made a big catch, including the husband of our Australian couple. His symptoms were severe, and his unpleasant convalescence was longer than the cruise itself, but he survived. That is probably one of those situations where not thinking with your own mind could triple your losses (with the holiday savings invested in a ruined holiday spend on a virused cruiser that made you sick to the point of life-threatening).

     On June 20 Trump plans to organize an election rally in Tulsa (Oklahoma) where about 19.000 people are invited to spend a few hours indoors listening to their dream candidate and cheering out loud their support. It is an official event and authorities approved it, so most people could lightly reason it should be ok to have republicans from across the US crammed into the same space. This kind of events are so much part and parcel of the American culture and politics that people could not give them up just because an invisible virus decided to stubbornly move around. Plus CORONA represents not news anymore as everyone got accustomed with, and even bored by this obsolete topic. And just a few days before, many cities had multiple days of approved and unapproved protests for social justice and chanted their loud support for the Black Life Matter (BLM) movement. Now it’s time for republicans to cheer up, and make their voices heard, and enjoy the fun, emotional, spontaneous, optimistic, inimitable Trump speeches they craved for. And during those speeches nobody will take CORONA seriously, as this topic will be approached lightly, and optimistically, with the invulnerability approach so energetically put forward by Trump’s prevailing attitude. So there is a good chance that the nasty virus will be looked at differently, as an actually unthreatening inconvenience, at least for that day.  

But CORONA doesn’t really care about US politics, or BLM, or whether she can operate on land in Oklahoma or on the sea near New-Zealand. Her only aim is to have a big catch. So chances are that two weeks down the road some republicans will get infected, and will further share their experience with their friends and family. And in the many weeks before the November election some former Oklahoma rally republicans will be unable to vote because voting is irrelevant for those who inadvertently passed on the other side of life’s threshold. That’s another way in which America is leading the world in terms of CORONA infected cases and fatalities, evening the number of affected Caucasians so as to keep up with the disproportionately large number of black cases occasioned by poverty, and lack of education, an lately by the numerous BLM unrests.    

         

Finally, what still surprise me is how ready and willing some people are to delegate their responsibility to whatever authority they happened to have above. By now everyone on the planet have heard in his language multiple messages about CORONA’s whereabouts and what we should do to avoid meeting her in person. However, if a Cruise company in Australia, or the Republican Party in the US, or the Government in Sweden says that it is OK to have a large meeting, or mingle with random strangers as we normally do, or to enjoy our already paid cruise, there will always be people who show up. Since the event was approved by an authority figure, they lightly reason it must be safe and sound to follow. Plus, they are convinced it’s not a big deal to participate, they are just engaging in normal behaviors that were impossible during the last months and stolen from them. I still can’t approximate how massive a threat must be to make people take it seriously, or whether it is humanly possible for a public event to be announced and not attended. Probably not!

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When anger overrides fear

Protesting during a pandemic represents a toxic combination with a potentially damaging impact for the society as a whole. However, the not even vaguely veiled dangers of CORONA contamination was literally trampled by the righteous anger tornados stirred by the knee on the neck murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis (May 25, 2020). The video showing Floyd’s last minutes struggle to breathe under the weight of former police officer Derek Chauvin went viral because it deeply touched on our emotions. This preventable death represents another incident where black citizens are overly-subdued by white police officers in the US, adding one more case to the already long history of unresolved issues. Upon seeing such injustice emotions got on fire and released a dynamite-like explosion of reactions. The wildly protesters went out of their way to make themselves heard and use this momentum to express their rage hoping to change something in the justice system. But as anger turned blind, more damage and suffering was inflicted, at least for the moment (i.e., as police or random cars were broken, buildings and stores were set on fire, protesters and police officers were injured, and non-trivial conditions for the flourishing of CORONA’s up-spiral ascent were created).    
      

Authorities could not oppose the protests, and faintly tried to remind citizens about face-masks and social distancing practices. Somehow remote from the mob, a CNN image depicted “A woman wearing a mask protests near the Colorado State Capitol in Denver” as mindful of such ideals. But in the background of the “I can’t breathe” T-shirt woman a large mass of unmindful protesters were not socially distancing and countless other clashes were recorder throughout the US. The crude reality is that when people are enraged it seems improbable to regulate their behaviors by appealing to their rationality or by reminding them of an invisible viral threat. As unfair as George Floyd’s death was, it is likely to cause more damage and death on the short term before it might contribute to the justice system on the long term. Besides the direct damage inflicted to human lives and properties, one additional reason is caused by CORONA’s indifference for how and why her spread is facilitated. Consequently, in two weeks we might see a rise in US infected cases, and in a month more than one additional black coffin conducted to the grave. However, this potentially larger damage prompted by the many individual decisions to take part in the protest could have been prevented if only the righteous anger would have been directed in a different way. But I must admit this is a really, truly hard and difficult to achieve task for the untamed human nature.

O the surface it might seem a sharp contrast between deciding to willingly keep one’s knee on someone’s neck for 8’46” and deciding to rightfully express one’s anger for such an appalling act while discounting the invisible no-death-threat-for-today carried out by a virus. But that’s only on the surface – as one action seem to lead directly to suffering and death of another human being, while the other seem to lead indirectly to similar results for oneself and others, but this time through CORONA’s agency. However, the I-can’t-help-it-but-rightfully-protest attitude, although not likely to incur a comparable degree of accountability, might toxically interact with the pandemic and contribute to the exponential growth of the death toll in the US. But powerful anger overrides fear, and instead of protecting black and white lives in the long term, protesters used the momentum to underline their revolt. In other words, they disregarded the invisible risks and went on for to punish the visible one. Only in one month’s time the protesters, the doctors, and we all would be able to estimate how wise that decision was.             

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The inadvertent consequences of disruptions

When disruptions hit us, or our family, organization or country, our reactions tend to be negative: we get frustrated, panicky-anxious, discouraged and resentful as we quickly realize that old solutions are useless, known shortcuts are impracticable and normal advancement is partially or totally blocked. So we see ourselves thrown in what we perceive as strange new mess with little (if at all) experience to rely on, facing an uncharted mountainous terrain. Our unpreparedness might be just part of the picture as we soon notice the clumsy movements of the other actors, be them big or small. Uncertainty kicks in as complex causal chains start to shift dramatically out of their normal tracks and make educated predictions seemed closer than ever before to five year olds guessing about nuclear power.

       Despite the undoubtedly negative consequences at all levels (health, economy, policy making, psychological functioning etc.) that we have to wrestle with, disruptions have at least two additional side-effects that we shouldn’t pass over. The first one is related to their capacity to make more transparent (at least temporarily) the internal, usually hidden, underlying mechanisms that sustain the disrupted system. By closely following how it was forced to perform under pressure and in uncertain situations, by watching its crude and spontaneous reactions, by seeing the route it followed when it had to unwillingly deforest the unexplored mountain - the subtle observer can only praise the golden opportunity to complete the image with the missing or dimly colored pieces of the puzzle. This is, in and of itself, a mighty topic I am certainly tempted to explore further (most probably in another post).

      The second side-effect of disruptions, that I am willing to chase now, is related to their capacity interrupt and disturb our internal world. The mere fact that old tracks turn unusable overnight urges us to suddenly stop, take a deep look at the new chaos, and devise something. But interestingly enough, the stopping and reevaluating moment could have consequences that might reverberate beyond the mere “what shell I do now?” unknown. Such suspended discontinuities, at least for those inclined to question the philosophical underpinnings of their behavior, might occasion a deeper analysis of what animates them (or their organization, the health system, the government) to engage in these behaviors, of why and how these actions were carried out in the first place. These unwelcomed and resented interruptions could actually make us pay renew attention, could bring a fresh perspective, could make some things appear sharper, and make us notice what previously stayed unnoticed. We might have the chance to listen the muted hums of deeply hidden personal wishes, to get in contact with our values, to reconsider some choices that were half-consciously reiterated hundreds of times during the loud noise of everyday live music.  

      Looking back two months ago, when the CORONA crisis had just started, for a moment I had the impression that my usually buzzing academic world - that continually demanded something of me - had suddenly stopped, and I was literally unable to interact with it (i.e., as the regular face-to-face classes were suspended). It was a moment of pure silence, when the whole world seemed suspended, smoothly floating in a foreign space, with just the void surrounding me from all over. And for a split second I subjectively had a powerful impression that I was totally free in that floating space, unbound by any straps, disengaged from everything except my passions, absolutely free to direct my whole mind towards activities that makes me reverberate with truly vital tonalities. It was during that moment that I’ve been in contact with my deep values whose hum was continuously blocked by the buzzing noises and the incessant external demands once essential for my professional development. It was during that moment that I realized how limiting the attached straps were for my intellectual freedom and for my creativity that could not take hold of my entire mind due, mainly, to the lack of psychological space. It was during that moment that I decided to carve in my program more writing time, to devote myself towards contemplating the fresh new images unintentionally revealed by CORONA’s multiple disruptions, to welcome and even entice creativity, to express myself courageously.  

      Besides being disheartening and forcing the stop and reflect stage, disruptions pressure us to take actions and push things forward, sometimes in entirely new conditions. After the denial is surpassed and the initial shock absorbed, after the earth rotates around its axis for a few uneasy nights, the unmistakable feeling that something significant has shifted willy-nilly pushes us to change gears if we want to rise up to the challenge. Unsure whether we can make even one step forward we make our first moves in a state of agitation, apprehensive of what might happen. Around us things look messy and we are not entirely sure how to proceed but it’s overwhelmingly evident that decisions have to be made and actions have to be taken. And the very interaction between the pressure to solve a problem and the messiness around (present in the environment or in our own minds or both) has the potential to spur creativity, as Tim Harford persuasively argues in his book. Baffled and resentful, we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position to cope with the unexpected. And since most memories fall short when it comes to solving new problems in unfamiliar circumstances we knock at the door of creativity hoping for some get-around ideas, or at least some plausible and handy hypotheses. We became suddenly ready and willing to step out of our comfortable shoes, to try new things, to tolerate unfamiliarity, and to spend more time solving problems. And such openness, that we didn’t even bother to greet before the crisis or to spend one evening per month with, was actually a by-product of the disruptive event per se. But Tim Harford mentions in his talk on the Importance of Being Messy that the alertness occasioned by taking an unprecedented rout, and sometimes by engaging in a longer adventure to explore the unknown, can actually bring the extra bit of energy needed for the creative work.               

      Finally, I am not arguing that disruptions are good and they should definitely get an invitation to the ball. I am not even arguing that they always lead to philosophical awakenings, or improve our creativity, or help us better understand the underlying mechanisms of the disrupted system. I am just arguing that disruptions primarily disrupt, and oftentimes bring unredeemable damages and lose. And that’s their main job! However, by forcing us to act differently they also have some inadvertent potentialities that some of us might take advantage of. And I don’t know what your reactions to CORONA’s multilevel disruptions were, but mine incorporated multiple concerns, and worries, and frustrations. But I was also surprised by an unexpected gift box I received with a word twisting game inside. The instructions were to use some word twists as a way to contribute to the up scaling of my neighbors coping strategies. And you might remember, from a previous post, that among my neighbors I counted the teenage Vietnamese girl who just learned English and the Peruvian middle age man who recently got divorced. And interestingly enough, playing around with the word game somehow captured my attention to the point of underestimating how fast a Sunday can pass while writing.     

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