The most prominent positive aspect of the coronavirus is that it forced us to contemplate how we live, and seek new and improved connections in society.
It slowed down the consumerist train we were riding, and gave us the space to revise what is essential and nonessential in our lives. It also showed us examples of nature restoring itself when we calm down in such a way.
It taught us lessons in our interdependence, from mutual dependence in our respective localities— maintaining personal hygiene, wearing masks and upholding social distancing conditions—to witnessing our tight worldwide interdependence in how the virus surfaced as an outbreak in one part of the world, and quickly spread to become a global pandemic.
By doing so, the longer the coronavirus stays with us (and it looks like it is not going anywhere anytime soon), the more it will serve to transform society at its core: from a society of individuals fueled by egoistic, individualistic and materialistic motives to a society that realizes the necessity to positively connect, and erect new leading values of mutual responsibility and consideration, in order to live well in our newly-revealed interdependent world.
People who commit suicide do not want to endure ongoing feelings of frustration and emptiness.
Like any person, they wanted to become fulfilled—and today there are myriad pleasures available to us at the tap of a button—but suicidal people find fulfillment to be completely elusive.
The inner distress they feel within exceeds any sensations that they can receive from anyone else.
Do our lives have meaning, a goal and a purpose that make our lives worth living? What is our impetus to continue living on in life?
Such questions awaken in certain people, and they drive some people to seek their answers, and some to a pit of desperation, where they would like to invert such questions and sensations, but they cannot, and then they reach the end.
To get answers to the questions about life’s meaning, I recommend checking out the links in my Quora bio, where there is a plethora of courses and other materials available to help people find the answers to life’s deepest questions.
We will see an end to the coronavirus when we overcome our negative thoughts, divisiveness and hatred of each other.
Today’s world is fundamentally different to the past because our present era increasingly reveals how dependent we are on each other, all around the world. And the more we depend on each other, the more we rely on each member of human society upholding values of consideration and responsibility toward their fellow human beings.
We need mutual consideration and responsibility today more than ever to spare ourselves from a lot of unnecessary suffering, and more so, to create a safer and happier future for all people.
In terms of the coronavirus, we are still in stages where we think that it will soon end and everything will return to “normal” again.
But it won’t.
The new era of interdependence that we have entered demands that we bridge our rivalries in order to experience our tightening connection harmoniously. Likewise, the coronavirus will subside to the extent that we rise above our negative attitudes to each other and positively connect.
We simply fail to see how much the health or illness of our bodies and surrounding society depends on the positivity or negativity of our thoughts in relation to other people. Until we start actively surrounding ourselves with socio-cultural influences that inspire us to compromise, cooperate, care for one another, and positively connect, then we will continue seeing a rise in negative phenomena—from more and more people falling ill with the virus, to more and more people losing their jobs, their businesses, and their sanity the more they have to maintain social distance.
Today’s tightening interdependent conditions embody a new stage in human evolution, and so we will have to get used to the fact that we will not return to our pre-coronavirus lives. As evolutionary biologists have shown, nature constantly evolves through crisis to greater cooperation and unity, and today is precisely a time of global crisis preparing us to make a global-scale unifying shift.
If we fail to actualize our shift to greater unification above our differences willingly, then we will experience tightening interdependence in an undesirable fashion. It would be akin to sharing a small room with our biggest adversaries. However, if we make moves to positively connect above our divisive inclinations—prioritizing values of mutual consideration and responsibility throughout human society—then we will experience a whole new harmonious world open up to us, ensuring good health, safety and happiness for all.
The good times in the United States have indeed come to an end, and they are not returning. There is a process unfolding in nature, and accordingly the future of the United States will be worse than the future of other nations.
The prevailing disunity within the nation, the individualistic detachment among people, even among more and more American families, and the increasing divisiveness and polarization throughout American society are all outcomes of competitive-materialistic individualism clashing with a new interdependent paradigm that nature is increasingly pressing us with, where we will need to exercise mutual consideration and responsibility in order to secure ourselves a positive future.
The past “what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is yours” paradigm, which America championed, no longer suits the new conditions that nature has placed humanity into, which demands us to function in a much more unified way.
Human nature is fundamentally egoistic. That is, it is a desire to enjoy at the expense of others, and our egoistic nature constantly grows throughout our evolution to a point where we can no longer find any meaningful or lasting enjoyment by trying to fulfill our egos directly. We have been crossing that tipping point significantly over the last 20 to 30 years, and thus we also bear witness to America reaching a satiation point and increasingly struggling to maintain the status it once had.
A positive future for any nation and for the world at large depends on a significant paradigm shift: that we change our connections from trying to egoistically gain and profit off of anyone that we can, to trying to benefit and care for others. These are not merely nice words for us to agree with in one moment, and then forget about in the next. Rather, these are laws of nature, and they reveal themselves to us more and more in our current era.
If we apply ourselves to reach balance with the laws of nature by looking out for each other instead of looking out for self-benefit, then we will experience a much more harmonious existence as we head into the future. Nature will respond to our connection-enriched relations positively, and we will discover a new kind of enjoyment and fulfillment seemingly filling the space between us.
Therefore, while on one hand, the past egoistic paradigm that America championed is coming to an end, as we head into the future, America has the pioneering spirit as well as the world’s stage to impact a major shift in human relations: By implementing positive connections in American society above divisions and polarization, America can become a major positive influence in the world, and such a shift in American society would have harmonious rippling effects all throughout American society as well as the world over.
The only way to end domestic violence for good is by implementing serious education that we need nowadays for our very survival: a new kind of education where we learn about how our egoistic human nature operates on us at every moment, how it is growing in us individually and in humanity as a whole, how it brings about such phenomena as divisiveness, hatred and violence, how today it has reached such heights that it needs new methods that our past education can no longer fulfill, and how to stop it from erupting in such terrible situations as domestic violence.
Violent tendencies exist in every person. While most domestic violence is thought of as men violently abusing women, today we also see such phenomena as mothers violently abusing their children, and even on the contrary, children doing so against their mothers.
Why did nature make us so savage that many of us strike out against our own family members?
It is in order for us to reach a conclusion that our egoistic nature is an evil inclination. Our ego, which is a desire to enjoy at the expense of others, ultimately hates anyone or anything that does not seem to benefit it.
Moreover, today more than ever, domestic violence acts as a prominent example of the immense hatred that is building up within human beings, and that it is all in order for us to reach a desire to put aside this hatred—which clearly leads to no positive outcomes—and start loving one another.
Therefore, the more violence and suffering amounts, the more potential we acquire to reach a desperate cry for change: to transform our nature from egoistic and hateful to altruistic and loving.
This is where the importance of a new form of education enters, one that focuses on teaching us how nature works—including human nature—and how we can develop positive attitudes to each other above the hatred that involuntarily surfaces inside us.
I’m optimistic that with such connection-enriching education, we can bring about great corrections to humanity. I have applied myself to connection-enriching education for dozens of years, and even though by nature I am very egoistic and domineering, by learning how human nature works, and by drawing alongside it a positive environment that is filled with positive examples of altruism, love and care, then I develop constant hope and motivation to become a better person from one day to the next.
That is the kind of drive we need to spread out to society at large if we are to see an end to domestic violence, as well as many other hateful outbursts occurring increasingly in our world today.
Good leaders first and foremost need to love the people they lead.
Their people need to be like their baby, the number one priority in their lives. They should thus be willing to live, work and sacrifice themselves for their people.
By loving their people, good leaders have no thoughts about themselves, but only about how to benefit their people.
In addition, good leaders should have the ability to foresee the future, to feel closeness toward the people they are directly responsible for, as well as the wider spectrum of human society. Good leaders should thus possess the wisdom to understand that a positive future depends on positive connections among people, and have it in their interest to develop positive ties not only among their own people, but between their people and all others. In other words, good leaders need to have a broad heart, a willingness to love everyone, and treat everyone’s success as their own success—not to build their own people’s success on the ruin of others.
Pandemic fatigue takes place when people get exhausted with the pandemic’s restrictions over a prolonged time period, and become less inclined to adhere to public health guidelines.
People with pandemic fatigue turn their attention away from health department regulations, and while different people feel and react to it differently, symptoms often include restlessness, irritability, low motivation, and difficulty to concentrate. It might also include socially retreating or changing eating and or sleeping patterns.
Also, people experiencing pandemic fatigue might react by blatantly opposing its regulations: attending parties, protests, cafés, restaurants, bars, and generally rejecting social distancing, mask-wearing and the recommended level of personal hygiene.
However, despite the various types of pandemic fatigue that many people experience as we plod forward in these testing times, the coronavirus itself remains unaffected. As carelessness increases, so do the amount of people testing positive for the virus. And we see that wherever governments loosen their public health restrictions, infections also increase.
The stressful paradox that many face today, where on one hand, they see no light at the end of the pandemic’s tunnel the further they trod into it, and on the other hand, they burn out in desperation, will lead more and more people to erupt in resistance to the regulations.
Pandemic fatigue should ultimately serve to accelerate our demand to try new remedies for the coronavirus. Instead of twiddling our thumbs waiting for vaccines, we can try to implement a remedy that is risk-free, and which costs us nothing. Before discussing this remedy, I’ll make an important disclaimer that this by no means suggests that we pay no attention to public health guidelines, but on the contrary, while rigorously following public health regulations, we can try to implement the following remedy to the coronavirus: adjusting our attitude to each other to think positively, considerately and responsibly toward one another.
If we could look deeper into what brought about this pandemic, then we would see that negative attitudes to each other create the biggest imbalance in nature, which invites a negative response upon us from nature. Likewise, if we change our attitudes to each other from negative to positive, careless and exploitative to considerate and responsible, then we would enter into balance with nature—and nature would respond positively to us in return.
So while we keep our physical distance from each other for the time being, we would be wise to seek how we could become closer in our mental and emotional distance. One practical way to do so is by relating to the observance of the health department regulations not for each one’s individual protection, but on the contrary, that we observe the health department regulations, keeping our social distance and wearing masks, etc., in order to not infect others. In other words, if we all thought of only “myself” as the one who hosts the virus, and that I now do not want to infect anybody else with it, then we would be on track to seeing the virus quickly subside from our lives.
Inverting the focus from one’s personal protection and benefit to the protection and benefit of others holds immense power. By using this period to make significant improvements in our concern and responsibility toward other people, we would bear witness to tremendously positive effects spreading throughout human society, starting by securing each other’s health.
We thus have nothing to lose and everything to gain, just to twist a little attitude knob within us so that we relate positively, considerately and responsibly toward each other, and then we would be headed on a path to healing not only ourselves, but human society as a whole.
Before asking about who would be a more supportive US president for Israel, we in Israel would be wise to question what we have done to merit the backing of a world superpower.
What are we projecting to the world? Beyond our impressive technological output, what are we contributing? And is advanced technology what the world really needs from us?
Today, the global environment we live in is changing, and likewise, the expectations upon Israel are gradually shifting as well. Heading into the future, if we will want to receive support from a major superpower, or from anyone for that matter, we will need to start paying more careful attention to what we project and contribute to the world, and whether it is what the world ultimately needs from us.
We are a unique nation because unlike other nations, we have no common biological root. Our ancestors, who were from originally from different clans and tribes, united as a nation under an idea: to unite (“love your neighbor as yourself”) above division (“love will cover all crimes”), which granted us the ability to project a positive force to the world, or in other words, to be “a light unto the nations.”
After living for a short period of time upholding our unification “as one man with one heart,” we soon afterward lost awareness of this common value that tied us all together as a nation. Likewise, as we failed to hold onto a mutual umbrella of love above our differences, then our differences eventually got the better of us, and we became exiled: we both lost our unification, and a land of our own.
Goaded by anti-Semitism throughout our exile, many of us rounded up in the land that would become known as the State of Israel, and after the mass tragedy of the Holocaust, a majority of nations agreed to its establishment.
Today, as we head toward the end of 2020, we stand after a decade of rising anti-Semitism, peaking in 2019 with its highest-recorded year of anti-Semitic crimes and threats in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands. We also face growing anti-Semitic sentiment worldwide dressed in a “criticism of Israel” rhetoric, which has gained considerable support diplomatically, academically and culturally, largely due to the efforts of the BDS movement.
If today the United Nations needed to reach a two-thirds majority vote on whether to establish the State of Israel, would it pass? It certainly doesn’t seem so.
We need to understand the root of the negative attitude toward the people of Israel from the nations of the world. When we do, then we can focus on what we need to do in order to invert the negative attitude into a positive one.
The source of the nations’ negative attitude toward us is due to our failure to live up to what made us the people of Israel to begin with: our unity (“love your neighbor as yourself”) above division (“love will cover all crimes”), which granted us the ability to project a positive force to the world (to be “a light unto the nations”).
As the previous decade was characterized by rising anti-Semitism that peaked in 2019 in many countries, including the United States, another characteristic of the last decade was that it was one of ongoing crisis: from aftereffects of the financial crisis that opened the decade with mass unemployment, home foreclosures, austerity measures in many countries, global protests and the forthcoming wars in the Middle East, the constant gray clouds of terrorist acts, mass shootings and a 9.17 percent increase in natural disasters hitting the planet, as well as higher levels of depression, anxiety, stress, loneliness, social division and opioid abuse in the United States than in previous times. In short, as history has shown, such as during the time of the Black Death pandemic that led to mass killings of Jews throughout Europe, or Germany’s First World War defeat and subsequent depression, which eventually led to the rise of Hitler, the Nazis and the Holocaust—when crisis hits, anti-Semitism rises.
Therefore, with our current divisive track record coupled with the crises humanity continues to experience around the world, and especially in America, we can expect more and more detractors eyeing us critically. Likewise, the next United States administration’s attitude to Israel as either positive or negative will depend on whether we upgrade our attitudes to each other to become a more unified people.
Think about what it would be like to be completely connected to other people, like cogwheels, spinning with everyone in total coordination.
Imagine that your thoughts, desires, actions and decisions depend entirely on your surrounding society and circumstances.
It would be intolerable feeling, worse than prison—total enslavement.
You would feel like a caged animal, frantically seeking every possible way to break free.
You would prefer to die than feel that kind of inescapable pressure.
Yet, whether we like it or not, humanity is heading in that direction.
Today, the coronavirus has already illuminated how we have entered a whole new era of global interdependence and interconnectedness, and we can only expect our connections to become tighter.
What, then, is the key to feel our increasing connection not as a prison cell that closes in on us more and more, but as an amazing new phenomenon that opens up all kinds of new opportunities?
That key is a new kind of education.
Until today, our education has mostly raised us to enter the job market, which has already started shaking under the pressure of today’s increasingly interdependent and interconnected reality. Moreover, as we mainly learn how to fill jobs and make careers for ourselves, and fail to learn about how we can manage our relationships successfully in a reality where we become more closely intertwined, then we experience myriad negative outcomes—from increasing depression, stress, anxiety and loneliness on personal scales, through to more social division and polarization in society at large.
At the base of it, the more we develop, the more we connect. However, our connections are superficial: we connect more technologically, economically and through all kinds of phenomena like the coronavirus that place us all into common circumstances around the world. The paradox is that the more we connect in such a way, the more detached we become in our attitudes to each other.
Therefore, today we need a new kind of education that guides our inner psychological adaptation to our increasing external connections, i.e., that we learn how to adapt our attitudes to each other in order to realize our increasing connections positively.
The problem is that our egoistic nature—the desire to enjoy at the expense of others—conflicts with our increasing connection, which demands us to be considerate, conceding, giving and responsible for one another.
What scares me, then, is the thought about how humanity will further connect: Will humanity become flattened under the evolutionary steamroller than connects people more and more with no conscious participation, and thus experience further development as pains and suffering; or will humanity start becoming organized to learn about its nature and the nature of the surrounding integral reality, and start making moves to match its currently divisive and egoistic attitudes with the perfect altruistic connectedness of the surrounding reality?
However, the fear I have is coupled with hope and an unending drive to pass on the method of connection that Kabbalists devised thousands of years ago precisely to be used in our era. I teach the method to my students in daily lessons, just as my teacher did for his students, and also participate in many different TV and Internet programs during the day, viewed by millions around the world in multiple languages—people who have no direct interest in Kabbalah itself, but who can use the principles of the method in order to better understand how nature works, and how it leads us to a need for connection. Even just this basic understanding of the method of connection trickling through serves to point the way to positive connection. However, as we can see, it is insufficient to spare humanity from crisis and suffering.
If we truly wanted to spare ourselves from unnecessary suffering as we further develop, we would need to integrate the method of connection into our educational systems and media influences, so that to the same extent in which we learn about how to fill job positions and encounter all kinds of media that influences us with mostly divisive messaging, we would learn about how to positively connect and become happy, confident and safe human beings, as well as engaging with media that influences us with positive examples, such as people overcoming their base egoistic drives by showing love and care for each other.
For anyone interested in further pursuing this topic, the above video is a documentary that one of my students created on this transitional moment in history, and today’s fateful need to positively connect.
Today, one of my students told me about this year’s very low ratings of the NBA finals, also mentioning how the recent Emmy awards plummeted to all-time low viewer numbers, down 14 percent from last year’s ceremony, as well as the Oscar awards earlier this year dropping to an all-time low viewership. They asked me what I think about this general decline in interest among various forms of entertainment and sport.
Our generation lavished in excesses of entertainment and sport more than any other. We placed them up on pedestals, showering their proponents with our utmost attention and respect. However, all such ways of enjoying and fulfilling ourselves are transient, and at a certain point, our interest in them wanes.
This is because human nature is a desire to enjoy, which constantly grows and demands new and different kinds of enjoyments to our previous ones. While all kinds of influences can turn our heads to basketball one minute, and then to film and actors the next minute, and then to another pleasure the minute after that, ad nauseam, at a certain point of our desire’s development, we will find that no matter what anybody tries to attract us with, we will feel disinterested.
It will simply be because our desire has outgrown what previously gave us enjoyment. Similar to a child who outgrows his or her toys, we too will start feeling drives for more mature and meaningful fulfillment—genuine human connection and answers to deeper questions about our life’s ultimate meaning, which will itch away at us more and more.
This year in particular, the coronavirus struck our lives, highlighting our vast interdependence all around the globe, and placing us all into a common global situation. It is as if we found ourselves aboard a new global Titanic, floating in space, without any clue as to where it is taking us or what will happen tomorrow.
As we float along together on this giant planetary ship, nobody really knows where to turn or what to do, so some turn right, others turn left, and we find ourselves in a major global crisis as we polarize more and more.
Therefore, as our desires start outgrowing what previously fulfilled them, and while we increasingly realize our tightening interdependence and interconnectedness worldwide—that we share a common global problem—it is no wonder that the NBA finals, and Emmy and Oscar award shows, have reached record lows in interest.
We are growing up. I am optimistic that we will become more aware of how our human nature operates on us, how it is growing to new heights, and how it starts demanding different and more meaningful kinds of fulfillment. I am also hopeful that we will succeed in providing our more mature needs the fulfillment they seek—to realize our increasing interdependence and interconnectedness positively, and by doing so, feel a much fuller, more expansive and authentic reality to our current one.
If we start navigating through these turbulent seas crashing against our common ship today, seeking how to meaningfully connect above our drives for momentary pleasures, then we can rest assured that our ship will reach a safe shore.
Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Are there any positives to the coronavirus?“
