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The Corona Reverse Forecast: How We Will Be Surprised When the Crisis Is "Over"
Source: www.horx.com, www.zukunftsinstitut.de
I am currently often asked when Corona will "be over" and everything will return to normal. My answer: Never. There are historical moments when the future changes direction. We call them bifurcations. Or depth crises. Those times are now.
The world as we know it is just disintegrating. But behind it, a new world is coming together, the shaping of which we can at least guess at. For this purpose, I would like to offer you an exercise with which we have had good experience in visioning processes at companies. We call it the RE gnosis. Unlike PRO-Gnosis, we do not "look into the future" with this technique. But from the future BACK to today. Sounds crazy? Let's give it a try:
The Re-Gnosis: Our World in the Fall of 2020
Let's imagine a situation in the fall, say September 2020. We are sitting in a street cafe in a big city. It is warm and people are moving on the street again. Do they move differently? Is everything the same as before? Does the wine, the cocktail, the coffee, taste like it used to? Like back then before Corona?
Or even better?
What will we wonder about in retrospect?
We will be surprised that the social renunciations we had to make rarely led to loneliness. On the contrary. After an initial shock, many of them were even relieved that all the running, talking, communicating on multi-channels suddenly came to a halt. Renunciations do not necessarily mean loss, but can even open up new spaces of possibility. Many people have experienced this, for example, when they tried interval fasting and suddenly found that food tasted good again. Paradoxically, the physical distance that the virus enforced simultaneously generated new closeness. We met people we would never have met otherwise. We reconnected with old friends more frequently, strengthening ties that had become loose and looser. Families, neighbors, friends, have moved closer and sometimes even resolved hidden conflicts.
Social politeness, which we increasingly lacked before, increased.
Now in the fall of 2020, the atmosphere at football matches is very different from that in the spring, when there was a lot of mass rage mobbing. We wonder why that is.
We will be surprised how quickly cultural techniques of the digital suddenly proved themselves in practice. Teleconferencing and videoconferencing, which most colleagues had always resisted (the business plane was better) turned out to be quite viable and productive. Teachers learned a lot about Internet teaching. The home office has become second nature to many - including the improvising and time juggling that comes with it.
At the same time, seemingly outdated cultural techniques experienced a renaissance. Suddenly, you didn't just catch the answering machine when you called, but real people. The virus spawned a new culture of long-distance calling without a second screen. Even the "messages" themselves suddenly took on a new meaning. People were really communicating again. No one was left floundering anymore. No one was stalling anymore. Thus, a new culture of accessibility emerged. The liability.
People who never settled down because of the hectic pace, including young people, suddenly went for long walks (a word that was rather a foreign word before). Reading books suddenly became a cult.
Reality shows suddenly seemed grotty. All the trivia trash, the endless soul garbage that flowed through all the channels. No, he did not disappear completely. But it lost value furiously.
Does anyone remember the political correctness controversy? The endless culture wars over ... well, what was it all about?
Crises work primarily by dissolving old phenomena, making them superfluous....
Cynicism, that casual way of keeping the world at bay through devaluation, was suddenly very much out.
The hyperbole-fear hysteria in the media, after a brief initial outburst, held off.
Along the way, the endless flood of gruesome crime series also reached its tipping point.
We'll be surprised, that drugs were finally found to increase the survival rate back in the summer after all. This lowered the death rates and Corona became a virus that we just have to deal with - similar to the flu and the many other diseases. Medical progress helped. But we also learned: The decisive factor was not so much the technology, but the change in social forms of behavior. The fact that people could remain in solidarity and constructive despite radical restrictions was the deciding factor. Human-social intelligence has helped. The much-vaunted Artificial Intelligence, which is known to be able to solve everything , on the other hand, has only had a limited effect on Corona.
This has shifted the relationship between technology and culture. Before the crisis, technology seemed to be the panacea, the bearer of all utopias. No one - or only a few hardcore people - still believe in the great digital salvation today. The big technology hype is over. We focus our attention again more on the humane questions: What is the human being? What are we to each other?
We marvel backwards, at how much humor and humanity actually emerged in the days of the virus.
We will be surprised, how far the economy could shrink without something like "collapse" actually happening, which was previously invoked with every tax increase and government intervention, no matter how small. Although there was a "black April," a deep economic slump and a stock market collapse of 50 percent, although many companies went bankrupt, shrank or mutated into something completely different, it never got to zero. As if economy were a breathing being that can also doze or sleep and even dream.
Today in the fall, there is again a world economy. But global just-in-time production, with huge branching value chains carting millions of individual parts across the planet, has outlived its usefulness. It is currently being disassembled and reconfigured. Intermediate storage, depots, reserves are growing again everywhere in the production and service facilities. Local production is booming, networks are being localized, and crafts are experiencing a renaissance. The global system is drifting toward gloCalization: localization of the global.
We'll be surprised, that even the asset losses from the stock market collapse don't hurt as much as it felt at first. In the new world, wealth suddenly no longer plays a decisive role. More important are good neighbors and a flourishing vegetable garden.
Could it be that the virus changed our lives in a direction it wanted to change anyway?
RE-Gnosis: Present-managing-through-future-jump
Why does this kind of "from the future" scenario seem so irritatingly different from a classical forecast? This has to do with the specific characteristics of our sense of the future. When we look "into the future," we usually only see the dangers and problems "coming toward us," piling up into insurmountable barriers. Like a locomotive coming out of the tunnel and running over us. This fear barrier separates us from the future. That's why horror futures are always the easiest to depict.
Re-gnoses, on the other hand, form a cognition loop in which we include ourselves, our inner change, in the future calculation. We connect inwardly with the future, and this creates a bridge between today and tomorrow. A "future mind" - future awareness - is created.
If you do it right, something like future intelligence emerges. We are able to anticipate not only the external "events" but also the internal adaptations with which we respond to a changing world.
That already feels quite different from a prognosis, which in its apodictic character always has something dead, sterile about it. We leave the rigidity of fear and get back into the aliveness that belongs to every true future.
We all know the feeling of successful fear overcoming. When we go to the dentist for treatment, we are anxious long before. We lose control in the dentist's chair and it hurts before it hurts at all. In anticipation of this feeling, we work ourselves up into fears that can completely overwhelm us. However, once we have survived the procedure, the coping feeling sets in: the world seems young and fresh again, and we are suddenly full of zest for action.
Coping means coping. Neurobiologically, the fear adrenaline is replaced by dopamine, a kind of endogenous future drug. While adrenaline directs us to flight or fight (which is not really productive in the dentist's chair, just as it is not when fighting Corona), dopamine opens our brain synapses: We are excited about what is coming, curious, anticipatory. When we have a healthy level of dopamine, we make plans, have visions that move us into anticipatory action.
Surprisingly, many in the Corona Crisis are experiencing just that. A massive loss of control suddenly turns into a real rush of positivity. After a period of bewilderment and fear, an inner strength emerges. The world "ends," but in the experience that we are still there, a kind of new-ness arises within.
In the middle of the shut-down of civilization, we walk through forests or parks, or across almost empty squares. But this is not an apocalypse, but a new beginning.
Thus it turns out: Change begins as a changed pattern of expectations, of perceptions and world connections. At the same time, it is sometimes precisely the break with routines, the familiar, that releases our sense of the future again. The idea and certainty that everything could be completely different - even for the better.
We may even be surprised that Trump will be voted out in November. The AFD is showing serious signs of fraying because vicious, divisive politics do not fit a Corona world. In the Corona crisis, it became clear that those who want to set people against each other have nothing to contribute to real questions about the future. When things get serious, the destructive nature that resides in populism becomes clear.
Politics in its original sense as the formation of social responsibilities was given new credibility and legitimacy in this crisis. Precisely because it had to act "authoritatively," politics created trust in society. Science also experienced an astonishing renaissance during the probation crisis. Virologists and epidemiologists became media stars, but "futurist" philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, who had previously been on the fringes of polarized debates, also regained voice and weight.
Fake news, on the other hand, rapidly lost market value. Conspiracy theories also suddenly seemed like slow sellers, even though they were offered like sour beer.
A virus as an evolution accelerator
Deep crises also point to another basic principle of change: The trend-countertrend synthesis.
The new world after Corona - or rather with Corona - is emerging from the disruption of the megatrend connectivity. In political-economic terms, this phenomenon is also called "globalization". Disrupting connectivity - through border closures, separations, compartmentalizations, quarantines - does not, however, eliminate connectivity. But to a reorganization of the connectomes that hold our world together and carry it into the future. There is a phase jump of socio-economic systems.
The world to come will value distance again - and precisely because of this, make connectedness more qualitative. Autonomy and dependence, opening and closing, are rebalanced. This can make the world more complex, but at the same time more stable. This reshaping is largely a blind evolutionary process - because one fails, the new, capable of survival, prevails. This makes you dizzy at first, but then it proves its inner meaning: future-proof is what connects the paradoxes on a new level.
However, this process of complexification - not to be confused with complication - can also be consciously shaped by humans. Those who can do this, who speak the language of the complexity to come, will be the leaders of tomorrow. The nascent hopefuls. The coming Gretas.
"We will adjust our entire attitude toward life through Corona - in terms of our existence as living beings in the midst of other life forms."
Slavo Zizek at the height of the Corona crisis in mid-March.
Every deep crisis leaves behind a story, a narrative that points far into the future. One of the strongest visions left by the corona virus are the Italians playing music on the balconies. The second vision is sent to us by satellite images that suddenly show the industrial areas of China and Italy free of smog. In 2020, humanity's CO&sub2; emissions will fall for the first time. This fact will do something to us.
If the virus can do something like that - can we possibly do it too? Maybe the virus was just a messenger from the future. His drastic message is: human civilization has become too dense, too fast, too overheated. It races too much in a certain direction where there is no future.
But it can reinvent itself.
System reset.
Cool down!
Music on the balconies!
This is how the future works.