Resilience specialist and neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik gives us his analysis of the health disaster and explains how the appearance of the coronavirus will profoundly disrupt our lives.
Is the health and economic crisis of 2020 bad news or the opportunity to make a fresh start?
BORIS CYRULNIK.
"Crisis" is not the right word to describe what we are going through.
After a crisis or a shock, everything resumes as before, without change.
Catastrophe is the right word, because we will not be able to start again as before.
The disaster generates a trauma that pushes to get out of the situation in a new direction.
There have been deaths, people traumatized, lives shattered by economic ruin.
But what caused this was society, not the virus.
Resilience will be longer and more difficult than if it had been necessary to emerge from a brief and brutal shock.
Bankruptcy is global.
We need a profound change in society so as not to repeat the same mistakes.
In March, Emmanuel Macron used the word “war” to define the fight against the virus.
Are we at war?
Yes.
All words change meaning when the context changes.
No one misunderstands when the lexicon warrior is used to describe a football match, for example: attack, offense, defense.
It is a usual semantic drift.
War is the right word to describe what weapons we had to use in an attempt to defeat the invisible enemy that is this virus.
Morning essentials newsletter
A tour of the news to start the day
Subscribe to the newsletterAll newsletters
VIDEO. Emmanuel Macron, March 16, 2020: "We are at war"
Have we ever fought such battles?
Yes, humanity has always faced catastrophes: wars, natural disasters, social insecurity, pandemics of plague, cholera… The youngest people believed that we could live without war or epidemic.
They lived outside of these realities and of death.
But they forgot that it has been the human condition since the Neolithic!
And each of these catastrophes has led to a change in society.
Which ones, for example?
The fourteenth century had to face successive epidemics of plague.
The development of the Silk Road and international trade favored the transmission of the virus.
In 1351, the Black Death had killed nearly one in two Europeans in a few years!
Those who survived are those who remained confined.
There were so many deaths that there was no more labor to cultivate the land and produce food.
Everything had to be learned again, many had to change jobs, families discovered the importance of the house.
The artists abandoned religious art for humanist, pagan, domestic art.
We invented a way of living together, which culminated in the Renaissance.
There was also, in 1755, the tsunami which caused the fire in Lisbon and killed 70,000 people.
This led to the total reorganization of the Portuguese city.
Or the First, then the Second World War.
But, in 2020, it is the first time in human history that the economy has been ruined everywhere in the world to escape death.
It is an ethical choice which of course also has consequences, especially social ones, but it is completely new.
READ ALSO>
Before the Covid-19, these epidemics which have exceeded one million deaths
How to approach 2021?
In 2020, protective factors against this virus were put in place: we confined ourselves, we wear masks and adopted barrier gestures.
We began to see that the problem was also our consumption patterns, our excesses, transport.
In 2021, we will not be done with this virus.
We are probably going to have to reconfine ourselves and we will have to get vaccinated.
All to prepare for the recovery and a new social and economic development, which will not happen before 2022.
What will 2022 look like then?
If we respect the rules already in place, the virus will probably be practically extinct, in any case enough not to cause a pandemic.
We will have to take stock: count the dead, assess the destruction, economic ruin, the number of those who have fallen into precariousness.
History shows us that disaster outcomes are always the same.
There are schematically only three possible avenues.
What is the first?
Make up for lost time and money during the crisis.
And put the pre-existing economy back on the road.
Exactly the same, with its pitfalls, its drifts which led to disaster.
We then put in place all the conditions to promote the emergence of a new virus within three years, perhaps even more virulent and destructive.
We know that this economic cataclysm stems above all from a global excess of transport, consumption and a general lack of ethics.
Did you know, for example, that a steak imported from Argentina goes around the world twice before arriving on the stall of a French butcher?
Is this really reasonable?
Is this what we want to reproduce?
What would be the second possible way after this crisis?
In the coming months, the number of bankruptcies and layoffs will explode.
And history shows us that gurus - scientific, political, religious… - emerge from situations of social and economic chaos.
They captivate and reassure the crowds.
Germany's defeat in 1918 brought Hitler to power in 1933. And remember even the most educated and educated Germans worshiped him.
Desperate people believe the gurus and “elect dictators” is a constant, because unhappy people vote for “saviors”.
Watch out for cultural crooks who will emerge in the coming months, because 2022 is the year of the presidential election!
The danger is there and can arise from economic chaos.
Far more people will vote for the extremes than before.
And even for cultural extremists - who claim predictions like conspirators - and religious, if they did come forward.
Is it important to believe to overcome a crisis?
Is believing in God or something else part of the resilience process?
Belief can be the one that protects: it is spirituality.
People who believe cope better with unhappiness, cope with it better, and it can then be a factor of resilience.
But there is also the closed belief, of clan, which leads to war, to hatred of others and to their annihilation.
Because he doesn't believe in the same God, he deserves to die for it, his life is worthless.
It is a perverse effect.
Disasters can thus become the breeding ground for conspiracy, religious, cultural, political and even scientific extremism.
Has conspiracy not exploded in recent months?
Terrorism has also reactivated in our territory.
These are the first signs of the totalitarian journey, of propaganda and of the possible emergence of new gurus.
During the past centuries, during the plague epidemics, the Jews were pointed out as scapegoats and burned alive by the plotters.
In 2020, I heard sectarian speeches claiming that this virus had been manufactured, or that it was not more dangerous than the flu, that we had to let nature work and let our old people die.
Who are the next scapegoats that the conspirators will appoint on social networks?
"Disasters can become the breeding ground for conspiracy, religious, cultural, political and even scientific extremism."
Réa / Valentine Vermei
Let us return to the three possible options for getting out of this crisis.
Reassure us, is a more optimistic third way possible?
Yes, that of rebirth!
It is not a revolution but a better evolution of the previous company.
This is the definition of resilience.
It is about building a new society from what was good before, to invent new values, new economic and social organizations, new rituals, professions, consumption patterns ... These projects were underway before 2020 but the pandemic accelerates them.
It's very positive, if you understand what led to the chaos.
So what could this new world look like?
First, as at the time of the Renaissance, it was undoubtedly the artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, designers and even journalists who would imagine the contours of this new society.
Their works, films and articles are already giving rise to democratic debates which will lead to the rebirth of our society.
We are going to change our consumption habits, refocus on the local, and therefore change our modes of transport, our social and family organizations.
In what ways?
As we have already done this summer, we will spend more family vacations, we will change our relationship with time and places, we will stay closer to home, our family ties will thus be less diluted.
And we will reconstruct reassuring emotional rituals.
This is essential, since the natural tranquilizer for any human being is attachment.
At the professional level, teleworking will undoubtedly become the norm.
Individuals will change jobs up to twenty times in a lifetime, challenging the role of the university, valuing learning and continuing education.
The couple will also evolve.
Women will be more and more independent.
The oaths will therefore no longer be the same, it will be the end of the marriage.
The very structure of families - undoubtedly more and more recomposed - will change, which will also lead to changes in parenthood, education, etc.
Will women have a different place in this new society?
It is desirable, yes!
Because, since the beginnings of humanity, the price to be paid under the reign of male domination is war, violence, work which borders on torture or slavery.
Are we really going to put this same process back in place?
It has been demonstrated: in the tertiary professions, which are developing more and more, women achieve the same performance and often obtain much better results than those of men.
Children don't have the same parents today as they did a few decades ago.
They will therefore not become the same adults.
Because their mothers are active and liberated, their fathers are more involved in the home and their education from their first thousand days of existence.
The societies of yesterday were built on violence and we can end it.
It all depends on the stories and debates that our artists, media, novelists and politicians will carry from today.
This reconstruction is based on the way out of the crisis that our democracy will choose.