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the changes ahead?
Covid
How do we navigate
the changes ahead?
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David Passig, Futurism

Biography

Futurism

David Passig

David
Passig

David Passig is a futurist, lecturer, consultant and best–selling author specializing in technological, social, and geopolitical futures. He is the Chairman of his consulting firm, Future Code Ltd. and co-founder of ThinkZ LTD. He has consulted in Israel, Asia, Europe and North America, and served as chief advisor to the Commissioner for Future Generations in the Israeli Knesset.

Transcription of the video

Q1

Which domain or aspect of social life will show the most significant positive societal and/or psychological change in response to the pandemic?

Most of the people think this is the end of the pandemic, in about a couple months, we’re going to have a vaccine or something like that. But actually, we are just at the very initial stage of a very long crisis that might take between three to five years. But we know from previous kind of pandemics, that at the beginning, people tend to lose confidence in their leaders, they tend to be very aggressive towards other groups. And they tend to be melancholic about almost anything in their surrounding. But about 5 to 10 years after such a crisis, we know that people regain confidence, they are trying to restart the new thinking about their social paradigms.One of those consequences is that people will be much attentive to understand how connected we are as a species.They will understand how we are in a kind of symbiosis with each other, we are not just, you know, affiliated. Those kind of terms, affiliation, be part of a group or sharing will be probably old terms of understanding how we connect with each other. Our connections are much, much deeper, they go through very deep layers of existence and that consciousness will be a much more spread across very different kinds of social groups.
Q2

What kind of wisdom will people need to capitalize on the positive societal and/or psychological change after the pandemic?

There is an idea in quantum physics that says that particles are entangled with some other particles. The entanglement idea is that for each particle in this universe, there are other particles that are kind of connected in a symbiotic way. And whenever you do something on one particle, the other particle that is far away in different place in the universe is reacting as if you were acting on him or only it specifically. So the idea of entanglement is probably one of the sources of this social consciousness that is going to develop, the more we enter the 21st century. So if you wish, this is something which is fascinating if we are to experience it. What happened in the last century was a similar process. After the Spanish flu, we started developing that idea of globalization. And that was the main idea of the 20th century. And we achieved a lot of thing because of that paradigm: Combining forces, combining entities, combining nations, etc, in order to multiply a force of unity. But globalization is primitive stage of understanding how we are connected.The globalization paradigm is based on a voluntarily kind of set of mindset. If I want to be part of a group of, let’s say, institutes or nations, then it’s my decision to make. If I decide that it’s not doing me any good, then I retreat and that’s it. But that’s not a paradigm that can avoid such a crisis. The World Health Organization was based exactly upon that idea that it’s voluntarily kind of Institute and it didn’t have any authority to influence the nations to act upon their guidelines. So we will be able to develop new institutes in the 21st century that will reflect the idea that we are really connected in a symbiotic way. And in those institutes, we will be given the authority to bring their decisions and their suggestions into play. Even though nations and other cultures will not accept those decisions, we will be giving them a lot of power to be able to institute their ideas. It looks and it sounds horrible, to say at this point, because we’re not exactly attuned to an international institute that will force the local and the national entities to do whatever they want. Even though we have been trying to do this in the last century, but we are moving towards the next stage of the development of that paradigm.
Q3

Which domain or aspect of social life will show the most significant negative societal and/or psychological change in response to the pandemic?

In the short term, which is in the next 5-10 years, we’re going to see hate crimes skyrocketing. We are going to see unusual leadership that is going to take over a democracy.We’re going to see leaders that are self-confident, that they will be able to do things that others are not able to do and we’re going to see some characters that are going to be very colorful in the leadership area worldwide in different places, specifically in democracies.
Q4

What kind of wisdom will people need to master to overcome major negative societal and/or psychological changes after the pandemic?

We are a species that is evolving. And fortunately one of the mechanisms of evolution is a pandemic, and then generally speaking, the crises. And we have to be very patient to see how we evolve. Because evolving is not an easy process to go through. Most of the time, it hurts. Most of the time, people are not willing to change and to be very creative in new ways in order to survive. We need patience to go through these times, but humanity is evolving, and thank God, we have a crisis that is hitting us in the head to awake from previous ideas.
Q5

What piece of wisdom do people need to make it through the pandemic?

If we are to learn something from the past and from previous pandemics, we know that whoever was organized in very tight communities, and has a greater change chance to go in those times without the significant byproducts, because communal organization is something that can provide for the very individual person, provide the psychological umbrella, and financial assistance in times that person and individual needs that assistance. The national entities and institutions in those kinds of times have hard time understanding the genuine needs of individuals, and they have hard time acting as fast as possible in order to address those needs in an immediate way. The only organizational entities that are able to act very fast and really be attentive to genuine needs are our communities. And whoever is not part of the community, this is the time to be part of the community. And by community, I mean any type of community. But that community needs to be constantly in contact with each other and with the group. We have technologies, it’s much easier to do.
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