On the need for painful reviews

From an interesting interview by the great American thinker, Noam Chomsky: "Anyone who dreams of returning to the normal situation that prevailed before the Corona pandemic is mistaken, mainly because that situation was not normal in anything."

What the pandemic has shown is the magnitude of the vulnerability of that "normal" situation, which some dream to return to once the effective drug and protective vaccine are discovered. This does not mean - as some people imagine - that once the pandemic ends, we will suddenly move to a world that has nothing to do with what we were living in before Corona.

What is certain is that the gravity of the crisis will compel us all to radically reconsider all the foundations upon which the contemporary world is built, and that the matter will lead - long or short - to a fundamental change in the ways we think and live, and the matter started, if not many realize.

This pandemic is like an earthquake that forces engineers to create buildings that will in the future be able to withstand earthquakes that may be stronger and more deadly; it is necessary to understand the weaknesses of old buildings. In the same way, there are painful reviews that we will have as individuals, peoples and nations, to show all the weaknesses in what we have built of intellectual and material systems and policies, and to use what the terrible experience we have taught us to build better.

Take the first system experienced by the Corona earthquake, which is the health system. For a health system to collapse in poor countries in front of a pandemic with such a risk is not surprising, but to give the major western countries - such as America, Britain and Italy - the catastrophic picture that we saw them transporting medical aid from military aircraft Chinese, this is something that all of these countries will have to make more than painful reviews regarding the rehabilitation of their health systems.

In fact, I was not surprised by the collapse of the American health system that Barack Obama tried to fix, then Donald Trump came to spoil all of the man's reforms. I was also not surprised by the dislocation of the British health system while paying - and making innocent patients pay - a liberal price that has lost all moral controls.

I remember that in the early 1980s - in my job as a professor of preventive medicine at the Faculty of Medicine in Sousse - I had a lesson for the fifth year students on health systems in the world, depending on the comparison between the health system in a communist country like the Soviet Union and a capitalist country like America as a model, and between countries like Sweden and Britain take the best ideas of capitalism and socialism.

I was demonstrating to the students - based on the amount of funding in relation to the gross national product, and the results in terms of public health - that the worst health system is the American. Its cost was high and its cost-effectiveness weak in terms of disease resistance and reduced death rates, both in infants and in the elderly. All this because it was not built for the benefit of patients, but rather for an extremist liberal interest. Health is a commodity, like all goods are bought and sold, and the concern for hospitals or insurance companies is profit above all else.

I have always shown students - based on available figures from scientific studies - that the best health system is the British system, because it mixes patient freedom, justice and planning, and because it is funded by the state through taxes. This was before Margaret Thatcher came to power and, in the late 1980s, the British health system was torn apart, and her keywords are privatization and the hospital as an economic institution that spends only patients on what you earn from them.

What is certain is that the liberalism that was under the artillery shelling of the world's leading economists - like Thomas Picti - will emerge from the crisis in a more vulnerable situation, not only as a result of the performance of the health systems that you owe, but also to show how quickly the global economic machine has shaped it, especially after the agreements of the President American Reagan and British Prime Minister Thatcher in the late 1980s.

As soon as our pandemic raids led to the collapse of production as a result of the interruption of communication between factories distributed around the world according to the licenses of labor here and there, which suddenly led to the unemployment tsunami and behind it the specter of the return of famines in the most vulnerable countries These are difficult times waiting for the worshipers of liberalism.

Peoples and elites turned a blind eye to their faults and shortcomings while destroying nature, as it also considered it an area of ​​enrichment from all fields. But it may not forgive its responsibility in the current economic crisis, and what crises may follow - after the end of the pandemic - of crises that will not be tolerated by neither the peoples, nor even the countries most subject to major international companies.

Patriotism and nationalism? The pandemic has shown the obsolescence of the concept as almost a caricature. This virus teaches us the most important lesson, which is that mankind is one and the world is one. What afflicts him and dies with his death?

Any meaning of the borders today in a world in which - as a result of the Chinese evil of the meat of the bats - thousands of Italians, Spaniards and French people are falling, and there are Lebanese hunger demonstrations, and robberies abound in semolina trucks in Tunisia. Everyone's mockery of his "brilliant" proposals for how to treat the disease?

What about democracy? Before the pandemic, she was in a difficult situation between the populist hammer and the anvil of corruption, which sowed all its pillars from the press, parties and elections. And it comes out after the pandemic, more exhausted than ever, and old and new autocrats rub their hands, comparing the poor performance of Western democracies with the performance of the Chinese system, presenting it as the optimal political system for the future.

It is useless to remind them that it was the DPRK that did the best against the epidemic. Today, eyes remain tight for China and the system in which the Arabs may see the realization of one of their oldest, deepest and most dangerous delusions: the just tyrannical regime.

Take human rights now; of course, there is a huge problem arising from the aggravating threat to individual and collective freedoms, with the technology that surveillance and tracking possibilities offer, and the pandemic represented a golden opportunity to test it on an unprecedented scale. The pandemic also put us as a jurist before a challenge that was never before.

Today we know that most of the people who are killed by the Coronavirus are elderly people with chronic diseases. Are we sacrificed - to preserve the lives of a relatively small group of people for a few extra years of their life-ending nature - with the rights of hundreds of millions to work and food by stopping the economic wheel and quarantine?

How do we respond, as jurists, to the news of the race between the wealthy people to buy small islands in the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, to entrench themselves and their families and their guards, pending the end of the pandemic, they do not care whether they will destroy a part of mankind or all people? Is the right to property - as stated in Chapter XVII of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - a comprehensive divorce that cannot be violated under any pretext, as is the case with Chapter Five, which prohibits torture and physical harm? Or is it a relative right that has certain limits?

Is it not the state’s right - in such circumstances - to suspend this right for owners of unjust wealth until it finances - with what they have piled up and exceeding their needs - projects to save hundreds of millions of hungry people, and they also belong to the human family and have the right to life if the pandemic is prolonged? What if the Universal Declaration itself needs revision not only at the level of this chapter, but also at the level of other chapters, for revision and addition?

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The issue is not that we expiate with all the theories we have worshiped, nor that we slam our chests in search of penance for our running beyond illusions that cost our people so much. The correct proposition is that we always think about the data of our time, with its concepts, language and images, and that at every stage of society’s development and its problems, we strive both to find solutions. Some of these solutions have succeeded, and they allowed societies to develop even relatively. There are solutions whose boundaries have become clear and the situation requires improvement. Among them are solutions that have proven corrupt or obsolete, and we have a right to search for alternatives.

This is exactly what we are required to do today, and the pandemic exposes all the old rifts that existed in the most sacred intellectual sanctities of this or that part of our societies, namely patriotism (and nationalism as a broader form of patriotism), progressive, democratic, liberal, human rights and political Islam.
Such a review would be extremely costly and painful, as it would necessarily receive a wide response from the temple guards struck by the Corona earthquake at heart.

In my youth I wrote a critical book - as strong as they say - entitled "In Prison of Mind" (which is available on my website) to describe the mentality of a people who Galilee said to them, "They prefer to deny facts that their eyes see in the sky rather than deny the mistakes they read in Aristotle's books." Then I learned by experience to understand - and even to understand - the position of the doctrinal, because in reality they perform a necessary function.

The most fear of societies is chaos, and therefore one of their most important demands is stability; therefore, they need the brakes of conservatives. But societies are severely weakened by inertia, and therefore one of their most important demands is development. Therefore, they are always in need of reformers and revolutionaries. In the end, neither the conservatives are able to get rid of the reformists and revolutionaries, nor can they get rid of those, and the collective mind needs both to find the necessary balance between stillness and movement.

This means that time and effort should not be wasted in discussing those who - consciously or subconsciously - have preserved as long as possible the old concepts and practices. Time is enough for them, so the best of them is the search for compromises, and the worst of them is the decay of a building that falls apart day after day, until it falls on their skeletons. A model of the 1950s nationalism that maintains Arabism over an outdated vision, and to this day defends the practices of tyrants who committed against this afflicted nation of crimes unless they dared neither colonialism nor Zionism.

It remains for the kinetic part of the collective mind to do its job and the situation as it is of exceptional gravity. We must therefore quickly create for us a valuable intellectual system that is the compass, just as we must create effective political tools for translating ideas and values ​​into actions that save individuals, peoples and humankind.

To date, there is not even a beginning of milestones for this system. Who can say today that he has a clear vision of post-liberalism, post-nationalism, post-democracy, post-political Islam, post-progressive, and post-human rights?

The only constant is that we must think outside the box of a struggle with our ignorance, with the enormous complexity of problems and with the conservative part of the collective mind. There is no choice but to declare the "intellectual aversion" and to combine all our energies to formulate such a vision.

How? See how the scientific researchers acted in this crisis, as the Chinese did not keep their discoveries regarding the genetic makeup of the virus, but were quick to put it at the disposal of all researchers around the world, as did their colleagues from all countries. Today, there is another experiment that continues at this moment. It is an initiative of an American university to collect the largest number of computers in the world, so that the network of enormous computational energy can accelerate the development of visualizing a protein shape that prevents the virus from landing on the surface of cells and then entering them.

It is not required that you yourself be a researcher or expert in proteins, all of you are required to lend your device in his spare time, to add his capabilities to the capabilities of the rest of the computers. As for scientific issues, they will be handled by the specialized researchers. These two examples open the way for us.

We need to put all of our experiences in the same basket, and tie our brains together. They are prerequisites for the crystallization of the new intellectual order that we desperately need, in order to save ourselves, and perhaps return to inject new ideas into a massive global collective mind that we see forming under our eyes, and we do not contribute to it, since the time of Ibn Khaldun. For the rest of the conversation.