The current novel coronavirus pandemic isn’t an existential crisis—unlike global warming—but it is a unique opportunity to reevaluate our most basic assumptions about modern civilization.
I’ve spent a good part of the last dozen years trying to come up with a viable alternative to the way that contemporary human society operates. I’m neither an economist nor a political scientist, but it’s been clear to me for most of my life that Capitalism and Democracy are, at best, imperfect solutions to the challenge of co-existing on a global scale. At worst—like this or this or this or that—they’re prone to exacerbate rather than alleviate crises.
It’s a valuable exercise to imagine how this pandemic might play out under different circumstances. Let’s say there’s a parallel universe, with an alternate Earth, where the economic and political systems are intentionally optimized to offer the maximum benefit to the greatest number of people, while doing the least possible harm. I call this paradigm Optimalism.
If this sounds utopian, that’s the whole point! Optimalism is a theoretical model of human society, specifically designed to address everything that’s wrong with the model we have.
It’s a bit of an over-simplification, but for the sake of convenience, let’s call our current paradigm (encompassing both Democracy and Capitalism) Individualism. Individualism is optimized for individual outcomes rather than universal ones and involves decisions made through variations on the winner-take-all contest. Because humans are naturally both greedy and scared, the promise of maybe being a winner and the threat of maybe being a loser have been an effective carrot and stick pair of motivational forces for several centuries.
And it’s true that over that time, by nearly every measure, everyone’s lives (even the losers’) have improved. But we could be doing so much better. It’s entirely possible to feed, house, clothe, educate and provide healthcare for everyone in the world, while using fewer of the Earth’s limited resources and producing less emissions and pollution than we currently do.
The biggest problem with Individualism is that it’s based on an outdated set of rules and doesn’t have the flexibility to adapt to a world that’s changing faster than anyone ever imagined. And critically, this paradigm is uniquely unsuited to situations like pandemics and climate change, where the consequences for losing are catastrophic for all of humanity—even for the winners.
In Optimalism, decision-making is guided entirely by science, instead of by ideology or the vagaries of “the market” .
Rather than political power alternating between groups of “conservatives” and “liberals” (who are themselves beholden to varying degrees to the wealthiest people and corporations), political power is decentralized and distributed among the whole population. I’ll explain what that means in practice in a later post.
So what happens when the humans of Optimalist Earth are confronted with a pandemic, like our COVID-19?
Arguably, under Optimalism, there would be no transmission of coronaviruses from wild animals to humans in the first place, because nobody would be hungry enough to resort to eating questionable meat from a wet market and because boundaries would exist to separate human and animal habitats. But that scenario wouldn’t teach us much, so let’s imagine that even on Optimalist Earth, every few years a virus makes the jump from infecting wild animals to humans.
You might think it’s inevitable that such a virus would spread among the local community for at least a few days until one of the victims’ symptoms got bad enough to send them to a doctor. But even that assumption is tainted by Individualistic thinking.
In an Optimalist society, healthcare is considered as essential as roads are in our world: a service that some people need all the time, that everyone needs sometimes and no one ever wonders whether they’ll be able to afford it when they do need it, because it’s just there by default.
The Optimalist medical system is built around preventing (rather than treating) disease, because that’s been shown to produce better health outcomes for all of society (as opposed to producing more profit for a few companies).
So, on Optimalist Earth, every home has a health scanner that tests each family member’s vitals on a daily basis. Because it’s a daily routine, this scanner knows each person’s individual variability and immediately detects any unusual deviation, to trigger a more in-depth medical examination. As soon as a cluster of similar anomalies pops up, a containment protocol kicks in. People identified as having the contagious disease are put into isolation, as is anyone they’ve been in contact with, until the infection is contained and eliminated. Simple.
But this simple process of isolating the infected is incredibly difficult under Individualism. On our Earth, the broad assumption is that adults don’t get to eat or have a roof over their heads unless they’ve worked to earn those things. Even most people with reasonable sick leave provisions aren’t in a position to survive weeks without working. All together, this discourages voluntary isolation and makes people especially resistant to mandatory quarantine.
On Optimalist Earth they believe that everyone should be fed, sheltered and kept healthy, no matter what. But they don’t stop at that. In the case of an epidemic, people get paid to go into quarantine, because they’re doing a public service.
Again, that was too easy, so let’s increase the difficulty level. We’ll say that the new virus is so novel that it evades detection by home testing equipment and so has had the chance to spread for a few weeks before the first acute victims receive medical intervention. Hundreds or even thousands are infected and the disease is spreading globally by the time it’s identified. A test hasn’t been developed yet, much less a treatment or vaccine.
First, it’s important to note that there’s a significant difference in the way a potential pandemic is communicated between these two alternate Earths. On our own Individualist Earth, people are being told conflicting things by a variety of sources that they don’t fully trust—including that they should consider submitting to restrictions that will have a negative impact on their livelihood and lifestyle. They’re told that they should do this even though the risk to them personally is very low. The culture of mistrust and entitlement allows people’s biases to overrule facts and they choose not to believe things they don’t like.
On Optimalist Earth, the messaging is consistent and factual, because knowledge is rightly enshrined as the most valuable commodity.
Free speech is important, but lies aren’t protected; demonstrably “fake news” is illegal and, as such, is punished. The people of Optimalist Earth trust news sources because they aren’t corrupted by individual, corporate or nationalist agendas. Instead, everyone receives the most up-to-date information available, with complete transparency. When doctors recommend social distancing as a way to slow the spread of a disease, most people listen. And again, because no one’s livelihood is on the line, people don’t hesitate to stay home when they become ill.
Meanwhile the scientific analysis of coronaviruses on Optimalist Earth is a global, collaborative effort and one that continues at full steam in between pandemics, rather than being reactive. The same applies to researching vaccines and treatments. Labs across the planet share results with each other, because they know that they’ll reach the goal quicker by pooling resources and not duplicating efforts.
With a combination of universal preventative healthcare, guaranteed sick pay and trustworthy media, any viral outbreak is quickly contained before becoming a pandemic. Thus buying time for the scientific community to develop and deploy treatments and vaccines.
I realize that while everything I’ve described above is technically feasible, it probably sounds fanciful to a lot of you. You might have questions like “but how do we pay for it?” or “what makes you think the people in power today will allow change?” I’m going to be writing a lot more about Optimalism over the coming weeks and months, which I encourage you to follow here on Medium and via From the Trees to the Stars. Please share your thoughts and if you or anyone you know has ideas or capabilities to contribute, please reach out.
Because as the stock markets crater and as overwhelmed governments resort to increasingly desperate interventions, with no end in sight, why shouldn’t we take this moment to consider if we really want everything to return to “normal”.
I mean, just imagine what a system of decision-making based on science could do for the climate crisis…
#Optimalism 