Angela Arnone

EMBRACING THE PANDEMIC ... in a manner of speaking Angela Arnone

Are human beings good or bad? Are they primarily intelligent or stupid? What role do wickedness and intelligence play in the social and economic structure of humanity? If we look for answers to these questions in the field of anthropology, we see how wealth has come to be in just a few hands and how the middle classes have disappeared, with the consequent decline of democracy, where it still survived. Remedies exist, but which politicians would be able to implement them, assuming for the sake of argument that at least in Western countries they are the real holders of power? For years, the entire world economy has been heading for a generalized overproduction crisis, generating mass unemployment. In the near future, this will be accentuated by the arrival of AI. Perhaps the pandemic in progress was not deliberately engineered, but it certainly has the great advantage of making fear erase anger and prevent or mitigate possible popular uprisings, like those that began in France, with the yellow jackets, or in Chile. Unless all this is functional to humanity's return to a pyramid-like social structure, which leading evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson believes to be an inevitable conclusion for the human species.