Continued — Part Six of “Coronavirus: Facts We Need to Know and What We Can Do”

The truth is that most of us will probably contract this virus in the coming months, and most of us will survive. Bitter events lie ahead, events that may be difficult even to imagine before they occur, but we must enter this storm prepared and beside one another.

In recent days social media have been filled with attacks upon one another: attacks on doctors and nurses, on people who are ill, and even on those who have died from the disease. Several hospitals have been attacked, and improvised instructions for preventing infection can be found everywhere.

There may be many faults across different parts of our society, but at such a moment the way to confront these deficiencies and weaknesses is not to destroy the few social structures that remain. The strength we give one another in this struggle will give us the capacity to overcome the threat before us.

A large part of the country’s administrative structure is made up of people like you and me. Like many of you, I have wished that greater wisdom and foresight governed the administration of our Iran, but I see no alternative to beginning the creation of that wisdom and foresight with each one of us. Spreading social anxiety through false information, whatever the motive, seeing ourselves as separate from other people and their fate in such circumstances, and attacking one another are neither wise nor far-sighted. These behaviours begin with us, and at a larger level in the administration of society they manifest themselves as a complete crisis of management.

At this moment none of us knows a way out of this crisis. A terrible social event is approaching us step by step. No piece of writing anywhere can provide an operational instruction manual for escaping the complexity of the present circumstances. Yet there is a general principle: “When circumstances are complex and filled with chaos and danger, asking ‘What should we do right now?’ is the wrong question. The right question is: what are we doing right now that we know in our hearts is wrong, and yet continue to do? We must find it and stop it, because in complex circumstances every step we refrain from taking toward greater complexity and chaos is itself a step toward a solution.”

At the individual level, the question each of us must answer is this: what are we doing in these circumstances that we know in our hearts is wrong, and that does nothing to loosen the knots of the social crisis? We must stop doing it. If all of us do so, truth itself will show us the way out.

Dr Aydin Areta
February 2020