I’m calling out to all the Homo sapiens who have evolved enough to start understanding that we need a change in our social structure. I don’t want the “wise men”, I want the “cooperative men” (Homo cooperantum).

“Modern” Homo sapiens continue to live the way they did 100s, in some ways 1000s, of years ago. Their excuse usually being something along the lines of, “100 years is the blink of an eye, relatively speaking”. Well, to me, that isn’t a very wise thing to say and hardly an excuse. We have built machines capable of computing information 4 times faster and hold 10 times as much data as the human brain (Scientific American) so the excuse of “it takes time” doesn’t sit well with me. We shouldn’t be living the way we did in the past while we live in a world that is faster and smarter. The present has different needs than the past had. The present faces challenges at a much larger scale than the challenges of the past.

Doesn’t everyone know that prevention is the key?

While Homo sapiens accomplish advancements in science and technology on a daily basis that our ancestors never could have even imagined, our social system stays pretty much the same. Scientists speak to the public, decision-makers, stakeholders, governments and global organizations, however, the predictions they discuss are taken with a grain of salt until the prediction becomes a reality.

The process of decisionmaking has always been slow and it still is detrimentally slow. It is hard to know why exactly, but I wonder if it is because not enough people listen to AND practice expert recommendations. Listening is one thing, actually changing behavior and practicing what is learned is another.

The idea that prevention is key dates back to AD 58 from the Roman poet, Persius, “Meet the malady on its way.” In other words from 1240 via de Legibus when he said, “It is better and more useful to meet a problem in time than to seek a remedy after the damage is done.”

So, while the idea that prevention is the key to success has been around since the year 58, why is it that in the year 2020 we don’t prepare based on predictions provided by influential, intelligent, specialized, and extremely calculated individuals? Why is it that we still do not believe in the accuracy of scientific predictions generated by thorough scenario analyses? For example, in 2015 Bill Gates gave a TED talk discussing the downfalls of the current global health system and discussed the possible implications of these shortcomings in the future, now in 2020 we are completely unprepared for COVID-19, exactly as he predicted if we continued with “business as usual”.

Excuses and justifications won’t suffice, we clearly have not done enough…

The goal here is to not criticize, I recognize that it is a difficult task to put theory into practice. I face this challenge every day as I piece together my Ph.D. thesis. My goal in writing this is to encourage everyone to stop making excuses and just do what needs to be done. The harsh truth is that regardless of how hard we have worked since Ebola, it wasn’t enough. The harsh truth is that we aren’t doing enough and I believe it is because we have a blind-spot. I don’t know what the blind-spot is, but it is there and we are not addressing it, clearly.

According to Web of Science (See Figure 1, below), the scientific research on Ebola exploded in 2014 when the outbreak first occurred. Article publications on the topic of Ebola went from 161 in 2013 to 774 in 2014 and 1834 in 2015.

Figure 1 shows that research efforts on Ebola increased dramatically following the outbreak of the disease, meanwhile, the research effort on disease prevention maintained its fairly linear progression.

I hope that you, the reader, understand the disappointment of Figure 1. You should be wondering why research regarding disease prevention didn’t also explode because of the Ebola outbreak. Understanding more about Ebola is important, but so is understanding why our system failed then and how it might fail in the future.

What can Homo cooperantum do?

My hope is that the evolved Homo sapiens reading this will realize that we must start thinking big picture before it is too late. You should realize that there is a critical flaw in our social structure globally if a pandemic is capable of shutting us down in a time where we can use our face to unlock a cell phone. If you are a Homo cooperantum, you should start thinking now about how you and your knowledge can be paired with others and their knowledge to start solving problems in an evolved way.

Wise men are intelligent from an individualistic perspective. Homo sapiens can continue to make their dreams reality by inventing the things they imagine. However, the intelligence of Homo sapiens has proven useless in terms of solving global problems, i.e. climate change, plastic pollution, war, pandemics, etc. The way that Homo sapiens implement their wisdom is flawed and we must recognize this. Our social structure is flawed, globally, and we all need to work together to start fixing it.

This post was inspired by Bill Gates and Yuval Noah Harari