THE CORONATION

CHARLES EISENSTEIN examines our current world in COVID-19 crisis, and looks at the questions we need to ask ourselves so that we can move forward into a new society. Here we offer excerpts from Charles’ essay. You can read the full story at https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/.

- CHARLES EISENSTEIN

CHARLES EISENSTEIN March 2020

For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?

COVID-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless. A few months ago, a proposal to halt commercial air travel would have seemed preposterous. Likewise for the radical changes we are making in our social behavior, economy, and the role of government in our lives. COVID demonstrates the power of our collective will when we agree on what is important. What else might we achieve incoherency? What do we want to achieve, and what world shall we create? That is always the next question when anyone awakens to their power.

COVID-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. To interrupt a habit is to make it visible; it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice. When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future.

We might ask, after so many have lost their jobs, whether all of them are the jobs the world most needs, and whether our labor and creativity would be better applied elsewhere.