Its true that “Tough times bring out the best and the worst in us”, with the world facing constant threat and crisis since the onset of 2020, things haven’t particularly been warm and cozy.
But with outbreak of COVID-n19 across the globe, though there have been mostly great moments of heroics and chivalry but on the far side there has been distrupting behavior with multiple incidents of looting, hoarding and many accounts of unruly & selfish behavior that has went largely unreported.
This uncivilized behavior mostly comes as shock to us when actually it shouldn’t because, humans for the larger part of the time since they have become bi-pedal have largely lived in small groups where survival was at stake and hostility against other groups was not only fair it was very much required.
It was around 3100 BC that earliest human civilizations came into picture and it meant humans would have to leave their ways of wild and shift from rules of nature to laws of society but, unlearning millions of years of training will prove to be very difficult.
Understanding this switch in primitive to civilized behavior is better aided with good ‘ol Maslow’s triangle.
The basic concept of the triangle is that without full-filling the requirements of lower level you cant progress to higher levels and if you do so then a downfall is pretty certain. Now societies here keeps the natural selection at bay almost elevating everyone to third strata now some societies even lay ground work for third strata so navigating that also becomes kind of easy, so now to keep the system at this stage, society introduces its rules & law that everyone adheres to in exchange of reaching third strata.
Now this where the things get tricky, society is an artificial construct that requires constant maintenance and there are a lot many parts of it like Law, governance, supply chain and all of them are interdependent and work together to keep society intact.
Now in times of distress like COVID when a lot these institutions get affected, the society’s trap-net starts dwindling, things revert to same old 5 tier triangle and for some less evolved and less patient ones, the rules of society bite the curb as soon as it happens and the primitive behavior kicks in, hence we see looting, hoarding & vandalism spiking.
Now why is it problematic ?
Let’s take the tale of two cats, both of them have an equal share of food given out to them daily, both remain satisfied from that & there is no feud. But one day suddenly an unknown entity whose threat level cant be assessed by the cats, appears and lays claim to food of one.
Now what would probably happen is that cats will feel that their assured food supply is threatened and both will try to make their case for the remaining one, might even end up fighting over it, while the unknown entity won’t do anything and things will run their course, and just like that entity has simply sat while the cats have taken out each other with their nuclear arsenals (these cats were actually human representation, how else do you think cats have nuclear warheads), now if the cats would have banded together and fought the entity instead, their chances of wining over might not have been fair but maybe they could have achieved a better result.
This uncertain entity can be a reflection of our times in fighting this global pandemic and fighting among ourselves on an individual as well at state and national level helps no one, instead working together might lead us somewhere.
This primitive behavior has been long programmed into us and instead of getting shocked and dumbstruck every time it happens, we should simply accept that evolution has not happened to everyone.
