What The Pandemic Brings

24.01.2021
What The Pandemic Brings

Memet Duran Özkan – GJC Member of Board

As Covid-19 Pandemic leaves behind a year, it continues without slowing down with imposing drastic changes in mankind’s  lifestyle and habits as a result of his evolutionary developments since ancient times until today and people accepting the new habits and behavior patterns based on this imposition with not much resistance.

Changes imposed by the pandemic, are the ones that are not only felt in every area of life rather than a change in the cultural dimension, but also the ones forcing you to abandon everything that is traditional, or nowadays, the traditional one is not welcome anymore and the era is pregnant to new pandemics, therefore, the society is reformed by being boiled down to individuals and by raising the awareness in individuals  to being have to protect themselves and follow the new rules.

A human, a social being, is being imposed upon with the pandemic by instrumentalization, in which everything that is social turns into an element that threatens the life of the individual, that healthier and freer individuals will be made by abandoning socialization and individualizing the humans. All kinds of activities and events that bring people together are quickly abandoned and the idea that life at home is more ideal with the new types of communication tools brought by technology and digitalization is offered to people. Accordingly, many work done in the office environment can be easily done at home on the computer via the internet, it is unnecessary to go to work/office, instead of working 8 hours in the office under the pretext of the health of the employee, it is used to working 24 hours at home under the name of flexible work.

On the other hand, many anti-democratic practices that people would normally oppose are presented by states as a means of combating the pandemic. People do not oppose these undemocratic practices, but voluntarily accept them. The fact that European countries, which are considered to be the cradle of democracy, were inadequate when faced with the pandemic is being shown by various media organs, while the the success of leader indexed totalitarian countries –such as China and Russia –   against the pandemic across China, is being exaggerated with news about the fact that there is no patient left with Covid especially in the city of Wuhan, which is the starting point of the pandemic, and therefore people are unconsciously being implemented with sympath towards leader indexed regimes. In this way, people are quietly directed from a more democratic world to a more totalitarian world.

The focus of the TV debate is that after the pandemic, nothing will be the same anymore. What’s not gonna be the same anymore? New habits that we will acquire with the development of technology and digitalization, abandoning the traditional one? For example, instead of having weddings with 500-1000 people in wedding halls, we will have weddings with only two families? Or are we going to leave the funeral ceremonies and express our condolences to each other through social media areas such as Facebook, Twitter? Won’t the number of people sitting at tables in parks and cafes cross the finger of one hand? Are we going to abandon non-governmental organizations such as associations, trade unions and settle for social media groups?  According to the bans imposed by countries these days, the human race will eventually abandon most of its such habits. When we question ourselves in this direction, we can easily see that we have almost abandoned many of our traditional habits for a year.

Is it just this kind of traditional behavior that is meant to be said with the phrase ‘nothing will be the same after the pandemic’? Admittedly not. In addition, it is necessary to say that with digitalization, our consumption habits will change. With a smartphone at hand, we will be able to get the product, food, information, that is, everything that can be consumed, with modern payment tools in a few clicks. This means that few global companies that control or use digital space control World Trade. Even today, there are huge gaps between global companies and local companies that use this space. As the world’s scarce resources increasingly fill the coffers of these global companies, the rest of the world is being deprived of these scarce resources every day. This leads to the gathering of World Resources in a certain group of people, and the remaining people and countries lack resources and wealth. In the long run, the result of this is worldwide chaos and internal confusion. As such, globalizing capitalism has only one option, which is to turn the pandemic into an opportunity and give up democracy. That’s exactly what’s being done these days.