The
leading topic of this year’s edition of Freedom Games is “A
Post-Pandemic World”. The
COVID-19 pandemic has become a planet-wide event of an unprecedented
scale.
In just a few months, the coronavirus killed hundreds of thousands of
people, millions have been infected. The majority of global
economies have been shut down. The lockdown has affected almost 2.7
billion of employees, which constitutes approximately 81% of global
workforce. Since the beginning of the pandemic, over 40 million
Americans applied for the unemployment benefit. This is situation
worse than even in the case of Great Depression.
This
is why it is worth using these strange times to reflect and talk
things over, in an attempt to set a new course for the “new normal”
in a post-pandemic world. COVID-19
acts as a global stress-test.
On how well do states and their institutions pass depends not only
their global standing, but also whether citizens will trust them. The
time for evaluation is yet to come – after the first peak incidence
decreases, the governments should be able to confront the
unprecedented economic crisis. How will our everyday lives change
(work, leisure, entertainment, private life)? What will move
permanently online, and what will still be considered worth appearing
in person for?
In
the age of big data, will democracy fall short of an efficient and
ruthless Chinese model, as predicted by Yuval Harari, among others?
COVID-19
has shown how important transparency is when it comes to the
information that authorities have
and how valuable trust of citizens in official statements is. Data
reliability of Chinese statistics is questionable. Meanwhile,
autocracies of the likes of Iran or Russia are doing as badly as the
United Kingdom or the United States – the oldest democracies in the
world.
Burdening
the working youth with the cost of pandemic only to save the elderly,
who in the “old” West have already managed to make for themselves
a comfortable life, would be yet another injustice on top of the
already existing ones. Labor
market regulation and high taxation favor those who have already been
operating on it.
The youth, a group that now includes also people around 40, will
likely struggle with the uncertainty of precarisation, impending
debt, and the need to take risks – which many of them cannot
afford. Next social rebellions in the countries with a growing
unemployment rate among the youth are just a matter of time.
Will
the challenges the humanity is now facing attract the youth and other
individuals to be more involved in the public life? Is it possible
that the current situation reveals a leadership that we need, and one
which would be capable of creating an emotion that might show the
link between a diagnosis and bold solutions? Are we humble enough to
seek answers to the new questions and to take our fate into our own
hands?
