If we changed the core value of our global culture to one of compassion instead of profit and economic gain, we could rewrite the rules of our system to deal with this crisis more effectively. By making this radical shift, at all levels of society, especially the top, we might find that we could tackle so many more of our seemingly insurmountable problems.

During this health crisis, it’s clear how compassion is what we need in our institutions, society, culture and ultimately the entire species. The me-first, competitive nature of our current system generates an appalling kindness deficit. Obviously, there are countless examples of genuinely humane, open-hearted acts of kindness. But on the collective level, that kindness is just not valued enough. Even the word “valued” begs the question of what ROI kindness might confer, in terms of social status, career advancement and income.

We hear too much lip service paid to compassion: not just virtue-signalling but the way the we all too often utter phrases as if reading from greetings cards, asking after each other, delivering words of care that are just polite rather than compassionate, that only skim the surface of kindness. This veneer of caring is itself part of the “veneer-eal” disease of valuing the superficial happiness of success and material gain above all else.

As we are encouraged to parade our retouched lives on social media, and pretend that the artificialness is not obvious, there is no real connection possible. Real connection is built on real compassion, which is altogether more penetrating. Of course it is tougher: it is founded on the courage to look pain, fear and uncertainty straight in the eye! To acknowledge it fully! If we were less consumed by the need to maximise material gain and garner superficial, short term rewards, and instead, chose to look squarely at the undeniable suffering that exists in the world, I believe things would be different. I know many people hate putting egotistic desire and compassion on either side of the scales. But our egotistic quest for satisfaction, comfort and approval is born of the pain we suffer at not being accepted and loved as we are. There is an unacknowledged pain and fear of its repetition at the root of the selfishness that we all exhibit from time to time.

And shame arises from continually endeavouring to hide these moments of selfishness and clothe them in whatever form of political correctness is currently fashionable. Shame only serves to perpetuate the selfishness. We become consumed by shame of failure, of being wrong, of being weak, of being not a valid cog in the shiny machine of our perfected, beautified modern society. In this absurdly optimistic world, human suffering – including the suffering at the root of selfishness itself – becomes taboo. We end up living under the rule of a toxic, narcissistic egotism. Its competitive nature sees anything that lies outside its boundaries as a potential threat and seeks to bring it under its hard control or else to expel or destroy it.

Such ruthlessness is undeniably fun in the context of playing games, but is it a basis for thriving in life? Well this hostile, exploitative side of human nature does have some clear benefits if we can manage to execute the mental ruse of viewing life as no more than a game of material win or lose. If happiness is to be measured in terms of riches and status – as it often is – then clearly a significant number of us should have plenty! And a few of us must have obscene amounts. But of course, we do know really that status and money don’t make us happy…

Human civilisation is consumed by an existential angst that we are not allowed to express. Anxious people who fail to bury their heads in the sand and who can’t repress their horror at the the stupidity and cruelty of the system are labelled as mentally ill and medicated. The colossal cost of our rapacious culture is as much to our inner peace as it is to the outer realm of the ecological system of the planet. Our angst eats away at the sense of spiritual security that we all crave, of knowing that we are loved, cared for and truly seen. It is a vicious cycle that keeps our collective ego going.

So ego and compassion are indeed on opposite sides of the scales! But just consider for a moment that there is such a thing as self-compassion: the ability to acknowledge our own suffering and indeed our fear and resultant selfish motives, to honestly see ourselves warts and all and still feel love… This kind of self-love negates ego.

The exploitative nature of our system inevitably promotes corruption at all levels. People who self-publish highly spurious or entirely bogus books on Amazon about how to avoid catching this virus in order to make a quick buck are clearly trying to gain from other people’s fear. They are yet more scammers! But is this behaviour really so different from the politician who tries to gain political mileage, or the journalist who writes an article that generates division and fear, or the photographer whose images accompany the article – images which are actually disturbing because they are slightly incongruent? Are these people individually responsible for their actions when they are merely functioning within a system geared towards opportunism and superficial effect?

I suspect that it’s only people with super-elevated, star-level careers who are often driven to corruption by their own narcissism, which is as extreme and even pathological as it is overlooked by a society built on ego: their version of sensational opportunism in the shadow of this pandemic is far worse than the terrified consumer emptying the supermarket shelves of essential items in a bout of panic-buying. Fear in this climate is of course inevitable and rampant. My point is that compassion trumps fear! Shame and ignorance are no match for true compassion and they wither in its presence. So in many ways, fear is not the enemy but just the drive of the ego for material gain. The problem is that when the necessary war on terror is placed in the well-practised but foolish hands of the human ego, we cannot win and the fear actually escalates either into utter panic or perhaps worse, it’s disguised version, apathy.

The ego is very slippery and good at denial. Burying our heads in the sand is an act of utter terror that, most of the time, we don’t even realise we’re doing. Apathy is usually a leaky container for our fear which then seeps out in various forms: patronising platitudes; subtle or open mistrust of each other; or full-on projection in the form of blaming or hating people we regard as being on the wrong side. The ego will try anything really that attempts to push our fear away, to project it outside its own domain.

And in the global cult of ego that we sadly inhabit, there are those who sit in very high places reaping the exorbitant material rewards of this fear pandemic. Whilst the rest of us comply to a greater or lesser extent as we scurry around, trying to get our share of the copious scraps. And those who refuse to buy into this malignant cult are cast as failures, weirdos, rogues and scoundrels. But who are the real scoundrels here? Some rogues are actual criminals, of course but true compassion is also the way of the rogue – a rebellion against our current egoistic system. And now is the time, in the age of free flowing information, for the vast swathes of rebels, who believe in the efficacy of compassion instead of ego, to use our voices.

Love is the alternative way of dealing with fear and the suffering it entails. If we use compassion at every level, on ourselves, our loved ones, on our fellow human beings, on all living things, and even on the rogues in high places that exploit us, we will see that the boundaries that exist between individuals, between families, nations or religions, even the boundaries between species are far from impermeable. We are in fact all one: a myriad forms of the same consciousness. A new virus is a sobering reminder of this ultimate truth. It reminds us that the ego’s manifesto of invincible control and total material comfort is absurd and stupid.

This pandemic is also an existential crisis, in my view, as we find ourselves waking up uncomfortably to the hideous hubris of modern man. We suddenly realise that we cannot make our cells completely impermeable to the pathogens that nature creates. Disease, old age and death are a natural part of life. Pain is inevitable. Running from this fact is mindless and destructive. So we can’t avoid suffering but we can care. We can bring kindness, love, gentleness and a sense of shared experience. In such a compassionate state, we will take action for the benefit of all. When relative gain and loss no longer matter, we cooperate rather than compete. We bailed out the banks in 2008 in an extraordinary economic reboot. So, evidently, we have amazing power – when multilateral consensus is reached – to achieve extraordinary things. If we can agree to keep the banks afloat, surely we can all agree that there are actually more important things than money: things like human life, having health systems that are not overwhelmed, or to look beyond this temporary crisis, we might consider the basic well-being of all living creatures on this planet to matter more than status and money.

To deal with the effects of this virus, we could freeze the markets, channel real resources to where they are truly needed and deal with it more responsibly, helping each other through it. Of course care does happen at a grassroots level, whatever our leaders or institutions do. The human spirit of care, compassion and cooperation is the real reason we function at all. If the powers that be can find the humility – or can be forced – to institutionalise this spirit of compassion in full acknowledgement of the ubiquitous fear and suffering that humanity faces, then compassion will spread like a contagion. And we might just surprise ourselves at our resourcefulness, our imagination, our adaptability – qualities that in a state of cooperation are nothing short of miraculous.

The war against fear, and against this virus, is one we can win with compassion. If we see this truth, then perhaps we will see that the precariousness of a tightly controlled, essentially hostile and exploitative system does not look like the best option for human civilisation any longer, but the worst. We will realise that we can change and quickly. Maybe then we will also see that the footprint of our grotesquely huge population on this precious planet, our beautiful home, is far, far too big and destructive; that we need to find ways to curb our exploitative tendencies so that our impact is not that of a plague but of a nurturing force. We could grow in compassion, care and creativity rather than malignant greed, anger and stupidity. Compassion is the necessary foundation if we are to use our boundless ingenuity to tackle not only this but all the countless problems we face, almost all of which are caused by the single problem of selfish, narcissistic ego. Ego is the virus! Compassion is the radical treatment and the vaccine!