Understanding society in the fauces of death
A Post COVID World
Predictions based on the Black Death
I’m a founder, optimistic, and passionate, but jumping into a new business without understanding what is expected to happen after COVID-19 sounds delusional to me.
We love to think we are special, that our lives are unique, and what is happening to us is unprecedented, but guess what? So did people during the Middle Ages as they were crushed by the deadliest pandemic recorded in human history [1].
The Black Death hit first in 1348 whipping close to 50% of Europe’s population. More importantly, it returned on average every ten years during the following centuries[2]; never leaving the ghost of devastation and sorrow behind.
Yet, only a century later the Renaissance flourished, Copernicus and Galileo preluded science, Columbus discovered the Americas, and the protestant reformation began. I wonder if there is a connection? Maybe as Buccio Da Ranallo said:
“When the plague was over, men revived”
Yes! The Black Death was devastating but it also brought much-needed change to Middle Age Europe. As a founder, I wonder if there is something we can learn from? Can we anticipate emerging business opportunities? And what changes can we expect as a society?
To the limits of my capacity, I dived in the psyche of men and women of the Middle Age and now present to you my findings:
1. Pandemics exploit human vulnerabilities
We like to think we are strong, and for the most part, we are. As a species, we are blessed to be dangerously on top of the food chain, we fear few and are feared by most, we‘ve’ shaped landscapes to serve our needs, and have harnessed technology to simplify our lives.
But as Nassim Taleb has expressed in his book “The Black Swan” we are naturally biased to underestimate meagerly low probabilities. And it is in the microcosm, where the virus, bacteria, and diseases thrive.
Nature is wise, and as a species dominates it starts to resemble less to a hunter and more to a prey. For the microorganisms, our hegemony as a species is a feast. We are spread all over the world sharing close to identical genetic material.
During the Black Death, our dominance was exploited by a tiny flea living in the scalp of rats. How could that diminutive organism inflict such damage?
- Medieval Medicine was ruled by Hippocratic mysticism; lacking an understanding of how diseases were treated, transmitted, and cured.
- People lived agglomerated in closed, dirty quarters; coexisting with rats.
- There was already enough travel and commerce to spread the disease between distant territories.
- Most of the doctors, as the Black Death arrived, fleed the cities when leaving barbers to take care of the sick.
I elate the courage of health care professionals, that have bravely taken care of the sick; risking their own lives and families in the process. But, I want to bring awareness to how dangerous our current social interactions are.
While we can attribute COVID-19 to a random mutation of an animal virus. The data speaks the opposite:
Eight pandemics in recent history are related to respiratory diseases, four of them in this century alone. The chart above depicts the number of deaths caused by each disease, in terms of the number of cases the data is darker: 1 billion cases are attributed to the Swine Flu, 100 million to date to COVID-19.
Before the Black Death, a similar, less fatal disease, known as Justinian’s Plague extended during the late Roman Empire (6th Century). History tends to warn us, let’s listen carefully to what it has to say!
Our social interactions were shaped by a vastly different world from the one we live in today. It was not uncommon, in ancient history, that an entire village’s population was annihilated by disease or plague, what we fail to realize is that today we live in a single global village.
In short, just as the Black Death exploited the unhealthy and dirty conditions the Medieval people lived in, COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases are exploiting the vast number of casual interactions that we used to engage in.
As a founder, I need to consider how our lives will look in a world where we engage in less frequent human relationships, but more meaningful ones.
2. Institutions will collapse and emerge
Medieval Europe was governed by one single institution: the Catholic Church. Two centuries later, Europe was a very different place, full of independent territories no longer under the rule of the Pope. This was caused by the void in power, as the Church failed to adapt to a new reality.
The Black Death ended the Church’s hegemony.
Religious Doctrine helped spread the Black Death
There are some people blessed with the gift of faith, but the average person believes in what they can see, and what the Middle Ages saw was terrifying: “Two-wheeled carts piled high with corpses and the dying creaked along the streets.”
And Catholic Masses, rituals, ceremonies, prayers, sacraments, and public gatherings did little to combat the disease. On the contrary, some of those activities even helped spread it further.
For the first time, prohibitions to attend Masses were enforced on the sick, some of the Masses were even canceled. The upheaval it provoked in the population, was similar to some of the measures enforced today.
As the rich faced death and desperately sought salvation; a dichotomy in the Church began, as avarice infiltrated the higher cusps of the clergy, creating a lucrative business around the selling indulgences.
On the opposite side, priests looked within to reexamine their faith, which brought a growing number of sects and fragmentation within the Church.
Pragmatism gave Birth to the Modern Nation States
Both, in Germany, and England the dissident Protestant religious movements were sheltered under the rising power of the state. After all, the Black Death was not subdued by the superstitious Medieval Medicine, nor the dogmatic beliefs Church.
It was the pragmatic and sometimes cruel actions taken by the State that helped confined the disease. As observed, some kind of “malicious air” brought from the sick to the healthy caused the transmission of the disease.
Social Distancing was born a long time ago, with even more radical measures than today. Infected families were locked down in their own homes, and immune people run the vital daily errands for them.
Many of the dismissed Catholic practices by the Protestants can be understood as preventing the spread of the Black Death. Shifting away from the public gatherings to the more private study of the Bible, Meditation, and Prayer. Medieval people adapted their beliefs to match their experiences.
Yes, these were horrific times, but the Nation-States stood up, and even if motivated by greed, lust, or fear they were in a position to support the Protestant Reform and free themselves from the yoke of the Catholic Church.
The Power Transition that Awaits Us
I consider myself a deep pragmatist, I search for the root cause of an issue to find valuable actionable insights. Countries had a beginning, democracy as well; and today we are on the cusp of a new shift in how power is distributed.
As countries weaken, corporations flourish.
Consider the balance sheets of governments: they are swamped in debt; as opposed to tech corporations sitting in a stockpile of cash. At an individual level, corporations have also grown more powerful, as their leaders are not subject to the same limitations their public counterparts face.
In terms of efficiency, corporations appear to be taking the more pragmatic approach. Google serves 4 billion people with little more than 100,000 employees; Facebook serves 2 billion with less than 50,000.
On the opposite side, the Catholic Church has 400,000 priests to serve its 1 billion people congregation, and the American Government employs 15% (24 million) of the country’s workforce.
Aristotle said it well, power can only be of 3 forms and 2 qualities:
For Aristotle, the superior form of government was Aristocracy; a strong case can be made that we moving closer towards the government of the few. Whether we succeed a building a true government of the wise or are left with the unfair rule of an Oligarchy, is up to us.
3. New Forms of Value will be Created
We have arrived at the last expected change that COVID-19 holds for the modern world, and it is how we, as a society, agree on the definition of wealth.
There was a time when the number of animals was the main source of wealth; during mercantilism, it was the accumulation of gold; In colonial times, it was the ownership of land; and now we are mesmerized by private stocks.
COVID-19 hit the hardest on landowners, especially those that held commercial real estate. Reliability steers our definition of value: before investing, the wealthy usually evaluate if they will be able to get their money back; only then are they concerned if their money will grow.
Stocks can be too volatile and time-consuming to manage, as an individual they can be too risky to trust. For the prudent, future wealth should not be bound to the whims of crowds, nor to changes in political legislation, and decisions of leaders that are often impossible to foresee.
The wealthy like to have control over their wealth, they also treasure peace of mind the most. Stocks do not help either of the two intended outcomes.
After the Reformation, Religious Ordes rose in prominence partly because of the belief that only Saints would intercede for the Medieval people. This was also a time when the figure of the Virgin Mary gained relevance as the merciful mother of Jesus.
Whether it was Franciscans that devoted their life and wealth to the poor; or Jesuits that bravely spread the Christian faith through the Spanish Empire. It was the Religious Orders that counteracted the Protestant Reform.
Follower was called, who shaped their live after a saint.
The word follower captivated my attention, as we have seen a trend during the last 10+ years, ever since Facebook dominated the social landscape we’ve seen the rise of a new figure: the influencer. It may have started as vanity, as a cool way to earn a living. But today, it’s a thriving industry on its own.
A significant amount of our decisions are shaped by social interactions; marketers realized this early and flooded influencers with requests and gifts. Most importantly, the followers started listening to the influencer’s advice, purchasing their products, paying for exclusive content, and ambitioning their lifestyle.
New forms of wealth often have a double-sided component associated with them. The first one is the capacity to endure and preserve wealth. The second one is composed of the new things that can be exclusively afforded by them, in the case of influencers and their audiences it is the lifestyle and public sympathy that comes with it.
A company stock derives its value from the total revenue it is expected to generate discounted to a net present value. Daniel Vasallo has famously estimated the value of his 50K Twitter follower base in half a million USD, as he has a highly monetized audience. But he adds a caveat to his calculation: he would only sell his audience because he could grow it again!
Increasingly, startups are built around a community, championed by Lolita Taub and The Community Fund. Investors are realizing that business models supported by an actively engaged group of small people make their products and revenues very difficult to replicate and steal.
Loyalty is what makes an audience uniquely valuable.
Cryptocurrencies as Bitcoin are no stranger to these social network effects, while there is impressive technology behind them, their disruption comes also from their decentralized architecture; it is consensus, after all, that keeps them stable.
ICOs go one step further, with some of them not supporting ownership, only the right to use the network. Decentralized Finance (DeFi), understands what we, as humans, sometimes fail to accept: everything in this life is borrowed.
COVID-19 reveals us a world where wealth is derived from social interactions.
Parting thoughts
I started this essay by stating that I’m a founder, and I began my research from a place of curiosity, wonder. Humbled, once again, by having overlooked History when first approaching the current events.
I thought I would find anecdotal evidence of similarities across our human temper when facing a Pandemic. But I wasn’t expecting to find certitude when reaching the conclusions.
Stripping away the names and events from History, a logical flow of will is revealed. As I began saying, I’m optimistic, I believe in purpose, directed to understanding reality. Today, we humans, are the epitome of that endeavor.
But I’m also ambitious, and unfortunately lacked the time to cover in-depth two more changes that I foresee awaits us as a society. Pandemics have a more subtle effect on our psyche, they remind us, as a species, about our mortality, and it is in light of death that the meaning of life is transformed.
Alchemy was the bridge between Medieval Medicine and Science, and it was first derived by the irrational pursuit of immortality. The desire to not die is natural and we may witness a New Alchemy driven by Biotechnology, we will try to find in the microcosm, the answers we cannot find in ourselves.
Unfortunately, just as Medieval doctors failed to understand it was bacteria that caused the Black Death; we have a surprisingly little understanding of the root causes behind diseases.
This is exemplified by the development of new vaccines mostly governed by chance, using brute force algorithms to exhaust every alternative until one works. But those who know, may not need to fail.
The second change I foresee is analogous to the discovery of the Americas. In a post COVID world, Space Exploration seems a less daunting and more important activity than a couple of years ago. What awaits us could be similar to what the Spaniards encountered in the Americas: a Brave New World.
I leave the exercise to the reader to reflect on what kind of new businesses could derive from the 3 predictions that we have explored:
- Digitalization of our daily interactions.
- A shift in institutional power to corporations.
- The monetization of human relationships.
As a starting point, you might be interested to know, that in the depressed economy of the Black Death, new professions emerged, including prayer and mourner. Yes, wealthy people needed prays and condonation for their souls as they moved closer to death.
Economists like to think that innovation and value are derived by reason, yet history would disagree. In a world powered by AI where inequality is expected to rise, what novel needs will be fulfilled to appeal to our minds and souls? For me, is peaceful enough to think that SocialQ is on the right path.
Finally, no story would be complete without a warning: dystopian novels tend to provide a very detailed description of how new societies are organized and controlled. But their authors, sometimes lack the imagination to find the ideal initial conditions that begot them. It would be easy to make COVID-19 the starting point of a dystopian best-seller.
As always I like to thank the close circle of people that review my writings and discuss the ideas that compose them. This time, I especially thank my good friend Math that brought light to the importance behind this topic. I also want to thank every person that has come in contact with me from these essays, your words of encouragement are always appreciated.
I’m a Growth Coach, I’m passionate about helping other people and startups fulfill their greatest business potential, I like to keep an open Calendar, and you may also find me tweeting my thoughts away.
My next monthly essay will be about distribution: in awe of Nature’s might and the mighty engineering following COVID-19, I will find novel ways that Nature has found to spread its will. I’m interested in the applications to Marketing. After all, as a founder is my job to spread the word about SocialQ.
As always, your follow and claps are appreciated!
See you soon,
Santiago M.
