HISTORY OF EPIDEMICS IN THE WORLD
Throughout history, one of the greatest enemies of humanity has been the epidemic. People living in Athens in ancient times and Florence in the Middle Ages lived knowing that an epidemic could break out at any moment and they could die.
1330' In the 1960s, the Black Death caused the bacterium named Yersinia Pestis to be transmitted to humans through fleas and rats in East-Central Asia and spread to the whole world. 75-200 million people died due to the Black Death. 4 out of every 10 people in England and half of Florence died in the epidemic.
While people blamed the bad weather, demons and angry gods, the rulers could not do anything except mass prayers and rituals.
In 1520, a small Spanish fleet sailed from Cuba to Mexico. A man on the ship arrived in Mexico without knowing that he was carrying the smallpox virus. He was left with a family there. This family spread the virus to the entire neighborhood. Cempoallan was buried in the cemetery within 10 days. Those who escaped from the town infected the whole of Mexico with the virus. Thousands of corpses rotted on the streets because they were afraid to approach them.
In 1778, there were epidemics of influenza, tuberculosis and syphilis.
In January 1918. The Spanish flu, which emerged in the trenches of France, infected one-third of the world's population, or half a billion people, through trade. A total of 50-100 million people died, and 40 million people died in World War I in 1914-1918.
2002- The world has gone through epidemics such as Sars in 2003, Bird Flu in 2005, swine flu in 2009-2010, and Ebola in 2014.
Fortunately, humanity has now been able to replace prayers and rituals with science and technology against epidemics. Our weapons now are vaccines, antibiotics, medicines. The World Health Organization declared that smallpox was eradicated in 1979. For the first time, people managed to eradicate an epidemic from the face of the earth. (Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow
HOW MANY TIMES WILL A PERSON ENCOUNTERE WITH AN EPIDEMIC IN A LIFETIME? WHAT DOES HE DO AGAINST PANDEMIC, A CONCEPT THAT HE HAS NEVER KNOWN?
In order to feel safe, he applies methods such as gaining knowledge, taking advantage of his instincts, being influenced by herd psychology and doing what everyone else does, turning inward, cutting off communication with outsiders. we started.
The danger of death It also affected the moral rules. At the beginning of the pandemic, people with a low perception of danger labeled people with a high perception of danger as anxious-obsessed, while as the weekly concrete number of infected people increased, they realized the real danger. Individuals first generalized the sheltered life mode they adopted to protect themselves and their families, and also affected other members of the society. He began to warn her about her behavior. "Be careful, don't leave the house, if the cargo arrives, throw the package in the trash, use your mask and gloves carefully."
The feeling of disgust will keep us alive!
We are disgusted by things that can be potential hotbeds of disease, such as vomit, other people's body fluids, and spoiled food. Now, we have updated the feeling of disgust. We are now disgusted by elevator buttons, foods in the supermarket, and people we see as suspicious.
Anxiety protects us!
The perception of danger presses the red button in our body. The brain, which receives the message from the red button, stimulates the sympathetic nervous system. The person whose sympathetic nervous system is stimulated focuses all its attention on survival. Run away, fight, freeze..
WHERE DID WE LEARN TO PROTECT OURSELVES?
Jung and Archetypes
Just as the body has evolved, internal predispositions and tendencies have also evolved throughout human history and are now in our genes.
We can find subconscious characteristics that a person does not acquire but inherits. For example, instincts that are activated without conscious motivation due to necessity. In this deeper layer we find archetypes... Instincts and archetypes together form the collective unconscious. I call them collective because, unlike the personal unconscious, they do not originate from a person's more or less specific experiences, but they are universal and occur regularly.
If we think of society as a human being, society has a subconscious, just like a person's subconscious. The experiences of our ancestors and these. How they cope actually remains as latent knowledge in our subconscious.
According to Jung, archetypes, which can appear in different forms all over the world throughout human history, can only be activated when they are activated by an experience, that is, when they are triggered. When they are born, they appear with the clothes they wear, influenced by the culture they live in or other factors. Otherwise, an archetype that is not triggered and does not take action cannot be perceived. Each archetype is actually a representative of a psychic quality, and the activation of archetypes means the activation of psychic qualities (will, courage, productivity) that are potentially in the unconscious.
Jacobi, J. (2002), C. G. Jung Psychology, Mehmet. Arap (trans.), Istanbul: İlhan Publishing House )
When we look at the archetypes in terms of the pandemic, the pandemic has perhaps caused us to experience courage, heroism and productivity characteristics that have been waiting to emerge within us for a long time.
While we were in flow in daily life, we were getting support from each other to solve our problems, we were used to standard solutions. The upside down system pushed us to be much more creative and productive. Maybe we look at the items in the house from a different perspective, we turn into an artist when changing them, and when there is no bread left at home, we can become a baker. With the feeling of deprivation. We feel safe as we take control of the story that begins.
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