The 1999 film, The Matrix, is about a man who discovers the world as we know it is actually an elaborate simulation created by intelligent machines who use it to control humanity in the “real” world—a dystopian future where the machines have taken over. In the decades since its release, the premise of the film has become an established metaphor for realizing that the world as it is can sometimes be radically at odds with the world as we perceive it. As one close-to-home example of this, I can recall the moment when I realized that health is more than doctors and medicines; that health is, in fact, an emergent property of the world around us, and that working to improve health means working to improve the context in which we live, and that it is that world that we should be focusing on to improve health.
Much of my career in public health has been an effort to make this very case—a vision of health that only sees health care is incomplete, that we need to talk about far more when we talk about health than treatment alone. In the post-COVID era, this strikes me as more important than ever. The dominant sense of the last 20 months is that what we just lived through was fundamentally a story about a virus. This, I would argue, is wrong, or at least incomplete. True, a coronavirus was the precipitating factor in what we experienced. But the nature of that experience was deeply, decisively shaped by the same factors that always shape health—politics, culture, the economy, the places where we live, work, and play, our social networks, and other structural forces that shape our world. Preventing the next pandemic means engaging with these forces, to shape a healthier society. To do that, we must first be able to see them clearly, to take the measure of their influence on health. Helping us do so is the aim of my forthcoming book, The Contagion Next Time, which will be released on November 1. The book argues that the pandemic was, at core, a story about how structural forces in our society left us vulnerable to the virus. The title is a tribute to James Baldwin’s book, The Fire Next Time, which helped readers better see the challenge of racism, and to insist this challenge must be faced in order to avoid future catastrophe. Contagion aims to shine a spotlight on forces in our society that shape health by examining them through the lens of the COVID moment, and in so doing cast light on the world as we should perceive it, rather than the world that dominates in the public narrative.
Recognizing then that we need to see the world somewhat differently has me asking often, what is it that keeps us from seeing the right world? It seems to me that we see the world the way we do through our biases.
Read the full post at The Healthiest Goldfish.