Page 4 - MONTT LATIN AMERICAN MAGAZINE, AUGUST 2021 (English)

without recipes from the past, and from the mind and spirit of a young person.
It should also be mentioned that this phenomenon is not typical of Chile, but if we review the history after each global pandemic such as the one that has a ected us, great social changes have occurred. One of the rst signi cant pandemics of which there is historical record happened at the best moment of commercial exchange of the Byzantine Empire. Many historians see in this weakening the de nitive collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire, with which Antiquity ended and the Middle Ages began. This situation facilitated the development of the barbarian kingdoms of Europe.
The pandemic of the mid-fourteenth century (between 1346 and 1353), killed 75 million people around the world and perhaps half the population in England. It supposed very important changes in the economy and a strong setback; the population crash took 100 years to recover. Commerce disappeared, cities fell, people went to the countryside, it a ected all social strata. The largest recession in history occurred. Europeans were forced to develop institutions and take measures, coordinated between di erent nations, to contain epidemics, greater knowledge of diseases and cooperation between nations, all factors that contributed to reducing mortality, generating the feeling of progress and “victory over nature”, which triggered the Renaissance. With this pandemic the Middle Ages ended and the “modernization” of Europe began.
And so, there are other examples that demonstrate the important effects and consequences of these global events, in which nature prevails over man, with a radical democratizing e ect, violently reminding
each one of us as a personal experience that we are all born and die equal, and that status and social position is irrelevant. Although this current pandemic did not have the costs in human lives as catastrophic as others of antiquity, the economic debacle that it produced is fundamental, generating impacts on the economies of the nations that are already a ected and that will last very strongly in the coming decades, imposing an individual psychological impact on the citizen masses of violent lack of protection due to the loss of employment sources and the fear of illness and death. This radical experience of lack of protection brought an immediate devaluation and brutal disarmament by itself of the entire pre-existing cultural sca olding that justi es social di erences by default, and remains etched in the depths of being as an eroding feeling of the cultural bases that justify and they numb social di erences. It is evident that the silent tolerance to accept these pre- existing di erences was seriously annulled or diminished in the face of the experience by the majority of their orphanhood, crudely manifested by the pandemic. Inequality has now become intolerable and this new feeling of intolerance thus provoked by the pandemic will necessarily lead to irrepressible major reforms.
It remains to be seen if the Chilean institutional channels to lead these forces are robust enough to achieve a real result, and if our people will have the greatness to understand the moment that is being lived, which is unique and of enormous relevance. It is important to wait for the intellectuals and politicians to enlighten with broad judgment and love for the country in order to reorganize the march of the nation in a positive, pragmatic and fair way.