We’re wired for love but humans have created stratified societies that enhance competition over cooperation and having over just being. The coronavirus pandemic provides us with an opportunity to rethink the way we live, to appreciate what we have instead of craving for what we don’t have. This might be an opportunity to become more aware of how crucial relationships are and that we’re so interconnected that what I do, can affect everybody else.
We often fail to embrace our common humanity or commit to our common destiny with full responsibility. It often takes a crisis, an epidemic, a recession, an earthquake, a hurricane, to activate what Shelly Taylor called our tend-and-befriend response. But if we learn new parenting and education modalities that take into account our human potential for empathy, compassion and solidarity, we will become equipped to solve the most pressing problems humanity and our planet face.
Our foremost asset is that we’re born hardwired for empathy, compassion, and love even if the current state of affairs in the world often seems to contradict this assertion.
Many of our problems come from the way we learn to respond to fear or perceived threats in the environment without consciously assessing them first. In other words, we have not learned to regulate emotions, we respond automatically. This is mostly because our educational and parenting models are centered on modifying children’s behavior instead of promoting autonomy, self-compassion, and empathy.