ABSTRACT
Institutions have been described as essential patterns of behavior that come to support a society and are generally understood and agreed upon in their roles. They can include behaviors that individuals must participate in as in rites of passage in religion, or in the use of money or joining a military or providing labor for communal structures or means as in irrigation. When one segment of a society comes to disagree with the goals of institutions and withdraws support or actively attacks one or more, it threatens not only the existence of the institution but the society as an organization. Often in history, revolutions are built on such attacks as in those of the Optimates in Ancient Rome or the Bolsheviks in Russia. The attack on the medical profession in the United States has been one that has a longer history, one bracketed in disbelief in science in general and has set the two institutions of religion and medicine at odds. An underfunded medical profession has faced the pandemic in a cloud of conspiracy theories that question even the purpose or need for medicine. The consequences during Covid-19 have been catastrophic by many assessments.
ABSTRACT
The time of the current Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic will become one of the key moments and a major factor that divides and characterizes epochs of history. The post-Coronavirus world will be very different than before, or you could say that it will be markedly distinct from it in structure and features. In this sense, the Coronavirus moment resembles—or almost resembles—other major moments in the past, which became reference points from a historical perspective. Accordingly, it is similar to developments such as the Fall of the Roman Empire;the launching of the religious reform movement and the religious wars that ensued;the rise of the capitalist order and its expansion around the world;the French and Bolshevik revolutions;the two World Wars, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Socialist Bloc;and finally the birth of globalization.