The societal carnage, and economic destruction of the rapidly spreading pandemic of Covid-19 virus infection can scarcely be overstated, and is yet to be fully experienced. Yet concealed beneath it is a much greater global pandemic that has been growing exponentially for the past two decades. It is not caused by a physical virus ravaging our physical well being, but a global epidemic of Institutional failure much greater, and more difficult to recognize and cure. In a strange, but obvious way, the Covid-19 pandemic merely illustrates the more deadly Pandemic.

Sixteen years ago, in my first book, Birth Of The Chaordic Age, I wrote of three related questions that emerged in my mind a half century ago, and came to dominate my life.

Why are organizations, everywhere, political, commercial and social, increasingly unable to manage their affairs?

Why are individuals, everywhere, increasingly in conflict with and alienated from the organizations of which they are part?

Why are society and the biosphere increasingly in disarray?

Those questions were fascinating when they emerged. They were critical as the century ended, and the millennium began. They are essential today. As we attempt to deal with the exploding spread of the Covid-19 virus, it should be apparent to everyone that we are in the midst of a global epidemic of institutional failure. Not just failure in the sense of collapse, but the more common and pernicious form—–organizations unable to achieve the purpose for which they were created, yet continuing to exist and expand as they devour resources, demean the human spirit, and destroy the environment.

The Covid-19 pandemic is global. Yet where is the global organization capable of an effective, coordinated, worldwide approach to understanding, and dealing with it? The United Nations may endlessly talk about it, but lacks authority or capacity to do anything, The World Health Organization may speculate about the extent of it, but has no means of knowing the extent of the problem, or means of dealing with it.

The same can be said of each individual nation state. The US congress, and administration are unable to effectively track the spread of it, or coordinate an effective national use of essential supplies to counteract it. Other national governments are equally inept. individual state and city government are somewhat better, but lack essential medical equipment or supplies. All such social entities compete against one another to protect themselves, and acquire equipment, with little regard for the good of the whole.

The US healthcare conglomerate has the same lack of ability to coordinate activities, or deal effectively with the flood of people requiring critical care. Many of the local, smaller hospitals are on the verge of insolvency. The drug companies and medical supply companies were overwhelmed by need, and woefully unprepared to develop vaccines or other preventative measures. Commercial stock corporations are more concerned with protecting profits, and making money from the pandemic, than coordinating resources to deal with it.

Lacking effective means to identify infected individuals, or treat them properly, government officials resorted to crude remedies, such as separating, and confining all people with resultant carnage to the economy as a whole, and economic damage to individuals and families. No one knows how serious the problem my be, how severe it might become, how long it will last, or what the ultimate cost in lives and property may be.

Such ever increasing. universal failure of institutions and management in every segment of society, whether social, economic or political, should suggest to everyone that there is some deep, universal, fundamental flaw in our current concepts of societal organization that we must come to understand and correct if there is ever to be an enduring, beneficent, human society in harmony with the human spirit and environment. It is not the purpose of this brief essay to discuss what that fundamental flaw is, or how it can be corrected. I have written expensively about that in books and essays, some of which are elsewhere in this web site.

This brief entry if only to point out that the Covid-19 virus emerged and has spread very chaordicaly, and clearly illustrates the futility of our simplistic, mechanistic, command and control concepts of organization when it comes to managing an ever more diverse, complex society.

The Covid-19 pandemic is a wake up call concealing a much greater, more deadly pandemic that we ignore at our peril.