“The corona pandemic brutally exposes the vulnerability of people and our society and radically exacerbates existing social opposites,” says psychotherapist and author Wolfgang Martin Roth, who will participate in the discussion on May 28th “Community: Strategies Against Selfishness”. Before, in a talk with news agency pressetext he highlighted the consequences of the virus-related exodus from the community in the form of social distancing. Every person is a potential carrier of infection “Social distancing affects the habitual structures of personal contact and encounter through caution, fear and distrust, especially in the group particularly at risk from the virus,” says Roth. If other people are primarily potential carriers of infection, the impartiality and ease of human encounters are questioned, it is hardly possible to make new contacts and maintaining existing ones is also restricted. “It will now become clear which people are really important for us – and for whom we are important.” Since COVID-19 prefers to hit older people, the virus marks them in a completely new way as a group and raises awareness of biological age as a survival criterion. “The pandemic radically questions the ‘youth culture’ of the elderly, who still feel young and fit, by throwing us back to human biologism,” says Roth. In general, risk groups are also badly affected by society. “Although they are increasingly protected, they are also distanced and devalued because they are excluded from the social encounter space.” More on pressetext.
