The word crisis is overused and misunderstood. Its etymological root coming from the Greek word “krino” meant “separate”, “choose”, “judge” or “decide” (McIoughlin). It leads us to believe that the word crisis depicts a state in which the human being, able to reflect on what is happening around him, has the possibility to deliver a critical analysis of his surroundings. The very word crisis is inherently linked to the existence of a living soul with cognitive capacities.
Political crisis, economic crisis, sanitary crisis, psychological crisis, and especially existential crisis show us how the term is multifaceted. So multifaceted that, pushed to its paroxysm, it has lost all meaning. The term “crisis” only highlights that there is something wrong and undefinable that our lack of vocabulary pushes us to use the term “crisis”, a term to which everyone in the room will nod to, because they might not really know what we are referring to, but they know that there are many things they would like to change.
The term crisis was the victim of an abuse of language. In Chinese, it embraces a broader definition: crisis, “危机” is the addition of the words danger and engine. And danger is the possibility that something bad or undesirable will happen. Desire is personal and entirely subjective. Therefore, a crisis, whether it is felt by numerous people, or only by one individual, cannot be depicted in a universal way.
However, a general situation, emphasized on with anxiety inducing forms of communication, can lead to a general crisis, in which everybody seems to be drowning in the same fear of one particular danger. Or so does Jim Callaghan said in his interview in 1979, during the Winter of Discontent which put England in the worst recession it had ever known. To him, there was no crisis (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX06xqN6710). The unnecessary tumult was coming from the media. But to the rest of the UK, there definitely was one.
As far as crisis is individual, the anxiety it creates can be transmitted to others, and especially with the rising influence of medias, as Carlo Caduff suggested in What went wrong: Corona and the World after the Full stop” (2020): “today’s fear is fueled by mathematical disease modeling…nervous media reporting”. There can be a general sense of crisis, a consensus on how people feel about a situation. However, it is possible to live in the denial of a crisis, just like Jim Callaghan was hoping to live in denial of the winter of discontent.
But the word crisis does not seem to match the current situation that has caused drastic changes to our lives. The crisis in itself does not imply that there is a change in our lifestyle, but denotes, at most, a sense of uncertainty, anxiety and questioning. Its subjectivity suggests that it is limited in the proportions it can take.
Coronavirus has metamorphosed our lives irreversibly. Calling it a crisis undermines the effects it had on us. Its unstoppable spread has caused a lot of destruction and violent changes. Cataclysm is the word matching these terms. I believe that we are undergoing a global cataclysm. Not a crisis, a cataclysm. In a crisis, many of us could have acted just as this man on Supertramp’s music album released in 1979. But we can’t.
