To Be Resilient, We Must Free Ourselves from Fear

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The Covid-19 pandemic was more than a health crisis. It was a stress test of the resilience of our social, economic, and political systems at a scale not seen since World War II. The pandemic revealed the profound weaknesses of our preparedness, while also pointing to new pathways for cultivating resilience. This illuminates the need for a “coupled system” approach: resilience cannot be understood or strengthened in isolation, but only by recognizing the intimate connections between human health and the health of Earth’s ecosystems.

At the same time, the global response to crises of all kinds reveals a paradox. Political elites and media actors often sustain their authority by cultivating fear: fear of pandemics, of financial crises, of unsustainable debt, of Russia or China, of climate change. Fear has become both a tool of governance and a commodity in the attention economy. Yet resilience requires the opposite: calm critical thinking, long-term responsibility, and the empowerment of individuals to make informed choices. This essay explores the tension between these two forces, resilience and fear-mongering, and suggests how to reconcile them.

«Resilience cannot be understood or strengthened in isolation, but only by recognizing the intimate connections between human health and the health of Earth’s ecosystems.»

Systems and Individuals

Resilience can be defined as the ability of a system to absorb shocks, adapt, and continue functioning in the face of stress and uncertainty. In public discourse, resilience is usually framed at the system level: resilient health systems, resilient economies, resilient societies. These approaches emphasize governance structures, risk management, and institutional capacity.

However, the Covid-19 experience highlighted a blind spot in how we think about resilience. Systems are made of individuals, and the resilience of the whole depends on the resilience of each component. In this context, resilience refers to the capacity to absorb shocks, adapt to stress, and recover function without collapsing. During the pandemic, this capacity manifested biologically through the strength and adaptability of individual immune systems: people with robust immune regulation and metabolic health, which are often the result of long-term lifestyle and environmental factors, could mount effective responses, whereas those with chronic inflammation, obesity, or diabetes had more difficulties to recover. This parallels resilience in natural and social systems, where survival depends on distributed buffers, redundancy, and adaptive capacity rather than mere efficiency.

At the societal level, resilience arises from diverse and decentralized capacities, such as public-health infrastructures, fiscal prudence, social trust, and transparent communication, that can reallocate resources and learn from failure. It can be measured through indicators such as recovery time after shocks, diversity of critical supply chains, or the degree of inequality and institutional flexibility. Yet resilience is not free: building buffers and redundancies often conflicts with the pursuit of short-term efficiency or unrestricted individual freedom. The Covid-19 crisis exposed this tension vividly: economies optimized for global efficiency proved brittle under disruption, while societies that invested in prevention, adaptability, and trust weathered the storm better.

This insight redirects our attention to individual resilience (physical, psychological, and social). Strong bodies and minds are the foundation of resilient communities. When individuals cultivate healthier lifestyles, better nutrition, and mental well-being, they reduce not only their personal vulnerability but also the collective reliance on scarce public resources. A society in which many individuals are resilient is itself more robust. 

Decay of Resilience in Modern Societies

Over the last half-century, the very forces that defined modern progress (industrialization, globalization, digitalization, and the pursuit of efficiency) have paradoxically made us more fragile. Industrial agriculture and mass food processing have increased yields and convenience but depleted soils, reduced nutrient density, and flooded diets with ultra-processed products rich in sugar, seed oils, and additives. Chemical innovation has brought plastics, pesticides, and synthetic compounds into nearly every aspect of life, from packaging to water supplies, introducing chronic low-level exposures that disrupt hormonal and immune systems. Urbanization and motorized transport have reduced daily physical activity, while the dominance of screen-based work and entertainment has fostered sedentary habits.

Meanwhile, the architecture of the modern economy (global supply chains, just-in-time production, and financialization) has optimized efficiency at the cost of redundancy and local self-sufficiency. Technological hyperconnectivity has amplified information overload, social comparison, and anxiety, contributing to the rise of depression and dependence on psychotropic medication. Collectively, these modern developments have eroded both individual and collective resilience: biologically through weakened immunity and chronic inflammation, psychologically through stress and alienation, and socially through the loss of redundancy, autonomy, and trust that once buffered communities against shocks.

In short, while medicine has extended life expectancy, the cumulative effect of modern lifestyles and environmental degradation has been a decline in the average resilience of individuals. Our immune systems are less robust, our psychological health is weaker, and our dependence on external interventions (pharmaceuticals, hospitals, governments) has increased.

This diagnostic underscores the urgency of a coupled system approach. The health of individuals cannot be separated from the health of the environment. Clean air, clean water, and nutrient-rich food are not luxuries but prerequisites for resilient societies.

Human-Environment-Health Initiatives

I propose a Human-Environment-Health Initiative: a ‘super-Apollo project’ mobilizing a few percent of global GDP each year to restore environmental integrity and rebuild human resilience. Financing would not depend on new taxes but on the reallocation of existing flows that currently undermine sustainability. Governments spend over $5 trillion annually on environmentally harmful subsidies supporting fossil fuels, chemical-intensive agriculture, and resource depletion. Redirecting even part of these funds toward regenerative farming, ecosystem restoration, pollution cleanup, and preventive health would yield far greater long-term returns. Additional resources could come from blended public-private financing, targeted carbon and toxicity levies, and outcome-linked instruments rewarding verified environmental and health gains.

Governance should avoid centralized technocratic planning in favor of a liberal, transparent, and decentralized framework. The initiative would set broad measurable goals, such as reductions in chemical exposure, biodiversity recovery, and improved population health, while empowering nations, regions, and cities to innovate locally toward these ends. Independent monitoring bodies and open data platforms would track progress, ensuring accountability and enabling citizens, researchers, and investors to evaluate outcomes. Success would be measured not in GDP growth alone but through resilience metrics: ecosystem vitality, reduced chronic disease burden, and faster recovery from shocks.

Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012), the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, showed, with her work on the governance of common-pool resources such as forests, fisheries, and irrigation systems, that local communities often manage more effectively than centralized authorities or pure market mechanisms. She identified a set of design principles that enable such systems to thrive: clearly defined boundaries, participatory rule-making, local monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict-resolution mechanisms, and nested governance from the local to the global level.

Drawing on Ostrom’s insights, the initiative would adopt a polycentric governance model in which self-organized communities, municipalities, and institutions share overarching goals but retain local autonomy. Rules and incentives would be co-designed by those directly affected, ensuring legitimacy and compliance. Transparent, community-based monitoring, supported by scientific guidance and open data, would replace hierarchical control. Higher-level institutions would coordinate and facilitate rather than command.

This Ostrom-inspired architecture would make resilience-building both adaptive and democratic, combining global strategic coordination with locally grounded action: an open-source model of collective stewardship aimed at the joint flourishing of humanity and the biosphere.

The objective is twofold:

1. Depolluting the environment to restore ecosystems that support human well-being.
2. Depolluting our bodies and minds by strengthening immune systems through education, lifestyle change, and medical approaches that treat the human organism as a holistic system.

This perspective aligns with both traditional ecological and modern systems science. It recognizes that resilience emerges from feedback loops between individuals, societies, and their environment.

Individual Responsibility and Education

A second pillar of resilience is individual responsibility. Western democracies have cultivated a culture of dependency in which citizens expect the state to protect them from all harms and blame authorities when crises occur. However, resilience cannot be delegated. Each person must take responsibility for cultivating their own health and well-being.

This requires large-scale educational programs to promote healthy diets, physical activity, and critical thinking. It also requires cultural change: re-embedding the idea that individuals are part of complex ecological systems, not separate from them. Education should start in childhood, emphasizing the connections between personal health, community well-being, and environmental sustainability.

«Resilience cannot be delegated. Each person must take responsibility for cultivating their own health and well-being.»

Technology can play a role: apps, gamified tools, and social networks can provide mutual motivation and coaching. But the deeper change is psychological: shifting from passive reliance on external authorities to active responsibility for one’s own resilience.

The Paradox of Fear and Governance

Here lies the paradox. Resilience demands individual responsibility, critical thinking, and calm engagement with facts. Yet contemporary politics and media ecosystems thrive on fear. The 2008 financial crisis was framed as the brink of systemic collapse; massive public debts are depicted as existential threats for the Western welfare system; the pandemic generated rolling waves of panic; geopolitical rivalries are dramatized as imminent wars; and climate change is cast in apocalyptic tones.

Why this pattern? Fear serves several functions. For media companies operating in the attention economy, fear is a profitable product: alarming headlines capture clicks, views, and advertising revenue. For policymakers, fear provides cover. It allows elites to deflect responsibility for policy failures, corruption, or incompetence by framing crises as external threats. It also justifies extraordinary measures, from financial bailouts to surveillance regimes, often with limited democratic debate.

The result is a population trapped in permanent anxiety. Citizens are bombarded with warnings and apocalyptic narratives, leaving little space for rational analysis. In such an environment, the cultivation of individual resilience is undermined. Fear corrodes trust, narrows attention, and discourages personal responsibility, which are precisely the qualities that resilience requires.

How, then, can we reconcile the call for individual resilience with a society addicted to fear? Several steps are necessary:

1. Cultivating Media Literacy. Individuals must learn to recognize fear-mongering and distinguish it from evidence-based information. Educational systems should teach not only health and nutrition but also critical thinking about media and information ecosystems.
2. Reframing Narratives. Leaders and communicators should shift from narratives of fear to narratives of capability. Crises should be presented as challenges to be met through resilience, cooperation, and innovation, rather than as existential doomsday scenarios.
3. Building Grassroots Movements. Since systemic reform is slow and elites benefit from the status quo, resilience must spread bottom-up. Communities of practice (neighborhood groups, schools, online networks) can model resilient behaviors and create positive contagion effects.
4. Embedding Responsibility in Institutions. Policies can align personal and collective resilience by rewarding responsibility and pricing negligence. The insurance model offers a compelling template: by linking premiums to risk profiles, it internalizes the costs of behavior: those who smoke or neglect health pay more, while those who maintain healthy lifestyles pay less. This principle can extend well beyond health insurance. In environmental policy, carbon and pollution pricing function as collective insurance, forcing emitters to bear the true costs of degradation while rewarding those who invest in clean technologies, regenerative agriculture, or circular production. Similarly, in finance, risk-weighted capital requirements and climate stress tests already adjust incentives toward long-term prudence, discouraging systemic fragility. Such mechanisms transform resilience from a moral exhortation into a market signal that fosters accountability and virtue. By making risk visible and costly, they promote preventive behavior across scales: individual, corporate, and governmental. Yet they also require new forms of ethical data governance: wearable devices, environmental sensors, and digital ledgers can provide accurate risk information, but their use must preserve privacy, transparency, and fairness. When designed with these safeguards, adaptive insurance-like systems can reduce both moral and environmental “pollution,” realigning personal choices and institutional behavior with the long-term health of society and the biosphere.

In this way, individual resilience can coexist with, and eventually counterbalance, the fear economy. By reclaiming responsibility for their own health and decisions, citizens reduce their vulnerability both to external shocks and to manipulative narratives.

Spreading Resilience

Resilience is not merely a technical concept of risk management. It is a holistic vision of how individuals, societies, and ecosystems sustain themselves under stress. To build resilience, we must restore the health of our environments, strengthen individual immune systems, and cultivate responsibility at every level.

But resilience also requires freeing ourselves from the grip of fear. Elites and the media will continue to trade in alarm and anxiety, because fear is a powerful instrument of power and profit. The task of resilience is not only biological and environmental but also cultural and cognitive: to resist manipulation, think critically, and act responsibly..

If individuals embrace this challenge of educating themselves, supporting one another, and re-embedding themselves in healthy ecosystems, the result could be a quiet revolution. From the bottom up, resilience can spread, making societies less dependent on fear and more capable of facing the inevitable crises of the future.