Acharya Prashant begins by warning that there might be much more lethal and incurable viruses to come in the future. He observes that we tend to talk of the virus as the problem, often depicting it culturally as a demon or a horned monster. However, he questions whether the virus is truly to blame. He asks rhetorically if the virus conspired to affect and kill humanity, or if we went and forced the virus to come to us. The speaker suggests that the virus was gladly living where it was supposed to be, in the lap of the jungles. But when we go to the jungle, destroy it, and consume anything we can lay our hands on, we have forced the virus to come to us. Now that the virus is among us, it is simply doing what its nature dictates: to mutate, travel, propagate, and infect as many as possible. The virus is doing what it must, but we are not doing what we must. The speaker describes the virus as almost a chemical, a little heap of genetic information that hardly has any consciousness; it is debatable whether it is even a living thing. He questions the logic of blaming the chemical, comparing it to saying carbon is evil or CO2 is a problem. He points out that it is humans who emit the carbon, and CO2 did not decide on its own to invade and maim us. The root of the problem, according to the speaker, is that our entire worldview is flawed. The very philosophy that forms the foundation of our civilization and existence is flawed, which is why we keep getting such episodic shocks. He expresses fear that a future event may strike humanity in a way from which it may never be able to recover, leading us to meet the fate of the dinosaurs. A small, almost innocuous virus has paralyzed the entire world, and he questions what would happen if a stronger strain were to emerge. When such a catastrophe happens, we will wonder why it happened to us, but the truth is that it was coming, and we just didn't see it. Acharya Prashant points out the hubris in our thinking. We think of ourselves as bigger than nature, and our heroes fancifully talk of colonizing other planets. Yet, right now, we cannot even go to the grocery store or walk to the next residential colony. This is because the ego does not understand; it does not have the power to understand. It can have knowledge and can multiply, much like a virus, but it can never be conscious. In this sense, the external virus is very symbolic of something within man: the ego. The tendency to proliferate, to destroy anyone it touches, and to reach others in a debilitating way is characteristic of both the virus and the human ego. He concludes by asking whether the ego is the virus or the virus is the ego, stating that this pandemic is the proof of our flawed ways.
