Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

All crises during their acute phase will trigger instinctive responses, like several shades of fear, deriving from the “primitive” part of the human brain. Conversely, vulnerability to a risk is associated with Individual responses, such as while crossing a flooded river or exiting a building during the earthquake. Risk perception is fundamental while collecting data for optimum application of emergency legal acts and enforcement of coercive interim measures in the context of cognitive crisis management Lack of visual contact with neither of the Chemical Biological RadioNuclear threats and social distancing in cases of extended outbreaks or epidemics constitute specific features of public health crises. Popular imagination, cravings for indigestible technical information and the legendary mistrust towards official institutions step in to gap collective insecurity. This common pattern of public response repeated in all crises is highly indicative of different groups or societies, pointing out massive insufficiencies and the long-term socioeconomic disturbance so eloquently outlined in the work of Ortega y Gasset. Community capacity building against a crisis is a private affair. All personal effort to direct human reason to the acquisition of wisdom is eventually reflected as education at the social level. Structuring Plato’s “community of pleasure and pain” and sharing a common moral language dignified by a system of values within the framework of a modern polity is one dynamic process which can be traced from Plato’s theory of knowledge and Aristotle’s political works to subsequent philosophers and other intellectuals.