The Coronavirus also Attacks Political and Corporate Bodies

La Peste (1947) by Albert Camus relates the story of a cholera plague that not only killed people in a town but also devastated the town's political and business bodies How is the COVID-19 pandemic harming not only us, our friends, and our families, but also the integrated interactions of our bodies with technologies, corporations, cultures, and politics? How will we get water, food, and information if we have no electricity, due to either the COVID-19 disaster or immoral people? How will we find new solid forms of living together in health, peace, and liberty? I pose the following five questions (1) Will better "domestic circulation" and "gross happiness products" offer new opportunities for stable and healthy political bodies? (2) Will the Belt-and-Road Initiative have healthy solutions for all bodies involved? (3) Will smaller political and corporate bodies be more robust and healthier, and how can we grow them? (4) Will artificial intelligence build strong organs in future political bodies, or will they disintegrate and destroy them? (5) Will integrated bioethics and biopolitics find other solutions?

(1) La Peste (1947) by Albert Camus relates the story of a cholera plague that not only killed people in a town but also devastated the town's political and business bodies. How is the COVID-19 pandemic harming not only us, our friends, and our families, but also the integrated interactions of our bodies with technologies, corporations, cultures, and politics? How will we get water, food, and information if we have no electricity, due to either the COVID-19 disaster or immoral people? How will we find new solid forms of living together in health, peace, and liberty? I pose the following five questions.
(1) Will better "domestic circulation" and "gross happiness products" offer new opportunities for stable and healthy political bodies? (2) Will the Belt-and-Road Initiative have healthy solutions for all bodies involved? (3) Will smaller political and corporate bodies be more robust and healthier, and how can we grow them? (4) Will artificial intelligence build strong organs in future political bodies, or will they disintegrate and destroy them? (5) Will integrated bioethics and biopolitics find other solutions?
My personal life is the most impressive evidence that all life is interconnected and interdependent. Even the most primitive single cell is built and functions by the interplay of a few segments of DNA, which themselves are connections of deoxyribonucleic acid long molecules that form individual and species life. As such, organic matter differs from inorganic matter such as rocks or stones. My body has my individual DNA as a recipe to build and preserve my cells and organs. My individual DNA is inherited from and combines my parents' DNA, which they got from their forefathers and foremothers, and which identifies them as belonging to the human species rather than to another species, such as a plant or animal. Adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine are the bases of DNA, which bond in specific ways to form a double helix string. However, I would not be able to exist, after gestation in my mother's body, without care, food, and education by my parents and their surroundings. I would not be able to live without the cooperation of the billions of microbes 3 in my intestine, my mouth, and my skin, which help me to co-digest my food and protect me from unfriendly or even deadly parasites, such as the actual COVID-19 virus. Infections such as the coronavirus or the flu virus are much more aggressive than diarrhea or simple stomach pain, but all these pains and troubles involve not only myself, but also my bacterial co-life and eventually my family, my doctors, and my pharmacists.
However, my personal life and those of my family and friends also closely interact in other integrated actions for my survival and well-being and for those of others. I cannot bake my own bread-where would I get the corn, rice, or potatoes, if not from farmers, neighbors, or merchants? How would I cook my meal, if someone had not built a stove and if others did not provide electricity or gas? How would farmers and mechanics work without tools? How would we as citizens cooperate without civility and social and legal rules? Is it acceptable to have sex with a married woman or an underage girl? In most states, marriage between one woman and one man is normal and legally protected, but other states, such as some Muslim countries, allow and protect marriages that include more than one woman. In more contemporary nations, civil unions between homosexuals is protected like marriage. The animal kingdom includes those who routinely have lifelong marriages, whereas others naturally change sex partners. Among deer there is a dominant male buck, and the younger males do not produce sperm; however, when the dominant buck becomes sick or dies, the younger bucks produce sperm and fight each other violently to assume the dominant position in the herd and fertilize offspring. There is an old Chinese saying: "Heaven and Man are an integral One. As a result, they are in constant pursuit of harmony between humanity and nature" (quoted by Pan Yue, Chinese Vice-Minister of State Environmental Protection in: China Daily, July 27, 2006). In Western tradition, Jesus was among the first bioculturologists, as he explained failures and success in human life and culture in the parable of a farmer who sowed seed into the land, "…but some seed fell on the road and was eaten up by the birds; other seed fell on dry and stony land, it grew initially but then had not enough water and soil and died; other seed fell under the bushes and was dominated by those bushes and could not develop either; other seed fell on the good land and bore fruit and harvest 30 times or even 100 times" (Matth. 13: 1-13).
The Greek word bios represents such a broad concept of sheng ming [ ], zest for life, joie de vivre, or lebenslust. Henry Bergson introduced the term lan vital to underline the difference between the invariable and static dur e and life as living (Bergson 1907). Darwin assigned zest and determination for life and survival to all forms of life when discussing the "struggle for life." Bios-life-includes not only the bodies of natural beings and biotopes, but also the "body politic" of our cultures and human communities. Here we must include the bodies and lives of corporations, institutions, cultures, and societies as communities and biotopes with geographic locations or that exist in cyberspace. For hundreds, if not thousands, of years, people lived in hutongs with private, semiprivate, semipublic, and shared public spaces; now many live in high-rise buildings with few or no semipublic or public spaces, but they may share non-geographic private and public cyberspaces of various types. Most older adults have experience of living in both small geographical communities and cyberspace communities; how will our children and grandchildren be shaped by the living environments around them? Modern societies are symbiotic living creatures of natural persons; natural communities such as families, clans, and villages or neighborhoods; and economic and legal "persons" such as enterprises, institutions, bureaucracies, and similar cyberspace-based persons, communities, and powers. They all wish to live well, to grow, and to sustain their lives and networks. This may lead to cooperation and support, network building, favoritism, mutual aid, and help, but it may also lead to corruption and exploitation in the interest of survival and protection and even expansion of one's biotope and influence. These tendencies of various players can and do lead to dysfunctional bodies and biotopes (Fukuyama 2014, 5-26). Other species live in the same geographic spaces as we humans do, but they recognize and live in their worlds differently. Bees and ants live in complex and highly structured social and biological "eusocial" communities (Crespi 1995, 109-115), but sometimes they suddenly abandon their hives, a phenomenon described as "colony collapse disorder." We humans are not truly social beings. Over the millennia, we have built and destroyed complex political, cultural, social, and economic communities that are variously stable and fragile, as can be seen these days in many Muslim and other countries . This phenomenon can also be described using the term "culture collapse disorder," based on discontent, hatred, ideology, and terror among humans. A similar "collapse disorder" has been reported, particularly in the United States, due to social distancing guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dogs orient themselves olfactorily, bats acoustically, and humans through communication and cooperation, competence and compassion, competition and cultivation. Corals build coral reefs; beavers build dams; birds build nests; and ants and bees build states . Humans build houses and streets, the Silk Road and the Internet, autobahns, and airways; cyberspace locations and environments have modified geographic distances, bridged differences, contributed to greater communication and cooperation, and also generated more and different forms of deceit, harm, and exploitation. We humans lack the specific highly developed senses of dogs and bats; instead, we use six basic and species-specific human properties separately or in coordination: "communication and cooperation, competence and compassion, competition and cultivation." We find these six "C" properties in all successful human endeavors and in traditional religions and communities (Sass 2011, 36-47). They have also been called values, virtues. or principles, which are agreed upon, revealed, or given by the Gods as commandments or instructions. In the Muslim hadith tradition, we read: "God, His angels and all those in Heavens and Earth, even ants in their hills and fish in the water, call down blessings on those who instruct others in beneficial knowledge" (Al-Timidhi, Hadith 422).
Knowledge is a double-edged sword. Poison can kill a person, but in the right dosage it can heal. Cain murdered his brother Abel with an axe, but axes can be and have been used to cultivate woodlands, build houses, and defend families against animal and human aggressors. This allows for spin-off or double-purpose applications and potentially devilish technologies that harm, kill, or eradicate individuals and communities. Czar Peter the Great learned how to use a dentist's pliers in Holland, but at home he advised the use of this tool for torture, even on his son. We humans have used these properties to build houses, roads, gardens, cities, farms, factories, and economic and social networks, both geographically and in cyberspace. However, we also have used these properties to destroy, harm, and kill people, natural and social environments, communities, and cultures. Modern societies are complex symbiotic and adaptable living things made up of natural persons; natural communities such as families, clans, and villages or neighborhoods; and economic and legal "persons" such as enterprises, institutions, bureaucracies, and similar cyberspace-based persons, communities, and powers. They all seek to live well, to grow, and to sustain their lives and networks; this might lead to cooperation and support, network building, favoritism, mutual aid, and help, but it might also lead to corruption and exploitation in the interests of survival and protection and even expansion of one's biotope and influence. These tendencies of various players can and do lead to dysfunctional bodies and biotopes. We humans seem not have made up our minds as to whether individual survival and happiness or group survival and happiness should be our goal.
[The integrated Political Body, The Pyramid of the Capitalist System] Should we follow Thomas Hobbes and suggest that the "ruler" use stiff punishments to force people to follow one and only one rule and command? Or is there another, better way, as Engelhardt suggested, quoting Heraclitus: "Thought is common to all men. Men must speak with understanding and hold fast to that which is common to all, as the city holds fast to its laws, and more strongly still. For all human laws are nourished by the one divine law" (Engelhardt 1996, 5). The Tao suggests: "Rule the land with justice, fight a war with surprise, and win a country with harmonious action" (Dao De Jing 57).
We humans create and use tools-both hardware tools and software tools-and we have correctly referred to ourselves as Homo faber, i.e., a tool-using species. Hardware tools include hammers and axes, farms and vineyards, houses and castles, cars and mails, and networks of electricity and commerce. Software tools include rules and values, punishments and honors, gods and goddesses, good and evil spirits, languages and traditions, ceremonies and festivities, and parties and enjoyment. All of these tools require reliable and careful handling.
Hardware tools. When our ancestors left the African jungle trees a million years ago, we used sticks to clear brush and cut paths and to intimidate or defeat unfriendly animals and human rivals. We learned to control fire and water and developed more diverse tools such as spades and axes, nails and hammers, sheds and houses, walls and castles, wagons and ships, and black powder for fireworks and to shoot projectiles. We also bred and crossbred cultured plants and animals such as rice, wheat, and apples and camels, mules, dogs, horses, and cows for food and commerce, and some just for company. Our personal and societal experiences and ecosystems grew larger and more complex due to complex tool use. We had economic, cultural, informational, social, and political internets before we created postal and telephone services and radio and television services. Today, globally integrated internets include people and things, alongside autobahns, railroad networks, shipping routes, and air travel, in addition to networks of algorithms that collect and interconnect data for interpretation in business and for learning about citizens and groups, and chatbots for detailed information, education, and networking in blockchains or among the general public.
Software tools. Homo faber has not only been successful in building hardware tools; we have also demonstrated and experienced a species-specific capacity to build software tools for shared social use, including narratives about family members, actual and deceased, imaginary dangerous or friendly spirits, gods and goddesses, devils and guardian angels, ceremonies and feasts honoring the seasons, emperors, gods, and local or religious communities or corporations in multiple fashions. Thus, by using more and more complex software tools, we have also modified our social biotopes from family clans and small neighborhoods to villages, cities, kingdoms, and empires of various kinds. These spiritual and social tools were formed and maintained by ever-changing social, cultural, and political networks that included clan and neighborhood traditions, retold oral and written narratives, educational cultivation of children and communities, and the formation and bonding of communities via shared spiritual dreams and convictions, play and games, ceremonies and festivals. These software tools made communities stable and prosperous by division of labor and expertise and by enforcing legal and political tools.
The human species uses two biological properties, "Contemplation" and "Calculation," which can be documented throughout history in all cultures as empowering the "sons of light" in battling the "evils of darkness." The virtual reality of gods, goddesses, and saints in many religions has proven its real power in guiding (and protecting) oneself and one's loved ones from misery and evil spirits. As Socrates argued in his discussion with Thrasymachus, the gods did not create values and success, but they love ethics and values as tools for harmony, stability, and service to peoples and ecosystems. The two biological "C" properties-contemplation and calculation-together with the other six "C" properties-communication and cooperation, competence and competition, compassion and cultivation-empower us humans to develop our human culture and its diverse history. Communicating by sound, speech, writing, and by music and theater and cooperating in multiple fashions only lay the essential groundwork; the technical competence and economic competition of two bakers in a village improve the quality of bread and keep prices down. Compassion and caring feel good and guarantee long-term, flexible, and stable cultivation.
Animate and inanimate tools. When we humans create and manipulate tools, we may differentiate between animate tools such as plants, animals, and humans and inanimate tools such as hammers, cars, and numerical or industrial processes and technologies. Animate life needs oxygen, neurobiological chemicals such as oxytocin and dopamine for breathing, food, and sleep, and it may feel love, despair, and happiness. Inanimate tools feel neither despair nor love; they are neither successful nor unsuccessful, whether separate like a hammer or coordinated like assembly lines or algorithm processes; and they need electricity or other energy to work. So far, we have cultivated animate tools only indirectly, via breeding and crossbreeding, selecting or killing in favor of cultivated cities and agricultural ecosystems. Only recently has CRISPR-Cas9 technology given us the tools to directly construct life-form tools, including the manipulation of human life. Some traditional breeding methods may have harmed animals, such as dachshunds with their inherited spine vulnerabilities, especially when required to use staircases, and they may have impoverished natural diversity via monoculture farming. CRISPR technology will increase those conflicts.
Life emotions, such as the nine reactions in tantric yoga-love, humor, wonder, courage, calmness, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust-require oxytocin and dopamine, whereas robot companions and machine learning are powered by electricity or other non-animated energy. Algorithms in mathematics, business, and science perform self-contained and ultimately self-learning step-by-step calculations, predictions, and suggestions in automated reasoning. Interactive social robots such as my old teddy bear; new dementia care companions that hug older adults; interacting and speaking toys for lonely children; sex toys for lonely singles capable of learning and increasing sex and sympathy, measuring their pulse, telling stories, and playing music; and other artificial empathy tools such as "love and provider" software and hardware for single men or women looking for sex partners. Although my 80+-year-old teddy bear formed my individual emotional personality, tools for older adult care, interactive children's toys, and sex dolls open a variety of new social and emotional cultures for even more individual and collective diversity.
Since Cain killed his brother Abel (Gen, 4:8), all types of tools have been used and even developed for extortion, domination, torture, stealing, lying, and killing. What good did the German extermination camps or the Japanese Rape of Nanjing do for the progress of liberty and freedom? Stalin's and Mao's cruel dictatorships followed, as did Pol Pot's, and today we see tribal warfare in Africa and elsewhere. Humankind has made great progress in cultivating raw biotopes into cities and agriculture and in inventing machines and internets of various kinds. However, we also use these new technologies to torture people with electricity rather than beating them with sticks and to steal via digital instruments rather than breaking into houses, or to make other nation's militaries "blind and deaf" and their social bodies sick via "information dominance." [Hardware Tools, Software Tools, Communication Tools] Communication tools. The health of social and political bodies is routinely measured in economic terms by the gross national product, but that statistic says nothing about a political body's harmony, health, or stability. King Jigme Singye Wangchuck of Bhutan, just after his coronation at 27 years of age, introduced the concept of the gross happiness product, an index that measures pride, coherence, satisfaction, knowledge, spirituality, individual emotional and physical health, harmony with the environment, balanced use of personal time, and of course a decent economic base that satisfies hunger and other basic needs. 4 The index includes eight specific pillars contributing to happiness: "physical, mental and spiritual health; time-balance; social and community vitality; cultural vitality; education; living standards; good governance; ecological vitality." 5 Businesses, the media, and governments may use the model of "growth happiness" as an empirical tool in political sociology, advising leaders, the public, and the media on policy issues.
Community happiness includes seasonal festivals, such as spring, moon, harvest, New Year, carnivals, and Oktoberfest; national holidays; religious holidays; local festivals such as kindergarten fests, school fests, sport team fests, neighborhood fests, high-rise neighbors' parties, and local heroes' birthdays; temple and church annual fests; and private club fests. The historically proven remedy for the domination of tools by immoral people, states, corporations, or robots is direct human interaction in the flesh, among the young, children, families, clubs, religious and other circles, sports teams, and neighborhoods.
The living material of political bodies is similar to that of individual bodies, but they are not identical; in the words of Confucius, they are "similar but not identical." (Confucius "harmony in diversity" in "Analects of Confucius", chapter 13, paragraph 23) The same can be said for societies and states of humans as for biotopes of microbes, states of bees and ants, natural and cultivated environments, and the myriads of microbiomes. Biotopes and individual bios are in permanent transition from one point in life to the next, changing Modern societies are complex, symbiotic, and adaptable living beings comprised of natural persons; natural communities such as families, clans, and villages or neighborhoods; and economic and "legal" persons such as enterprises, institutions, bureaucracies, and similar cyberspace-based persons, communities, and powers. They all wish to live well, to grow, and to sustain their lives and networks; this might lead to cooperation and support, network building, favoritism, mutual aid and help, but it may also lead to corruption and exploitation in the interests of survival and protection and even expansion of one's biotope and influence. These tendencies of different players can and do lead to dysfunctional bodies and biotopes. Other species exist in the same geographical spaces as we humans, but they recognize their world and our world differently; bios is pluripotent and pluriperspective life all of the time. As far as our human species is concerned, it seems "that the evolution of our species privileged group (6) For the term "body politic," cf. the Oxford English Dictionary: "a nation regarded as a corporate entity." (7) The impressive engraving of Abraham Bosse on the title page displays the biological, bioethical, and biopolitical power of an oversized person symbolizing the body politic waving a sword in one hand and a ruler's crosier in the other, governing the lands, his body formed by a large number of diverse individual people; for images of Leviathan and Behemoth, see the Internet.
survival over personal survival" (Lawler 2013, 155). 8 Bees live in complex and highly structured social and biological communities, but sometimes they suddenly abandon their hives in a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder; humans from time to time destroy their complex political, cultural, social, and economic communities, as can be seen these days in some Arab and Muslim countries and elsewhere around the world, based on discontent, hatred, extreme ideologies, terror, exploitation, and simply widespread unhappiness and the loss of mutual trust and mutual aid. Individual bodies are more integrated than political ones, but political bodies may come in even more shapes and shades than individual bodies do. Some body parts such as mafiosi, dictators, and leaders of good or bad dominating economic, religious, or social groups might be happy and healthy while the rest of the political and social body suffers from disorders and sickness due to negligence or exploitation. Political bodies strive in the same eight "C" biological dimensions; they need internal and external communication and cooperation as their blood stream and nervous system, competence and competition in survival, contemplation and calculation to set their vision and goal into practice, compassion to deal with their constituency, and good skills in cultivation to extend their lives into the future.
Public things and beings, in comparison with individual and private things and beings, have been called res publica, from which the term republic derives; other political bodies include kingdoms, empires, democracies, and aristocracies. Similar to individual bodies and other forms of bios, one size does not fit all. Aristotle in his Politeia describes various bodies of political bios and their advantages and disadvantages and suggests a harmonious blend of meritocracy and individual virtue. Oligarchic and democratic bodies can deteriorate into totalitarian and anarchic bios, but neither power nor commerce is the life purpose of the body politic, rather happiness and bodily health. Healthy families and clans are the basic living matter out of which healthy, strong, and happy political bodies are formed; this comes holds "We are, as Haidt puts it, both 'sociocentric' and 'individualistic', but we find home, place, significance, and happiness in the sociocentric mode, being 'full of emotions finally tuned for loving, befriending, helping, sharing, and otherwise intertwining our lives with others'. So, we find happiness not in autonomously pursuing it as a right but satisfying our natural social desires to belong." close to the Confucian model of the state's being one large family in the wide world of bios composed of smaller families. Spinoza (Spinoza 1670) offers a highly modern understanding of the bios politic as a highly adaptable complex form of life. He argues that because humans are endowed by God, "freedom of philosophy can be granted without hurting personal piety and peace in society, and that on the contrary peace in society and personal piety would be eliminated in deterring liberty and philosophy." Long-lasting states and societies seem to have a rather modular body of more or less loosely integrated or interacting parts that allow for transformation and modification once one or more parts become weak, distressed, sclerotic, cancerous, or otherwise threaten the other parts or the entire body. Vast political bodies with relatively long lives are not run on a short dominant leash. The empire of Genghis Khan was a center over multiple more or less independent bodies that enjoyed freedom of religion and internal affairs. Charlemagne ran his European empire with only a few hundred people at the center, among them a few dozen riding messengers who carried mail to his various relatively independent fortresses. The more successful emperors of China ruled the provinces and instructed the mandarins via royal letters and only in the most dangerous situations had to seek solutions and protect the body politics via war. The multicentered 1,000 years of the Holy Roman Empire (Wilson 2016) were marked by various interacting power bodies of kings, princes, dukes, bishops, and free cities in a decentralized manner and by relatively autonomous rural peasant communes that owned most land and had their own rules and traditions for how to work the land together as a commune or allocate to certain families. None of these political bodies were nation-states, as these have developed only during the last 200 years.
For millennia, important settlements were protected by walls; rivers were the connecting roads of choice; and capitals and rulers were quite often far away. Today, I can fly in 8 or 10 hours from Beijing or New Delhi to the capitals of political bodies in Europe, the Americas, and, of course, Asia. Today, I can travel from Beijing to Shanghai by train comfortably and quickly in 4 hours and from Paris to London in about the same time. How much longer than 4 months of travel each way would Confucius have needed to travel by ox wagon or donkey from his family place close to Jinan, Shandong province, halfway between Beijing and Shanghai, to either one of these cities? How long did it take for riding messengers or sailboats to convey messages from Paris to London or New York before telegraph cables were laid 150 years ago? Today I can reach nearly every marketplace and person around the clock in no time, via the Internet and Skype. How will our social and political bodies change and adapt to those new territories; how far are they still part of them; and how much will they challenge, modify, or even destroy them?
There has always been the risk of deliberate or accidental destruction of human cultures and societies (Sass 2005;). I only mention five, as follows.
(1) Global pandemics and biological warfare. From time to time, viral and bacterial infections break out naturally, mostly due to naturally modified pathogens with different toxicities and lead times of incubation, as demonstrated by the global coronavirus pandemic. However, human diseases have also been weaponized. Around 1,000 BCE, the Hittites drove infected people into their enemies' lands; in 1346 CE, the Mongols catapulted the corpses of plague victims into the Crimean city of Kaffa; and during World War II, the Japanese threw ceramic bombs with bubonic plague fleas into the city of Ningbo. Today, unlike the innocent people who happen to be victims of the coronavirus, bad people and bad governments may deliberately and strategically distribute debilitating or deadly microbes and even genetically manufacture viruses for various kinds of warfare. Imagine the case of a group of lunatics or determined suicidal killers who infect themselves with a deadly virus of their own making and thus have a substantial lead time during which they can spread the disease before they die. They could use subways, buses, supermarkets, and airplanes strategically to infect fellow humans by dispersing the virus via exhalation or by infecting surfaces touched by other people, who would then serve as involuntary collaborators during their incubation time. Deposits of deadly or debilitating viruses under government control in many countries are easily available to those governments and, to a lesser extent, to individuals, but known pathogens, such as those for the Ebola virus or other microbes, can also be collected in their natural biotope, reproduced in larger quantities, and even modified for better use as weapons.
Humankind's global integration makes biological combat a weapon of choice for desperate killers who are either suicidal or intend to infect others who are willing or unwilling to be carriers of death. In our integrated modern world, it would be difficult to keep the spread of such a disease under control. Biological warfare could endanger those criminal states and politicians themselves, except that they can initiate strict border controls after the attack and/or store an antidote to protect their own population. Microbes manufactured for warfare or mass control in an unruly society need not be lethal, as long as they help dictators or aggressors make military forces or entire populations incapable of resistance for a limited time by causing serious disorientation, pain, or discomfort.
In naturally occurring pandemics, deadly pathogens are the enemy; in biological warfare, human aggressors are the enemies and pathogens their weapons of choice. The very few acute and preventive weapons for defense include (1) complete, easy-to-understand public information and advice and (2) good public health infrastructure and pre-acute storage of remedies for easy distribution. A temporary reduction of freedom of mobility and other temporary restrictions of civil rights after the outbreak might also become necessary. Official or voluntary quarantines in certain places, such as emergency offices, hospitals, nursing homes, and uninfected villages or provinces, as well as mandatory inoculations and other interventions, are other extraordinary means necessary to win such a war. The goals of these extraordinary means must be fully communicated before the outbreak. Preferably, independent, trusted individuals or groups from civil society should simultaneously supervise such announcements.
When terrorists work alone in small cells, the best defense and prevention strategy against all forms of terrorism and radical discontent in society is to support healthy cultural and ethical environments and to educate the populace to be risk-competent and vigilant. Global high-tech networks of communication and travel allow both good citizens and evildoers to successfully reach their goals. Terrorists will most likely have direct or indirect support from one or more mafia-type groups, or even from governments or religious factions (such as pirates had from official powers in the past). If this is the case, those entities must share the blame and punishment and must be exposed publicly. If the biomedical killing of masses of innocent people is an option seriously contemplated by governments, the best defense would be high levels of research and preparedness-and, unfortunately, a policy of threatening to retaliate in a similar manner. During the Cold War, this approach was called the strategy of mutually assured destruction.
(2) Electric risk and electromagnetic shock. Our sun constantly emits radiation at various intensities, which from time to time is quite severe. In the past, however, we neither knew about it nor had the means to measure it. In September 1859, the largest geomagnetic solar storm ever reported (called the Carrington event after the British scientist who reported and documented it) destroyed many of the first telegraph lines in Europe and North America and caused a number of fires; a similar storm today would render the entire infrastructure of electricity and communication useless. We now know that extremely strong lengths and kinds of radiation will interfere with our electric networks and may destroy hardware and software. However, the same or similar radiation can also be initiated by states or by criminals using strong magnetic radiation as a deliberate means of destruction. If exploded high in the air over southern China or the east coast of the United States (or fired from a harmless fishing trawler), a device similar to a hydrogen bomb that emitted strong gamma radiation would render useless the digital infrastructure of an area encompassing Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangdong or the entire corridor of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC. The entire integrated electric grid would be affected, including microchips in phones, cars, supermarkets, and elevators, and all forms of digital communication and cooperation, including those of the police, military, rescue forces, and media. In 2008, the U.S. Congress Commission on Electromagnetic Pulses estimated that 90% of the U.S. population would die within 12 months after a total loss of electricity from starvation, disease, or societal breakdown (Pry 2013). People would die in their high-rise buildings and might even kill each other over food and water. Cars would not operate, and planes would fall out of the sky. People would be clueless as to what had caused the breakdown of civilization, because the Internet and the media would not be functional. Attacks on utility infrastructure would occur, destroying water dams, power grids, pumping stations, and all kinds of control systems. All sorts of private intellectual and real property would be stolen. The comfortable, civilized, highly complex, ultra-modern human biocultural elephant reveals that it is standing on feet of clay, and that it is literally built on sand (i.e., on silicon).
(3) Confidence risk in paper-and-promise. Trade and commerce have become increasingly integrated and are thus prey to unintentional or deliberate attacks on basic trust. The message "In God we trust" on every piece of U.S. currency has a genuine meaning. An unintentional meltdown of markets in real estate and finance occurred in 2004 and 2008, and only a concerted effort to rescue those who had caused this meltdown avoided an international catastrophe in the bios of economy and business. Today, individual computer hackers or state-supported criminals could create total havoc in the planet's fully integrated commercial life. Because high-frequency trading is already done primarily by artificial intelligence, glitches or technical inequalities in the software of trading machines, not human competence in trading, result in winning or losing.
Consider this case: a crazy person, a group, or a government throws US$800 billion in real U.S. Treasury bills on the European markets, not derivatives. The investor asks to be paid not in contracts or in futures, but in scarce, real-value assets such as gold, silver, diamonds, land, corn, or cotton, to be delivered immediately. Once those billions are offered, European markets suffer a shock. Little trading occurs, and the markets shut down in no time. The U.S. and Asian markets do not even open. Scared people run to their banks for paper money. With no more paper money, my local bank closes the next day, and my neighborhood ATM is empty. Gas stations and supermarkets decline my credit cards, occasionally accepting promise-on-paper money or bartering goods or services. Because trust can easily be destroyed, even well-placed rumors from experts and the public might already have done the job of exposing the empty promises behind the signatures on paper money. Civil discontent towards promise-on-paper will lead to civil disobedience and disorder and result in sick political bodies.
(4) Revolt and repression risk. When Karl Marx searched in 1848 for huge human masses as a powerful force for changing unfair social and political environments, he identified the exploited proletarians of the early European industrial revolution. Today, he would identify the unhappy and frustrated segments of populations undergoing the transition from traditional to modern societies. These include youth in the so-called Arab Spring and its counterrevolutions, global fashion modes of rebellion against tradition, and reactionary revolts against the fast-moving developments of global integration and the loss of traditional points of orientation in religion and culture. These losses have led to uncertainty and disorientation on the part of many young people, resulting in a rebirth of religious and cultural extremism and backward-oriented narrowness. Many studies examine such discontent in cultures and the changes, destruction, and reconstruction brought about by rebellion. Freud (2005) used psychoanalytical methods and principles to analyze social and cultural success and upheaval in cultures and countries, just as he had earlier diagnosed diseases in individuals. Most new centuries provide various reasons for confusion exploding into rebellion and discontent and many new forms of protest. At the same time, political dictators or strong social or business forces may use the same new communication and cooperation technologies for microscopic invasions of privacy, for indoctrination and introjection, or to promote their own selfish interest in power. In his famous lectures on "Biopower" at the College de France in 1978, Michel Foucault (1903 discussed the use of information and indoctrination methods by nation states in Europe since the 18th century: "when discipline is the technology deployed to make individuals behave, to be productive workers, biopolitics is deployed to manage population; for example to ensure a healthy workforce." He traced the model of biopolitics back to the Greco-Roman and medieval emperors and kings; nowadays, he might recognize the power of radio, television, and the Internet to achieve even more successful forms of domination and indoctrination and their avoidance. A new "political class," comparable to the feudal circles of yesterday and including networks of political officials and corporate leaders, conducts its own business based on self-interest and learns more and more about oneself by collecting data (Anderson 2020, 59-68). New environments of information, communication, and cooperation based in cyberspace can work both ways, in favor of further liberation and the development of civil societies or in favor of state-controlled or business-controlled masses; in favor of better transparency or in favor of even more successful corruption and exploitation. This is similar to the double-purpose or spin-off use of old technology.
(5) Territorial mix-up risk. In the old days, communities had eremites, who left the "real" world to emigrate into close communication and integration with non-geographical spiritual powers; they might, however, still have been indirectly related to the "real" world by praying for peace and divine intervention. Nowadays, emigrants from the "real" world may become famous citizens in "Second Life" or other Internet territories as celebrated orchestra conductors or famous singers, football and boxing stars, inventors and saviors of humankind, while at the same time they are "nobodies" who live unknown and are not socially integrated or even recognized in their private quarters. "This is not a game; this is real life" is a widely quoted slogan of one of the Internet portals. Internet addiction has become one of the most difficult disorders to treat in psychiatric therapy. Much has been made, particularly in science fiction narratives, of the threat from artificial intelligence turning against the existing balance of interaction and interdependence in the wide modern world of bios. Little is known precisely about systems of mad and aggressive artificial intelligence turning outside their sphere, running rampant in taking control of local or global automation, destroying all or some integrated forms in the world of modern human bios, much as mad and aggressive individuals today who cause destruction by killing fellow humans with traditional explosives or deadly infectious microbes (Diamond 2006). Well-functioning digital and microbial infrastructure and more or less harmonious biological, economic, social, and political bodies are essential for the survival of the bios of our modern culture, but they have made the new complex, adaptable, and integrated collective and political bios more vulnerable in many new dimensions. How will we build a new culture and civilization after the COVID-19 virus (Dartnell 2014)? [Markets, Electricities, Money, Espionage, Virtual Realities] In 1852, Czar Nikolas I used biomedical terminology to describe the weakening Ottoman Empire as "the sick man at the Bosporus." After 1,000 years of good health and periods of great cultural and political success, the empire had lost the vigor of life via arthritis and sclerosis of the body and by infections from the outside, such as from the colonial powers of France and Britain. Dormant rivalries between Shiite and Sunnite denominations, together with new tribal conflicts using extreme interpretations of Muslim traditions, marked and continue to mark the demise of a formerly great body politic. American meddling and military and political intervention devoid of any understanding of the prevailing basic cultures of personal and tribal loyalty have added to further metabolic and anxiety disorders of the successor bodies, as have geopolitical squabbles about influence peddling around the destroyed or already cadaveric remains. Feverish extensions of the sick political bodies of the former Ottoman Empire extend into Europe, challenged by an anxiety disorder caused by an excessive number of refugees who lack familiarity with traditional bodily functioning in pluralistic Western societies and who themselves have been within the walls of despair and fear. Old social and political bodies such as Iraq and Syria are disintegrating, infected by some sort of "cancer" or "autoimmune disorder." Societies that are unwilling to adapt or incapable of adapting to the modern world have been called "sclerotic"; other coronary or infectious diseases, such as dementia, hypertension, diabetes, and arteriosclerosis in many modern societies and cultures, can be said to exist in businesses, corporations, and communities, possibly related to the rapidly changing half-life of social change. However, there is also "preventive health care" in the form of democratic fitness training and body building and the support of happiness in the cultural and social biotopes of economy and politics, in clans, communities, healthy and growing countries, and weak and disintegrating societies.
Will we see a new "localism" [see the appendix "localism"] as a form of geographic patriotism in complex adaptation and modification based on discontent in our cultural and political bios? Or will powerful adaptive bodies politic eat up and integrate these newly developed alternative nerve systems into their bodies? Highly centralized and non-modular political bodies have fewer opportunities to recognize and implement initiatives to support health and happiness from one of their organs or from grass-root levels, and thus are threatened with sudden political failure and losing the sparks of individual and communal creativity, competition, and innovation for modification of their body bios and its living body parts.
It is only natural that the enormously expanding bios of integrated geography and cyberspace overwhelms many individuals and communities because information overflow and confusing new options for flexible adaptation into new territories are too powerful. Reduction of complexity then becomes a strategy to cope with new information and options by protecting or regaining individual identity and self-respect by finding integration in hopefully harmonious and less-confusing healthier interactive biotopes that offer solidarity, camaraderie, friendship, and a new personal identity in such groups or movements in new and simple territories of local geography and supportive and attractive cyberspace. An article in the Harvard Business Review described corporations as living beings with an internal metabolism integrated in their specific biotope (Reeves 2016, p. 49). 9 This definition would be suitable for individual humans, other species, and all integrated biotopes. 1. Will these new internets replace traditional non-geospace powers of religion and narratives? 2. Will they be used to form new global or local networks of eccentric or bad people for fake news? 3. Will they be destroyed or manipulated by state or non-state players? 4. Will they replace friendship and lovemaking in geospace with new adventures and cultures in cyberspace?
The gross happiness initiative [see the appendix "Gross Happiness Product"] can be considered as a remarkable tool to measure and promote ethics toward bios into the wider population, to develop statistics for political and social decision-makers, and to alert people via festivities and celebrations that "your happiness is part of something bigger than you," that is, the health, happiness, and sustainability of the body politic. Nian Zhong suggested that a review of the classical Chinese concepts of family and family connectedness may serve as a model for new biocultures in the 21th century: (9) "Complex adaptive systems are often nested in broader systems. A population is a CAS [complex adaptive system] nested in a naturel ecosystem, which in itself is nested in the broader biological environment. A company is a CAS nested in a business ecosystem, which is nested in the broader societal environment. Complexity therefore exists at multiple levels, not just within the organizational boundaries; and at each level there is tension between what is good for an individual agent and what is good for the larger system." (Reeves 2016, p. 49) "Following the wisdom of Chinese people on family happiness could help to build a harmonious society in the world: draw on their empathy, putting themselves in others' shoes, addressing others' needs and concerns, showing love for one's nearest of kin, one's fellowmen and all living things" (Zhong 2014. 152-159). 10 Ruiping Fan reminded us that cultural, social, and political interconnectedness in the Confucian sense does not mean equal, but rather differentiated and graded connectedness: "1. One has moral obligations to take care of one's family members (such as one's parents, spouse, and children), than others in one's local or religious community (such as neighbors, friends, and acquaintances); 2. One has more moral obligations to take care of those in one's local or religious community than other citizens in the state; and 3. One has moral obligation to take care of one's fellow citizen in the state than other people in other states" (Fan 2016, 204). 11 Hobbes gave the body politic, which was taming, dominating, and punishing, the name of the sea dragon Leviathan in reference to the geographic organization of robust human society. Today, we may recognize the interacting and fighting powers of the land giant and the sea dragon symbolized in the powers of the land giant in cities, streets, police and military forces, factories and businesses, and the powers of the sea dragon in the fluidity of dreams and visions and the realities of internets of peoples and things, grasping more and more power from the land to the interconnected waters, streams, and lands as new ecosystems. Many images display a struggle between two beasts, which symbolizes not only for us humans the eternal struggle for life and struggle in life, the elan vital, for all forms of bios, but also and in particular for the human bios. For us humans, the Behemoth represents the strong lands and fortified cities, the armies of soldiers and military might; the Leviathan lived in the running streams and other water bodies and nowadays lives in the liquid powers of the all-invasive (10) "Chinese people's idea of 'happiness for all people' could be used as a very important resource to enhance the happiness of all the people around the world," p. 152. (11) Fan adds for a future contact with extraterrestrials as a fourth suggestion, "one has more moral obligation to take care of one's fellow humans on earth than extraterrestrial aliens' (214).
Internet. This intermingling of both gigantic powers will more than ever decide the future of human culture and human existence. In 1819, Moses Mendelsohn argued with regard to religious fighting: "Brethren, if you want true peacefulness in God, let us not lie about consensus when plurality seemed to have been the plan and the goal of providence. No one among us reasons and feels precisely the same way the fellow human does. Why do we hide from each other in masquerades in the most important issues of our lives, as God not without reason has given each of us his/her own image and face?" (Mendelsohn 1819, 201). Given the quest for harmony and the diverse and often contrarian powers within social, cultural, and political bodies, we may rephrase Mendelsohn's insight into the diverse bios of individual humans and human communities as a bioethical suggestion: Brethren, citizens, politicians, and leaders, if you want peace and harmony in our political life, then let us not lie about uniformity when adaptability, plurality, and modality seem to have been the blueprint in the wisdom of bios. No-one among the bodies politic has body structures and social interactions fully identical to those of others. Why do we hide from each other behind the masquerades of one-size-fits-all democracies or similar bodies, as the vital, highly adaptable, and complex human bios has not without reason given us and our political bodies different shapes and shades? Would less uniformity and more diversity be better than punishments and laws? Lao Zi (Dao De Jing 57) suggested "Rule the land with justice, fight a war with surprise, and win a country with harmonious action ": "How do I know this? The more prohibitions we have, the more rebellious the people will be. The sharper the weapons are under the people, the more turbulent the land will be. The shrewder the people, the more abnormal things occur. The more laws there are, the more thieves and robbers will be there. Therefore, the wise person says: When I am not greedy, the people will become rich by themselves. When I act with harmony, the people will change by themselves. When I refrain from imposing, the people will do justice by themselves. When I refrain from craving, the people will get rid of their cravings" (Hou 2017, 29-32).
Modern societies are complex, symbiotic, and adaptable living beings of natural persons, natural communities such as families, clans, and villages or neighborhoods, and economic and legal "persons" such as enterprises, institutions, bureaucracies, and similar cyberspace-based persons, communities, and powers. They all wish to live well, to grow, and to sustain their lives and networks; this might lead to cooperation and support, network building, favoritism, mutual aid and help, but this might also lead to corruption and exploitation in the interest of survival and protection and even expansion of one's biotope and influence. These tendencies of different players can and do lead to dysfunctional bodies and biotopes. Bees live in complex and highly structured social and biological communities, but sometimes they suddenly abandon their hives in a phenomenon called "colony collapse disorder" (Lu 2014, 125-130). From time to time, humans destroy their complex political, cultural, social, and economic communities, as seen these days in some Arab and Muslim countries and elsewhere around the world, a phenomenon that we may describe as "culture collapse disorder," based on discontent, hatred, extreme ideology, terror, exploitation, and simply widespread unhappiness and the loss of mutual trust and mutual aid. In the coming age of globalization and the Internet, national or regional states will share their integrating power and matter with other social, cultural, communal, and political bodies, and the loyalties of citizens might be divided in nontraditional ways, such as between church and nation state, but in much more complicated and changing ways.
Individual bodies are more integrated than political ones are, but political bodies may come in even more shapes and shades than individual bodies do. Some body parts, such as mafiosi, dictators, and leaders of good or bad dominating economic, religious, or social groups, might be happy and healthy while the rest of the political and social body suffers sickness due to negligence or exploitation. Political bodies strive to achieve the same eight "C" biological properties; they need internal and external communication and cooperation as their bloodstream and nervous system, competence and competition in survival, contemplation and calculation to put their vision and goal into practice, compassion in dealing with their constituency, and good skills in cultivation to extend their lives into the future.
Similar to individual bodies and other forms of bios, one size does not fit all. Aristotle described different bodies of political bios and their advantages and disadvantages, suggesting a harmonious blend of meritocracy and individual virtue. Oligarchic and democratic bodies can deteriorate into totalitarian and anarchic bios, but happiness and bodily health are the life purpose of the body politic, not power or commerce. Healthy families and clans are the basic living matter from which healthy, strong, and happy political bodies are formed; this comes close to the Confucian model of the state's being one large family in the wide world of bios composed of smaller families. Spinoza, as already mentioned, had a more workable and complex understanding of the "bios politic" than Hobbes did.
Long-lasting states and societies seem to have a rather modular body of more or less loosely integrated or interacting parts, which allowed for transformation and modification once one part or another became weak, distressed, sclerotic, cancerous, or otherwise threatened the others or the entire body. Vast political bodies with relatively long lives were not run on a short dominant leash; the empire of Genghis Khan was a center over multiple more-or-less independent bodies that enjoyed freedom of religion and over their internal affairs. Charlemagne ran his European empire with only a few hundred people at the center, among them a few dozen riding messengers who carried mail to his various relatively independent fortresses. The more successful emperors of China ruled the provinces and instructed the mandarins via royal letters and only in the most dangerous situations had to seek solutions and protect the body politics via war. The multicentered 1000 years of the Holy Roman Empire (Wilson 2016) were marked by various interacting power bodies of kings, princes, dukes, bishops, and free cities in a decentralized manner, and by relatively autonomous rural peasant communes that owned most land and had their own rules and traditions about how to work the lands together as a commune or allocate them to certain families. None of these political bodies were nation-states, as these have developed during the last 200 years. The health and happiness of integrated political, social, and corporate bodies must be well grounded (Sass 2020).
The gross happiness initiative alerts people via festivities and celebrations that "your happiness is part of something bigger than you." Nian Zhong suggested that a review of the classical Chinese concepts of family and family connectedness may serve as a model for new biocultures in the 21th century: "Following the wisdom of Chinese people on family happiness could help to build a harmonious society in the world: draw on their empathy, putting themselves in others' shoes, addressing others' needs and concerns, showing love for one's nearest of kin, one's fellowmen and all living things" (Zhong 2014, 152-159). 12 At the end of a confrontation with Job (Job 40f), God boasts about his powers in creating all forms of bios on land and in the sea, the most powerful of them the gigantic land creature Behemoth and the most powerful sea dragon Leviathan. The mythological animals Behemoth and Leviathan had already played a role in the mythology of the Sumer dynasties, approximately 7,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, near Ur. In 1716, the Ottoman Empire attacked the Christian Habsburg Empire but was defeated by the famous Prince Eugene of Savoy. Today, young German boys and girls in remote Christian villages of the Westphalian province in Germany learn about Islam, become fanatics, travel in t-shirts and with backpacks to the Muslim countries in the Middle East and behead other Muslims. The first battle in 1716 was a fight between two Behemoths on land, but the battle of today is a battle of the Leviathan against Behemoths on land and in cyberspace. On September 11, 2001, the widely unknown "little Leviathan" Al Qaida attacked the most powerful Behemoth, the United States, and the Behemoth declared war on this ever-growing Leviathan. The events in Syria, Iraq, and Libya in recent years have also led to Leviathan-like feedback in European cities such as Hamburg, Paris, and London, where Muslim Kurds and fanatic Sunnite Muslims fight each other in the streets of the European Behemoth countries of which they are a part. Recently, the liquid water dragon has conquered lands in Syria and Iraq and given birth to a new Behemoth of a radical Muslim Caliphate that exercises dominance over lands and people.
In a recent book 'Medicine and Ethics in Times of Corona', edited by Martin Woesler and myself, I summarized: 'Medicine and Ethics share millennia of interaction in all civilizations. Sickness, epidemics, droughts, and plagues are natural events and harm or kill individuals, species, biotopes. Individuals, families, neighborhoods, cultures, businesses, and states may additionally be injured or destroyed by stealing, murdering, civil rebellion, and war. Human technologies and cultures have modified our globe and made it more livable. Fresh water supply, sanitation, healthy housing, health care systems have improved human life expectancy and happiness, -ever more rapidly during the last centuries, decades, years. The global corona pandemic, alike the global climate change, call both for long-term planning instead of short-term fixing. Science has collected a wealth of information on bacterial and viral diseases and global threats to life of biotopes, plants, animals, humans, families, villages and cities. We have a diversity of perspectives on pandemics; other viruses in our social and political bodies such as threats and malfunctions of electricity, communication, trade caused by nature, bad people or bad government.' (Woesler 2020, 4) Approximately 2,500 years ago, Lao Zi suggested a recipe for healthy and happy living of individual and integrated bios: "cultivate yourself and virtue will become true; cultivate the family and virtue will be complete; cultivate the village and virtue will grow; cultivate the country and virtue will be rich; cultivate the world and virtue will be wide" (Dao De Jing 54). We can redefine Lao Zi's recommendation for the 21st century by saying: "cultivate yourself and your life, and virtue will be true; cultivate political and corporate persons, and virtue will be great; cultivate social and natural environments, and virtue will be full; cultivate communication and cooperation, and life will grow; cultivate compassion and competence, and life will be rich; cultivate the geographies and internets of the worlds, and virtue will be wide." (1) Whole Community Recovery, a project by the Royal Society of Arts that has been ongoing in West Sussex for some time now, explores the role of social networks and connected communities in sustaining healthy political bodies at the local level (Pascoe 2015). The initiators summarized this as follows: "Three main principles from our work in West Sussex: Co-production is key for service users to own, and feel a valued part of their personal recovery process. A holistic whole person approach enables services to encompass multiple dimensions of a person's recovery, increasing the likelihood of a success in the short and longer term. Social connectedness -within the recovery community and wider local community -creates a network of support and opportunities for individuals, enhancing the sustainability of recovery" (p. 37). Future decentralization tendencies and movements can most likely be seen as a positive contribution to sustaining or regaining modularity, which has been demonstrated to be a central property in the survival of complex adaptive systems such as political or environmental bodies. Highly centralized and poorly modular political or environmental bodies, such as dictatorships or agricultural monocultures, have few opportunities to recognize communal creativity, competition, and innovation to modify their body bios and its living body parts. New localism would allow for cultural and social modularity. It is only natural that the enormously expanding bios of integrated non-geographies and cyberspace has overwhelmed many individuals and communities in confusion and disorientation. A reduction in complexity can make the social and political body stronger and healthier. These interactive biotopes will more easily offer solidarity and camaraderie, friendship, and a new personal identity in such groups or movements in new and simple territories of local geography and supportive and attractive cyberspace.
A growing number of city dwellers, old and young, seem to be looking for smaller neighborhoods such as traditional hutongs or small rural villages. Might new localism in the presence of global threats and breakdowns by pandemics, other natural disasters, or war and bad people and corporations be a good way to break down the long lines of business interrelations and dependencies, fake news, and unrealistic hopes for people and communities who have lost direct human and social intimacy and contact? The recent initiative by Liu He, Vice Premier of China, to strengthen local and domestic production away from long interdependent production, technology, financing, and regulation, seems to be a new step to improve health and happiness on the local level and to reduce the dependency of the rest of the world on Chinese productions and services. "Domestic circulation" is the new version of localism promoted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Li Yiping, professor at Renmin University, wrote that the domestic economy will become more stable by focusing on circulating domestic production and consumption together. This will also allow the hinterlands of China's rural areas to develop without becoming overly dependent on big cities. "China has huge room to increase domestic demand. And given its vast land mass, abundant resources and capabilities to build a relatively sound industrial chain. China can boost its economy greatly relying on growing domestic demand" (China Daily Aug 14, 2020). This idea will make Chinese consumers happier and stabilize the political body.
Of course, any form of new localism might develop into a narrow-minded provincialism or even dogmatic geographical patriotism. This may result in a hatred of strangers and thus become dangerous in other ways to large social and political bodies and economies. Will the Belt-and-Road strategy support or delay this internal circulation of political, economic, and cultural bodies? Let us hope that in complex adaptations and modifications, political bodies integrate these newly developed nerves and muscles into their bodies. For additional readings on integration and connectivity, see Khanna (2016), Moore (2014), andSchuhmacher (1973).

(2)
The success and health of a political body are routinely measured in economic terms by the gross national product, which has become an important piece of information for political, economic, and social decision-makers. However, in 1972, Jigme Singye Wangchuk, the King of Bhutan, introduced a gross national happiness model for his country, which covered coherence, personal pride, satisfaction in culture, governance, knowledge and spirituality, physical and emotional health, harmony with the environment, and a balanced use of personal time (Policy Innovations, in: http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/briefings/data). The Bhutan gross national happiness index has been regularly reviewed and published ever since. In 2015, 8.4% were deeply happy, 35% extensively happy, 47.9% narrowly happy, and 8.8% unhappy, which represented a 1.8% improvement over the 2010 figures. The 11th Five-Year Plan for 2013-2018 detailed goals and estimates of cost in support of industry, transport and communication, the Internet and media, energy, trade, renewable natural resources, education, health, environment, governance, and vulnerable populations. In 2010, men were happier than women, people who lived in residential areas were happier than rural people, single and married people were happier than widowed, divorced, or separated people, educated people were happier than others, and farmers were less happy than people in other occupations.
In 2012, the United Nations adopted the concept of the gross happiness product and defined the pursuit of happiness as a human right and a fundamental human goal. The General Assembly, "conscious that the pursuit of happiness is a fundamental human goal, recognizing also the need for a more inclusive, equitable and balanced approach to economic growth that promotes sustainable development, poverty eradication, happiness and the well-being of all peoples, decided to proclaim 20th of March the International Day of Happiness, invites all Member States of the UN system and other international and regional organizations and individuals, to observe the International Day of Happiness in an appropriate manner, including through education and public awareness-raising activities" (Wikipedia: International Day of Happiness, and;internationalhappinessday.net).
The human freedom index, published jointly by the Cato Institute, the Frazer Institute, and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, measures personal, civil, and economic freedom. Hong Kong, Switzerland, Finland, and Denmark were the first 4 of the 512 countries, and Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Iran were the last. The human freedom index model covers "rule of law, security and safety, movement, religion, civil society, expression, relationships, seize of government, legal system and property rights, access to sound money, freedom to trade internationally, regulation of credit, labor and businesses." (Vasquez, 2015) Anderson, R. "When China Sees All', The Atlantic 326 (2)