I am far from the toughest guy in the world. My life has been pretty cushy. I was never on some sea tossed landing craft, waiting for the ramp to drop and expose me to machine gun fire.
Yet reactions to the virus create massive chaos in my head. Why are people reacting the way they are? Has courage in the face of adversity been completely abandoned? Has the rejection of transcendence, things larger than ourselves and our senses, forced humankind into a very narrow, narcissistic hallway. The only way the guys pictured above got into that boat is that they saw the world and life as something bigger than themselves.
My cursory understanding of the output of modern philosophy is the elimination of absolutes, of Truth with a capital T, of God, of anything that is beyond the senses. Either it does not exist or our reason is insufficient to understand it so why bother.
I have decided try and sure up my understanding of these developments in philosophy by reading The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics by A. W. Moore. This takes some courage as it will suck up a lot of reading time, but is a required exercise in advance of any sorting out.