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Building a Peace Narrative

August 21, 2019 by Charles Eisenstein

August 2019
This essay has been translated into French.


(An edited transcript of the 2019 Cobb Peace Lecture)

The word narrative is bandied about a lot today, so that it’s almost become a cliché. But cliches are born from insight. In this case, it is about the power of the stories that we tell about ourselves, each other, and the world to cohere us in a common purpose.

A lot of the things that we need to do today don’t make sense if you are the only one doing them. A story can order the world, so that we see our choices as part of a larger happening. Granted, the “larger happening” unfolding on Earth today is bigger than any story that we could make about it. Nonetheless, for me a story that allows me to make meaning of my life, identify my allies, and understand what my role is, is essential.

The understanding of the power of narrative extends to all parts of the political spectrum. Everyone wants to control the narrative, a power for good or for ill. Adolf Hitler understood it well, riding a narrative of racial superiority and national glory that legitimized his ambitions and channeled latent cultural energies toward genocide and conquest. Today we also have powerful unresolved energies in society, just like in the 1930s: discontent, desperation, hostility to the elites, anger at the way society has turned, grief over the loss of community. How these express depends in large part on how problem and solution, cause and effect, are narrated to us.

If we want to serve peace and wellbeing for all people, a world of healing where society and all the beings on this planet are moving toward greater wholeness, we’d better make sure that we’re telling the right story. Today the dominant narrative, whether we recognize it or not, is a war narrative, not only on the obvious level of US foreign policy, identifying enemies around the world and bombing them, but also in our basic understanding of how the world works and how to solve problems. War thinking permeates the public psyche. To build a peace narrative, we need to identify the existing foundational war narrative. So, I will begin by excavating it and laying the foundation of a peace narrative. Then I’ll move on to its building components and architecture.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

In preparing for this lecture, I read a classic essay by the Christian theologian Walter Wink called “The Myth of Redemptive Violence.” Redemptive violence is the idea that the way to make a better world is to destroy something, to kill something, to kill evil, to extirpate evil, to overcome the forces of evil and chaos with the forces of good and order. Wink traces it back to a Babylonian creation myth over 3000 years old. In the beginning, the god Adsu and the goddess Tiamat were all by themselves in the universe. Since that was boring, they decided to have kids, a whole bunch of them. It wasn’t long before they regretted it because the kids were making too much noise. And so they decided, of course, that they were going to kill all their children. Right? Problem solved. Well, the children got wind of this and decided that they would kill their parents first. It wasn’t too hard to finish off Adsu, but Tiamat was a different story. None of them dared to face Tiamat until the youngest of the children, Marduk, volunteered. He said, I will destroy Tiamat, our mother, on condition that all you brothers and sisters make me the supreme ruler of the universe. (I’ll leave it to your imagination to draw parallels to the US after World War Two.) Marduk comes up with a plan. He blows poison gas into the stomach of Tiamat and stabs her with a spear. She explodes; all her guts and blood spew out and, from her body parts, he constructs the world that we live in today.

This creation myth recounts the misogynistic killing of the great mother, who was identified with chaos and the wild. Ancient civilizations associated good with order. The king was the incarnation of good, conquering the beasts, killing the lions, cutting down the forests, bringing civilization to the barbarians, domesticating the wild. This process continues today, as we take the pieces of a ruined Gaia and build civilization out of them, building the world out of the destroyed mother.

The myth of redemptive violence translates in a striking way into modern science, which says that the tendency of the universe is toward entropy, toward disorder. Only by imposing our design onto this chaotic, disorderly and degenerating universe are we able to maintain a realm fit for human habitation; to impose good upon chaos. If you accept that nature itself hasn’t any inherent intelligence, any inherent tendency toward complexity, toward the emergence of beauty and organization, but instead that it normally degenerates into disorder, then we are inescapably at war with nature all the time, subject at any moment to being extinguished by random natural forces. Our wellbeing in that view comes through imposing more and more control on this wild, arbitrary, random nature that is outside of ourselves. For centuries, the ambition toward control has defined progress.

Here is the basic template of war thinking. First identify the cause of the problem, the culprit, the perpetrator – find something to fight. Then, control, imprison, exclude, kill, humiliate, or destroy the bad guy, the culprit, the cause, and all will be well. And the better able we are to do this, the better human life is going to be. Walter Wink gives the example of Popeye the Sailor. Every episode of the cartoon has the same plot: Brutus kidnaps Olive Oyl. Popeye tries to rescue her and is beaten to a pulp by Brutus. Then, just before Brutus can rape Olive Oyl, Popeye eats a can of spinach and, with a surge of strength, turns the tables on Brutus and beats him to a pulp instead. That’s the plot of Popeye. Walter Wink points out that nobody ever learns anything from this encounter. The characters do not grow or develop in any way, implying that this is just the way things are. The lesson is that the way to solve a problem is to overcome the enemy with force.

The War on the Symptom

The mentality of finding an enemy to overcome with force extends beyond warfare. Take agriculture, for instance. You have a problem, like declining crop yields, you identify the cause – there are weeds in the field. And the solution is to kill the weeds . Or maybe you have strep throat. What’s the cause? Let’s find the pathogen. That’s the orientation. Find the pathogen. Ah, streptococcus bacteria. Solution? Kill it with antibiotics. Or how about crime? Well obviously crime is caused by criminals, right? So if we lock up the criminals, then we won’t have any more crime. Terrorism, obviously it’s caused by terrorists. So let’s kill the terrorists. No more terrorism. Problem solved.

What if you want to be a better person or more effective in the world? Applying the same formula, you find the inner bad guy. Maybe it is your procrastination, your laziness, your addictions, your selfishness, your ego. Great – now you’ve got something to attack, something to control. Maybe you’re overweight and you think, “Oh, it’s because I’m eating too much.” Calories become the bad guy, and the solution is to control them. So this war thinking is nearly universal.

The war on the other always mirrors a war on the self. Underneath our judgments lurks a sneaking suspicion that maybe I’m one of the bad guys. In fact, this is more or less what science, economics, and many religions have been telling us. For example, an explicit teaching of biology has been that reproductive self interest is the fundamental motivation of all living beings. Selfishness, we were told, is programmed into our genes. That means that in order to be anything other than ruthlessly selfish, you have to overcome nature. That’s war mentality.

An alternative to war emerges when we see all the enemies – weeds, criminals, terrorists, calories, selfishness, laziness and so forth – not as causes of evil, but as symptoms of a deeper condition. Focusing on the symptoms, warring on the symptoms, allows the deeper causes to go unexamined and unchanged. We never ask, “Why does Brutus want to kidnap Olive Oyl?” If we don’t unearth that, we will be fighting Brutus again and again forever.

(And what if the spinach runs out or stops working? What if the weeds develop herbicide resistance and the bacteria develop antibiotic resistance and Brutus eats spinach too and starts an arms race?)

War thinking addresses its failure by going to further extremes. Don’t just beat up Brutus – kill him. Find an herbicide so powerful it kills the weeds once and for all. Find the Final Solution. Defeat evil once and for all in an epic war to end all wars.

We tried that once. It was called the Great War. Now we call it World War One.

When we see causes as symptoms, we can ask questions like, Why are weeds growing in the field? War thinking is not usually helpful with this question. Perhaps there’s a lack of biodiversity in the field or the soil is depleted in some way and those weeds are coming actually to repair the soil because there’s an intelligence in nature. There is nothing to fight.

Why is there crime? Is it because those criminals are just bad? Or are they acting from circumstances that we won’t ever examine if we are at war with them? What are the economic circumstances? How about legacy racism? What about trauma, despair, or the loss of meaning in life?

In all cases, war thinking is a simplifying and reducing narrative. To wage war, you pretty much have to reduce the enemy. You have to dehumanize the enemy. It’s a universal tactic in war to make them – them – less than fully human. If you want to kill or exploit somebody, dehumanization is a key enabling method. As war thinking infiltrates our political culture, I’m seeing more and more dehumanization and demonizing of the other side, left and right, red and blue, Democrat and Republican. Each side constructs narratives that make the other contemptible, evil, subhuman.

Here are some words that are agents of dehumanization that you see all the time in political discourse and beyond: “How could they?” “It’s totally unjustified!” “What’s wrong with them?” A war tactic is to accuse our opponents of some deficiency in their core humanness. They’re stupid, they’re ignorant, they’re immoral, they’re entitled, they’re greedy. And then this narrative gets weaponized because we can then use it to arouse the indignation of our side, to stir up war fever so that we can rise up and destroy those bad guys.

A Recipe for Despair

I was recently on a podcast speaking about the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, speaking about ecological healing, regenerative agriculture and things like that, and the interviewer said, “Well Charles, what would you say to this? The power elite are never going to change. They’re benefiting from this. They’re happy with this and they’re not going to change. So in order to change them, we’re going to have to somehow bring them down. We’re going to have to rise up in bloody revolution; that’s the only realistic way.”

So let’s first assume that that’s true. If that’s true, then our one hope lies in overcoming them by force because “they’re never going to change.” We have a formula for creating change when there’s a bad guy. It’s in all the movies, not just Popeye, it’s in Batman, it’s in the Lion King. It’s in pretty much every action movie you’ve ever seen. It’s in Star Wars. You kill Darth Vader, you kill the emperor, you destroy evil.

In the real world, our one hope is impractical. If it comes to a contest of force, who has more force? Who has more military power? Is it we hippies and peaceniks? Or is it the military-pharmaceutical-medical-financial-educational-NGO-prison-industrial complex? They have the guns. They have the money, they have the surveillance state, they have the police, they have the control of the media. So if, if it comes down to a contest of force, they’re going to win. Even if we talk about the force of propaganda and the force of a narrative and we try to ignite the rage and indignation of the oppressed against them, guess what? They are even more adept at manipulating narratives and making you look bad because they control the media. They’re doing it right now, creating narratives that are more ubiquitous and have a farther reach and more PR and advertising behind them, more money behind them than yours do.

So, domination is probably a recipe for failure unless you become so good at the technologies of war that you do tear them down. You have to be extremely good at wielding power to defeat the military-industrial complex at its own game. So you defeat the bad guys and now you’re in power. But is the fight over now? No. They are still bad guys out there. And in order to defeat those bad guys, you need to consolidate your power and extend your power, all of course to protect the world from evil. It’s OK to do that, because you are the good guy. You know it to be true. The whole war against evil was premised on it. So, identifying as good, you pursue yet more power. George Orwell described this very, very clearly in 1984: the goal of the Party is power. The justification is that they’re going to create a perfect world, and in order to do that, they have to have complete power. What is power? Power is the ability to make others suffer. So you end up becoming evil yourself.

The more likely scenario is that you lose the fight with the powers-that-be. And that’s why so many activists fall into despair. Despair is built into the paradigm of the fight. On one level it is because we know the powers are too great for us to win. Underneath that there is a kind of futility: if we do win it’s the same. The science fiction writer Phillip K. Dick put it really well in Valis: “To fight the empire is to be infected with its derangement. This is a paradox. Whoever defeats a segment of the empire becomes the empire. It proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby, it becomes its enemies.” If you go to war against war, if you go to war against the empire, you have actually become part of the empire. And George Orwell illustrated this too, when the main character, Winston, gets recruited into the resistance. Actually he’s being entrapped, but he thinks he’s being recruited into the resistance. And he’s asked, basically, how committed he is to overthrowing the Party, questions like, “Would you be willing to do anything? Would you be willing to commit sabotage? Would you be willing to commit mass murder if it served the overthrow of the Party? Would you be willing to throw acid in a child’s face?” And he says yes, therefore revealing himself to be no different from the Party: do anything to gain power. Do anything to overthrow evil.

The Threat of the Pacifist

Consider the following as a general principle: in any fight – and more and more of our political discourse has become a fight – the resolution lies in the things that are hidden by the fight, the things that both sides agree on without even knowing it and the questions that neither side is asking. So for example in the fight over immigration, one side says, “Immigration is harming us, they are breaking our laws, let’s keep them out.” The other side says, “You horrible bigoted, intolerant people, this nation was built from immigrants. It is inhumane to run detention systems and separate families. We should welcome the unfortunate masses from the world.” Nobody, at least in the mainstream media, is asking why are there so many immigrants to begin with. What has made life in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and so forth, so unbearable that people are willing to risk their lives and their children’s lives, willing to leave their homes and families. for a totally uncertain future? What would it take for you to do that?

That’s an uncomfortable question, first because it takes us outside of the familiar war paradigm of problem-solving. For the conservatives, you can no longer blame bad immigrants. For the liberals, you can no longer hold to the story of unfortunate victims of someone else, that can find salvation in America, Land of the Free, because any serious inquiry into that question reveals that we ourselves, the United States, is the cause of much of the misery in Latin America and elsewhere. US support for military coups, juntas, death squads, the war on drugs, and neoliberal austerity and free trade policies have made life in many places nearly unliveable.

As the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You look for nails and you start to see things that aren’t nails as nails, because here’s your tool. When you have the tools of war, you look for an enemy. If none is to be found we are uncomfortable, because we don’t know what to do anymore. All the more so when, as with immigration, the perpetrator, the cause of the problem, includes oneself.

If you are a pacifist or a peacemaker, you may find that you arouse a lot of hostility from both sides of a conflict. People who gain their identity from being on Team good in the war against Team Evil, actually need Team Evil. They need the other side. It’s like two cards leaning against each other and propping each other up. When “evil” is taken away, there is a crisis, a kind of political vertigo, and a desperate rush to find a new bad guy. Hence the flailing attempts after the defeat of the Soviet Union to reconstitute evil in concepts like the “Axis of Evil,” “Islamic terror,” the “clash of civilizations,” and more by demonizing Iran, Russia, and China. Team Good needs Team Evil to validate its identity. The pacifist, by challenging the identity of both sides, arouses more hostility than the enemy does. Pacifists are more despised than the enemy.

Foundations of a Peace Narrative

As the above-mentioned examples demonstrate, war thinking pervades modern civilization. It goes all the way down to cosmology, to physics, and in biology to the idea of the selfish gene, setting up a view of nature as, in the words of Rudolf Steiner, a war of each against all. All of this, I would add, is obsolete science. Now we are starting to understand, with research on emergence and self-organizing systems, which are ubiquitous in nature, that the world actually has a tendency toward order, towards beauty, as if there were an intelligence in all things, and not toward disorder as the Second Law of Thermodynamics seems to imply. The selfish gene, likewise, is obsolete biology. Now we are appreciating symbiosis, cooperation, and the merger of individuals into greater wholes in an ascent of complexity. That’s how biology works.

The emergence of systems thinking in biology is part of a peace narrative. Nature is not one gigantic war of each against all. Cooperation and symbiosis are primary evolutionary principles.

Ok, so what is the foundation of a peace narrative? If, as I said before, the essence of war is reduction – the reduction of the universe to object, of life to thing, of other people to enemy – the simplification of complexity so that there is a thing to fight – then, if we want to build a peace narrative, the first foundational pillar would be holistic thinking. Holistic thinking understands that everything is intimately related to everything else. That everything is a part of everything else. That to exist is to be in relationship. That we are not separate individuals, but are interdependent both practically and existentially. That we are inter-existent. Therefore, anything that we see as an enemy is part of a constellation of relationships that includes ourselves. To use a Buddhist term, the foundation of a peace narrative is interbeing: a connected self in a living, interdependent universe, in contrast to a separate individual in a world of other.

From that foundational understanding, we seek to understand the constellation of relationship – the first pillar of a peace narrative. So if you are getting strep throat a lot, you might seek to understand, “How is the bacteria part of my body ecology?” In fact, a healthy microbiome on the mucus membranes of the throat includes friendly bacteria that secrete substances that suppress the pathogenic bacteria. Killing the strep bacteria will end that particular episode of illness, but it also kills off the friendly bacteria, leaving you more susceptible. This exemplifies a general principle: war creates the conditions for war. When you bomb the terrorists, you create conditions for more terror. When you lock up the criminals and destroy families and destroy communities, you’re creating conditions that breed more crime.

Looking through a holistic lens, the lens of interdependency and interrelationship, the base conditions that breed all the things we war against become visible. And we no longer then default to fighting something. That doesn’t mean that there’s never a time to fight. It doesn’t mean never to run away from a robber or never to use antibiotics. Maybe you theoretically know that this person is about to harm your child because he suffered childhood trauma himself, but in this moment that doesn’t help you, and the only response you can see is to intervene forcefully. The problem comes when we default to a fight first because we’re so used to seeing the world in terms of good and evil. So a fight becomes the default, reflexive response.

The Pillar of Compassion

When we can understand the conditions that generate the behavior that we are fighting against, then there are other options, specifically, the option of changing those conditions. This leads to the second pillar, which I’ll call compassion. What is compassion? It’s not the superior person indulgently, patronizingly tolerating or sympathizing with the condition of the inferior person. Compassion is basically feeling what it’s like to be somebody else. It is the experience of identifying with somebody else and knowing what it’s like to be them. It comes from the question, what is it like to be you? What are the conditions that have made you into who you are? And how can I participate in the evolution of those conditions?

For most people growing up in this society, to see those conditions requires some deprogramming: deprogramming from condemnation, from, “which side are you on?” From judgment, judgment in the sense of, “If I were you, I wouldn’t have done that. I’m better than you.” Or maybe I’m worse than you. Usually it’s I’m better than you.

I once made these points to a colleague, using the example of how inner-city youth are demonized as “thugs” in total ignorance of their social and economic conditions. She heartily agreed that they couldn’t really be morally blamed for their behavior. But, she said, that doesn’t hold for the white supremacists. She said, “I can understand why a black kid who grew up in the ghetto might turn to crime when there’s no other economic opportunities and he’s suffered intergenerational trauma. But those white supremacists have no excuse. Look at those guys with their bellies hanging out over their belts, in their tee shirts and their hats. The very picture of entitlement. They’ve got no excuse to be the way that they are.”

We’re just waiting for someone to hate aren’t we? Here’s the enemy! Here’s someone upon whom we can let loose with our righteous rage. It feels good, doesn’t it, to know you are on the side of good and right. It feels good to let loose with the hate.

That feeling is a clue that a hidden psychological or emotional need is operating. Ultimately, it comes from the wound of self-rejection.

A few years ago, there was a biker gang riot in Texas. Rival gangs converged at a bar and started beating each other up in the parking lot. The police came, they started beating up the police too. It was a horrendous violent riot. I read about it in Salon magazine, which featured photographs of the men involved in this incident. Of course they chose the most contemptible unflattering pictures you could imagine. And the sub headline should have been: Here’s someone you can hate. Here’s the bad guy. Of course, every time they run an article about Donald Trump or anyone else in the opposite camp, they choose an unflattering photograph too. Both sides do that. It is part of the war strategy of dehumanization. Me, I look at those photographs and think, “Once upon a time, every one of those men was a cute little baby. A sweetums. What happened to you, my brother?” And I look deeply and sometimes I can see a hurt and frightened child, bewildered by the brutality of this world. That begets a different kind of solidarity than that of war. We don’t need a common enemy anymore to join together.

Compassion is the opposite of the dehumanization upon which war narratives depend. Dehumanization is a simplifying narrative, which is the opposite of holism or interbeing. The habit is, for example, when addressing racism to blame it on the individual attitudes of bad people – racists. Racism is caused by racists, right? Or could it be that racists are a symptom of racism, not the cause, and that by dehumanizing them we reinforce the basic psychic template of racism. Racism is dehumanization, and it will not be solved by dehumanizing the racists. Oh, it might feel good, you get to be on Team Good. But is that what you want to serve? Or would you rather serve the healing of racism?

Sacrificing Winning

I have a feeling that the healing of Earth, that we all want so much, is going to require a sacrifice. We are going to have to sacrifice the identity of being on the moral, ethical, right side. Nearly everyone imagines themselves to be. For things to change, an awful lot of letting go is necessary. But only for the other side, right? Are you willing to hold as lightly to your rightness as you wish them to hold lightly to theirs? How are you any different?

The third pillar of a peace narrative is to end the internal war and to develop a peace narrative inside of ourselves. It is to heal the wound of self-rejection, and thus to remove the psychic engine of war – the division of the world into us and them, good and evil, me the good person and them the bad person. The best, easiest way to establish your identity as a good person (and meet the need for self-acceptance) is in contrast to the evil people. So, are you willing to give that up? Are you willing to give up having been right all along?

How much do you care about peace? It said that one cannot serve two masters. Temporarily, you can, you can serve peace and at the same time serve getting the approval of an in-group. You can serve peace and at the same time serve your identity as a good person. You can serve peace and at the same time serve your goal of being heard, of being seen, being recognized, of being seen as a leader, of believing yourself to be moral. You can serve both for a while, but eventually the generosity of the universe is such that you will reach a choice point where you get to decide what you really serve, and you then need to make a sacrifice. This can be a bitter pill to swallow.

Please understand that I am not making a moral exhortation to drop hatred and anger. I am not the privileged white guy imploring those he has oppressed not to be angry with him. The point here is not that anger or hatred are wrong. It is that the energy of anger is neutralized when it is diverted towards symptoms rather than causes. It is that hatred is based on a misdiagnosis of cause. They lead either to revenge, defeat, or endless war.

The temptation to go to war is everywhere. Maybe you get upset about GMO seeds and Monsanto, which is now Bayer, vigorously spreading GMOs around the world. Destroying peasant agriculture, corrupting entire governments, instituting the next iteration of industrial agriculture, patenting seeds and varieties that were developed by indigenous cultures and so on. Okay, we’ve got to stop this. How are we going to do that? Well, in the mentality of war, step one is to identify somebody as the bad guy. Easy – that’s the Monsanto executives. Why are they doing that? How could they? If I were them, I wouldn’t do that, would I? I wouldn’t make those decisions. If I were a fracking executive, I wouldn’t destroy and pollute the waters like that. All for what? For my greed? I can’t believe those people. Let’s arouse some hatred. Let’s tear those fuckers down. That’s the strategy.

Imagine that you are a Monsanto executive and hear everybody talking about how greedy you are, how horrible you are, and you’re thinking, “I walk my neighbors dog when they’re on vacation. I work really hard. My colleagues respect me. I’m advancing science to feed the hungry.” Or maybe he’s a fracking executive, and his story is about building America’s energy independence. In their story, they’re the good guys and by demonizing them you seem ridiculous. You are in fact offering yourself as the bad guy by the way that you see them and relate to them.

What’s the alternative? Earlier I described two possibilities either get defeated by the military-industrial complex, or you overcome them and become the new complex. What’s the alternative?

The alternative comes from an entirely different place: interbeing. It starts by asking, Why? Why is he so greedy or why is she pro-fracking or why is he violent or why are those people – you know who they are – pro-this or anti-that? What story informs their belief system and what state of being co-resonates with that story? What is their experience of life? All we judge, we begin to investigate as symptoms. We ask, for example, Where does greed come from? That question opens up insights, understanding, and new possibilities for change. We may discover that it is another one of those symptoms, just like strep. It’s a symptom of an experience of scarcity. It’s a hunger that can never be met by the objects that are offered to feed it. If somebody is cut off from community, cut off from nature, cut off from meaning in their lives, they’re going to be hungry for those things. But instead, what’s offered is money, prestige, possessions, power. Those are the substitutes modern society most conspicuously offers.

A Story is an Invitation

If you can look at the person that you call an enemy and see in them that actually, on a deep level, they want what you want and what all people want – to contribute their gifts to a more beautiful world, to be generous, to belong, to know and to be known, love and be loved, and to serve a purpose beyond themselves – if you can see that, you’ll be able to speak to that, and you’ll be able to create an invitation to that.

One of my mottos is that the story that we hold about a person is an invitation for them to step into that story. Consider the story of Julio Diaz. This guy in New York, maybe he was Puerto Rican origin, can’t remember, but he takes the subway home every day and gets off a stop early to buy a burrito at his favorite burrito store before walking home. Well one day he gets off, and on his way to the restaurant a mugger holds him up at knifepoint. “Give me your wallet!” Okay. He gives him his wallet and then says, “Hey kid, it’s cold out. Do you want my jacket too?” And the mugger – what’s he going to say? Nonplussed, he says, “Sure, OK.” Julio gives him his jacket, then says, “Hey, I was about to go get a burrito. It’s a really good burrito joint. You want to come with me?” What can he say? He comes with him. And then they’re at the counter ordering their burritos and Julio says, “You know, I would treat you to the burrito but you’ve got my wallet. Can I have my wallet back?” He gives him his wallet. Then Julio says, “Now give me the knife, too.” The mugger gives him his knife.

That would not have been possible if Julio had seen that teenager as a bad guy. But he was able, even with a knife in his face, he was able to see something else. He held the teenage mugger in a story of, who knows, “A troubled young man with a good heart” so strongly that the mugger was helpless to resist. That is the power of the stories that we hold about each other. They can generate miracles. Now I’m not offering that as a formula. If someone holds you up at knifepoint, you can’t imitate the words or tactics of Julio unless you actually see something in your assailant, in your enemy, that you can speak to from a different story. It can’t be just a spiritual ideology, you have to actually see it. Conditioned to dehumanized versions of enemies, whether muggers or corporate executives, we might have trouble seeing something else, but we can learn with practice. The practice is in looking for it. To see it you have to look for it. To look for it, you have to be willing to put down the benefits you get from holding others as enemies or as lesser than, less moral, worthy, beautiful, or conscious than you. Less enlightened than you. Less spiritual than you. Less ethical than you. You have to be willing to put those judgements down, because as long as you hold them, you invite the enemy to be those judgments.

Judgements are a cloud, a distorting cloud that reduces people to the image of the judgements and allows little opportunity or invitation for them to be anything else. So you have to be willing to put them down. How do you do that? Is that a fight against yourself? Is that an effort of will? No. Putting them down comes from understanding where those judgments come from. Why do we have such a need to establish ourselves as the good guys? It comes, as I’ve said, from a wound of self-rejection. The wound of self-rejection is also a product of war thinking, that says something is wrong with you, and virtue comes through some kind of self-conquest. It’s built into school, it’s built into parenting, it’s built into religion. It’s ubiquitous in our culture. If you’re a parent, anytime you look at your child with contempt or disgust and say, “Why did you do that? How could you?” You’re basically conveying, “you’re bad.” It’s not just in the words,it is the energy behind them. “Why did you do that?” is rarely an honest question. Usually it is a coded condemnation. If you made it an honest question, then you’d be getting somewhere. Why did you do that? Please help me to understand, because I know who you are, divine being. Help me to understand, Monsanto executive. Help me to understand, Donald Trump. Maybe you don’t ask that person specifically, but that’s the orientation. That’s a way to look for what Julio Diaz was able to see, so that you can invite it into expression.

Peace Words and Solidarity Stories

So those are some of the foundations and pillars of a peace narrative. The building blocks, the construction components are the stories that foster understanding. They could be stories that help people understand what it is like to be an immigrant, what it is like to be a racist, what it is like to be a corporate executive, or what is like to live in a ghetto. So many of our political stances would be untenable if we really knew what it was like to be somebody else.

These stories need to be presented in a way that they can be heard. They are harder to hear if I present them with a secret agenda of making you feel ashamed and humiliated. The purpose is not to bludgeon their conscience with how much harm they’ve caused. That’s another form of warfare. Instead, I can present the story and trust you to make the connections. When that happens, authentic shame might arise, as opposed to coerced shame. Authentic shame is the breakdown of a self image. It dissolves and the chemical bonds, the psychic chemical bonds that held it together; they release heat and your face flushes. Energy that had been bound up in defending and upholding a self-image is liberated, and you feel a lightness and a new clarity of vision. To go through that process fully, it really helps to know that you’re loved. It is very vulnerable, and no one is likely to go all the way through it unless they feel safe. Instead they may retreat into defensiveness.

That’s why these stories –the building blocks of a peace narrative, the building blocks of solidarity that doesn’t require an enemy – are so much more powerful when they’re presented and held in a way where people feel safe to hear them. They have to sense that you’re not trying to attack them, and you trust them, you trust their basic goodness. You trust. You take the stance of, “I know it’s hard for you to go through this humiliation. I’m here for you, my brother, my sister. I’m here for you. We’re in this together.”

That’s a peace narrative. We are in this together.

Another component of building a peace narrative is our words and how we use them. A lot of the English language subtly or not so subtly suggests and facilitates dehumanization and war thinking. Take for example the word “inexcusable.” What is actually meant by inexcusable? Something like: Some bad actions have an excuse, they’re justified. (Justifiable is another such word.) And some actions just have no excuse. And if they have no excuse, you only did that because you’re a bad person. Words like that insinuate war ideology into our language. That’s true even if you’re hurling those epithets of greedy, inexcusable, unjustifiable, evil, or immoral at the warmongers. In so doing, you become one of them.

The point here is not to set ourselves up as the language police. Changing the words we use is not enough. As anyone knows who has studied Nonviolent Communication, the NVC formula can be used very violently. It depends on the intention behind it. I’m not an agent of the PC word police, extending its patrol to any word that might humiliate or dehumanize somebody. The reason I bring attention to these words is to illuminate the perceptions and assumptions built into them. Our use of these words can alert to how we carry war thinking within ourselves.

Then, rather than go to war against our own war thinking, we can look beneath that symptom and address the wounds. These are wounds of self rejection, alienation, and cutoff from community and nature and intimate participation in the material world. These have happened through trauma of all kinds, some obvious, some normalized in modern society and hence invisible. When we begin to heal those and no longer see through the lens of good guys versus bad guys, us versus them, good and evil, right and wrong, then it no longer feels good to use those words. They feel like lies. They feel inconsistent with who I am and who I want to become.

So those are some of the building blocks to place atop the foundation and pillars of a peace narrative. They embody peace in our words and in stories that foster understanding, that induce people to ask or to wonder or to consider, “What is it like to be you?” What are the conditions that generate the things that are hurting the world so much? That are so painful to witness? War thinking actually maintains those conditions. It maintains the status quo by diverting the grief, pain, and rage that injustice inspires onto a proxy called the enemy. Here’s something that hurts. Police violence, incarceration, ecocide, the draining of a wetland, whatever it is, here’s something that hurts. War thinking takes that energy that could go to healing and diverts it onto a scapegoat, so that we fight the symptoms forever, ignoring and even aggravating the cause. Let’s not take that bait. Let’s get serious about world healing.

A More Beautiful World

Beyond the foundation, pillars, and building blocks of a peace narrative, we might also speak of its structure, its architecture. I call it a story-of-the-world, the “more beautiful world our hearts know is possible,” that we invite people into. It’s a world where everybody has a place, where everybody is valued, where everybody is welcome, where everybody is known to have a gift that is essential to make that world even richer. And nobody is left out. As with Julio Diaz, to speak compellingly of that world, you have to have seen it. The story we hold about the world is an invitation for the world to enter that story too. We have to have seen it. And I would say probably everybody in this room has seen it. You have had a glimpse of what the world could be, that the world could be peaceful. You’ve seen that this isn’t really working for the power elite either, it’s not working for the perpetrators, the military commanders, the politicians, the executives. You might see that there’s a part of them that is willing to make the courageous choice to let go of something that was precious to them, something they’re starting to realize it’s not so precious after all.

Here we all are, having caught a glimpse or many glimpses in our lives of a world that we know is possible. And if you’re like me, we don’t know how to get there. The mind says it’s not possible because, What’s the plan? The mind is immersed in – I’ve been calling it war thinking, but it’s deeper than war thinking – forced-based causality. How are you going to make it happen? That’s a more subtle variation on war thinking. How are you going to make it happen? How are you going to exert a force on a mass? That’s Newtonian physics, another part of the old story of separation. Well, we don’t know how it will happen. We don’t have enough force and information to make it happen. If it isn’t entirely up to our own force, we’re going to have to trust something else. We’re going to have to trust that there is an intelligence in the world greater than ourselves, that there is an organic tendency or will toward organization and beauty and complexity that is unfathomably mysterious. Therefore, we don’t have to know how it’s going to happen, nor do we have to fight the world to make it happen.

Instead, we start by listening. What is my part? How shall I be deployed? Where am I to be and what is mine to do? What calls to my care? And from that place, maybe we become able to speak that world story, to speak that invitation, or maybe we just carry it in ourselves and act from our deep-seated knowledge of it. In these gatherings we remind each other that the knowledge that a more beautiful world is possible is real knowledge – because you wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t seen it too. The very fact of this gathering stirs my optimism. It reminds me, I’m not crazy. You wouldn’t be here otherwise or have stayed to listen to all these words. Even if you have come with loads of skepticism and despair, you’re here. You still have hope. Life never dies. Living things die, but life itself always strives for more life. Thank you for carrying that bit, that glimpse of a more beautiful world with you, so that we can weave a peace narrative around it. Yes. Thank you so much.


Video of this lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj9aI1d8miE




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Filed Under: Political & Social Tagged With: cultural narrative, Essay, Home-V1, interbeing, new story, old story, transition

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Mary Miesem says

    August 22, 2019 at 1:10 pm

    Thank you for this. Your words speak to the heart. I follow a path that strives to move toward a peace narrative, and what you write validates for me the importance of this work. I’m going to share this. There are many out there who will see themselves and be inspired.

  2. Joanna Salidis says

    August 22, 2019 at 1:49 pm

    Charles, thank you so much.
    Love,
    Joanna

  3. Lisa says

    August 22, 2019 at 2:20 pm

    This is outstanding; thank you so much for taking something that feels overwhelmingly complex and putting clear language to it. Thank you for helping to point to a path of peace. Not an easy path, but the only viable way to healing and wholeness.

  4. JOEL WYSONG says

    August 22, 2019 at 2:21 pm

    Once again, Charles, you have touched me deeply with your wisdom.

  5. Priya says

    August 22, 2019 at 2:45 pm

    This is the nicest and best thing I’ve read for a while, thank you for writing it …

  6. Nancy says

    August 22, 2019 at 5:17 pm

    I am weeping in tenderness and gratitude and while I have long held on to being a good girl in contrast to what felt perverse in my family I have also long had compassion for each of them though I do not feel at all safe with them.

    Let me say one simple thing. LOVE in my experience and feeling held are so darn important…I know that last year when I had an affair and maybe felt love, admiration and joy for the first time in my life, my body healed even tho I later got hurt. I would not have missed that sacrifice/cost of feeling LOVE.

    So much more I could say here. I like text and the ability to trace words with my body in contact with a page even if on a computer. I think in this moment for some odd reason of Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem, Call me by My True Name….and I have long used the motto Together We Heal. Much appreciation, Charles.

  7. Erica Etelson says

    August 23, 2019 at 12:14 am

    For activists trying to make change in a dysfunctional “democracy,” we sometimes resort to direct action and civil disobedience — of course, we see ourselves on the side of justice and, therefore, our tactics are righteous, the end justifies the means, even if the means involves force. Direct action is non-violent but it is an application of force in the sense that — the system isn’t working so we need to disrupt it and force the powers that be to listen to us and yield to our demands, even if those demands aren’t universally shared by all Americans/human beings. I’m all for what Charles is talking about as far as eschewing hatred and contempt and self-righteous superiority and trying to see the other person’s humanity, complexity and decency. At the same time, given the urgency of so many existential problems confronting our country and world, and given how badly divided we are with strong unwillingness to hear what the other side is saying, would Charles say that taking direct action in the service of what our side believes is “justice” is part of the problematic war model or is justified and necessary?

    • Dwain Wilder says

      September 18, 2019 at 3:49 pm

      A great question, Erica! At its best, non-violent direct action does not initiate or call for a use of disruption. What it aims to do is to make manifest the disruption that exists but is tolerated by the governed and the people as well. That in itself is a witnessing of reality, a physical explication of it.

      There are blockades that I have participated in that do not stop there. In a blockade, one physically, with an unmovable presence, interrupts an injustice. I was part of Staughton Lynd’s Peoples Congress of 1965, in which we physically blocked the entrance to the congressional building, as best we could, to demonstrate that the people would not tolerate being represented in fighting this war. We submitted without struggle to arrest. I’ve been part of other blockades also, on similar grounds.

      It seems to me that private citizens who put their bodies at risk to interrupt the injust operations of the law or the government – or in the present case of the world’s governments’ refusal to acti decisively on the climate crisis – is to interrupt violence with peace. As long as one is willing to accept the consequences of one’s action with no physical forcing, I maintain that is confronting injustice and the violence perpetrated by governments and industries bent on maintaining their ability to continue making money regardless of the unjust consequences of their rapacity.

      I do agree that we should stay away from war-like framing of our actions. Struggling with one another is a very human thing to do. Making war or entering into battle always comes out of the three poisons humanity is liable to: greed, hatred and delusion. Sometimes a threat is so dire that a society understandably cannot rise above it to a higher consciousness, and therefore must be forced into some really evil karma. The attack on Pearl Harbor comes to mind. But along with accepting that karma comes much dire evil done in response. The internment camps of the Japanese shortly after Pearl Harbor comes to mind, of course, as do many other episodes of WW II, such as the atomic bombing of Japan, and the fire-bombing of German cities. Could we have been wiser? Many wise people were like voices crying in the wilderness – some of them conscientious objectors such as the Seventh Day Adventists. Many of these were imprisoned, forced to serve non-combatant roles in the military, or volunteered for forest fire-fighting, etc.

      Life is complex, and clarity hard-won at best.

  8. Sandra Taylor says

    August 23, 2019 at 6:51 am

    terrific essay charles – I have been on team good for a long time and through meeting you and other synchronistic happenings I have been practicing letting go of the us and them , learning inclusion , feeling for the other, embracing where possible and observing. this year I challenged myself with a dysfunctional committee – still set in the war story committed to making enemies and unnecessary difficulties. I used love, tolerance , clear communication , refused to take it personally at least overtly -there was an inner struggle . I wont say it is all peaches and cream, I did note the main trouble maker found it difficult to get a purchase on my ‘refusal to fight and my passion to come up with creative inclusive ideas and has had to leave. I am interested to see where and how it unfolds from here . It is a challenge to remove our Selves from the dominant story , to really look deeply into it and then reshape our world accordingly. You have a great gift of synthesising and bringing us along into the unfolding story. many thanks and blessings to you and yours.

  9. Olivier Clerc says

    August 23, 2019 at 1:32 pm

    That’s a fantastic essay, Charles ! Thank you so much.
    Do you allow me to have it translated and shared in French ?
    It is so much needed.
    I work a lot on stories and narratives, I have translated several books by my friend Dr Lewis Mehl-Madrona, and anything that goes in that direction needs to have an audience as wide as possible.
    Kind greetings from Burgundy,
    Olivier Clerc
    http://giftofforgiveness.olivierclerc.com

  10. michael robertson says

    August 28, 2019 at 8:24 am

    Awesome! The time is now. Let’s give peace a chance. Thank you CE for providing a path.

  11. Sheryl Morris says

    August 28, 2019 at 11:03 am

    Reading here with hope.
    Many wonderful thinkers and writers channeled and enter- woven here; help me add to the list: Marshal Rosenberg, Maria Montessori, Paulo Freire, John Buck, Riane Eisler,…

  12. Mike says

    September 3, 2019 at 12:00 am

    Thank you Charles for spreading I AM love(d). In the accepting and grounding of that, I see it out there as You Are precious. In seeing that I real-ize I AM love(d, ing). In that I share You Are precious. I am you, and IOU while you we experience ourselves as relation.

  13. Rosalind says

    September 11, 2019 at 6:22 am

    Dearest Charles,
    My heart is joining and celebrating the ‘isness’ of truth that has manifested through you.
    Thankyou

  14. Koyo H Masore says

    September 21, 2019 at 12:28 am

    I’ve been thinking about how to lead a more peaceful life for quite some time. Some days I feel a bit overwhelmed with everything happening in my life and the world. Though now I feel more content in trusting the peaceful path.

    Charles, Thank you for making such a beautiful essay about the love we all have.

  15. Anand says

    September 25, 2019 at 9:54 am

    Awesome narrative. If we could add some science about the structure of the life atom or soul that takes the form of the cute little baby you described in the passage it would complete the narrative.
    I am not a good writer like you but have great content about coexistence. A set of 16 books which explains every single sub atomic particle to the whole universe.
    I tried making a small presentation of the same.
    https://www.slideshare.net/AnandDamani/knowledge-to-create-a-heavenly-experience-and-live-it-always
    Would love to exchange more thoughts and start the process of setting the world in order.

    Anand.

  16. Tristan Mules says

    September 26, 2019 at 4:40 am

    Thanks Charles. This has been your drive for a long time… and its such a worth cause. Transferable to so many of our modern issues of objectification.

    I would like to point out some demonisation and group think that I see occurring often enough these days. You mentioned the misogyny of killing your own mother, but what about the misandry of killing your own father? What an easy thing to overlook in our time of ‘toxic’ masculinity, the patriarchy and the backswing against men. Its very cool to jump on the feminist bandwagon and use words like that, but not so cool to point out discrimination against men, by women.

  17. tita says

    October 15, 2019 at 4:06 am

    Just beautiful thank you

  18. Fatima says

    October 28, 2019 at 4:31 am

    Thanks for sharing this!

  19. Fatima says

    October 29, 2019 at 6:55 am

    Thank you Charles for spreading

  20. Bertrand Canac says

    April 27, 2020 at 3:39 pm

    The basis of peace is happiness.
    Peace is within, in the silence and bliss of pure consciousness, beyond the noise of thoughts.
    Only when a man is permanently established in the bliss of pure consciousness can his individual peace be real and permanent.
    It is only when enough people will live the bliss of the silent state of their own consciousness, that world peace will be real and permanent.
    Bertrand Canac

  21. kamir bouchareb st says

    June 9, 2020 at 5:38 pm

    thanks for the last information

  22. Mel says

    June 17, 2020 at 8:19 pm

    From Charles I get a glimpse into the mind of the American upper middle class. I think Charles means well. But as a middle class kid who has clearly had an easy life, Charles has no insight into the life and mindset of someone who is oppressed and lives in poverty. He is not aware that for a person in that position, there IS a need to fight against “the other”, namely, the oppressor who placed him there. Charles’ philosophy only makes sense if you’re from the privileged class. You think a black man living in poverty, trying to feed his kids working a shit job for minimum wage would buy Charles’ ‘solutions’ ? I can see it now. “Just chill out, brother, we’re all interconnected. We’re all in this together. There is no “other.” We’re one human race. Trust the higher intelligence. There is no one to fight.” How do you think that would go down? What Charles says is true on a metaphysical level, but when we consider social structure and class, it’s not anything that an oppressed person could relate to. Nor a mother who lost her home and child to US bombs in Syria. Nor a person who had their drinking water poisoned by corporate activities. Basically, most people in this world. For those who have suffered most from the social order established and maintained by the ruling class, Charles’ ‘solutions’ are unacceptable.

  23. kamir bouchareb st says

    July 7, 2020 at 3:09 am

    nice topic

  24. kamir bouchareb st says

    August 31, 2020 at 6:00 pm

    very good

  25. kamir bouchareb st says

    September 18, 2020 at 6:22 am

    thanks for the last information

  26. Vanessa says

    July 26, 2021 at 4:38 pm

    Powerful paper and so important. For my I have always felt my life work is t become radically, unconditionally loving. True love is unconditional. But I, like many people, have some serious trauma. And an impact of that is a need for control where in the past I had no control. To heal from trauma there is a need either for the safety as you speak of in the essay, or to create the safety you do not feel via control. So my question is, how do we let go of this deep, unconscious need in favour of the complexity and interconnectedness, when safety is otherwise not apparent?

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The Coronation

For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?

Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless. A few months ago, a proposal to halt commercial air travel would have seemed preposterous. Likewise for the radical changes we are making in our social behavior, economy, and the role of government in our lives. Covid demonstrates the power of our collective will when we agree on what is important. What else might we achieve, in coherency? What do we want to achieve, and what world shall we create? That is always the next question when anyone awakens to their power.

Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. To interrupt a habit is to make it visible; it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice. When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future. We might ask, after so many have lost their jobs, whether all of them are the jobs the world most needs, and whether our labor and creativity would be better applied elsewhere. We might ask, having done without it for a while, whether we really need so much air travel, Disneyworld vacations, or trade shows. What parts of the economy will we want to restore, and what parts might we choose to let go of? And on a darker note, what among the things that are being taken away right now – civil liberties, freedom of assembly, sovereignty over our bodies, in-person gatherings, hugs, handshakes, and public life – might we need to exert intentional political and personal will to restore?

For most of my life, I have had the feeling that humanity was nearing a crossroads. Always, the crisis, the collapse, the break was imminent, just around the bend, but it didn’t come and it didn’t come. Imagine walking a road, and up ahead you see it, you see the crossroads. It’s just over the hill, around the bend, past the woods. Cresting the hill, you see you were mistaken, it was a mirage, it was farther away than you thought. You keep walking. Sometimes it comes into view, sometimes it disappears from sight and it seems like this road goes on forever. Maybe there isn’t a crossroads. No, there it is again! Always it is almost here. Never is it here.

Now, all of a sudden, we go around a bend and here it is. We stop, hardly able to believe that now it is happening, hardly able to believe, after years of confinement to the road of our predecessors, that now we finally have a choice. We are right to stop, stunned at the newness of our situation. Because of the hundred paths that radiate out in front of us, some lead in the same direction we’ve already been headed. Some lead to hell on earth. And some lead to a world more healed and more beautiful than we ever dared believe to be possible.

I write these words with the aim of standing here with you – bewildered, scared maybe, yet also with a sense of new possibility – at this point of diverging paths. Let us gaze down some of them and see where they lead.

* * *

I heard this story last week from a friend. She was in a grocery store and saw a woman sobbing in the aisle. Flouting social distancing rules, she went to the woman and gave her a hug. “Thank you,” the woman said, “that is the first time anyone has hugged me for ten days.”

Going without hugs for a few weeks seems a small price to pay if it will stem an epidemic that could take millions of lives. There is a strong argument for social distancing in the near term: to prevent a sudden surge of Covid cases from overwhelming the medical system. I would like to put that argument in a larger context, especially as we look to the long term. Lest we institutionalize distancing and reengineer society around it, let us be aware of what choice we are making and why.

The same goes for the other changes happening around the coronavirus epidemic. Some commentators have observed how it plays neatly into an agenda of totalitarian control. A frightened public accepts abridgments of civil liberties that are otherwise hard to justify, such as the tracking of everyone’s movements at all times, forcible medical treatment, involuntary quarantine, restrictions on travel and the freedom of assembly, censorship of what the authorities deem to be disinformation, suspension of habeas corpus, and military policing of civilians. Many of these were underway before Covid-19; since its advent, they have been irresistible. The same goes for the automation of commerce; the transition from participation in sports and entertainment to remote viewing; the migration of life from public to private spaces; the transition away from place-based schools toward online education, the decline of brick-and-mortar stores, and the movement of human work and leisure onto screens. Covid-19 is accelerating preexisting trends, political, economic, and social.

While all the above are, in the short term, justified on the grounds of flattening the curve (the epidemiological growth curve), we are also hearing a lot about a “new normal”; that is to say, the changes may not be temporary at all. Since the threat of infectious disease, like the threat of terrorism, never goes away, control measures can easily become permanent. If we were going in this direction anyway, the current justification must be part of a deeper impulse. I will analyze this impulse in two parts: the reflex of control, and the war on death. Thus understood, an initiatory opportunity emerges, one that we are seeing already in the form of the solidarity, compassion, and care that Covid-19 has inspired.

The Reflex of Control

At the current writing, official statistics say that about 25,000 people have died from Covid-19. By the time it runs its course, the death toll could be ten times or a hundred times bigger, or even, if the most alarming guesses are right, a thousand times bigger. Each one of these people has loved ones, family and friends. Compassion and conscience call us to do what we can to avert unnecessary tragedy. This is personal for me: my own infinitely dear but frail mother is among the most vulnerable to a disease that kills mostly the aged and the infirm.

What will the final numbers be? That question is impossible to answer at the time of this writing. Early reports were alarming; for weeks the official number from Wuhan, circulated endlessly in the media, was a shocking 3.4%. That, coupled with its highly contagious nature, pointed to tens of millions of deaths worldwide, or even as many as 100 million. More recently, estimates have plunged as it has become apparent that most cases are mild or asymptomatic. Since testing has been skewed towards the seriously ill, the death rate has looked artificially high. In South Korea, where hundreds of thousands of people with mild symptoms have been tested, the reported case fatality rate is around 1%. In Germany, whose testing also extends to many with mild symptoms, the fatality rate is 0.4%. A recent paper in the journal Science argues that 86% of infections have been undocumented, which points to a much lower mortality rate than the current case fatality rate would indicate.

The story of the Diamond Princess cruise ship bolsters this view. Of the 3,711 people on board, about 20% have tested positive for the virus; less than half of those had symptoms, and eight have died. A cruise ship is a perfect setting for contagion, and there was plenty of time for the virus to spread on board before anyone did anything about it, yet only a fifth were infected. Furthermore, the cruise ship’s population was heavily skewed (as are most cruise ships) toward the elderly: nearly a third of the passengers were over age 70, and more than half were over age 60. A research team concluded from the large number of asymptomatic cases that the true fatality rate in China is around 0.5%. That is still five times higher than flu. Based on the above (and adjusting for much younger demographics in Africa and South and Southeast Asia) my guess is about 200,000-300,000 deaths in the US – more if the medical system is overwhelmed, less if infections are spread out over time – and 3 million globally. Those are serious numbers. Not since the Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968/9 has the world experienced anything like it.

My guesses could easily be off by an order of magnitude. Every day the media reports the total number of Covid-19 cases, but no one has any idea what the true number is, because only a tiny proportion of the population has been tested. If tens of millions have the virus, asymptomatically, we would not know it. Further complicating the matter is the high rate of false positives for existing testing, possibly as high as 80%. (And see here for even more alarming uncertainties about test accuracy.) Let me repeat: no one knows what is really happening, including me. Let us be aware of two contradictory tendencies in human affairs. The first is the tendency for hysteria to feed on itself, to exclude data points that don’t play into the fear, and to create the world in its image. The second is denial, the irrational rejection of information that might disrupt normalcy and comfort. As Daniel Schmactenberger asks, How do you know what you believe is true?

In the face of the uncertainty, I’d like to make a prediction: The crisis will play out so that we never will know. If the final death tally, which will itself be the subject of dispute, is lower than feared, some will say that is because the controls worked. Others will say it is because the disease wasn’t as dangerous as we were told.

To me, the most baffling puzzle is why at the present writing there seem to be no new cases in China. The government didn’t initiate its lockdown until well after the virus was established. It should have spread widely during Chinese New Year, when every plane, train, and bus is packed with people traveling all over the country. What is going on here? Again, I don’t know, and neither do you.

Whether the final global death toll is 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million, let’s look at some other numbers to get some perspective. My point is NOT that Covid isn’t so bad and we shouldn’t do anything. Bear with me. Last year, according to the FAO, five million children worldwide died of hunger (among 162 million who are stunted and 51 million who are wasted). That is 200 times more people than have died so far from Covid-19, yet no government has declared a state of emergency or asked that we radically alter our way of life to save them. Nor do we see a comparable level of alarm and action around suicide – the mere tip of an iceberg of despair and depression – which kills over a million people a year globally and 50,000 in the USA. Or drug overdoses, which kill 70,000 in the USA, the autoimmunity epidemic, which affects 23.5 million (NIH figure) to 50 million (AARDA), or obesity, which afflicts well over 100 million. Why, for that matter, are we not in a frenzy about averting nuclear armageddon or ecological collapse, but, to the contrary, pursue choices that magnify those very dangers?

Please, the point here is not that we haven’t changed our ways to stop children from starving, so we shouldn’t change them for Covid either. It is the contrary: If we can change so radically for Covid-19, we can do it for these other conditions too. Let us ask why are we able to unify our collective will to stem this virus, but not to address other grave threats to humanity. Why, until now, has society been so frozen in its existing trajectory?

The answer is revealing. Simply, in the face of world hunger, addiction, autoimmunity, suicide, or ecological collapse, we as a society do not know what to do. Our go-to crisis responses, all of which are some version of control, aren’t very effective in addressing these conditions. Now along comes a contagious epidemic, and finally we can spring into action. It is a crisis for which control works: quarantines, lockdowns, isolation, hand-washing; control of movement, control of information, control of our bodies. That makes Covid a convenient receptacle for our inchoate fears, a place to channel our growing sense of helplessness in the face of the changes overtaking the world. Covid-19 is a threat that we know how to meet. Unlike so many of our other fears, Covid-19 offers a plan.

Our civilization’s established institutions are increasingly helpless to meet the challenges of our time. How they welcome a challenge that they finally can meet. How eager they are to embrace it as a paramount crisis. How naturally their systems of information management select for the most alarming portrayals of it. How easily the public joins the panic, embracing a threat that the authorities can handle as a proxy for the various unspeakable threats that they cannot.

Today, most of our challenges no longer succumb to force. Our antibiotics and surgery fail to meet the surging health crises of autoimmunity, addiction, and obesity. Our guns and bombs, built to conquer armies, are useless to erase hatred abroad or keep domestic violence out of our homes. Our police and prisons cannot heal the breeding conditions of crime. Our pesticides cannot restore ruined soil. Covid-19 recalls the good old days when the challenges of infectious diseases succumbed to modern medicine and hygiene, at the same time as the Nazis succumbed to the war machine, and nature itself succumbed, or so it seemed, to technological conquest and improvement. It recalls the days when our weapons worked and the world seemed indeed to be improving with each technology of control.

What kind of problem succumbs to domination and control? The kind caused by something from the outside, something Other. When the cause of the problem is something intimate to ourselves, like homelessness or inequality, addiction or obesity, there is nothing to war against. We may try to install an enemy, blaming, for example, the billionaires, Vladimir Putin, or the Devil, but then we miss key information, such as the ground conditions that allow billionaires (or viruses) to replicate in the first place.

If there is one thing our civilization is good at, it is fighting an enemy. We welcome opportunities to do what we are good at, which prove the validity of our technologies, systems, and worldview. And so, we manufacture enemies, cast problems like crime, terrorism, and disease into us-versus-them terms, and mobilize our collective energies toward those endeavors that can be seen that way. Thus, we single out Covid-19 as a call to arms, reorganizing society as if for a war effort, while treating as normal the possibility of nuclear armageddon, ecological collapse, and five million children starving.

The Conspiracy Narrative

Because Covid-19 seems to justify so many items on the totalitarian wish list, there are those who believe it to be a deliberate power play. It is not my purpose to advance that theory nor to debunk it, although I will offer some meta-level comments. First a brief overview.

The theories (there are many variants) talk about Event 201 (sponsored by the Gates Foundation, CIA, etc. last September), and a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation white paper detailing a scenario called “Lockstep,” both of which lay out the authoritarian response to a hypothetical pandemic. They observe that the infrastructure, technology, and legislative framework for martial law has been in preparation for many years. All that was needed, they say, was a way to make the public embrace it, and now that has come. Whether or not current controls are permanent, a precedent is being set for:

  • • The tracking of people’s movements at all times (because coronavirus)
  • • The suspension of freedom of assembly (because coronavirus)
  • • The military policing of civilians (because coronavirus)
  • • Extrajudicial, indefinite detention (quarantine, because coronavirus)
  • • The banning of cash (because coronavirus)
  • • Censorship of the Internet (to combat disinformation, because coronavirus)
  • • Compulsory vaccination and other medical treatment, establishing the state’s sovereignty over our bodies (because coronavirus)
  • • The classification of all activities and destinations into the expressly permitted and the expressly forbidden (you can leave your house for this, but not that), eliminating the un-policed, non-juridical gray zone. That totality is the very essence of totalitarianism. Necessary now though, because, well, coronavirus.

This is juicy material for conspiracy theories. For all I know, one of those theories could be true; however, the same progression of events could unfold from an unconscious systemic tilt toward ever-increasing control. Where does this tilt come from? It is woven into civilization’s DNA. For millennia, civilization (as opposed to small-scale traditional cultures) has understood progress as a matter of extending control onto the world: domesticating the wild, conquering the barbarians, mastering the forces of nature, and ordering society according to law and reason. The ascent of control accelerated with the Scientific Revolution, which launched “progress” to new heights: the ordering of reality into objective categories and quantities, and the mastering of materiality with technology. Finally, the social sciences promised to use the same means and methods to fulfill the ambition (which goes back to Plato and Confucius) to engineer a perfect society.

Those who administer civilization will therefore welcome any opportunity to strengthen their control, for after all, it is in service to a grand vision of human destiny: the perfectly ordered world, in which disease, crime, poverty, and perhaps suffering itself can be engineered out of existence. No nefarious motives are necessary. Of course they would like to keep track of everyone – all the better to ensure the common good. For them, Covid-19 shows how necessary that is. “Can we afford democratic freedoms in light of the coronavirus?” they ask. “Must we now, out of necessity, sacrifice those for our own safety?” It is a familiar refrain, for it has accompanied other crises in the past, like 9/11.

To rework a common metaphor, imagine a man with a hammer, stalking around looking for a reason to use it. Suddenly he sees a nail sticking out. He’s been looking for a nail for a long time, pounding on screws and bolts and not accomplishing much. He inhabits a worldview in which hammers are the best tools, and the world can be made better by pounding in the nails. And here is a nail! We might suspect that in his eagerness he has placed the nail there himself, but it hardly matters. Maybe it isn’t even a nail that’s sticking out, but it resembles one enough to start pounding. When the tool is at the ready, an opportunity will arise to use it.

And I will add, for those inclined to doubt the authorities, maybe this time it really is a nail. In that case, the hammer is the right tool – and the principle of the hammer will emerge the stronger, ready for the screw, the button, the clip, and the tear.

Either way, the problem we deal with here is much deeper than that of overthrowing an evil coterie of Illuminati. Even if they do exist, given the tilt of civilization, the same trend would persist without them, or a new Illuminati would arise to assume the functions of the old.

True or false, the idea that the epidemic is some monstrous plot perpetrated by evildoers upon the public is not so far from the mindset of find-the-pathogen. It is a crusading mentality, a war mentality. It locates the source of a sociopolitical illness in a pathogen against which we may then fight, a victimizer separate from ourselves. It risks ignoring the conditions that make society fertile ground for the plot to take hold. Whether that ground was sown deliberately or by the wind is, for me, a secondary question.

What I will say next is relevant whether or not SARS-CoV2 is a genetically engineered bioweapon, is related to 5G rollout, is being used to prevent “disclosure,” is a Trojan horse for totalitarian world government, is more deadly than we’ve been told, is less deadly than we’ve been told, originated in a Wuhan biolab, originated at Fort Detrick, or is exactly as the CDC and WHO have been telling us. It applies even if everyone is totally wrong about the role of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the current epidemic. I have my opinions, but if there is one thing I have learned through the course of this emergency is that I don’t really know what is happening. I don’t see how anyone can, amidst the seething farrago of news, fake news, rumors, suppressed information, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and politicized narratives that fill the Internet. I wish a lot more people would embrace not knowing. I say that both to those who embrace the dominant narrative, as well as to those who hew to dissenting ones. What information might we be blocking out, in order to maintain the integrity of our viewpoints? Let’s be humble in our beliefs: it is a matter of life and death.

The War on Death

My 7-year-old son hasn’t seen or played with another child for two weeks. Millions of others are in the same boat. Most would agree that a month without social interaction for all those children a reasonable sacrifice to save a million lives. But how about to save 100,000 lives? And what if the sacrifice is not for a month but for a year? Five years? Different people will have different opinions on that, according to their underlying values.

Let’s replace the foregoing questions with something more personal, that pierces the inhuman utilitarian thinking that turns people into statistics and sacrifices some of them for something else. The relevant question for me is, Would I ask all the nation’s children to forego play for a season, if it would reduce my mother’s risk of dying, or for that matter, my own risk? Or I might ask, Would I decree the end of human hugging and handshakes, if it would save my own life? This is not to devalue Mom’s life or my own, both of which are precious. I am grateful for every day she is still with us. But these questions bring up deep issues. What is the right way to live? What is the right way to die?

The answer to such questions, whether asked on behalf of oneself or on behalf of society at large, depends on how we hold death and how much we value play, touch, and togetherness, along with civil liberties and personal freedom. There is no easy formula to balance these values.

Over my lifetime I’ve seen society place more and more emphasis on safety, security, and risk reduction. It has especially impacted childhood: as a young boy it was normal for us to roam a mile from home unsupervised – behavior that would earn parents a visit from Child Protective Services today. It also manifests in the form of latex gloves for more and more professions; hand sanitizer everywhere; locked, guarded, and surveilled school buildings; intensified airport and border security; heightened awareness of legal liability and liability insurance; metal detectors and searches before entering many sports arenas and public buildings, and so on. Writ large, it takes the form of the security state.

The mantra “safety first” comes from a value system that makes survival top priority, and that depreciates other values like fun, adventure, play, and the challenging of limits. Other cultures had different priorities. For instance, many traditional and indigenous cultures are much less protective of children, as documented in Jean Liedloff’s classic, The Continuum Concept. They allow them risks and responsibilities that would seem insane to most modern people, believing that this is necessary for children to develop self-reliance and good judgement. I think most modern people, especially younger people, retain some of this inherent willingness to sacrifice safety in order to live life fully. The surrounding culture, however, lobbies us relentlessly to live in fear, and has constructed systems that embody fear. In them, staying safe is over-ridingly important. Thus we have a medical system in which most decisions are based on calculations of risk, and in which the worst possible outcome, marking the physician’s ultimate failure, is death. Yet all the while, we know that death awaits us regardless. A life saved actually means a death postponed.

The ultimate fulfillment of civilization’s program of control would be to triumph over death itself. Failing that, modern society settles for a facsimile of that triumph: denial rather than conquest. Ours is a society of death denial, from its hiding away of corpses, to its fetish for youthfulness, to its warehousing of old people in nursing homes. Even its obsession with money and property – extensions of the self, as the word “mine” indicates – expresses the delusion that the impermanent self can be made permanent through its attachments. All this is inevitable given the story-of-self that modernity offers: the separate individual in a world of Other. Surrounded by genetic, social, and economic competitors, that self must protect and dominate in order to thrive. It must do everything it can to forestall death, which (in the story of separation) is total annihilation. Biological science has even taught us that our very nature is to maximize our chances of surviving and reproducing.

I asked a friend, a medical doctor who has spent time with the Q’ero on Peru, whether the Q’ero would (if they could) intubate someone to prolong their life. “Of course not,” she said. “They would summon the shaman to help him die well.” Dying well (which isn’t necessarily the same as dying painlessly) is not much in today’s medical vocabulary. No hospital records are kept on whether patients die well. That would not be counted as a positive outcome. In the world of the separate self, death is the ultimate catastrophe.

But is it? Consider this perspective from Dr. Lissa Rankin: “Not all of us would want to be in an ICU, isolated from loved ones with a machine breathing for us, at risk of dying alone- even if it means they might increase their chance of survival. Some of us might rather be held in the arms of loved ones at home, even if that means our time has come…. Remember, death is no ending. Death is going home.”

When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, even inter-existent, then it bleeds over into the other, and the other bleeds over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships. The War on Death gives way to the quest to live well and fully, and we see that fear of death is actually fear of life. How much of life will we forego to stay safe?

Totalitarianism – the perfection of control – is the inevitable end product of the mythology of the separate self. What else but a threat to life, like a war, would merit total control? Thus Orwell identified perpetual war as a crucial component of the Party’s rule.

Against the backdrop of the program of control, death denial, and the separate self, the assumption that public policy should seek to minimize the number of deaths is nearly beyond question, a goal to which other values like play, freedom, etc. are subordinate. Covid-19 offers occasion to broaden that view. Yes, let us hold life sacred, more sacred than ever. Death teaches us that. Let us hold each person, young or old, sick or well, as the sacred, precious, beloved being that they are. And in the circle of our hearts, let us make room for other sacred values too. To hold life sacred is not just to live long, it is to live well and right and fully.

Like all fear, the fear around the coronavirus hints at what might lie beyond it. Anyone who has experienced the passing of someone close knows that death is a portal to love. Covid-19 has elevated death to prominence in the consciousness of a society that denies it. On the other side of the fear, we can see the love that death liberates. Let it pour forth. Let it saturate the soil of our culture and fill its aquifers so that it seeps up through the cracks of our crusted institutions, our systems, and our habits. Some of these may die too.

What world shall we live in?

How much of life do we want to sacrifice at the altar of security? If it keeps us safer, do we want to live in a world where human beings never congregate? Do we want to wear masks in public all the time? Do we want to be medically examined every time we travel, if that will save some number of lives a year? Are we willing to accept the medicalization of life in general, handing over final sovereignty over our bodies to medical authorities (as selected by political ones)? Do we want every event to be a virtual event? How much are we willing to live in fear?

Covid-19 will eventually subside, but the threat of infectious disease is permanent. Our response to it sets a course for the future. Public life, communal life, the life of shared physicality has been dwindling over several generations. Instead of shopping at stores, we get things delivered to our homes. Instead of packs of kids playing outside, we have play dates and digital adventures. Instead of the public square, we have the online forum. Do we want to continue to insulate ourselves still further from each other and the world?

It is not hard to imagine, especially if social distancing is successful, that Covid-19 persists beyond the 18 months we are being told to expect for it to run its course. It is not hard to imagine that new viruses will emerge during that time. It is not hard to imagine that emergency measures will become normal (so as to forestall the possibility of another outbreak), just as the state of emergency declared after 9/11 is still in effect today. It is not hard to imagine that (as we are being told), reinfection is possible, so that the disease will never run its course. That means that the temporary changes in our way of life may become permanent.

To reduce the risk of another pandemic, shall we choose to live in a society without hugs, handshakes, and high-fives, forever more? Shall we choose to live in a society where we no longer gather en masse? Shall the concert, the sports competition, and the festival be a thing of the past? Shall children no longer play with other children? Shall all human contact be mediated by computers and masks? No more dance classes, no more karate classes, no more conferences, no more churches? Is death reduction to be the standard by which to measure progress? Does human advancement mean separation? Is this the future?

The same question applies to the administrative tools required to control the movement of people and the flow of information. At the present writing, the entire country is moving toward lockdown. In some countries, one must print out a form from a government website in order to leave the house. It reminds me of school, where one’s location must be authorized at all times. Or of prison. Do we envision a future of electronic hall passes, a system where freedom of movement is governed by state administrators and their software at all times, permanently? Where every movement is tracked, either permitted or prohibited? And, for our protection, where information that threatens our health (as decided, again, by various authorities) is censored for our own good? In the face of an emergency, like unto a state of war, we accept such restrictions and temporarily surrender our freedoms. Similar to 9/11, Covid-19 trumps all objections.

For the first time in history, the technological means exist to realize such a vision, at least in the developed world (for example, using cellphone location data to enforce social distancing; see also here). After a bumpy transition, we could live in a society where nearly all of life happens online: shopping, meeting, entertainment, socializing, working, even dating. Is that what we want? How many lives saved is that worth?

I am sure that many of the controls in effect today will be partially relaxed in a few months. Partially relaxed, but at the ready. As long as infectious disease remains with us, they are likely to be reimposed, again and again, in the future, or be self-imposed in the form of habits. As Deborah Tannen says, contributing to a Politico article on how coronavirus will change the world permanently, ‘We know now that touching things, being with other people and breathing the air in an enclosed space can be risky…. It could become second nature to recoil from shaking hands or touching our faces—and we may all fall heir to society-wide OCD, as none of us can stop washing our hands.” After thousands of years, millions of years, of touch, contact, and togetherness, is the pinnacle of human progress to be that we cease such activities because they are too risky?

Life is Community

The paradox of the program of control is that its progress rarely advances us any closer to its goal. Despite security systems in almost every upper middle-class home, people are no less anxious or insecure than they were a generation ago. Despite elaborate security measures, the schools are not seeing fewer mass shootings. Despite phenomenal progress in medical technology, people have if anything become less healthy over the past thirty years, as chronic disease has proliferated and life expectancy stagnated and, in the USA and Britain, started to decline.

The measures being instituted to control Covid-19, likewise, may end up causing more suffering and death than they prevent. Minimizing deaths means minimizing the deaths that we know how to predict and measure. It is impossible to measure the added deaths that might come from isolation-induced depression, for instance, or the despair caused by unemployment, or the lowered immunity and deterioration in health that chronic fear can cause. Loneliness and lack of social contact has been shown to increase inflammation, depression, and dementia. According to Lissa Rankin, M.D., air pollution increases risk of dying by 6%, obesity by 23%, alcohol abuse by 37%, and loneliness by 45%.

Another danger that is off the ledger is the deterioration in immunity caused by excessive hygiene and distancing. It is not only social contact that is necessary for health, it is also contact with the microbial world. Generally speaking, microbes are not our enemies, they are our allies in health. A diverse gut biome, comprising bacteria, viruses, yeasts, and other organisms, is essential for a well-functioning immune system, and its diversity is maintained through contact with other people and with the world of life. Excessive hand-washing, overuse of antibiotics, aseptic cleanliness, and lack of human contact might do more harm than good. The resulting allergies and autoimmune disorders might be worse than the infectious disease they replace. Socially and biologically, health comes from community. Life does not thrive in isolation.

Seeing the world in us-versus-them terms blinds us to the reality that life and health happen in community. To take the example of infectious diseases, we fail to look beyond the evil pathogen and ask, What is the role of viruses in the microbiome? (See also here.) What are the body conditions under which harmful viruses proliferate? Why do some people have mild symptoms and others severe ones (besides the catch-all non-explanation of “low resistance”)? What positive role might flus, colds, and other non-lethal diseases play in the maintenance of health?

War-on-germs thinking brings results akin to those of the War on Terror, War on Crime, War on Weeds, and the endless wars we fight politically and interpersonally. First, it generates endless war; second, it diverts attention from the ground conditions that breed illness, terrorism, crime, weeds, and the rest.

Despite politicians’ perennial claim that they pursue war for the sake of peace, war inevitably breeds more war. Bombing countries to kill terrorists not only ignores the ground conditions of terrorism, it exacerbates those conditions. Locking up criminals not only ignores the conditions that breed crime, it creates those conditions when it breaks up families and communities and acculturates the incarcerated to criminality. And regimes of antibiotics, vaccines, antivirals, and other medicines wreak havoc on body ecology, which is the foundation of strong immunity. Outside the body, the massive spraying campaigns sparked by Zika, Dengue Fever, and now Covid-19 will visit untold damage upon nature’s ecology. Has anyone considered what the effects on the ecosystem will be when we douse it with antiviral compounds? Such a policy (which has been implemented in various places in China and India) is only thinkable from the mindset of separation, which does not understand that viruses are integral to the web of life.

To understand the point about ground conditions, consider some mortality statistics from Italy (from its National Health Institute), based on an analysis of hundreds of Covid-19 fatalities. Of those analyzed, less than 1% were free of serious chronic health conditions. Some 75% suffered from hypertension, 35% from diabetes, 33% from cardiac ischemia, 24% from atrial fibrillation, 18% from low renal function, along with other conditions that I couldn’t decipher from the Italian report. Nearly half the deceased had three or more of these serious pathologies. Americans, beset by obesity, diabetes, and other chronic ailments, are at least as vulnerable as Italians. Should we blame the virus then (which killed few otherwise healthy people), or shall we blame underlying poor health? Here again the analogy of the taut rope applies. Millions of people in the modern world are in a precarious state of health, just waiting for something that would normally be trivial to send them over the edge. Of course, in the short term we want to save their lives; the danger is that we lose ourselves in an endless succession of short terms, fighting one infectious disease after another, and never engage the ground conditions that make people so vulnerable. That is a much harder problem, because these ground conditions will not change via fighting. There is no pathogen that causes diabetes or obesity, addiction, depression, or PTSD. Their causes are not an Other, not some virus separate from ourselves, and we its victims.

Even in diseases like Covid-19, in which we can name a pathogenic virus, matters are not so simple as a war between virus and victim. There is an alternative to the germ theory of disease that holds germs to be part of a larger process. When conditions are right, they multiply in the body, sometimes killing the host, but also, potentially, improving the conditions that accommodated them to begin with, for example by cleaning out accumulated toxic debris via mucus discharge, or (metaphorically speaking) burning them up with fever. Sometimes called “terrain theory,” it says that germs are more symptom than cause of disease. As one meme explains it: “Your fish is sick. Germ theory: isolate the fish. Terrain theory: clean the tank.”

A certain schizophrenia afflicts the modern culture of health. On the one hand, there is a burgeoning wellness movement that embraces alternative and holistic medicine. It advocates herbs, meditation, and yoga to boost immunity. It validates the emotional and spiritual dimensions of health, such as the power of attitudes and beliefs to sicken or to heal. All of this seems to have disappeared under the Covid tsunami, as society defaults to the old orthodoxy.

Case in point: California acupuncturists have been forced to shut down, having been deemed “non-essential.” This is perfectly understandable from the perspective of conventional virology. But as one acupuncturist on Facebook observed, “What about my patient who I’m working with to get off opioids for his back pain? He’s going to have to start using them again.” From the worldview of medical authority, alternative modalities, social interaction, yoga classes, supplements, and so on are frivolous when it comes to real diseases caused by real viruses. They are relegated to an etheric realm of “wellness” in the face of a crisis. The resurgence of orthodoxy under Covid-19 is so intense that anything remotely unconventional, such as intravenous vitamin C, was completely off the table in the United States until two days ago (articles still abound “debunking” the “myth” that vitamin C can help fight Covid-19). Nor have I heard the CDC evangelize the benefits of elderberry extract, medicinal mushrooms, cutting sugar intake, NAC (N-acetyl L-cysteine), astragalus, or vitamin D. These are not just mushy speculation about “wellness,” but are supported by extensive research and physiological explanations. For example, NAC (general info, double-blind placebo-controlled study) has been shown to radically reduce incidence and severity of symptoms in flu-like illnesses.

As the statistics I offered earlier on autoimmunity, obesity, etc. indicate, America and the modern world in general are facing a health crisis. Is the answer to do what we’ve been doing, only more thoroughly? The response so far to Covid has been to double down on the orthodoxy and sweep unconventional practices and dissenting viewpoints aside. Another response would be to widen our lens and examine the entire system, including who pays for it, how access is granted, and how research is funded, but also expanding out to include marginal fields like herbal medicine, functional medicine, and energy medicine. Perhaps we can take this opportunity to reevaluate prevailing theories of illness, health, and the body. Yes, let’s protect the sickened fish as best we can right now, but maybe next time we won’t have to isolate and drug so many fish, if we can clean the tank.

I’m not telling you to run out right now and buy NAC or any other supplement, nor that we as a society should abruptly shift our response, cease social distancing immediately, and start taking supplements instead. But we can use the break in normal, this pause at a crossroads, to consciously choose what path we shall follow moving forward: what kind of healthcare system, what paradigm of health, what kind of society. This reevaluation is already happening, as ideas like universal free healthcare in the USA gain new momentum. And that path leads to forks as well. What kind of healthcare will be universalized? Will it be merely available to all, or mandatory for all – each citizen a patient, perhaps with an invisible ink barcode tattoo certifying one is up to date on all compulsory vaccines and check-ups. Then you can go to school, board a plane, or enter a restaurant. This is one path to the future that is available to us.

Another option is available now too. Instead of doubling down on control, we could finally embrace the holistic paradigms and practices that have been waiting on the margins, waiting for the center to dissolve so that, in our humbled state, we can bring them into the center and build a new system around them.

The Coronation

There is an alternative to the paradise of perfect control that our civilization has so long pursued, and that recedes as fast as our progress, like a mirage on the horizon. Yes, we can proceed as before down the path toward greater insulation, isolation, domination, and separation. We can normalize heightened levels of separation and control, believe that they are necessary to keep us safe, and accept a world in which we are afraid to be near each other. Or we can take advantage of this pause, this break in normal, to turn onto a path of reunion, of holism, of the restoring of lost connections, of the repair of community and the rejoining of the web of life.

Do we double down on protecting the separate self, or do we accept the invitation into a world where all of us are in this together? It isn’t just in medicine we encounter this question: it visits us politically, economically, and in our personal lives as well. Take for example the issue of hoarding, which embodies the idea, “There won’t be enough for everyone, so I am going to make sure there is enough for me.” Another response might be, “Some don’t have enough, so I will share what I have with them.” Are we to be survivalists or helpers? What is life for?

On a larger scale, people are asking questions that have until now lurked on activist margins. What should we do about the homeless? What should we do about the people in prisons? In Third World slums? What should we do about the unemployed? What about all the hotel maids, the Uber drivers, the plumbers and janitors and bus drivers and cashiers who cannot work from home? And so now, finally, ideas like student debt relief and universal basic income are blossoming. “How do we protect those susceptible to Covid?” invites us into “How do we care for vulnerable people in general?”

That is the impulse that stirs in us, regardless of the superficialities of our opinions about Covid’s severity, origin, or best policy to address it. It is saying, let’s get serious about taking care of each other. Let’s remember how precious we all are and how precious life is. Let’s take inventory of our civilization, strip it down to its studs, and see if we can build one more beautiful.

As Covid stirs our compassion, more and more of us realize that we don’t want to go back to a normal so sorely lacking it. We have the opportunity now to forge a new, more compassionate normal.

Hopeful signs abound that this is happening. The United States government, which has long seemed the captive of heartless corporate interests, has unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars in direct payments to families. Donald Trump, not known as a paragon of compassion, has put a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions. Certainly one can take a cynical view of both these developments; nonetheless, they embody the principle of caring for the vulnerable.

From all over the world we hear stories of solidarity and healing. One friend described sending $100 each to ten strangers who were in dire need. My son, who until a few days ago worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, said people were tipping at five times the normal rate – and these are working class people, many of them Hispanic truck drivers, who are economically insecure themselves. Doctors, nurses, and “essential workers” in other professions risk their lives to serve the public. Here are some more examples of the love and kindness eruption, courtesy of ServiceSpace:

Perhaps we’re in the middle of living into that new story. Imagine Italian airforce using Pavoratti, Spanish military doing acts of service, and street police playing guitars — to *inspire*. Corporations giving unexpected wage hikes. Canadians starting “Kindness Mongering.” Six year old in Australia adorably gifting her tooth fairy money, an 8th grader in Japan making 612 masks, and college kids everywhere buying groceries for elders. Cuba sending an army in “white robes” (doctors) to help Italy. A landlord allowing tenants to stay without rent, an Irish priest’s poem going viral, disabled activitists producing hand sanitizer. Imagine. Sometimes a crisis mirrors our deepest impulse — that we can always respond with compassion.

As Rebecca Solnit describes in her marvelous book, A Paradise Built in Hell, disaster often liberates solidarity. A more beautiful world shimmers just beneath the surface, bobbing up whenever the systems that hold it underwater loosen their grip.

For a long time we, as a collective, have stood helpless in the face of an ever-sickening society. Whether it is declining health, decaying infrastructure, depression, suicide, addiction, ecological degradation, or concentration of wealth, the symptoms of civilizational malaise in the developed world are plain to see, but we have been stuck in the systems and patterns that cause them. Now, Covid has gifted us a reset.

A million forking paths lie before us. Universal basic income could mean an end to economic insecurity and the flowering of creativity as millions are freed from the work that Covid has shown us is less necessary than we thought. Or it could mean, with the decimation of small businesses, dependency on the state for a stipend that comes with strict conditions. The crisis could usher in totalitarianism or solidarity; medical martial law or a holistic renaissance; greater fear of the microbial world, or greater resiliency in participation in it; permanent norms of social distancing, or a renewed desire to come together.

What can guide us, as individuals and as a society, as we walk the garden of forking paths? At each junction, we can be aware of what we follow: fear or love, self-preservation or generosity. Shall we live in fear and build a society based on it? Shall we live to preserve our separate selves? Shall we use the crisis as a weapon against our political enemies? These are not all-or-nothing questions, all fear or all love. It is that a next step into love lies before us. It feels daring, but not reckless. It treasures life, while accepting death. And it trusts that with each step, the next will become visible.

Please don’t think that choosing love over fear can be accomplished solely through an act of will, and that fear too can be conquered like a virus. The virus we face here is fear, whether it is fear of Covid-19, or fear of the totalitarian response to it, and this virus too has its terrain. Fear, along with addiction, depression, and a host of physical ills, flourishes in a terrain of separation and trauma: inherited trauma, childhood trauma, violence, war, abuse, neglect, shame, punishment, poverty, and the muted, normalized trauma that affects nearly everyone who lives in a monetized economy, undergoes modern schooling, or lives without community or connection to place. This terrain can be changed, by trauma healing on a personal level, by systemic change toward a more compassionate society, and by transforming the basic narrative of separation: the separate self in a world of other, me separate from you, humanity separate from nature. To be alone is a primal fear, and modern society has rendered us more and more alone. But the time of Reunion is here. Every act of compassion, kindness, courage, or generosity heals us from the story of separation, because it assures both actor and witness that we are in this together.

I will conclude by invoking one more dimension of the relationship between humans and viruses. Viruses are integral to evolution, not just of humans but of all eukaryotes. Viruses can transfer DNA from organism to organism, sometimes inserting it into the germline (where it becomes heritable). Known as horizontal gene transfer, this is a primary mechanism of evolution, allowing life to evolve together much faster than is possible through random mutation. As Lynn Margulis once put it, we are our viruses.

And now let me venture into speculative territory. Perhaps the great diseases of civilization have quickened our biological and cultural evolution, bestowing key genetic information and offering both individual and collective initiation. Could the current pandemic be just that? Novel RNA codes are spreading from human to human, imbuing us with new genetic information; at the same time, we are receiving other, esoteric, “codes” that ride the back of the biological ones, disrupting our narratives and systems in the same way that an illness disrupts bodily physiology. The phenomenon follows the template of initiation: separation from normality, followed by a dilemma, breakdown, or ordeal, followed (if it is to be complete) by reintegration and celebration.

Now the question arises: Initiation into what? What is the specific nature and purpose of this initiation?The popular name for the pandemic offers a clue: coronavirus. A corona is a crown. “Novel coronavirus pandemic” means “a new coronation for all.”

Already we can feel the power of who we might become. A true sovereign does not run in fear from life or from death. A true sovereign does not dominate and conquer (that is a shadow archetype, the Tyrant). The true sovereign serves the people, serves life, and respects the sovereignty of all people. The coronation marks the emergence of the unconscious into consciousness, the crystallization of chaos into order, the transcendence of compulsion into choice. We become the rulers of that which had ruled us. The New World Order that the conspiracy theorists fear is a shadow of the glorious possibility available to sovereign beings. No longer the vassals of fear, we can bring order to the kingdom and build an intentional society on the love already shining through the cracks of the world of separation.

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