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.
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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.
Clearly you didn’t get sick or know anyone with long Covid or who lost people. Don’t insult heretics and outcasts amd lump them with anti vaxers ect.
His whole family has actually had Covid, and survived as I get. He’s not saying here either that Covid is not real. I am an anti-vaxxer and probably a rieligious heretic.. and don’t mind either term. As an anti-vaxxer I admit there is a valid Coronavirus without comorbidities that has bee greatly embellished and has some serious detriment to how it’s treated and is done so in spaces that are more than probably “factories of spread,”.. most pointedly to say like ventilation systems. Look up the Cholera outbreak in London in the 1850’s and smart men got it wrong then too.. only difference there is people during that actual pandemic were falling over dead in the streets. Our overactive scientific sensitivity and idolatry has more made us larger victims of Big Pharma than Covid has actually killed us… and the economic decimation that Covid has caused is more than the sacrificial lamb that they wanted. Open your eyes dear.. I feel for your loved ones sickenss but we as a planet can’t afford to close our eyes to the bigger travesty here.
Well said, CR. You beat me to the punch!
Explain the dead
Less than 1% of the US population
There are no dead from COVID: it doesn’t exist, there is no virus. The respiratory ailments people are suffering from are the same ones the human race have always suffered from.
There are however, a substantial number of people dead or badly harmed by the vaccines. Exactly how many we don’t known, but probably tens of thousands at the very least in the U.S. alone. Potentially even hundreds of thousands.
I think that the notion of creating trenches for either side and seeing it as a war is what Charles is trying to say . Expressing his own opinion whilst describing the naive and short sighted solutions that are achieved when either side scores the apparent win. Having read the Coronation I do’nt think Charles is without empathy or compassion for lives lost or lives destroyed by Covid.
Eliza its easy to see your emotion and understand it , however its probably true that with the amount of information at our disposal from either side of the argument (one side getting the greater exposure ) it would be right to say that membership to either side represents a reasonable level of risk, the conclusion of which may only be revealed in the future . Both sides promote and ideal of responsibility and world citizenship . We have to make choices based on our personal circumstances, free choice feels like its sacred .
There is proof that both ideologies lead to immunity, and probably a health solution for both sides would be to focus in the future on reducing inflammation in the body which is a fact of modern living and its effects from internal and external environments , indeed metaphorically part of the solution may be to avoid inflammation in the mind and psyche also . I feel there is still room in the Covid Scenario for freedom of choice . No sacrificial lambs needed.
And a month later have come the mandates. The government is now doubling down. The vaccinated and the unvaccinated are spreading the myriad of variants and the chronically ill (50% of the US population!) are getting very and sick and many dying. Do you recall in April of 2020 when it was reported that 95% of those dying were very low in vitamin D. Was there a double blind study done to see how efficacious Vitamin D would be? We locked down — oops, less exercise for everyone; not a good idea. Like 25 years ago, if someone had a back problem, they were told to stay in bed (which made them worse). There is so much we don’t know. I only wish that Bk is right and that we can honor each other’s choices. We all make the best decision we can based on the facts at the time we know them. Hopefully, we’ll be able to continue to say, “My body, my choice.” I wish everyone good health, enough wealth and wisdom.
“The vaccinated and the unvaccinated are spreading the myriad of variants and the chronically ill (50% of the US population!) are getting very and sick and many dying.”
State and corporate propaganda is **claiming** that the unvaccinated are spreading myriads of variants, but that isn’t what’s happening. There are no variants because there’s no such thing as COVID in the first place. Indeed, there is no such thing as “infection” as we normally understand it: German New Medicine and its founder, Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer, definitively disproved infectious germ theory years and years ago.
GNM is authentically scientific in ways that germ theory is not. Pasteur’s germ theory, in all its various convolutions and modifications, is a “just so” story, a staggeringly lucrative one for Rockefeller-instigated corporate medicine, but not genuine science.
You’re inching towards understanding. Sounds like you need shrooms.
Absolutely! Golden Teachers are recommended here…
Ken Wilber’s “Pre/Trans Fallacy” overlays perfectly on the C19 vaccine debate. Those getting vax’d (like myself, and gladly) are “conventional.” Those opting to not get vax’d may be doing so from a decidedly thoughtful (post-conventional) or ignorant (pre-conventional) position.
While there may be a lot of fearfully obedient vaccinated “sheeple” out there, there are a hell of a lot of ignorant unvaccinated people out there too.
Thanks for the Ken Wilber connection. I haven’t looked at anything of his for a while, so I will go back and look at him in this context.
As one of the thoughtful “post-conventionals” who reads and watches a lot of the lockdown/mask/vaccine sceptics, I suspect that there are plenty of intelligent unvaccinated folks out there, and that we outnumber the ignorant sceptics as well. We tend not to demonstrate since that seems to play into the hand of our increasingly authoritarian governments.
CJ Hopkins springs to mind as another example of a post-conventional thinker, if I understand the concept correctly.
Excellent essay, Charles…i would suggest that the other way heretics are being labeled today is: racist…such a handy and terrible label and so effective in intimidation, and in shutting down meaningful dialogue or change.
this is brilliant! thank you Charles. just what i needed to convince me i NEED to go to that party i’m invited to at the only restaurant in town that isn’t playing by the “rules”. life was never about being safe…why should that ever change?!
Yes!!
Your ethnographic fantasy reminds me of an essay I encountered 50 years ago as a potential anthropology major. It was titled Body Ritual Among the Nacirema:
https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacirema.pdf
I am concerned that some logical fallacies have been used in this essay to make a point. The Nredom example is a straw man. To say that the scientific method is synonymous with the hegemonic culture that has grown with it is misleading. To group all of those who question verifiable, repeatable current explanations of experienced reality (science) all together as “heretics” creates a misleading narrative that gives equal status to fantasists and those who do have better verifiable, repeatable explanations of reality together. This creates more pollution of our psychological ecosystem, not less.
Would you be willing to construct arguements in future essays that do not use logical fallacies? If you need them to support a point of view, this indicates that your point is not accurate.
I don’t think that the Nredom example works as a straw man. It is rather analogous to a story, an allegory of sorts, that is meant to highlight similar easily recognizable patterns in the way science is used and practiced in the covid era (and before) with rituals, faith and censure analogous to how religious practice can create climates of hysteria. I don’t think that there is a direct statement that the scientific method is synonymous with the hegemonic culture but rather that science, as a social phenomenon, as a practice rooted in cultural assumptions and socio-political historical contexts (colonialism, capitalism, etc…) is not immune to dogma, bias, and corruption. Finally, the essay does not claim that all of those who question scientific dogma (saying “those who question verifiable, repeatable current explanations..” is a trap that establishes that current explanations are verifiable) are “heretics” but that it is the scientific “priesthood” that automatically labels anyone questioning official explanations as “conspiracy theorist” (or any other such label currently used), thereby reinforcing the argument that science can be used as part of a program of control to create hysteria, similarly to the dynamics of the sacrificial victim.
There may not be “a direct statement that the scientific method is synonymous with the hegemonic culture,” but this is strongly implied here and elsewhere in Eisenstein’s writing. Benn’s complaint is still mostly legitimate. Eisenstein does indeed edge perilously close to a straw man, even if it doesn’t qualify as a straw man per se. At the very least, he doesn’t make any effort to help readers avoid lapsing into an automatic equation of hegemony and science.
Eisenstein does indeed have a tendency towards gross oversimplification and overly confident and misleading generalizations, and it does make a huge difference what someone’s reasons are for being a COVID dissenter. Henry Makow is a far right conspiracy theorist who believes the Illuminati are currently enacting a centuries old plot to genocide the human race. The vaccines are an elite plot to poison and murder billions. Needless to say, we have to take his ideas on faith, he offers no evidence he is correct. Practitioners of German New Medicine, on the other hand, reject the mass mandatory vaccine campaign because they believe in an alternative medical theory that is scrupulously scientific, and that offers a radically different paradigm for understanding disease – in GNM most diseases are not infectious hence there is no need for vaccines to save us from “invading” viruses. This radically different understanding of disease was arrived at using all the techniques and methods of orthodox science, however. GNM remains a little known science not because its methods of discovery and development were in any way unusual, but simply because hegemonic mainstream medicine could not accept such a drastic paradigm shift.
I would put forth the idea that a dogmatic approach to reality isn’t a function of a particular practice, culture, time period or belief system but rather a psychospiritual pattern that affects all of us to a certain extent but that can sometimes become exaggerated and dysfunctional. In my experience, dogmatic rebels and “free-thinkers” are just as likely as non-dogmatic adopters of mainstream orthodoxy. I’d bet that the vast majority of Priests out there – scientific, religious or otherwise – actually thrive on living close to mystery – which is essentially the opposite or even the antidote to dogma. If I am right about this then the conversation we should be having would be centered around questions such as: under what conditions does dogma thrive? What are the dangers of dogmatism? How can we, as individuals and as a society, safeguard ourselves against these dangers?
“At the very least, he doesn’t make any effort to help readers avoid lapsing into an automatic equation of hegemony and science. ” Really Chris? You should not insult the intelligence of the readers, or Eisenstein’s intent for that matter. I already equated hegemony and the “science” that dominates the mainstream narrative today. One only has to be familiar with the pre-pandemic, peer-reviewed science on wearing masks to make that assessment. The current (pandemic era) peer-reviewed science on masks is authored by the institutions that are funded by gates and fauci and company. OSHA also has completely REVERSED their policy regarding masks. Pre-pandemic they followed the peer-reviewed science; now they just follow the money.
L’il ol Me:
The argument I put forth was that non-mainstream, heterodox scientific heretics are still using (more often than not) the traditional scientific methods: they are being censored, deplatformed, and silenced because what they have to say threatens the establishment, not because they use different methodologies or anything like that. Ryke Geerd Hamer was immersed and trained in mainstream medicine – in a very real sense he was much more rigorously “scientific,” much more of a firm, staunch adherent of the Western “Scientific Method,” than his numerous detractors ever were.
He was silenced, and his scientific theories relegated to the fringes of the internet, because of the power of plutocracy – infinite money wedded to inflexible dogma – not because his investigatory methods were particularly unorthodox.
If it’s the “science”, please explain why some very eminent scientists – Mike Yeadon, Sucharit Bhakdi and Peter McCullough to name just three – are censored and prevented from taking part in the debate. This is the antithesis of science
Charles, thank you for articulating and expanding on my lived experience of almost 79 years. Always aware that my non mainstream viewpoint has been percieved as Disturbing to the status quo , I nevertheless have never wavered from the notion of wanting to die consciously, which arrived in my teenage era. In my forties this became the quest to live consciously and every day this is reaffirmed. Reading Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams and Reflections in my late 30’s brought a wave of relief and validation. When I read or hear your contributions, there is the same experience. I AM NOT ALONE. By the Way, Rudolf Steiner has a word for these forces. Ahrimanic. Like the story of Rumplestiltskin, what can be named loses it’s power to enslave.
A breath of fresh air! Thanks.
History shows that what shifted power and wealth have always availed of a Pandemic. Coincided with fear it dissolved the existing social structures and ownership; modulated social behaviour in turn peoples’ assets gets as bona vacantia (ownerless good) reaped and the rulership re-organised by the knowledgeable elite; who advanced their trade which increased the risk of a plague. This history; Klaus Schwab, CEO of the World Economic Forum (WEF) calls it ‘the natural history of globalisation’
Thanks for taking a stand and describing the world as you see it, Charles. Your books have opened my mind to alternate views that conflict with the agenda of manipulation I’ve ingested my entire life. I feel safe, confident and emboldened to live a full life as a beautiful human being when people like you express complex truths so eloquently and without judgement. You always seem to tread a careful line with your work, not wanting to alienate any readers, but I admire you for this essay.
Peter, you express my feelings about Charles’ work in general and this essay in particular very well.
Thanks Charles, really appreciate you applying a Girardian frame to this pandemic. Girard believed that we are living in a transitional time, between the end of scapegoating/ritual violence to control the potential for greater violence, and the emergence of a new system to control violence-namely the ethic of love. In this transitional period, the old system is tried and tried again, but it doesn’t work. Control increases. Doesn’t work. How come history takes such a long, long time, when you’re waiting for a miracle? (Bruce Cockburn)
Dear Charles,
I am very curious how it feels to post your writings on the internet and be met with the comments here. I ask as a fellow writer who cares deeply about the world and has a hard time engaging with the internet.
Thank you for the words,
-sb
I’m still shaking in laughter at the ethnographic report you made up. I was already excited for whatever flavor of fiction you are brewing, but even more so now that I know it is likely to be funny.
Girard’s framework of scapegoating show us how we are collectively stuck in patterns of violence. Yet his ideas of “Mimetic Desire” offer a deep root cause for that stuckness, and a potential doorway toward collective healing, a doorway toward “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.” Our mirror neurons are primed to mimic other’s desires. This is keeping us trapped in extractive capitalism, and a world based on scarcity, violence and control. It doesn’t have to stay this way. The mimetic nature of desire can liberate us.
I would love a part three to this essay series, with Charles exploring Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, and how we might invite this source of creation into the seeding of the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
This validates my un-aloneness in questioning science as reliable Truth. I would love more short videos on this topic. Perhaps I am deluded or fantasizing or wishful thinking … this is how the status quo, the conventional culture makes me doubt myself. Still somehow I persist. and I do not know why and would love more articulation and exploration. I am subscribed to your YT channel and watching.
Julie, if you enjoy stories, you might enjoy by Jon Rappoport’s writings.
This analysis of Covid as an outbreak of religious hysteria doesn’t really work. It is hysteria, but only because the Davos plutocrats and oligarchs want it to be so. If they ever believed in the viability of the PCR test, they don’t now: the only reason they continue to insist the “science is settled” and the test is accurate and must continue to be used is because it serves their purposes of dismantling the last remaining trappings of liberal democracy and ushering in the post-democratic, surveillance state Great Reset.
We aren’t ruled by religious True Believers in Covid at all, but rather by scheming, strategizing Machiavellians who are fully aware their “magic wand” doesn’t work but don’t care. Sure, they might (some of them) believe there is a thing called Covid-19 but they are perfectly aware it’s not serious and the vaccines are not a cure. They keep pushing this hysteria on the public not because they themselves are also believers in it but because it’s extremely useful to them. But time and again, you refuse to see Machiavellianism and Realpolitik at work even when it’s right in front of you.
“Those who attribute the controlling programs of Bill Gates and the technocratic elite to malice do not see the idealism behind the Technological Program. To the elites, their critics seem incomprehensible: deluded, ignorant enemies of progress itself, enemies of the betterment of humanity.”
This is completely ridiculous, bordering on inane. It’s not either/or. Clearly there is a tremendous amount of genuine “malice” mixed in with the idealism. What else would you call the willing use of a campaign of fear and terror on the psyches of people everywhere to attain your ends. One can imagine you chastising contemporary opponents of Bolshevism for thinking of Lenin, Stalin or Beria mainly as malicious souls thirsting after absolute power and not paying enough attention to their lofty political ideals. You are mistaking the rhetoric for the reality.
And contrary to what you assert, most of the Great Resetters are perfectly aware theirs is not the only viable option for the human race moving forward. They are so committed to it not mainly out of starry-eyed Utopianism, but because they know it’s the only way they can continue to hold onto their vast fortunes and oligarchic control over the masses. They are perfectly aware it is possible to create a much less polluted world and a more just world WITHOUT the Great Reset, but they ALSO know that all the OTHER workable options on the table – absolutely ALL of them – would HAVE to involve currency resets that must INEVITABLY result in a drastic diminishment of the financial wealth of the Davos families and cliques themselves. The Great Reset is the ONLY transition movement that allows for the human race to move into a new phase of evolution WITHOUT any decrease of the wealth, power, and status of the oligarchs. They see this clearly, they are not stupid or confused about this, and it is their avarice and greed, not to mention their obvious contempt for the masses, not their supposed idealism, that mainly drives them.
But hey, at least you’re finally getting around to admitting that the Great Reset is behind the Corona Hoax. That’s at least an improving over your usual dismissal of all such talk as “seeing conspiracies where there aren’t any.” Will you now admit that your Coronation and Conspiracy Myth essays missed the mark and that there really is a coordinated conspiracy and collusion going on and driving the hysteria over Covid?
Interesting comment, thanks for shedding some more light here and digging a little deeper (in my opinion). I’d say the article is quite spot on, although maybe a little evasive? Cheers.
Fair points Chris.
I think Charles would lose most of his bourgeois readership and following were he to admit that much about what is really, truly happening. He needs to tread on eggshells to feed his kids. In his defense however, I think he makes a good point about all of this simply being ritualistic and spiritual and that science is just another ritualistic practice. No matter how things change, they stay the same- deeply symbolic.
I find myself reminded by the lines from W. H. Auden in his poem ‘In Memory of Ernst Toller’:
“We are lived by powers we pretend to understand:
They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end
The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.. ”
There are forces that control us, ideas, ideologies, deep biological, psycho-spiritual ancient patterns of behavior that have a huge influence over us. These forces seem to audit our progress and are those which we must submit to whether we like it or not. We are simply driftwood on waves in that regard, as fatalistic as that may seem.
I also believe that there are forces that seek agency in human flesh, that Darth Vader [cough] ….I mean Bill Gates is targeted to play a role, an evil one at that despite his sweaters, but ultimately a role in this grand narrative to push us through this Kali-yuga period. I don’t know if we can stop that; the ridiculousness, hypocrisy and farce of this world. It is getting to the point where everything is becoming so subverted and demonic that pretty soon all of the this world will collapse in on itself. As we know, it all goes far deeper than a so called virus.
Random thoughts; Huxley’s Brave New World the current social engineering blueprint or just good old fashioned spell-casting written by an aristocrat? The worship of science, the efforts to quantify everything and control everything and have everyone effectively managed and compartmentalized is a wild force, something unleashed and rather ironically out of control (Charles may be pointing to or making this point).
The question remains on whether all of this could be orchestrated by humans alone. For who is the Sith lord/Wormtongue the sits next to one of the Rothschilds and whispers direction? What is really driving Klaus? Does Ray Kurzweil really in his soul of souls want immortality in some trans-human vampiric body that is exchanged every lonely nihilistic millennium? Why do these individuals and groups seem to be perpetually winning? Oh to be a fly on all those elite boardroom walls, just for one day – what madness would we witness, what would we learn, I can only wonder.
You are not alone, stay strong.
Chingachgook,
I don’t really disagree with any of that, but that seems to me to be YOUR insights and articulations that you’re overly generously crediting to Eisenstein. Eisenstein makes these big broad grandiose claims and his readers then hail him as a genius. They’re fitting the jigsaw puzzle pieces together themselves and then bizarrely giving the credit to Eisenstein.
Yes, Eisenstein is correct that we moderns have made a religion out of science (not a novel idea, just about every critic of modernity has said the same), but in this instance, it’s not that simple. Let me make an analogy with two of shakespeare’s Greatest plays. Shakespeare was fascinated with how the human psyche can be gripped by delusional and paranoid fears, especially sexual fears, and how this can drive us to tragedy.
In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes drives his own paranoia. He convinces himself his wife and best friend from childhood are having a secret affair behind his back and works himself up into a frenzy of jealous rage. But it’s all coming from his own diseased sexual imagination, there is nothing but his own psychic wounds that drives him into murderous madness. In Othello, however, it is the cold-blooded Machiavellian manipulator Iago who lures Othello into his trap. Obviously Othello was already vulnerable to Iago’s cunning deceptions due to his pre-existing temperament and situation, but there simply would have been no tragedy without Iago as prime mover.
Shakespeare is careful to show the difference between the two situations. My point is, outbreaks of religious hysteria in history usually follow the Winter’s Tale template, and the people who succumb resemble Leontes. In the case of Covid, however, it is crystal clear that the religious hysteria, to call it that, is following the Othello template, and the people succumbing are like Othello being deceived by Iago.
Because Eisenstein has this lifelong aversion to precision, accuracy, and “local colour,” if you will, he always ends up giving an analysis of particular issues that at first appears to hit the nail on the head, but then seems to somewhat miss the mark the more you delve into the issues. A disappointing repeat experience for me has been to be initially wowed and dazzled and enthralled by his analysis of something, but then I’ll do a deeper dive into the subject at hand and realize that Eisenstein has glossed over a hundred details that call into question or complicate his take. Of course he’s entitled to say and think whatever he wants, but somebody who purports to be a serious philosopher and intellectual is not really someone I can admire if I keep discovering, time and time again, that he doesn’t actually know what he’s talking about a lot of the time. As a former fan, that has been my disappointing and disillusioning repeat experience with Eisenstein.
Thank you Charles for this insightful essay that perfectly articulates my own observations and intuitions, thus making me feel less alone in the madness that surrounds us. I also appreciate those who have made the effort to criticize this essay in compelling terms (Chris, etc), therby fostering a real debate. It’s been such a long time since I’ve encountered a real debate!
Charles, I love your writing, your mind, your heart, your discerning wisdom. A suggested addition to your poignant story –
The priests wanted everyone to believe they possessed the only cure. Yet, there were other healers, who recognized that something was indeed making people sick, and sometimes there was sickness in clusters, suggesting proximity could infect others with the evil spirit. These healers set out to find a way out of this tragedy, and they did – but the cures they found were not sanctioned by the priests. But they persisted, and where they helped people recover, the evil spirits did not return, mutated, with vengeance, as they often did when the priests’ “cure” was used. The priests, sensing that if the truth was known they would loose control of the story – and perhaps some, perhaps more than we know, believed their own story and felt they were doing good – were threatened by the healers’ cures. They worked to silence them, drown them out in the town square, follow them with “fact checkers” and create doubt and division among the people. Meanwhile, people continued to become sick. At first, those who took the priests’ potion were quickly healed, and far less died than before the priests concocted their potion. (Well, some became very sick from the priests’ potion, but no one was allowed to speak of them – their illnesses / deaths were attributed to other spirits, random accidents, unrelated deaths, re-possessions because of the unruly contaminated).
Despite silencing of healers, despite growing division and distrust, for a time, the evil spirit seemed to recede. Then, the tide turned. The spirit had learned to maneuver around the priests’ cure. More, and more, and more people became touched by the poisonous spirit. At first, those who listened to the priests fared better than those who did not, and the message from the Ministry of Truth was – “See? We are Right! Blame the Unclean!” Those who had access to the cures the humble healers offered did the best of all, but they were few and far between, because those healers had been silenced.
Soon enough, however, the evil spirit became so powerful, that the priests’ cures were no longer much help at all. They were told they needed more, and more, and more of the priests’ medicine.
There had been a man, who knew well the spirit patterns, who was neither a priest nor a heretic, but was moved to speak out, before the spirit mutated, foreseeing what would happen. His name was Geert. The heretics didn’t trust him, for he came from the establishment. The priests didn’t trust him, they felt betrayed that he came from their higher ranks, and were speaking against their policies. They mocked him, lied about him, and tarnished his reputation. In the end, he was right.
The medicines that had power to make the evil spirits go away and not return, that came from the healers, not from the priests, were becoming harder and harder to access, as more and more people became possessed, and their healing power was so needed. The priests were sure they knew The One Solution – and anything that diverged from that, must be shut down – at all costs. Still, the brave healers who understood the power of the cure that could not bring the priests any real gain, the cure that could rid the world of the evil spirits, pressed on. They spoke when, how, where they could. They whispered messages, they told others how to access the real cure.
One healer, named Pierre, spoke to the leaders of his country. He was passionately excited, because he knew this plague could be brought to an end. His excitement was used to portray him as delusional – there are no “miracles”, besides what the priests offer. Another healer, across a wide ocean from Pierre, was named Tess. She had previously worked with the priests, and was very wise, and had not lost her soul. She knew a real cure when she saw one. She spoke for the truth, and great risk, and was also mocked.
Yet as history looks back on this tale, the wise brave ones who should have been listened to all along .. Pierre, Paul, Tess .. Geert … Robert, who was a priest and risked his life to speak the nuanced truth about their potions, which were not exactly as they claimed … And Charles, a storyteller whose words are a cauldron of wisdom, observations, just enough humor, and what is needed to be understood, yet is often left unsaid … They all were remembered as heroes …
Well done, Ellen.
Poster “Maxwell” left this eloquent comment under an article at the Off Guardian:
https://off-guardian.org/2021/07/21/the-propaganda-war-and-how-to-fight-it/
Everything they do and say is designed to wear you down and break your resistance. They are trying to panic the masses into compliance. There is a solid, growing army of resistance. Do not break ranks. Stand firm.
The rats are cornered, hence the pressure, they are terrified. Do NOT give up. Many still do not comprehend the seriousness of what has taken place.
The best way to counter the propaganda is in your day to day exchanges with any and everyone you encounter. It is simple to get even the most ardent believer to begin to have a bit of a gnawing doubt. Those on the fence, which represent the majority, only need one item or one moment to turn the tide for them. Have various tactics/narratives ready to meet the needs of disparate situations. Ask questions of those who you encounter. It all starts to add up.
In a time when so many have embraced unreality it can be hard to believe that they will ever be jolted back- but reality does have a way of surfacing for even the most obtuse.
If I had to choose one word to describe what the majority are feeling it would be disoriented. This creates fear and uncertainty and that is being exploited. Do what you can to re-orient them and dispel the fear.
Though the below is a comment I posted in a recent OG article it fits better with the topic of this piece by CJ:
Everything we have been told over these last 18 months is an orchestrated, pre-scripted screenplay that’s been crafted to sell a story.
We are currently immersed in the most massive project of societal engineering, coercion and oppression yet seen, a replacement for but far outstripping the phony “war on terror”- and this is just the beginning. If we don’t push back now our lives and our children’s lives will never be normal again.
We have been told many things to get us to this place.
In this story it is said that if you demand that others put a barrier over their face to reduce their oxygen levels, which damage their lungs, and demand they poison their bodies with an untested toxic substance, as you have obediently done, then you are deemed a virtuous Saint of the State rather than a judgmental sadist.
In this story we are being told that those who don’t wear masks are killing others even as these unmasked refuse-niks don’t seem to be dying themselves. How does this work?
Another part of the story we are being told is that the “unvaxxed” are a menace to society and could be killing others. Just as it is with these maskless vagrants, these dirty “unvaxxed” souls don’t seem to be dying themselves and seem to be some of the most healthy people on the planet.
This too is a confounding element to the story, at least in a rational world.
In this story it is considered completely normal to be injected with known carcinogens and neurotoxins to somehow promote health. And those healthy people who refuse to be injected with toxic nano-particles are to blame for the unhealthy people who took the poison. And that feeling deathly sick after taking the injection indicates that the poison is making you healthy.
Maybe the entire story isn’t so sane and only works in an upside world. Maybe the story is a bit of a hoax.
Now the latest update to the story is that of the new variant that possesses never before seen traits that are guaranteed to wipe out the planet unless even more poisons are taken.
Maybe someone should tell the believers of this story that they are sleepwalking towards a dystopia and in the final chapter the virus intends to mutate into a dictatorship.
My comments… : Can such a situation arise purely out of religious hysteria? Doesn’t the hysteria have to be guided and directed to an extent? In other words, while it is a case of religious hysteria, to be sure, it’s also what Eisenstein doesn’t want to admit, because then he’d have to concede he was wrong about something — there is also serious conspiring, strategizing, and collusion going on to attain a certain outcome. Politicians around the world don’t serve their constituents, they receive their marching orders from members of the financial oligarchy. They aren’t in the grip of a religious fear; rather, they are simply and quite soberly following orders from their true bosses, who are anything but the demos.
Years ago, Eisenstein published a piece attacking Foster Gamble and his movie is THRIVE:
https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/thrive/
Foster Gamble responded to Eisenstein’s critique:
https://www.thriveon.com/media/foster-gambles-response-to-thrive-critiques
And Eisenstein responded to Gamble’s response:
https://gaiaseus.wordpress.com/2011/12/14/charles-adds-more-perspective-to-the-thrive-conversation/
In my opinion, Gamble wipes the floor with Eisenstein here. And after the last year and a half of an elite-directed global Corona hoax, Gamble has clearly been vindicated in his distrust of the oligarchs whereas Eisenstein shown to be naive, simplistic and downright obtuse in his “see no evil, hear no evil” assumptions. Eisenstein’s Girard series is little more than the flailing attempt of an egotist intellectual to misdirect readers away from his past errors of judgment, and to avoid having to admit he was wrong in his decade long dismissal of “conspiracy thinking” by shifting the goalposts. It’s fundamentally dishonest and self-serving rhetoric.
So obstinate is Eisenstein in his refusal to concede even the tiniest point to his opponent that we get the following exchange.
Gamble:
“Though Charles writes in his book that “free energy technologies have been in existence for at least a century,” (SE, p.443), in his THRIVE review he contradicts himself by taking a swipe at our credibility in saying, *“I won’t consider here the scientific plausibility of such technology, which appears to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”**
Let me clarify that first, a toroidal technology, like an atom, a human or a galaxy is an open system and the 2nd Law applies to closed systems. It’s not the motion of the machine which is perpetual, (all matter wears down) it’s the source of energy! Second, what is the explanation for the fact that these inventors are getting raided, shut down, threatened and sometimes killed if they are actually all charlatans? It’s documented that the US Government has denied and confiscated over 3000 patent applications for alternative energy devices. Doesn’t it make sense that they might actually know something about how and which devices actually work?”
Eisenstein replies:
“Free energy technology: I think Foster misunderstood my comment that it appears to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That statement was not a “swipe at [his] credibility.” I used the word “appears” on purpose (whereas most debunkers would say simply that it violates the Second Law) because I agree with Foster that these technologies do not in fact violate the Second Law at all, for precisely the reason Foster adduces.”
This is an utterly LUDICROUS reply! In context, Eisenstein is questioning Gamble’s credibility and there is no other conclusion any reader unfamiliar with Eisenstein’s other writings could possibly draw. It looks like a debunking and that’s all any reader of the piece could reasonably be expected to infer. Yet even here, Eisenstein can’t concede Gamble has a point. He can’t concede even the tiniest little thing to any debate sparring partner whatsoever!
Even worse, after tearing apart Gamble’s work, and after Gamble specifically replies to and in my view effectively rebuts all of Eisenstein’s various accusations, Gamble then critiques some of Eisenstein’s own views, which draws the following huffy, indignant response from Eisenstein:
“Most of the rest of Foster’s response targets my views in general, and not specifically my review of Thrive. As to charges that I advocate non-action or eschew logic and empirical observation, I will let my writings speak for themselves. These quotes have been taken out of context and given interpretations that are in many cases caricatures of my intended points.
I think they read like some kind of cartoon version of my thesis. But nowhere do I say, as these disembodied quotes imply, that I think injustice needn’t be confronted, or that we can trust centralized authority to solve our problems, or that we can blithely ignore dangerous people. As for Foster’s criticisms of my views of money, fractional reserve banking, fiat currencies, and credit, there is certainly room for informed debate about these issues, but they are not trivially mistaken as these criticisms imply.”
In other words, Gamble is expected to defend his ideas in precise terms, but Eisenstein is too hoity-toity to defend his ideas and prefers to let them speak for themselves. He accuses Gamble of caricaturing his thesis but offers no evidence of this. In my view, Gamble caricatured nothing and it’s Eisenstein who incessantly offers insulting caricatures of other people’s opinions and ideas. Without his arsenal of straw man arguments and misleading caricatures, Eisenstein wouldn’t have a writing career at all.
Excellent summation of where we are from Foster Gamble, written last year, that certainly is far superior to his onetime sparring partner Eisenstein’s inadequate analysis:
https://www.thriveon.com/media/covert-19
Chris, I agree with some of your points but your relentless criticism on every post on this website is exhausting and makes you look desperate for attention. Do you just stalk Eistenstein’s work to insult him every chance you get? Are there not more useful ways to spend your time? You seem to be obsessed with him. Take a breath, hun. You’re embarrassing yourself.
J.C., I wouldn’t feel the need to comment so much if Eisenstein didn’t feel the need to comment so much. I’m offended by the way he presents himself as a universal expert capable of revealing the deepest truth about every topic under the sun. Of course, genuine polymaths exist, but Eisenstein definitely isn’t one, and even polymaths are usually cautious about certain topics and realize they can’t possibly know everything. Yet Eisenstein’s ego is so immense he really does seem to think he knows everything.
He may be a “polite” and “courteous” critic of other writers’ ideas, but he’s also an unrelenting one, whose every book and essay seem geared to explaining why everyone else has failed to see the full picture that only he can see. I reject that intellectual arrogance and feel driven to show why Eisenstein himself is frequently wrong in his analysis. If Eisenstein is going to constantly find fault with others’ explanations, it’s only fair to demonstrate his own very real limitations and failings, and not simply accept the weak and unpersuasive claims of his various fans that Eisenstein is so much deeper and I’ve failed to grasp his incomparable depth.
Could it be that there is no ‘right’ and ‘wrong’? The notion of this derives from ego anyway because essentially there is no right, wrong or ultimate answer to anything. There will be some people who will be better to get vaccinated. There will be some who won’t. The problem is neither will know until it is too late whether they made the right decision or not. Does it need to be natural health versus drugs? Maybe both have their place at different times and for different people? Perhaps love, understanding and dropping the need to be right or wrong and think in extremes, opening our minds to other trains of thought and ideas is the real key.
Age, obesity, and perhaps diabetes are the three highest risk factors for a bad covid outcome. There are several online calculators that will show you your personalised risk. Even though I’m in my mid-60s, those calculators show that my risk is low. Nothing about “too late” there.
I’m not disagreeing with your comment about there being essentially no right, wrong or ultimate answer, but that statement doesn’t help those of us who have weighed the evidence and decided not to get a vaccine but are now being threatened by our respective governments and many businesses.
I think Charles’ essay shows that science has been fetishised. I follow lots of “dissident” scientists, including eminent medical professionals who despair at the way the scientific method has been dropped in favour of the new scientism religion.
Your risk of getting it may (and i emphasize may) be low, but what about your risk of spreading it?
There is nothing to spread. Covid doesn’t exist. The PCR test used to diagnose it is unreliable and fundamentally unscientific.
What are people getting sick with then? Various respiratory diseases that already exist and are not novel infections.
Just the right words at just the right moment.
Can I offer some perspective from New Zealand on the issue of Covid-19. We did a hard lockdown for six weeks. Covid vanished. We had a collective response to a problem and solved it. Sure there was a small group of dissenters that didn’t agree with what the government response was but they were in the minority. Largely people banded together, looked after each other and got on with the job. Our economy (apart from obvious sectors such as tourism) has flourished. We’ve got record low unemployment. Look after the health of the people and the economic benefits follow. For me Covid has more highlighted the fact that we need to work together on global problems for the greater good. But instead countries have had individual, often chaotic and confusing, responses, which has just perpetuated the problem and arguably made it worse. The economy has often been prioritised at the expense of the health of the people. We also have individual responsibility. Not all government regulation is bad. We elect governments because at times we need to be led collectively in one direction. I can see governments around the world trying to lead people in a direction towards a resolution of Covid but because individuals are resisting and struggling against it due to belief in their individual ‘rights’ as more important than the collective good governments then need to move from suggestion to encouragement to stricter regulation. I don’t believe they want to do this but have had to. I also see the importance of strong communication. Most governments have not done this particularly well leading to general confusion. I also realise not every country is in the position to lockdown hard for six weeks. But Covid just highlights the fact if one of us is not doing well we are ALL not doing well because we are all linked essentially. If there is poverty and countries cannot cope with a pandemic it affects us all. If people have the virus it doesn’t just affect them but also everyone else globally. None of us live in isolation. We won’t solve issues such as climate change unless we all move collectively in one direction and that might mean personal sacrifice of some individual ‘rights’ for some of us for the greater good. For me Covid is a test for even bigger issues like this. And right now we are all failing.
Hi Karen, I’m also in New Zealand and fall into the ‘minority’ of people you mention who ‘didn’t agree with what the government response was’. I think I detect your heart is full of pride at the results of the action taken last year at the start of Covid, which must feel really good! I totally agree with your statement that ‘We also have individual responsibility. Not all government regulation is bad.’ Especially the first statement! I also couldn’t agree more that we are all essentially linked. I’m sure you would agree that every thing that exists is essentially linked.
It’s nice to find things we agree on but now I want to discuss with you……I think that you are asking me (because of the group I inhabit) to be prepared to sacrifice my personal right to not take the vaccine for the greater good, is that right? You liken it to the ‘individual ‘rights’ ‘ (why do you put that word in quotes btw?) we might have to sacrifice ‘for the greater good’ of solving issues such as climate change. Can we just look at the difference between what those individual rights might be? On the issue of climate change, I argue that things we may have to sacrifice are not rights but behaviours, such as over consumption and waste production. Unless anyone can claim they have a right to be greedy and pollute without restraint. The vaccine issue however, involves the right- or not – to refuse to allow something to be injected into our sovereign body.
Just about ALL of us are guilty of over consuming and polluting at every turn so it’s really difficult to deal to that one. We simply and with complicity go about our daily lives side by side doing very little about it. But an individual’s decision to remain unvaccinated provides an easy target for judgement. ‘You don’t care, you’re murdering people!’ ‘How selfish!’ ‘You’re slowing down return to ‘normal’!’ You didn’t say that but that is usually what people mean when they are asking for behaviour for the sake of others. Imagine if we all went round saying that to each other as we sit in a traffic jam with our gas guzzling urban tractors queuing up to buy over-packaged, over-processed food! That’s where we should be telling each other that!
It’s hard trying to work out how best to live in a society that is increasingly obsessed with a mono-issue culture, namely the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. I have been struggling with feeling increasingly like some kind of rebel, questioning my motives around my decision to be not vaccinated. The truth for me is that I am genuinely very afraid of the vaccine – or whatever we should call this gene-therapeutic injection. It’s not that I don’t care about other people, or that I want to be ‘difficult’, or that I just want to stick it the ‘the man’, I just don’t want to mess with the function of every cell in my body. I’d rather take my chances. I assure you, I act responsibly – I wear a mask where I have to, I stay home if I feel unwell, I don’t pillage every bag of flour or every toilet roll when in lockdown (which hello! Here we are again!). But I absolutely do NOT want to be injected with that stuff. I don’t even know exactly all the ingredients, (does anybody?) but I have read about the spike proteins and how they are intended to work and it doesn’t sound right to me. I would rather have the original pathogen as in the original vaccines. In the meantime I support my immune system. I listen to my body.
10 years ago, I got through cancer that way. I took 2 rounds of chemo and then said ‘on yer bike’. To put those chemicals into my body seemed so counter intuitive. I refused radio, I kicked tamoxifen into touch. ‘I’m worried about you’ said my oncologist. ‘Don’t be’, I said. He crunched my stats into a machine. ‘8% chance better off….’ he said, ‘Big deal’ thought I. I know a few women who have done everything they were told and sadly are now gone. I’m just crossing my fingers here and doing what I can and it seems to be working so far.
My point is that the oncologist had it completely wrong. All the training, the science, the data, the machines, the medical equipment, all of it fighting for space, to exist and be relevant. While he thought he was doing the right thing by applying all the tools at his disposal, it was completely the wrong thing for me. Our transitions into and out of this life seem to be based on so many more things than medical science can offer. There are just so many other factors that play into the presence and quality of lives than what scientists, doctors or politicians can provide for us. There is no one way. We have lived for so long in groups that require us to comply with sets of behaviours and beliefs that we tend to default to a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ way of doing things. I respect your decision to get vaccinated and I ask you to respect my decision not to. We’re not ‘failing’ at anything except in finding a better way to live together. We both see answers that lie in different behaviours. We are equal but different. Kia kaha.
Thank you, Rachel in New Zealand, with all my heart. You articulate my position and heartbreak as someone who is choosing not to allow the “gene therapy” inoculation into my body. At the moment it seems profoundly difficult to stand up for being “equal but different”. The heartbreak is that this is affected the viewpoint even of close family members who treat one as “unclean” and “immoral”. But, thank you, it helps for standing tall.
Another Rachel-this one in the USA.
“While he thought he was doing the right thing by applying all the tools at his disposal, it was completely the wrong thing for me.”
Thank you for this thoughtful post. This part in particular I really agree with.
“Can I offer some perspective from New Zealand on the issue of Covid-19. We did a hard lockdown for six weeks. Covid vanished. We had a collective response to a problem and solved it.”
I’m sorry, Karen, but that just didn’t happen. Your claim is false. The media has been lying to you. You definitely didn’t solve anything via hard lockdown, but that’s what they want you to believe. The PCR test can give any result anyone wants. So the WHO will adjust their recommendations as to how many cycles to use depending on what picture they want to present. If they want you to believe lockdowns work or vaccines are working, they will recommend fewer cycles. If they want to present a picture of mounting illness and spreading disease, they will recommend more cycles. The result is purely an illusion, as the tests can give you any result. The same person can be tested twice, one after the other, and get a positive from one and negative from the other.
Are our organs of truth (“knowledge production”) healthy? Journalism is so diseased as to be an abhorrent cesspit, a commercial quisling wearing the skinsuit of a long deceased professionalism that may never have existed. Science? Little funding goes into the reproduction that is, in principle, at the core of the scientific method. What little has been invested shows that the results of foundational experiments in every branch of science – including medicine – cannot be reproduced with any respectable degree of reliability, showing either opposing results or effects so minute as to be noise and not signal. Or both. We are, as a civilisation, bereft of clear direction, not as a failure of either religion or science or politics, but due to the common factor in all of them: us.
There’s an issue here that muddies your exposition.
In your (somewhat contrived) allegory, the “priests” are simply doing mumbo-jumbo, in the derogatory sense. In reality, the COVID vaccines and isolation techniques actually work. The real question, is “‘work’ to what end?”
The answer is, of course, “control.”
The first thing I understood, back in March of 2020 or thereabouts, was that the entire issue revolved around hospital capacity. The math was simple: R-naught of x, serious illness rate of y, time to recovery or death of z, means that hospitals run out of resources in time T. That means heart-attack victims wait in ambulances. It means broken arms go untended. It means doctors and nurses burn out, hospital supplies are consumed, morgues fill and then overflow. The entire medical system collapses.
Quarantine is a simple solution always works with communicable diseases, if you isolate the vectors, which — this case — was known to be people. But it also ravages “the economy,” and you know (perhaps better than anyone) how artificial and fragile that particular thing is. And isolation makes humans — the social animal — crazy. So from the beginning it was: control the economy by keeping the workforce active and let the hospital system crash and burn, or control the disease and hope that we can get this inconvenience out of the way before the economy collapses or erupts in mass insanity. Humanitarian considerations — and perhaps the threat of total social breakdown? — made that choice a foregone conclusion.
When the vaccine arrived and proved that a) it worked AS a vaccine, and b) it killed or maimed surprisingly few people, it removed the conflict, and led to another foregone conclusion. Vaccinate, end the quarantine, and save the economy. Back to “normal” by mid-summer. Win-win-win. Yay team!
But vaccines were sold as a cure for illness, not a cure for the economy. And it isn’t a cure for illness. You can still die of COVID, even if vaccinated. You can pass it along, even if asymptomatic. In an absolute sense, COVID vaccines don’t (always) work.
I got an intimate exposure to this kind of issue when I was diagnosed with cancer. With surgery and chemo, I was quoted a 70% survival chance. I laughed, and had to correct the doctor. In reality, I had a 100% chance of recovery, OR a 0% chance of recovery: in a group of 100 people with identical prospects, 30 would get no better, and 70 would be cured. The real problem was, the doctor (and medical science) simply didn’t know enough to say which group I belonged to. Statistics only apply to aggregates.
It’s the same with COVID. The vaccine gives you odds — pretty good ones, actually — but no one can say which group you’re in. But when it’s sold as a cure, each failure becomes a betrayal, and a reason for vengeance.
The deeper problem has been that, as “normal” has returned, people have realized that “normal” deeply sucks, and — as you have pointed out — we have purged our society of the festivals of chaos that remind us of just how precious “normal” is. So we have a double-whammy. Revelation that “normal” really sucks, and perceived betrayal by the priesthood.
Deadly brew.
Great to see open scientific debate. It is impossible to make informed decisions without it. Those who censor opposing views destroy scientific debate and should never be trusted. They are by nature Totalitarian.
Don’t know where this comment fits, if anywhere – there doesn’t seem to be a place for an “original” or naked comment”, only as a “reply” to another – and some comments don’t have a “reply” option … so if my comment seems to not address the one I am “replying” to, forgive me – I don’t know where else to put it ….
So anyway – it seems to me that this thread, for the most part, is a critique of “science” as an arbiter of “truth”- insofar as it is considered the only arbiter of “truth” , or the only “legitimate” way of knowing, I agree – but I wonder if perhaps the problem is that we equate “the scientific method”, with “science”, “the state of knowing” – the former involving hypotheses (which must be “falsifiable” in its construct, experimentation, which results must be replicated a sufficient number of times, becoming a “theory” which at some point is accepted, or not, as “fact”
If only those things that pass this rigorous test are accepted as “truth”, and only such truths are considered as legitimate bases for action – I think that explains a lot of our frustration, disagreement, and turmoil …
At the risk of ridicule (wouldn’t be the first time, won’t be the last :)) let me suggest a place, a very legitimate place, for that good ole’ concept of “common sense” – not that it trumps science, but that it can be a very useful tool in figuring out how to act in a particular case while “science” is laboriously figuring it out … The example I use in the instant case is the idea of masks – if Covid is, initially at least, a respiratory disease, one gets it by breathing in the SARS- CoV2 virus ( if you don’t believe in viruses, you can stop reading here 🙂 ) and transmits it by breathing out, and, insofar as it causes adverse health conditions, it is a pollutant – so SARS-CoV is an air pollutant and we are the source of the pollution – how do we handle air pollutants – in the absence of eliminating them, we filter them out – masks are air filters – so, it seems to me, the issue for “science” is what are the best air filters that are breathable … and “science” has done a great deal in figuring that out (and, more common sense, like seat belts, they don’t work unless worn properly). In the beginning, I campaigned, wherever i could, for masks – the public didn’t need N95s – the medical folk did – telling the public they didn’t need them was a gross error – instead we focused on getting more ICU beds and ventilators – trying to close the barn door after the horse was out – if we had focused on getting more masks and wearing them – we wouldn’t have needed so many ventilators and perhaps more of my medical colleagues, the ones we, initially, called “heroes”, would still be alive …
Of course there are some folks who can’t wear them – for folks with severe COPD, or on oxygen, who have to work hard for every breath, there is probably no mask that is “breathable” enough – but for the general public, so many of the other critiques are, IMO, specious – I get that folks don’t like to wear them, but there are a lot of things that folks don’t “like” to do that we do because we give a damn about our fellow humans
The interesting part for me is that this rather fits with the idea of vaccines, insofar as our immune systems are designed, over millions of years, to defend us from “invaders”, but they can be overwhelmed – so the trick is to keep the amount, or dose, if you will, of exposure at a level that our immune system can react to in a constructive manner so it can do its job. For folks who are “asymptomatic” or only mildly ill with the disease, I suspect it is a result of a healthy immune system confronted with a lower dose of the virus – one they can handle – for folks who get really sick and die, the inputs are less than “ideal”. The virus is an incredible survival machine – so it evolves in a way to insure that survival – either by increasing it’s replication ability and/or outwitting the immune system. In any case masks, good ones properly worn, decrease the dose inhaled and the dose that gets out into the air that others breathe – they are, IMO, the most effective form of “social distancing” – vaccines (ones tailored to the virus at hand, and that’s another story) provide a “taste” of the virus that the immune system can handle – standard platforms use inactivated viruses.
At this point perhaps I should explain that I am a retired medical professional, trained, with a couple of degrees, in the “hard sciences” – entitled, IMO, to be critical of them from an “insider’s” POV – who has spent a couple of decades at the interface between “hard science” with its technology and actual human beings (called “patients” in the old days, now “clients” or “consumers”) – have learned, hopefully, to pay attention to “the facts” as they are presented, observed, considered and hopefully understood – and “know” that waiting for the “scientific method” to elucidate the “truth” I need before taking action is, too often, a mistake – “common sense”, judiciously applied, is, as in this instance, IMO, a better choice …
These are some things I “know” – without the benefit of the “scientific method”
Thank you, Rachel in New Zealand, with all my heart. You articulate my position and heartbreak as someone who is choosing not to allow the “gene therapy” inoculation into my body. At the moment it seems profoundly difficult to stand up for being “equal but different”. The heartbreak is that this is affected the viewpoint even of close family members who treat one as “unclean” and “immoral”. But, thank you, it helps for standing tall.
Another Rachel-this one in the USA.
Thank you, Rachel in New Zealand, with all my heart. You articulate my position and heartbreak as someone who is choosing not to allow the “gene therapy” inoculation into my body. At the moment it seems profoundly difficult to stand up for being “equal but different”. The heartbreak is that this is affected the viewpoint even of close family members who treat one as “unclean” and “immoral”. But, thank you, it helps for standing tall.
Another Rachel-this one in the USA.
Sweet 3 part series!! Reading all the comments peeps! love it.
Am I the first to draw parallels with CE’s analysis to that of Mr. Fredrich Nietzsche?!?!?!?! It appears as though CE is not picking sides of a moral debate, but perhaps explaining of what type of symptom one would have to live to arrive at the moral evaluation of master morality vs. slave morality?
I predict part 4 to be a solution that presents one of two outcomes:
1. an article written promoting any and all art, music, drama and occurrence’s that transcends today’s soon to be destructive social norms (like maybe a festival of which we know is simply just that?)
2. Other.
Actually, Eisenstein is quite dismissive of Nietzsche in Ascent of Humanity, where he gives him a one sentence dismissive mention.
I don’t see any parallel between the two. Nietzsche is quite obviously ten times the thinker that Eisenstein is. Eisenstein isn’t even in the same ballpark.
I want to appreciate you, Charles, for putting in words the indescribable- the ‘entity’ (not sure myself how to name it) that is lurking behind all what we can name at any given moment as a problem to be solved/controlled. To name the need, to look beyond what is happening and ask How it is happening? To give a space to all those feelings of unknown and let them be, instead of jumping in with quick ways how to create less space, more control, less aliveness. And I resonate a lot with Girard saying that ‘it will overflow’…It is overflowing…
I appreciate you because for me you are creating this space, space for questions, for life to flow in. Thank you.
I’m sorry—-I love most of the writing that you do, but I don’t see fascism in masks or vaccines. If it was, everyone would have been forced to get a vaccine from the very beginning. I don’t feel forced to do anything. I’m sure if we were a healthier society—-having better food to eat and using things like acupuncture and supplements for our healthcare, fewer people would die from Covid. We could have done what Sweden did and keep everything open with no mask mandates. I believe we would have had many more deaths as they admit they had more deaths. I f that had happened, I would have confined myself. If id had a regular office job, I probably would have quit rather than to risk dieing or getting sick. Public health laws make me feel safer.
What doesn’t make me feel safe is 2 sides hunkered down fighting each other. I think if we had 3 or 4 political parties and ranked voting in place so that no one political party would ever gain political control, we would have to do what we did in the past and Communicate with each other and find common solutions.
Leaders lying to their constituents to make them fearful thereby gaining power also makes everything worse.
I do believe that if we do not find a way to communicate soon, our country is headed down. I do not agree with the extreme left, but I do see the Right as more Rabid about theirs rights over others. Can’t agree with you on this one.