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The Healing of Congo

July 5, 2012 by Charles Eisenstein

July 2012


Congo is like a microcosm of the entire planet, taken to its extreme. One of the most beautiful places on Earth, it is also among the most troubled.

 

Today I received the following letter from my dear friend, Cynthia Jurs. For the last two decades she has traveled all over the world on a mission of peace and healing where it is needed the most, including Liberia, Los Alamos, Hiroshima, Israel/Palestine, New York City, Colombia, and many sacred sites as well. Each place she goes she ceremonially buries an Earth Treasure Vase according to the instructions given her by a 106-year-old lama in a cave in Nepal. Yes, it sounds like a New Age cliche, but that’s what happened. You can find out more about her project here.

Cynthia wrote:

“Dear Charles,I just returned 2 nights ago from [The Democratic Republic of] Congo where I was for 3 weeks and read your email yesterday. This morning in my jet lag stupor I woke at 3am and began to read from one of the many books about Congo I have been drawing from in order to understand what the solution to the mess there might possibly be. I suddenly found myself thinking of you. Hearing your musing about what is next and how best to channel your gift, I wonder if you might be interested in turning your attention to Congo?Unlike any place on this Earth, it is very difficult to see how to resolve the situation in Congo. I think your insight and the issues you are grappling with to write a new story in the world could be of great benefit if directed towards looking deeply at Congo. It is one of the (maybe the most) resource-rich countries in the world, with the world’s second largest expanse of rainforest providing precious oxygen to the planet. It is also a lawless state with a more or less non-functional government and countless militia groups terrorizing citizens, raping hundreds of thousands of women, killing and stealing in an ongoing effort to control the resources and mines and perpetuate ethnic tribal divisions that go back a very long time. The recent violence began when the genocide in Rwanda spilled over into Congo but the roots of it go back much farther. 6 million have died in Congo since 1994 and 1 million in Rwanda’s genocide. The world turns away and continues to buy smart phones dependent on minerals mined in Congo. The dysfunction of international NGOs, aide agencies, the UN, the EU and USA is astounding — nothing changes — only crippling dependency and ongoing terror.

Clearly a new vision is needed. I went there with filmmaker Raji Mandelkorn and brought our 27th Earth Treasure Vase which we succeeded in planting in the vast Itomwbe forest (a 6 hour drive from Bukavu in E Congo many said we should not make) with a pygmy community that only 2 weeks before had been invaded by rebels trying to take over that section of forest. Raji and I spent 2 weeks in Bukavu and did 3 trainings in media for social change focusing on empowering women to tell their stories and stand up for a new Congo. [Support their Indiegogo fundraising campaign!] We worked with many men and women in different aspects of media (TV, radio, newspaper-such as it is). We shared video with them that Raji edited of women in Liberia offering their solidarity to end the violence. Instead of focusing on their problems and victimization, we interviewed many women (and some men) both rural and city about their visions for a new Congo and what solutions they see. I come away feeling that people are ready for things to change and are willing to take a stand. But leadership is needed and strategy is important.

It was very exciting to be considering what a movement there would look like and how it could be implemented. One big drawback is the hopeless infrastructure, including internet, which exists only minimally. We gave away cell phones and video cameras and did some amazing work with hundreds of folks. We even came up with the beginnings of a design for a unified association for peace in Congo. An analysis needs to be done and a strategy needs to be formulated for how to leapfrog over the powers that be, unblock the situation and catalyze a big change in Congo. It is time for a more beautiful world there and Congo’s future and our own are completely interdependent. And, it IS a very beautiful place — you cannot believe the beauty of this last unexplored wild region of the world. Mountain gorillas, enormous rivers and water everywhere, vast dense forests, active volcanoes, lush fertile soil that can grow anything, all the minerals in the world….and poverty everywhere.In spite of all the talk of how the international community needs to help, the change needs to come from the people not from the outside. It will never come from the outside as long as the outside international community is organized as it is. The thing is, it would be easy if there were one dictator to topple or a clear war to end. But the situation is so complicated and interconnected and the rebel groups that continue to terrorize the people, so hard to pin down. And, it is all caught up with the corporations that want to exploit the resources at any price – perfectly mirroring the global situation everywhere.

Apologies for the length of this email and for being a sounding board in my attempt at post-pilgrimage integration. I truly feel that, like everywhere else in the world, the time is now for change in Congo. And that the change that is called for needs to come from a completely new order, unconditioned by the same old paradigm. Like everywhere, it is time for women to take the lead, and regular citizens there agree. The environment and the women are precious resources that need to be protected. The wealth concentrated in the hands of a few clearly needs to be redistributed to the people for the benefit of all. Needless to say, there is much more I could say about things we witnessed and experienced. For now, please let me know if any of this sparks some interest in you to explore further. I just feel that with all the work you have done to unpack the ascent of humanity, evaluate the world of economics and inspire a movement for a more beautiful world to be possible — and your belief in miracles — that your insight could truly benefit an entire country so intimately and destructively tied to us all. The world has thrown up its hands and said Congo is a lost cause. But I believe that Congo is presenting us with an unprecedented opportunity to turn around a situation that is the ultimate embodiment of our collective shadow.What do you think?” — Cynthia

The first thought I had upon reading this was, “If Congo does not heal, nothing will heal; but if Congo heals, everything will heal.” Perhaps the first part of that statement is too strong – I don’t mean to imply that you can’t experience healing unless the situation in Congo improves. Ultimately, though, we are all connected. If Congo is a lost cause, then so is everything else. Congo is like a microcosm of the entire planet, taken to its extreme. One of the most beautiful places on Earth, it is also among the most troubled. There is no covering up the enormity of the situation, there. There is no pretending that the world is basically working OK, there. There is no denying that it will take a miracle – in addition to a lot of work – to create a beautiful future in Congo.

The Danger of Intervention

To write off Congo would be like seeing a severe diabetic with numb feet and writing off his/her feet. The numbness in the feet is a localized symptom of a systemic disease. So also would it be foolish to think that the solution lay in treating the feet. When the international community asks, “What should we do about Congo,” already it implies that the treatment lies in the feet, leading to interventionist solutions such as sending in troops or instituting “development” projects.

Intervention suggests that the problems in Congo originated in Congo. They do not. To take one example, the pressure to liquidate their natural capital comes not from within but from without: it is the consequence of the global economic system and the ideological system that contains it. Thus it is that when we try to “help” Congo or any other nation through “development,” the problems get worse.

Before we ask, “How can we help?” we should ask how we can stop hurting. Otherwise we will be helping with one hand and hurting with the other. Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole describes the hypocrisy like this: “The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.” I think Cole is being a little heavy-handed here – many in the NGO establishment don’t support the most obviously brutal policies. They fail to fully understand, however, the built-in brutality of the system. They might decry the policies of the mining companies (who, in Congo as elsewhere, access resource-rich land through the terrorizing and massacre of its inhabitants) without understanding that this behavior is inevitable in our present financial system. Probably their own money is invested in funds that invest in those very mining companies, or in their customers, or their bankers, or their suppliers, all of whom are under pressure to seek higher returns. It’s all about business really. The dispossession and death of Pygmies in Congo doesn’t factor into the price of minerals. Merely by seeking the best deal, we contribute to the Pygmies’ horror. The hypocrisy is systemic; indeed it is hard to avoid taking part in it.

Who among my readers doesn’t use cell phones or computers that incorporate minerals from Congo’s mines? Who doesn’t try to get the best deal on these devices, contributing to the price-pressure that fuels the race to the bottom? I am not trying to make you feel guilty here; I am only highlighting the systemic nature of the problem.

The situation is actually even worse than helping with one hand and hurting with the other. Even the helping hand, the giving hand, often sets the stage for more effective taking later. For example, military interventions usually attempt to install business-friendly regimes that facilitate the conversion of a country’s natural wealth and human wealth into financial wealth (benefiting its elites and global investors).

The Pitfalls of “Development”

Similar problems lie in many non-military interventions going by the name of “development,” which means development of ways to extract a nation’s minerals, timber, and other resources, while turning its people into a consumer market and a source of cheap labor. Conceptually it is even more problematic: development says, essentially, “Join us.” “Follow us.” It doesn’t question whether our path has been good for the planet, or even our own people. What can really offer the Third World as the terminus of development? “Join is in our planet-killing lifestyle”? “Rise to the top with us, so that someone else might be at the bottom”? “Join us in our empty, alienated consumerist hell and the disintegration of community, family, and civic society”? This is what we offer when we build roads, factories, schools, mines, and so forth in “developing countries.” Let us ban that phrase from our lexicon. “Developing” implies: “destination us.”

In fact, it is development that has so disrupted the fabric of Congo society that it has degenerated into warlordism. Once upon a time in Congo, people took care of each other’s needs without money; community was strong, and men were bound by community norms and did not rape and kill. All of this unraveled under the successive blows of the slave trade, colonialism, and now globalism. To turn a land and its people into profit, their existing, self-sustaining relationships must be destroyed. Much of what goes by the name of “development” contributes to this destruction. Consider the following passage from The Ascent of Humanity:

To introduce consumerism to a previously isolated culture it is first necessary to destroy its sense of identity. Here’s how: Disrupt its networks of reciprocity by introducing consumer items from the outside. Erode its self-esteem with glamorous images of the West. Demean its mythologies through missionary work and scientific education. Dismantle its traditional ways of transmitting local knowledge by introducing schooling with outside curricula. Destroy its language by providing that schooling in English or another national or world language. Truncate its ties to the land by importing cheap food to make local agriculture uneconomic. Then you will have created a people hungry for the right sneaker. We need to look for a deeper solution.

The Congolese, I am told, want better roads, more modern development. Ultimately, this decision should be theirs to make. But do they understand the hell that development might lead to? Do they understand that their own present condition is the price they are paying for the West’s “development”? To them it may seem that the lack of roads is a huge problem, as women get raped, kidnapped, and killed walking to market. But would driving around in vehicles do anything to stop the villains? At the very least, the decision about how to develop should be free of the pressures of foreign mining companies and of the commodity markets that drive them. It should be free of the agenda of the Congolese 1% as well – countless examples of “development” show that too often, it is only the elites that benefit. The decision should also be free of Western-based prejudices about what is backward and what is advanced. The suggestions I am about to offer encode a very different kind of development, that does not involve the conversion of Congo’s forests into lumber, its minerals into holes in the ground, and its people into a labor force and a consumer market. They all involve disruptions of the global status quo; in fact, to implement them would be nothing short of revolutionary. Interventionist help disrupts nothing and changes little. But to change the conditions pushing Congo ever-deeper into horror requires that everything change.

Leapfrogging the 20th Century into the 21st

Let’s start with the easy things. In 2010, The Paris Club of creditor nations canceled $7 billion of Congo’s foreign debt. The rest should be canceled as well, without the kind of conditions imposed in the 2010 cancellations that made them contingent on improvements in the business environment (by which they meant creating conditions for the continued operation of mines and other extraction industries on behalf of international capital). It is shameful to extract loan payments from a country so impoverished.

Congo is, as Cynthia said, one of the world’s most mineral-rich nations. It is also one of the monetarily poorest, ranked last by the UN in development. One would think that the solution to its poverty would be to develop its mineral resources and use that money to modernize the country. But, even aside from the drawbacks to development as usually practiced that I described above, the world cannot do without the Congolese rain forest. New roads mean more logging, more deforestation, more mines. The undeveloped state of Congo makes it a treasure for the world. That is not to say that its people should stay mired in starvation. We need to envision a different sort of development, perhaps development that leapfrogs the 19th and 20th century into the 21st. The rest of the world should encourage this, and not the ravaging of its wilderness, its traditions, its beauty.

One way to do this is to pay Congo for the “ecosystem services” that it is providing for the world. In the debate over global warming and environmental protection, industrializing countries make the point that the developed world is trying to prevent them from doing what industrialized countries did – to exploit their natural resources and develop industry, with its unfortunate environmental consequences. If developing countries are prevented from following suit, they will remain forever weak. In our current economic system, these critics have a point. One becomes wealthy by externalizing costs onto the environment. It is time for the world to recognize that the value of intact rainforests is far greater than any amount of lumber or minerals that could come from them. Congo should not have to develop its wilderness to become rich. The rest of the world should support Congo in preserving its wilderness. We should pay Congo to guard and steward this precious reserve of biodiversity, carbon sequestering, and oxygen production. These could be Congo’s main “export” to the world; they merit a payment at least as great as the potential income from its mineral wealth.

Any development that happens in Congo should be done with an eye on preserving those things that make it precious. Perhaps there are alternatives to the 19th-20th century model of building a centralized industrial infrastructure. Congo could develop ecologically-integrated permaculture rather than commodity agriculture. It could develop a distributed solar power system rather than a centralized power grid. It could develop bicycle and rail transportation rather than superhighways. It could also preserve traditional healing systems, gift economic systems, and education tied to the land. Note that none of these things will generate commodities for the world market as it presently exists. That is as it should be. The world needs its intact ecosystems more than its lumber and minerals.

The people of Congo may not realize just how sick, poor, and desperate our wealth has made us. Here in America, a small minority of people are beginning to wake up to the disaster our development has caused. We are trying to undo the “development” that has ruined our land and our communities, our topsoil and our water, our air and our bodies. Hundreds of thousands of young people are leaving the cities and going back to the land to farm but not with big machines and high-tech chemicals. Instead they are using a mix of new and ancient techniques that heal the land, are small-scale and local, and that actually can produce higher yields than chemical-intensive agriculture in some cases, much higher. Similarly, the most progressive cities in America and Europe are realizing the mistake of highway-building and automobile reliance, and are returning to rail and bicycle-based infrastructure. Perhaps Congo can learn from our mistakes, skip the ruinous development model of the 20th century, and take up the most advanced trends on the planet right now. Unlike us, the Congolese haven’t ruined their original natural wealth yet. Congo could become the most flourishing place on earth. In the old model of wealth, it was among the poorest. In the new model it can be among the richest, for it has fewer mistakes to undo. Its land is less ravaged, and its people still remember how to live from the land.

As a practical first step, instead of developing more mines and oil wells, the country could put a moratorium on new mines. For that to happen would require the support of the world (until now, the world has pushed Congo to develop its mines; for example, Canada tried to block the 2010 loan forgiveness because the Congo government closed down a Canadian-operated mine). Artisanal miners, wildlife poachers, and illegal loggers would need other employment as game wardens, forest wardens, and so forth, and for that to work there would have to be more money in such professions than in extraction. That is why ecosystem services payments are so important.

This is no trivial matter, since the world industrial system demands minerals from Congo, and will continue to do so as long as we have a linear resource-product-waste model of production. Our throwaway goods do not reflect anywhere near their true cost to Earth or to future generations. Internalizing these costs, so that pollution and ecosystem destruction become much more expensive, entails fundamental changes in our economic system – both structural changes and conceptual changes. Ecosystem services should be valuable everywhere, not only Congo.

Without a new economic order, there is no escaping the pressure to convert non-monetized natural capital into monetized commodities. The profits are visible to the world financial system, but the costs to human beings and especially women, the land, other species, the indigenous, and future generations never enter the balance sheet. That must change – and what better place to initiate that change than Congo, cursed and blessed to be the least developed nation on Earth?

Part 2–  Acting from Interconnection

Because we live on an interconnected planet, what is happening to Congo is happening to ourselves as well. Can we understand that we are not separate selves, but that everything happening in the world is happening to ourselves? If so, it stands to reason that in the transition to the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible, every place and every one must come along with us. No place, no people, no person can be written off. We can feel it in our bones, that with each loss of a species, a culture, a forest, we all become irrevocably poorer.

This principle of oneness that motivates the ideas I described in Part 1 can also inform the strategies of the people on the ground, the women and men of Congo. Translated into the Christian terms of that nation, it is the principle that we are all one in spirit; that the spirit of God lives in each and every one of us.

You may ask, how dare he make these metaphysical pronouncements when children are dying at the point of a bayonet and women are being hacked by machetes? I go there only because of our apparent helplessness to cease creating and recreating a kind of world that no one wants. We are trapped in a mythology that is invisible to us, enacting the roles it assigns us, living the lives it prescribes us, being the beings it defines for us.

This mythology tells us who we are, what the world is, why we are here, where we are going. It is a story of Separation: humanity separate from nature, human beings separate from each other, the divine separate from the world, matter separate from spirit, the mind separate from the body, Congo separate from America, you separate from me. The institutions of civilization, and in particular the usury-based money system, embody and enforce this story.

The same mythology also tells us how to solve problems and create change in the world. When something is separate from oneself, one applies force to change it. In physics, we apply force to matter to perform work, to mold the world to our design. We understand economic behavior to be based on selfishness – “rational self-interest,” economists call it – and so we apply economic force in the form of incentives and penalties to change people’s behavior. We use physical metaphors in our conceptions of political action too: We put “pressure” on the government so as to “force” it to change a policy. Different parties applying opposing pressure create political “tensions.”

The world of Separation is crumbling as its institutions founder in a crisis that will never end, and the methods of force are revealed as impotent to solve today’s problems. Acting within its logic, we can only create more of the same. More technology, more pesticides, more antibiotics, more weapons, more prisons, more control of every sort intensifies the problems they were meant to solve. But we now have available a new logic, the logic of interconnection, of interbeing. Implicit in it are not only different systems – of money, technology, medicine, education, energy, and more – but also different strategies to solve problems and change the world.

If that doesn’t convince you, consider that extreme though it is, the situation in Congo is no less hopeless than the situation globally. It is no more realistic to expect the warlords to let go their grip on power than it is to expect the global financial elite to let go theirs. While in the case of Congo we might hope for an external power to overthrow the rule of force with even greater force, on the global tableau there is no external power to appeal to. We will not achieve victory by force.
When our usual understanding of cause and effect denies the possibility of a solution, we are left hoping for a miracle. But can we go beyond hoping for one, and actually bring one about? Given what we understand today about what is geopolitically practical, it will take a miracle to change the global economic forces that continue to push Congo toward ecological destruction and violence. It will take a miracle to bring peace to a country so torn by conflict and warlordism where, as Cynthia said, NGOs, governments, and the UN are paralyzed and any hope rests with the least powerful (in conventional terms): the women and men of Congo themselves.

What is a miracle, anyway? It is simply something that is impossible from an old set of operating assumptions, an old understanding of reality, of cause and effect, but possible from a new. To achieve the impossible, we must operate from a different Story of the World. In this different logic, the most powerful people are no longer the warlords, the corporations, the governments, or the bankers. Their methods are becoming obsolete, giving way to a new logic.

The Alternative to Force

What, in this context, is the opposite of force? If force is what one object exerts upon another object external to itself, then an alternative to force would include and not externalize this other. The alternative is, in short, love. Love is the expansion of ones self to include another. It is the felt experience of non-separation. When I love someone, their happiness makes me happy, and their pain hurts. Love is the felt truth of interbeing. But how to apply this to a bloodthirsty warlord? It seems naïve, if not downright insulting, to suggest love as the answer to brutality, rape, and mass murder.

Let us be under no illusions about what we are up against. Cynthia described to me a certain warlord, let’s call him Colonel X, whose men had committed and continue to commit awful atrocities. A woman who had survived one of their rape/massacres had fled and was now speaking up about what had happened, so the colonel put out a death warrant for her. He tries his best to intimidate or exterminate all witnesses.

It would certainly seem that there is no alternative but force in dealing with such a man. It is hard not to see him as wholly evil. Like a mass in physics, he is something “other” than ourselves, an external thing that can only be moved by force: military assault, assassination, economic pressure, the shame of exposure, or the threat of the above. The assumption is that he will only respond to threats to his self-interest; that is, to force. That’s his language, we think, but by applying it ourselves, we become like him. We become ourselves capable of monstrous acts, all in the name of good. In the conquest of evil, any means is justified. Hitler and Stalin justified their actions by ideals that seemed lofty to them: the purity of the Aryan race, the purity of the Communist Party. What is purity, but the elimination of the Other? It is time for the War against Evil to end.

If the idea of a strategy motivated by love sounds naïve, keep in mind the evident impracticality of force, the sordid history of “humanitarian intervention,” and most of all that in the transition to the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible, every place and every one must come along with us.You might agree that a healed planet will not come to be without a healed Congo. Can you also see the necessity, or even the possibility, of it including a healed Colonel X?
One basic strategy toward this end is collective witnessing: bringing public attention to the actions of everyone involved. I have noticed that my conscience often needs help from other people when I face hard choices. When other people are watching, it is much easier to do the right thing. A cynic might say that this is because I fear social shaming and ostracism, but we might turn that around and say that when people are watching me with the attitude, “Charles, I know you want to do the right thing,” then it is easier to believe that about myself too.

Applied to activism, this suggests a mirror image of the common strategy of exposing crimes to humiliate and bring pressure to bear on the perpetrators, what some have termed, “name, blame, and shame.” When we operate from the perspective of “holding them accountable,” “exposing them,” and making them ashamed of their actions, then of course the targets of our attempts will do anything in their power to oppose us and hide what they are doing. A different attitude and a different vocabulary might evoke a different response.

By making the atrocities visible, the perpetrators get the feeling that “the world is watching.” At present, Congo has one of the lowest Internet connection ratios in the world, which makes it harder to make the atrocities visible through social media. As Cynthia mentioned, this might be a good way to help from the outside: we can help Congo leapfrog the mass media of the 20th century and build the social media of the 21st. Activists can also invite international observers – witnesses for peace – to troubled areas. In order to short-circuit political opposition, these tactics should be framed in the most non-threatening, positive way possible. For example, the tactic of making atrocities visible could be, “Let’s show the world a Congo without rape.” I want to speak here to the understanding that the land and people of Congo will only be healed through extraordinary means: a revolution of love. Perhaps the future holds Truth and Reconciliation committees like those of South Africa, a women’s movement like that of Liberia, a unity movement like that of Rwanda. While all of these brave experiments suffer flaws, they are also the vehicles for miracles of healing. Only a miracle will suffice in Congo because of the sheer horror of what that country has experienced. Peace will only come through forgiving the unforgivable. The alternative to forgiving the unforgivable is vengeance and an onward, endless spiral of violence.

Of course, tactics of love and non-violence require incredible courage, sometimes of the order of the man standing before a tank. Where is such courage found? It is found among the people of Congo.

Consider these words of the filmmaker Raji Mandelkorn:

We can discuss the capacity for love that a child has or a dog or a privileged person or a person who has suffered a great deal. Though potentially we may all have the same capacity for love, those who have suffered the darkest depths of human grief have been carved out by sorrow. If they do not give in to anger and revenge, they become the greatest vessels for love and thus they become reservoirs of it.

The people of Congo are among the world’s most traumatized and tragedy-stricken. Their hearts ache with a love for life, survival, and hope. Their eyes cry  the same tears for their children’s futures as they do for their tragic pasts. These are a people whose capacity for love is great and whose love is ready for action. naïve or unrealistic to expect a revolution of love by such people to succeed? I think it would be unrealistic to expect it to fail.

Hope Lies with the Women

In Congo, labeled by some as the rape capital of the world, it would seem there are none so powerless as the women. But in a revolution of love, perhaps it is the meek who will inherit a new kind of power. In Congo as elsewhere, the powerful are stuck, paralyzed. According to one activist in Congo, Grace Namadamu (Neema), the men of her country are so locked into the habits of violence and the status quo that any real change must come primarily from the women. She writes in an email:

“On the other hand, we see an awakening happening in the consciousness of women, and a few men as you know. And as a result, a certain resolve is building; a resolve to take a stand against every enemy of their future. And they seem to see clearly, that their enemy is not a form, but wages its warfare through culture, traditions, religions, and history. Sure, there are bad people in the wrong places, but they are there because culture, tradition, religion, and history have governed things, and said we are their servants. The Day is dawning however where a new constitution is taking hold within us, and more than courage; a determination to say we will no longer be enslaved by these tired conventions.

Neema is part of a fledgling women’s movement in Congo that I believe will change that country beyond recognition. Patriarchal methods of domination and force are bankrupt, and the alternative lies in the province of women (and the inner feminine of men as well). It is the realm of interconnection, of care-giving; it is in fact the same spirit that motivates the economic proposals I have laid out above. We want to give to Earth, no longer just to take.

Another strategy toward a “healed Colonel X” (and the entire way of being he represents, which indeed exists as a shadow in all of us) is to always offer a choice, an opportunity to step into a different life story. Backed into a corner, facing the alternatives of either a war crimes tribunal or victory, the warlords will certainly fight to the end for victory. I had a vision just now of Colonel X being visited by a delegation of women and men from this new movement. “Colonel,” they say, “a new era is dawning in Congo and we would like you to be part of it. The mass rapes have to stop, and we want to invite you to help us.” Then they propose something involving sending observers, or asking that his men be allowed to volunteer to cease being killers and become protectors instead. Perhaps such proposals might seem silly under present circumstances, when everything seems to be working for Colonel X, but as this movement grows his room to maneuver will shrink. As the tide of the times changes, people will begin to question the way they have been doing things, and open up to new choices. Of course, it would be foolish to expect that all of the Colonel X’s out there will choose the way of peace at first, but some of them will.

Some of them will, and some of them do. Consider the story of another friend of Cynthia’s, the notorious General Leopard (the nom de guerre of Christian Bethelson), a Liberian rebel leader during its awful civil war. In this milieu of massacre, child soldiery, and torture, he was, in his words, a man with “no conscience.” Eventually the war ended, and with it Bethelson’s livelihood: he had no skill other than killing. He decided to go to the nearest war, in Ivory Coast, where there would be demand for his gruesome services. On the way his car got stuck in the mud. Nearby, also stuck in the mud, was a car bearing members of a peace group called the Everyday Gandhis. Intrigued by their conversation, he announced himself as a former rebel general, and to his astonishment the group gathered around him, hugged him, told him they loved him. He decided to join them and dedicate his life to peace. If he can do it, anyone can.

Isn’t that the kind of world we want? Where men defect, en masse, from the patterns of violence that bind them today? Is a revolution of love too much to strive for? It would sound naïve indeed, if it were not for the fact that we really have no alternative.

The economic and technological proposals of the first half of this essay arise from the same source as the non-violent action proposals that follow. Both arise from the principle of interconnection or oneness. What happens to Congo is happening to us, and Colonel X’s predicament is our own predicament. From the outside, we realize that the pristine natural capital that remains in Congo is essential to our own well-being. From the inside, a revolution of love bases its hope on the redeemability of those who have perpetrated violence, those who have been complicit in it, those who have turned a blind eye. We know that they too want a different world, for they are none other than ourselves. Every place and every person must come along with us.

To support Neema and the vision described herein, please contribute to the Indiegogo campaign for the Women Witness Congo project.

 

This article was originally published in The Intelligent Optimist



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Filed Under: Self & Psyche Tagged With: activism, Essay, interbeing, miracle, new story

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Dee Kongo says

    April 27, 2014 at 2:30 pm

    Hi Charles I have a question

    1. It is possible for the RDcongo to change back to Kingdom of Kongo ?
    2. It is possible to change education system in congo ? Would it not be useful to study in their own mother tongue to help them undestand and to get to know their land and it’s natural resources ?
    And if is possible what do think it will take to achieve it
    Thank you for your article

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Charles Eisenstein

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The Coronation

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

The Reflex of Control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Conspiracy Narrative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The War on Death

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What world shall we live in?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is Community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Coronation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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