https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/?_page=3&fbclid=IwAR0PtcOIxexwG_osRlYZfsJHMM7jr1Fui3JLcSBYv2kGLXs59jOal8_wcW4
The Coronation
March 2020
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 isCOVID 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:
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 Covid-19 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.
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 isCOVID 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.
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 Covid-19 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.
As many have shared I was looking for your thoughts on the Corona Virus and knew they would come. Knew you were working hard at it. Seeing a message from you in my inbox late last night was so sweet. I was about to head upstairs for bed but sat down and read the essay in one fell swoop. I will have to return to it several times in the next coming days to really digest it. But know this… we are all so grateful for the gift of your deep thinking. I am excited to be living at this extraordinary time. You’ve said it differently than I might but I had concluded that the virus held an evolutionary gift for our species and our earth…may it be so! With deep appreciation….
Not what I expected, but beautiful and soothing.
So I guess: what was needed instead.
May we choose our path wisely
These are of moral imperative and the empathy to care for all beings, human amd nonhuman animals might be just the medicine we need. ❤
do words matter here:
replace ‘social distancing’
with
social spacing
physical distancing
physical spacing
?
then there is
psychological distancing;
how far do I need to stay away
to preserve some sanity
amidst all this hyper sanitization
and infodemic
this eddy of fake news,
some true
who knows
?
I am sitting with the question
what is real? vs what is true?
My feelings are real and my
body sensations are real
About the true part:
I have to do Byron Katies often:
“is it really true?” “how do I know it’s true?”
I am happy for the revitalization
of nature
dolphins swimming in the Venice canal
blankets of smog lifted from urban centres.
“if all humans perished, the earth would thrive…”
is an old adage that rings true right now.
As I walked this week
I attuned my ears to birdsongs
esp. to the dash dash, dot dot dot dot dot tune of the red cardinals
and when I noticed early shoots peaking forth
from the ground
I was reminded
not of hope
because right now
hope is too strong a word for me
but
that life in various forms continues and regenerates
even if I may not be a part
of this continuance or rebirth.
My greatest tool, resource
is mastering my dance with the Unknown:
this dance that served me well
along my journey with chronic illness.
I am actively practicing
leaning into
fully being with
making besties with
the Unknown
with Uncertainty.
I am reminded of what I read once:
In the west they say
“PANIC PANIC, EVERYTHING IS OUT OF CONTROL”
&
The Buddhists say
“relax, relax, everything is out of control”
and
how can I relax?
Is it as simple as a deep inhale and exhale
moment by moment?
I am asking myself many questions and holding them,
vs jumping on theories.
Like:
“what is our relationship with viruses?” “how can we coexist with them?”
“how does 5G play into all this?”
(and I am very angry about 5G)
“how can I shift my negative views about technology , even as we ramp up these days?”
( I am all too aware that isolation and loneliness were epidemic pre Covid 19, thanks to social media)
“will those who are awakening and clarifying their values go back to their old ways after all of this settles?”
“what will leadership at the global level look like? “even as more countries put up walls?”
“ will the next ‘Buddha’ really be community as they say?”
“are any of the ‘conspiracy theories’ out there true?” Who do I believe?”
“how can I forgive?”
“how can I trust?”
‘Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.’
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Real as the ground
I walk on less often
with far greater charge
to each lift, carry, place.
Thank You!! <3
Thank you for taking the time to think and feel so deeply into this immense moment in history and begin to tease out what we might shape from the chaos and bewilderment of these times — and why. It’s very helpful for me personally to feel less alone in contemplating these questions.
Sending love and peace and vitality the expanding capacity to trust in each moment to you and your family…
Physical distancing in an epidemic runs counter to our instincts to hang together in crisis, so it is a major test of social discipline. Obviously, a controlling government may seek to perpetuate draconian controls, but longer term we need a new social system coming out of this crisis. One that is based on the continuance of all life through future generations, including that of the ecosphere on which human life depends. We have to increase the planetary human mindshare favoring survival and reproduction over our urges to dominate and control.
Charles, you are insightful, a poet, an inspiration. May we emerge from this great turning into a new light: joyful, free, full of life and compassion and love for each other, and our beautiful world. May our hearts break when we see injustice, and may we claim our true inheritance: children of the Light, of the Truth, of the One King.
Abrazo, Mofwoofoo aka Tom, founder of chambalabamba community (chambalabamba.org)
Our next evolutionary step will occur in this next cycle, which will bring extensive mutation to the Solar Plexus and the emerging non-linear, non-verbal felt sense of awareness that is neither body awareness nor mental awareness, but emotional or spirit awareness”. Hope this can be of help. Love, Navin
.
But what to do? Now that the cat if out of the proverbial bag. And Pandoras lid has been lifted. We stay in denial or do we do something about it. Do we keep looking at the parts and not the whole. Do we continue to live and dwell in our own separate solos and echo chambers. Do we realize that we are both the problem and the solution. And the choice is ours which way we wish to go. And what we choose to believe.
In all of this you are right I believe. Choice. We are free agents. We hold in the end the responsibility for what we believe in. Even if our course of action is curtailed by others. Physically and materially more endowed and powerful than we are.
But this is not just a material or physical problem. This goes beyond the limits of just being an existential crisis. This is an indictment of our whole way of living. And seeing and navigating the world around us. For we have been so incredibly and unbelievable narcissistic. We have lost of sight of our blind spots. And that we simply do not know what we do not know. And how do we deal with that.
How to be both humble and bold. Knowing and unknowing. Fragile yet resilient. Afraid yet resolved. Dire yet optimistic. The many paradoxes this moment calls for. How do we become comfortable and at ease and even at peace with paradox. Even and especially when our lives seem to depend on it. For it does.
Hello Heart
What do you want?
I don’t know –
that’s clear.
What’s dear?
Love, friends,
connection –
that’s clear.
Hello Sun
glad you’re here
today
after the drear.
Hello Drear
I care, I’m here
whisper, whisper
a prayer of care
La la la la
here and there.
May all beings
everywhere
be safe
be happy
be loved
find peace.
Tiny notes (I rarely find typos in writing). Second to last paragraph: “initiation?The popular” just needs a space.
Unless I am reading it wrong, this sentence needs an “are”: 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?
Thank you for going deep and coming back up to “shimmering surface” to share your wisdom.
March 22 I posted on facebook “I am remembering Barbara Marx Hubbard talking about “hospicing out the old and midwifeing in the new” – birthing of humanity. As so many of us are cocooning right now, I trust that new Design Science Engineers and artists are creating a quantum leap new world that works for everyone. And so it is. Amen.”
Charles Eisenstein I am surrounding you with love and happiness and clarity and joy. blessings (Daniel Schmachtenberger’s Mom)
I loved that you alluded to the cutting of the thread of fate. I love the range of your understanding and your questions. The universe is unfolding as it should, as it will. THANK YOU.
Pandora Corona
March 14, 2020
This pandemic, Corona Virus,
new to the world,
makes it’s way like a self-crowned personage,
a regal but deadly presence,
an autocrat, which like all bullies, eventually topples.
But this stealthy organism is opening
a Pandora’s box of possibilities.
Stealing our breath, making us pause,
while clearing our atmosphere,
space photos show no pollution in the industrial world,
show us what can happen if we green our lives.
Slows us down, to meet this moment, and one another,
not go go go, but stop, look, listen.
What have we been missing? Kindness and community.
Songs from the balconies, stars in the night, silence in the woods.
Shared sense of commonality; we truly are connected.
Breathe the same air, drink water that once was the ocean,
eat food grown halfway ‘round the planet,
and know we are not divided from this world.
Steeling our resolve to turn this fear, this angst,
into a moment of humanity,
Ah, yes, humanity showing us what it’s got.
Do we have what it takes to be relations to the world?
Sleepy-eyed no more, no excuses now, call the neighbor,
play with the kids, read the book,
plant the seed, wash the hands,
practice self-care, other care,
share the food, share the workload,
and even that precious TP (really, what is that all about?).
Seeing a new way to be in the world, it is 2020 after all,
cognizant how fleeting and fragile it is,
what a strange and special moment inhabited in this world.
Why not live it for the highest good of all?
Pandora has made her move, the lid is off, the chest is open, all the possibilities flying around.
Which ones will we catch and claim, which will fall aside?
Sitting on the edge, on the precipice of beginnings and endings,
Sits sweet hope, for a healthy world, a crown of creation.
“God of change unbind my wings.
Detach me now from grabbing things.
I fly with you to unborn lands.
We, all safe, now in your Hands…”
Rev. Richard Page
(we met at IONS where we traded books)
‘’So I think we’re going to see a series of crisis moments, each one more severe than the last; and at each crisis moment we’ll have a collection choice – do we give up the game and join the people? Or do we hold on even tighter? It’s really up to us to determine at what point this wake up point will happen’’
And a little out of context,
‘’ . . . . the other part is the coming of age ordeal, when the old world falls apart, and a new world is born’’
One of the things that arises in me is how the concept of “control” for me seems related to the “self”. To me, it’s similar to the contemplation of how much “structure” (routine, etc) versus “fluidity” is the right balance at the individual and collective level. Back to the first sentence/concept, the balance is what I wonder. The belief that the “self” can “control” its own destiny is at the center of those that think differently than me. I believe I am here to serve something bigger than myself and have to turn myself over to the fact that my environment is more persuasive than my “individual will”. Most of what I read corroborates this on the meta level of what I sense on the personal level. So what is the right balance of taking ownership/control/will in ones life and our collective lives versus relinquishing to mystery/life/something greater. I try to consciously choose the latter as much as I can to rebalance my existence, but it is difficult in a world that pushes me towards the former.
So compleat.
[Liked the sidebar astrology interview – will go back for more of them!]
Your magnetized audience member,
Barbara
Charles, this is one unbelievable collection of intelligentsia, wrapped in total heart-centered compassion, empathy, humanism and love. It took me over an hour to read, as I mindfully centered on each word, every sentence, phrase, paragraph and intonation of what you were expressing and feeling. Well worth my hour and a half of “life.” Equal to millions of dollars in the traditional world, at least!
Charles, I’m SO GLAD I met and spent several days in retreat with you at Garrison Center a few years ago. I have you in my psyche and cells, now. You were always in my heart.
You are so right when you said, in short, that nobody knows what’s going on. Or, what “might” continue to go on—from remaining isolated and anxious, to having the screws put tighter to all of us, in everyday circumstances, i.e. invisible bar codes that keep track of our state-mandated vaccinations and God knows what else! (I didn’t even “know” there were such things as invisible bar codes—eek gads! Is this for real or an imaginative made up way of getting your point across even stronger?) If the latter, rest assured my friend, you certainly DID!
Charles, this prose is nothing short of BRILLIANT. Miraculous. Insightful. Creative. Promising. Hopeful. Wild. Wooley. Wizardry. I love you & all of our compadres on this most unusual, ever unpredictable and continuously mysterious journey we all travel together now. Indeed, we are ALL IN IT TOGETHER. I pray for magic in the air, stardust in the skies and miracles of radiance that will shift our world towards the grace, love, harmony & beauty that are all possible. Forever.
Never mind all the conspiracy theories, let’s all share in the beauty of what is struggling to be born.
Beautiful concept. I agree wholeheartedly.
While reading, I notice a great gratitude for your eloquence and that you are who you are. I bow to your believing in and sharing yourself as you do. You provide conceptual understanding of what my body knows.
Then in that, I also notice my doubt of myself, awaiting your words to confirm my felt senses.
My hope is that I daily walk my path with courage, care, and willingness to not know.
If the chrysalis is cracking thanks to a Corona, who or what will we become? Do we Want to become? Will we Allow ourselves to (dare) become?
The greatest threat to Humankind is a lack of Humankind(ness). This is also our greatest immune boost. And I relish the day when Connectivity is borne of Creativity rather than Catastrophe – that we might usher in a music-driven, worldwide “B’earthday” Party for the Planet celebrating Every living being; called Synchronistory!
Meanwhile at the threshold, what a crossroads indeed – and what a WOW written piece, Charles :-).
Your humanism at the forefront while you challenge entrenched and outdated concepts of the ‘old order’ whose death rattles we suffer through together….
Brings to mind another great revelation …… Prior Unity – the basis for a new human civilisation… a book by the world friend Adi Da ….essential reading
Thank you
A masterpiece which shows the quality of your soul and consciousness of your being.
Don’t know if you’ve heard, but both the scientist who wrote the Imperial College London study that was used to initiate the “shelter in place” and Dr. Fauci who said it was 10 times worse than the flu, have re-evaluated the numbers and reduced their predictions dramatically.
https://beforeitsnews.com/health/2020/03/breaking-experts-drastically-alter-course-on-coronavirus-video-3016637.html
https://www.oann.com/dr-anthony-fauci-backtracks-on-deadliness-of-virus/
Also there’s a hospital in NYC using IV vitamin C.
JD
Ask questions. Chief among them. Is this what it means to be human. To destroy your own ecosystem. And yourself in the process. Along with the future of your children. All for the sake of making money. And if so. Could we not have done better. Or is this a fatal condition of being human.
The Coronavirus is merely an extension of an extinction that we have created. It’s just that because it’s now affecting us. We are paying it this much attention. Whereas before most of us could not have cared less.
Can we please translate to more languages so that all people can read? I could volunteer to translate to Greek if you would like.
Thank you Charles 🙏🏽
Space is not ready for us, lets get to just flying the planet as a ship.
The pilot is the astronaut and the scientist the indigenous.
Two of equal training in surviving each other, two of equal purpose to do the utmost to save both the mission and keep the ship intact with all its support systems.
Canada came so close recently to reset the compass of democracy.
You see, this was Gene Roddenberry’s dream. Although politically unpopular for tv.
He gave us the screens, the tec and the way to imagine possibilities, out of cardboard and glue, and we stuck to it.
Also we must adopt the spiral, this is a paradigm that we are not in linearity, how can we be?
We can not reach a destination and not be interrupted, we spiral to point b, with life in between, thanks John Lennon.
So, hearing the colonial a little, I wish upon the spectrum of Charles to continue on in fashion, I love what you write even though it makes a leader out of some, more than a chief, which in a loving todays world is over run with cronyism.
Thank you so much for your deep thoughtfulness and how you connect so many dots. Like others I’ve been feeling some of what you’ve put into words here. I live in South Africa and am in day 3 of “lockdown”. I’m one of the privileged few who has a nice house with space to do this in. We’re not allowed to leave our houses except for absolute emergencies, not even walking. A majority of people are living in overcrowded and dense settlements often without decent water and sanitation. No savings to stock up on food for 3 weeks. Police and army are being used to ‘enforce the lockdown’. Finally the penny is dropping, without paying attention to “cleaning the tank”, we will all be impacted. Suddenly water tankers that people have been asking for, for years, are arriving (at least in some instances).
So I particularly resonate with what you say and it deeply disturbs me:
“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..”
I feel like I’m living inside of and colluding with the security state you describe.
Yet I also feel like I am experiencing both totalitarianism and solidarity simultaneously –
the great paradox of community organising and beautiful acts of kindness and compassion together with the draconian measures and increased physical isolation. In South Africa many of us are using the language of “physical distancing with social solidarity”. I’m part of a cross continental African group of about 60 people who every night, at the same time, together listen to a short audio meditation visualising everyone in the circle. At the end we’ve been focusing on sharing our gratitude for all health workers and emergency personnel. We then reflect on the experience for about 45mins afterwards. It’s proving to be a very important touchstone in people’s lives, a moment to experience an energetic connectedness, a transformation of fear into courage, peacefulness and calm in the midst of external chaos. As you say – ” which fork in the road we choose” is a very salient question. How we be now during this moment will hopefully influence that choice.
Thank you does not express my gratitude for your clarity and insight and consciousness and inner knowing that love is the answer and unites us all. We can trust in the unknown, the mystery of Life that is always evolving for the highest good of All! You and your words are the most hopeful and all inclusive information/communication that I have heard, read, taken in. Your word and your spirit is needed. How can I help you spread your words and your wisdom. Blessings and please keep up and keep on sharing and expanding your message. I love you and the spirit of knowing that you embody! I feel wholeness…the integration of the polarities of life and of this “conflict” that we are facing. Thank you for sharing this truth. I finally found you and feel hopeful that we can and will unite in the name of Love!
Thank you for this beautiful essay. It touches and inspires me a lot. I had never read anything from you before; hadn’t heard of you. Your essay somehow reflects in a very focussed way all the thoughts that came up my mind during the two weeks of self-isolation I’m in. I walk a lot in the forest with the dog – my daily meditation – and your essay helps me to bring back my focus on what is essential in life: connection from the heart with all the people who are important for me.
lots of Love,
Pieter
Also are you going to write on how we can change the economic structure worldwide in the face of huge unemployment, business collapses, Government relief in some countries resulting in billions of debt to countries – to whom is that debt owing and will it be repaid? Can we all refuse to pay back the banks now?
Emulating the caterpillar, dissolving into quantum soup within its chrysalis, you have exposed through your wisdom and view of the imaginal cells, the emerging butterfly, breaking through and beyond the shackles of restraint, to fly free, shining its beauty upon the world.
Let the Human Metamorphosis continue!
With love from Bali
I know this is a big ask.
Could you supply a version of your beautiful essay as a précis, a single page of A4, say, 350 to 400 words?
I’m asking this as the lifelong friend of several dyslexics, with whom I’d love to share it.
Those of us who are wordsmiths easily forget how they struggle to absorb our Love from the written page.
It might be easier for you now a few days have passed since completing the longer version.
It might then turn into a powerful short talk on film, too.
And for me too, many things you mentioned I had thought or sensed before.
It’s great to see it put in context, and with many more aspects to think about.
I loved this one particularly” 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.”
I used google to translate it into German to share with more friends. I’m not a great translator, but I will try to improve it a little bit myself in the days to come.
Or has any of your German friends already made a good translation?
Thanks so much for all. Iris
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Rsz3xXJ8Y43MjTJ5PRV3VIVgzfV2bNNO
have you followed the abyssmally glacial pace of this species planet wide response to a man made disease? there is very little ‘phenomenal’ to speak of with these latest hi jinks in a relatively unbroken chain of disgusting and dismaying behaviours by an organidm that has unashamedly titled itself apex predator of what is now, SCIENTIFICALLY, classified as an earth in trouble.
personally, i hope this blessing takes a wholesome bite out of the scum that calls itself ‘humanity’. the body known by the same as ‘earth’ will cry no tears and will undoubtedly be the better for the loss
Aho! Thanks for your insightfull words. Very uplifting.
This to me looks like a powerful and effective lever for long-term societal change. If we depend upon the powers that be, they are much more likely to tend towards totalitarianism. I can see few levers from current central powers that will provide a more lenient governance. After all, they move to protect their own position and have been moving in the other direction until this crisis.
So, if we are to see a ‘reset’, I see it coming from an inadvertent ‘mistake’ by the current authorities and economists. Such a basic wage for all would change the underlying processes of work and play. And once introduced it would be difficult to move away from.
I live in the UK and it is a crying shame that the Labour Party did not get into power in December. If it had, the election would have given it a mandate for radical change and I am sure Labour would have ushered in a basic wage for all – which is what we effectively have with the introduction of the 80% earnings for all employees laid-off now. How important for the world was that election now?
The UK could have paved a new way forward, and funnily enough, Jeremy Corbyn had exactly the right credentials and viewpoint to make a post capitalist society work with his innate humanitarian views.
I have also long argued that technology can re-shape the world for the better. History tells us that for the last 3,000 yeas or so, most humans outside the ruling classes have lived a poor, often short, and sometimes unspeakable lives. There are very few societies that were successful in providing a ‘reasonable’ life for the many. Without technology, make no mistake we shall be back there very quickly.
I am sure many people think that moving back to a more ‘natural’ way of life is an answer. Unfortunately it is only possible for a tiny minority and those who either live in a non-populous place like New Zealand, or have extensive capital available to create their own space. For the rest of us there is simply not enough land to feed us all.
The way forward must therefore be through technology. I have long argued that humans are the ultimate toolmaker. Some animals also are toolmakers, but they have not progressed to our level. We like many animals are social. And it is this social aspect of our nature that drives almost everything we do and not our logical minds as we like to think. (see: The Human Contradiction http://www.commonsensethinking.co.uk/humancontradiction.html)
To found a new type of (non-totalitarian) society, it must therefore be based on technological improvement. This gives us a quandary. How do we lever technology in a society that is no longer based on winner takes all? Where will the drive to improve the technology come from? We are toolmakers, technology is just another name for tools, so we need to think hard how we can achieve this continuing improvement.
My own view is in the not too distant future, we shall create the ‘smart robot’ revolution. (http://www.commonsensethinking.co.uk/Resourcism.html) This is the turning point where we have created a robot smart enough (not sentient or anywhere near), to be able to re-create itself. This will not be an instant conversion of course, but as we approach this step-change, we shall realise that many of our needs can be met with very little human intervention. What is the timescale for the smart robot? Within 80 years I suspect, maybe a lot sooner, especially if we could see that it was the way forward in our new societal order. The world would then be full of smart robots that can do most things from farming, manufacturing, delivery, transport etc. The only thing that then makes economic sense is ‘Resourcism’ (http://www.resourcism.org/)
Resourcism is a new economic proposition that is fundamental to the world and what we can expect it to provide for us. Clearly, humans must make choices of how the resources are shared out. Perhaps a new more humane society that you address as one outcome, will be more suitable to creating such choices in a much fairer way than now?
JP
Thank you for the deep insights. I Have have been prizing this time of pause and pondering how to begin exploring the different paths appearing in the wilderness.
Charles, I have to point out one very problematic area if this essay: the citation of the retracted article “Potential False-Positive Rate Among the ‘Asymptomatic Infected Individuals’ in Close Contacts of COVID-19 Patients” by G H Zhuang et al. The article is no longer available in the original and the author has stated there is an unspecified “sensitive” problem with it. I am disturbed by casting doubt on the substantiality, the reality of the coronavirus situation when the science and testing is really quite solid. It is fascinating to entertain the thought that this whole thing might be created out of whole cloth by fear and false positive tests, but the sensitivity and specificity of the tests developed in the US is quite good. As you point out, so much is unknown at this point, but the biggest part of the problem is we need more testing.
Thanks as always for your deep reaches into uncharted territory.
Kindly,
Ben
This is so true and so many are afraid to speak to this …As a small business owner…I felt the “shaming'” that was happening of me staying opening although I have ample space for 10 people to come into a 2000 sq ft studio and practice yoga…I was called selfish and irresponsible. I see the imprints we are creating will have permanent events in our pysche and we will take another few years to unravel these “control valves” placed on us….do not leave your house…keep 6 ft distance…oh that’s not enough…make it 12 feet….don’t take anything from anyone…..The trauma is high and our recovery will take all our energy as well. Neighbors calling the police saying the neighbor kids are playing with each other….
“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.”
This is a great gift befriending Covid-19 could give us…However, we are seeing increased trauma responses…the sheer fact the state of VA would make ABC store “essential” and to stay open…means that that there are habits will go wild and instead of being a rehab intervention…this may push us into addictive behaviour….my hope is what you are offering…..
“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. “
Just kidding, I dig it! Going to cough this up all over my social medias.
My big question early on is ‘aren’t we over-reacting to this?’ I SOOO much appreciate your thoughtful attention to the ‘conspiracy theories’ surrounding our times. I too ‘pay attention to the fact that they exist’ and feel like we ignore them at our peril as they express genuine possibilities. AND at the same time, I FEEL in my gut that these measures we are taking at the moment to social distance are right and good and I resonate with them deeply.
My life is already pared down to the joyous essentials, so I am personally ‘ok’. But lately I have been asking myself “to what lengths should we humans be going to keep ourselves alive?’ On a compassionate level of love and care for individuals, it seems as if we should pull out all the stops, but on a ‘species’ level, we are the only species on the planet that has this kind of high-level medical care that keeps patients alive far longer than nature would have them, left to nature’s own devices. This sounds terrible, I know and uncaring, but to discuss it from a place of love and care and to raise the question: ‘at what price?’ is something that I really think we need to talk about. I would rather take my chances and die early, and live a fully free and loving life, than do everything in my power to live as long as I can at the expense of the kind of societal controls that could be on our horizon. Just raising the question and knowing I am not the only one asking this, is helpful to me. I have long resonated with the idea of ‘terrain’ and ‘root causes’ with respect to health and medicine and love the analogy of saving the dying fish while also cleaning out it’s aquarium.
What I am FEELING these days, in Canada, is love. Love like i have never felt it before. All over the place. I feel like our citizenry is going along with these control measures because for some reason they FEEL right and good. Few people are afraid of the virus that I know, of getting sick themselves. They are rallying around service workers, trying to do their part to alleviate the strain on our health care system and workers. The FEEL is loving solidarity. My ‘feeling’ is that if these measures were contrary to our good, we would feel ‘off’ about them, say if we were told to walk across the street if we saw someone from a different nationality or something like that. We would NOT resonate with this, we would not all be on board. Something in the zietgeist of this situation has us all resonating from a place of love. When it is NOT love that we are feeling from our leaders, we will know it and feel it and respond accordingly. This gives me hope. It gives me trust. The bulk of us ARE feeling solidarity and as sense of ‘in this together’ which is incredibly ironic given how bodily separated we are. WHICH brings us to a broader and very interesting issue: our connectedness BEYOND our bodies. We ARE one with each other in ‘spirit’ as it were in spite of our being bodily separated. Technology joins us, but it is just the means to an end. We are ALREADY connected in our hearts, our technologies just demonstrate that and facilitate the outer expression of that inner oneness.
I am so glad for this little community of like-minded folks who are able/willing to ponder these great issues. There may be many more of us out there than we know and perhaps even a tipping point that will swing the balance towards a ‘More Beautiful World’ that is perhaps rushing towards us even in this moment. It may be that all we have to do is surrender to something wonderful that is already on its way.
And people stayed home
and read books and listened
and rested and exercised
and made art and played
and learned new ways of being
and stopped
and listened deeper
someone meditated
someone prayed
someone danced
someone met their shadow
and people began to think differently
and people healed
and in the absence of people who lived in ignorant ways,
dangerous, meaningless and heartless,
even the earth began to heal
and when the danger ended
and people found each other
grieved for the dead people
and they made new choices
and dreamed of new visions
and created new ways of life
and healed the earth completely
just as they were healed themselves.
https://www.oprahmag.com/entertainment/a31747557/and-the-people-stayed-home-poem-kitty-omeara-interview/
SURVIVAL vs. SACRIFICE
Presence
Witnessing
Acceptance
Insight
Isolation
A pause
Selfishness / Annihilation
Giving
The word for crisis from Greek, meaning “sift”, or, in other words “to re-evaluate”
STAY or GO
INTIMACY
– the thing we need the most- stripped away.
The faith needed.
This is incredibly lucid, no other word could summarize my astonishment with your work in general.
Please keep the flame on!
My very best wishes,
Kevork
The Rev. Stephen Kendrick, minister of First Church Unitarian Universalist in Boston, gave his sermon today over the radio waves of WERS 88.9, and said he found divinity within the irrepressible creativity of our human artistic spirit. And he also highlighted the opportunity of this astonishing pause, and concluded,
“Instead of ‘repent!’, I say, ‘repaint!'”
“I sent you Eisenstein’s thinking about corona. It helped me put this in perspective. Each day I awake on our living planet now is a gift. I am 80years old, and if I get sick and die of this it will be okay…nobody’s fault…my time to go. I didn’t really think I would live to see the beginning of the big transition time, but here it is. I hope it makes us humans become more conscious and thoughtful, more loving, more accepting, and in awe of the wonders of life and the peacefulness of death. I want to stay home and die here in my right place with loved ones nearby and loving energy on gossamer threads coming from my loved ones far away. I hope you all stay well and will be part of the change toward a more loving, balanced, harmonious and connected way of life for all.”
Now I will read your essay again and look forward to more as we go along. Love, Diana
Don’t know if you’re killin me or giving birth to me.
I’m for using Pavarotti and kindness bombs (or whatever, what you said).
Thx from my heart for the enlightenment.
Fran
and forget our perfect offering,
there’s a crack, a crack in everything,
that’s how the light gets in!
—Leonard Cohen
So grateful for such balanced, open, rich views
and the Space…. holy soothing Space of “I don’t know”, of no black nor white, no short cuts nor by passing… the ground for life to express itself at a pace that has nothing to do with the instant survival response nor some clever cognitive firing.
I can fully appreciate how the opposite (be it the catastrophic hysteria or the glittery spiritual by passing) follows the road of fast consumerism by another “this is it” kind of answer, in which I dipped in too many times, leaving more frazzled, overwhelmed, confused and looping deeper in my own insanity.
More reads of “the Coronation” to be for another slow sip of the unknown, another small nudge within the crystallized, another gentle breath in the discomfort, another heart opening in the great Mystery, another bow in reverence to What is….
Thank you
I will certainly read it more than once. It is like a security blanket map to me – although it makes no promises, the honesty you shared is hugely reassuring & a gift to all that take the time to read it. Thank you for being you.
Like many, I have been You Tubing a bit. I especially enjoy the brilliant Kenyan Trevor Noah who took over for John Stuart on Comedy Central. His trips to Kenya to speak w his Granny are full of delight and wisdom.
He learned from her and I believe participated in, planting potatoes…..after death, the body would be buried, covered over and as they had little land, potatoes would be planted over the beloved. I doubt the powers that be in control now would ever allow this nor would we have the purity of body/soul to tolerate.
I love this vision of pushing up daisies and feeding the next generation.
As usual, thank you Charles and all for opening my eyes and heart a bit more. Feeling the richness of the loam of us ALL and this idea planet.
WHO decides how to handle this virus? Whose values preside? And what is the decision process to get there? The audience for this kind of missive is mainly white, well-educated, and middle class or more. So am I; I am not trying to shame anybody here. I am asking: If you have decided that you don’t want to isolate yourself; you are open to your mortality, unafraid, unwilling to deprive yourself and your kid of human contact; unwilling to submit to centralized control… Do you have a right to decide that for others who don’t have much voice in society anyway? Are your values theirs? If you have cancer, and have decided you don’t want further treatment; you are ready to die surrounded by your loved ones… bless you on your journey. If you have a contagious illness and decide the same thing, resulting in you and your friends breaking quarantine, you are unwittingly exposing others to your values–values you agreed on and less privileged people didn’t… or, if they have, we may not know about it–because like it or not, we don’t move in the same circles.
Charles, you did a beautiful job here… I agree with many points, and do not mean to shame you by these words (a common problem nowadays). But I think this kind of writing would be so much more effective couched in a communal response that was issued by a group of elders, by people representing some of the under-represented groups of our society. There could be fruitful disagreement, out of which a stronger coalition could be made. And I am sure there would be many points of accord and solidarity, out of which more effective networks would be forged. You are asking for more community–I am suggesting it be implanted in the very important act of storytelling, of meaning-making.
Sad world, we live in… We only act for ourselves, not for others.
“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.”
– Charles Einstein
We only act for ourselves, not for others.
“There are some data suggesting that COVID infection, especially later in severe illness, may have a significant cytokine surge causing or contributing to the pathology,” said David Cennimo, an infectious-disease expert and assistant professor at the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. “I am not aware of data on elderberry and cytokines or COVID specifically.”
https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/mar/23/does-elderberry-make-things-worse-people-exposed-c/
Given elderberry’s role in boosting immune response, something that can exacerbate the effects of the virus as above, it’s far from obvious whether it might harm or help. The FDA has even been cautious about its NSAID recommendations due to possible unknown interaction effects. There is no malice in holding back recommendations for medicine, but much more so a duty of care.
We operate a food rescue nonprofit and have seen the state of emergency with hunger for years-
Also during the first 3 weeks of this have seen fear grip the hearts of our volunteers even in very controlled and safe settings disabling is to feed the hungry as we had been doing before this- now with an amplified need.
K-
Joyskitchen.org
This happens through the malnutrition and compromised health that has been common since the agricultural revolution. But it also comes from the concentrated populations of humans and other animals that acts as a breeding ground for new diseases to mutate. Even malaria probably originated in agricultural centers before spreading out into the wild.
It’s not merely aspiring ruling elite taking advantage of a bad situation or simply promoting some ideological vision of progress. That makes it seem too conscious and intentional. Research shows that places of high rates of infections and parasites also have high rates of conservatism and authoritarianism. It is a psychological response built into our biology from hominid evolution.
If we want to seek a truly free and democratic society, we will have to create a fully healthy society. Disease brings out responses of fear and anxiety with demands to enforce control, stability, and certainty. But most of the diseases we face are caused by our own behaviors. Most healthcare costs go to metabolic diseases caused by the heavy consumption of refined carbs, added sugar, seed oils, etc.
Consider that 88% of Americans suffer from some condition of metabolic syndrome: obesity, diabetes, fatty liver disease, heart disease, hypertension, etc. And consider that those infected and dying from COVID-19 are mostly those with metabolic syndrome. This is because insulin resistance is at the root of metabolic dysfunction and insulin is central to the immune system. About compromised immune functioning, there are other causal mechanisms as well related to diet and lifestyle.
We see health as a secondary issue. But maybe it’s the singlemost important issue. When we look to utopian visions of the future where progressive ideology has come to dominate, such as Star Trek: The Next Generation, what we see is a society that has solved the healthcare crisis, where healthcare is effective and available to all, where diets and lifestyle promote health instead of disease. People don’t seek right-wing authoritarianism because of the lack of infectious diseases and parasites that elicit such a deep-seated response.
We need to learn to think more carefully about what creates the conditions for the kind of society we find ourselves in.