Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 30, 2023 - January 19, 2024
Why are we so susceptible to hysteria? Why are we so susceptible to propaganda? Why are we so susceptible to fear? Why are we so susceptible to control-based solutioneering?
How much of life shall we sacrifice at the altar of safety?
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.
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.
Covid-19 is accelerating preexisting trends, political, economic, and social.
Since the threat of infectious disease, like the threat of terrorism, never goes away, control measures can easily become permanent.
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.
“Can we afford democratic freedoms in light of the coronavirus?” they ask. “Must we now, out of necessity, sacrifice those for our own safety?”
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.
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.
spent time with the Q’ero in 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.
To hold life sacred is not just to live long, it is to live well and right and fully.
Anyone who has experienced the passing of someone close knows that death is a portal to love.
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.
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.
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.
As the statistics I offered earlier on autoimmunity, obesity, and the like indicate, America and the modern world in general are facing a health crisis.
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.
A more beautiful world shimmers just beneath the surface, bobbing up whenever the systems that hold it underwater loosen their grip.
The virus we face here is fear, whether it is fear of Covid-19 or fear of the totalitarian response to it,
I am not ruling out the possibility that someday at least some of the conspiracy theories surrounding Covid will be accepted as true.
Conspiracies do happen, and plausible means and motives are present. However, at present I still believe that most of the Covid response can be explained in other ways, namely systemic bias, groupthink, religious hysteria, mob mentality, and so forth—subjects from which conspiracy theories can divert much-needed attention.
Today, the broad consensus of trust in science and journalism is in tatters.
Our institutions of knowledge production have betrayed public trust repeatedly, as have our political institutions. Now, many people won’t believe them even when they tell the truth.
The loss of trust in science, journalism, and government reflects their long corruption: their arrogance and elitism, their alliance with corporate interests, and their institutionalized suppression of dissent.
I was a little disappointed actually, because there is indeed part of me that wishes the problem were a bunch of dastardly conspirators. Why? Because then our world’s problems would be quite easy to solve, at least in principle: Just expose and eliminate those bad guys. That is the prevailing Hollywood formula for righting the world’s wrongs: A heroic champion confronts and defeats the bad guy, and everyone lives happily ever after. Hmm, that is the same basic formula as blaming ill health on germs and killing them with the arsenal of medicine, so that we can live safe, healthy lives ever
...more
conspiracies involving powerful elites do happen.
War mentality saturates our polarized society, which envisions progress as a consequence of victory—
Each side uses the same formula, and that formula requires an enemy.
So, obligingly, we divide ourselves up into us and them, exhausting 99 percent of our energies in a fruitless tug-of-war, never once suspecting that the true evil power might be the formula itself.
The wise monarch pays attention to an unruly subject, such as a fact that defies the narrative. Maybe it is simply a disturbed troublemaker, like a simple lie, but maybe it signals disharmony in the kingdom.
We can question assumptions both sides take for granted, and ask questions neither side is asking. Not identified with either side, we can gather knowledge from both. Generalizing to society, by bringing in all the voices, including the marginalized ones, we can build a broader social consensus and begin to heal the polarization that is rending and paralyzing our society.
There is more to living than merely staying alive. We are here to live life, not just survive life.
We are not the discrete, separate individuals that modernity narrates to us. We are interconnected. We are inter-existent. We are relationship. To live fully means to relate fully.
Being quarantined in the room and isolated from family is causing massive amounts of invisible suffering and decline,
it’s not Covid that is killing their loved one—it’s the restrictions.”
Accordingly, healers treat disease by exorcising bad spirits, lifting curses, negotiating with the ancestors, driving away ghosts, and so on. People in those cultures widely consider such methods to be effective.
Mired in ignorance and superstition, they have yet to emerge into the light of modern science,
They believe in them because they work.
If it took an attitude of cultural respect, the Western media wouldn’t be so quick to write off a medical tradition with thousands of years of clinical experience and refinement practiced by literally hundreds of thousands of doctors.
None of this is to say that modern medicine has nothing to offer traditional cultures.
economic, and political systems in the image of the West. We must remember that some of the most heinous acts of racial oppression were done in the name of uplifting the savages, Christianizing the heathens.
The idea was to bring them into the “melting pot” of America, to make them like us, to supersede a backward, superstitious, inferior culture with a modern, superior one.
It is quite understandable that in a situation where one culture has vanquished another, that the vanquished should wish to join the victors. Traditionally, conservatives have said, “Too bad, we won and you lost,” while liberals have said, “Oh, we must be nice and make a place for the less fortunate.”
Science itself is changing as long-held truisms collapse.
None of the problems facing humanity today are technically difficult to solve.
However, what all of these easy solutions have in common is that they require agreement among human beings.
There is almost no limit to what a unified, coherent society can achieve.
