06 August 2022

Virus: feared vector of health

 [This article is a companion piece to The real Great Conspiracy]

I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection, and I think we overplayed the vaccines and it made people then worry that it’s not gonna protect against severe disease and hospitalisation – it will – but let’s be very clear: 50% of the people who died from the omicron surge were older and vaccinated. – Deborah Birx 

In a time of universal deceit, the truth is a revolutionary act. – Wrongly attributed to George Orwell

Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know. – Pema Chödrön

Introduction

I’ve already planted the above Birx quote at the top of a previous post; it reveals so much about our modern situation. Appointed by Trump as “Coronavirus Response Coordinator”, Birx recently admitted on Fox News that she withheld critical information on, and therefore “overplayed” the effectiveness of, the so-called ‘vaccines’. In a single sentence, she asserts these medical devices “will” protect against “severe disease and hospitalisation”, but then proceeds to inform us that 50% of those who died “from” omicron were “vaccinated” – two, three or four jabs? – and “older” – older than average life expectancy? 

“But let’s be very clear”.

What a sentence she put forth into the world! One dizzying contradiction following a garbled passage on overplaying vaccine effectiveness somehow worrying people about that effectiveness – huh? – in a hurried gush of bewildering blah. How is she, or the government, or the official covid narrative, remotely trusted? 

Well, mass formation is the answer, but it still bedazzles me.

I could say more about Birx’s Blurt, but will leave it at that. It stands at the top of this article as an exemplary expression of advanced civilisational decadence. Below, we’re going to take a look at the nature of that decadence, and what it might teach us about ourselves and civilisation.

In a nutshell

It boils down to this: There is far too much power in the hands of far too few people. To make matters worse, The System does not promote the wise and humble to its power-management echelons. Worse still, modernity’s education systems dumb down the majority. Actually, probably every single one of us is dumbed down by establishment education systems, worldwide. 

And these are not the only fatal problems modernity faces. There are several other fundamental issues also pertaining to power accumulation that are rooted in how we culturally understand success and value. I’ve repeatedly addressed these matters here at Econosophy.

Consequently, there is now far too much to change in too short a timeframe if we are to avert some manner of very messy collapse. This was the likely outcome of a human world intractably entangled (invested) in decisions made over the last three centuries or so. Our hands and feet are bound by such convoluted knots, our societal nimbleness now spasms one weak breath above nothing.

Despite many thinkers and activists having written, sung, shouted, and otherwise agitated on these points all along the way, somehow this situation has crept up on us. I think this is because a civilisation’s defining paradigms – this time around materialism’s definitional hold on wealth, value and success – determine its vector far more than valid criticism thereof. Critics are effectively asking a partying throng of teenagers to stop what they’re doing and go clean their rooms. By the time the house is visibly falling down, it’s too late.

This dynamic is, I suspect, endemic to civilisation to some degree, and perhaps even to life itself. It is thus not conspiratorial in the first instance. That said, it requires conspiring to get us to the stage where the house is falling down and we didn’t see it coming. Otherwise, I suspect the critics would have become sufficiently effective at pointing out the negative consequences of the constant partying, such that less dramatic corrections would have been possible. Humans are not stupid, just manipulatable towards both wisdom and folly. It takes sustained effort to ensure the majority of humanity is nudged away from wisdom across several centuries. And vice versa of course, albeit in the latter instance an organic, loving manner of effort fundamentally different from the former.

To repeat a point I make often: The primary beneficiaries of the partying want to remain its primary beneficiaries. Like vigilant gardeners, they are therefore constantly obliged to nix any serious threat to that partying, the very partying on which their lofty status rests. Being systemic, then, this obligation remains regardless of churn within civilisation’s upper echelons. “Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.” After all, this is essentially what the upper echelon’s job involves: ensuring maximally stable continuity; their ‘livelihoods’ depend on it. Their efforts to that end must, I believe, include some amount of conspiring. It is, however, beyond my wisdom to make any confident pronouncement on whether all this is somehow for the ‘greater good’. Were I forced to address that possibility, I would, like a good philosopher-poet, respond, “It is, and it is not.”

One way or another, then, we now find ourselves in clown world, in upside-down world. Humanity has been here many times before; historical dawn to historical decadence is a repeating pattern. At its end stage, as if a paranoid cocaine addict, civilisation peers out at the world that sustains it and confuses the health-restoring correction rushing towards it from the horizon as a virus-like existential threat. 

To the ramparts!

Desperately seeking correction

I’ve been pondering the ‘rightness’ of majority desires and expectations as a true indication of where humanity stands in terms of its quality of consciousness. We get the most accurate read possible on where we’re at as a people by looking at the quality of our choices, fears, desires and expectations. 

In other words, I’m exploring this alarming idea: while ego dominates the vast majority – thanks to all that dumbing down and the sacred cow of consumerism –, totalitarianism might be the only ‘healthy’ way through this historical moment. Rephrased as a question: Is the disruptive, psychic-toxin-purging frenzy of totalitarianism now the only possible experience powerful enough to bring us to our senses, to bring us back towards our better selves?

Just as with all sicknesses, totalitarianism’s particular presentation of collective symptoms would also be a mechanism for purging the patient of particular toxins. Would that make totalitarianism the ‘right’ choice, the painful-but-healing choice, for what ails us? 

If sufficient numbers of us fail to do the work to self-heal, fail to communicate our experiences and perspectives lovingly and effectively enough, are we thereby ‘choosing’ totalitarianism by default? It’s not an easy question to answer.

As argued above, there are manipulators perpetuating our ego-based state of being, manipulators who ‘benefit’ – for want of a better word – from the status quo. Nevertheless, we are each responsible for our own evolution, for our own quality of consciousness. The only alternative I can see to this unvarnished truth, is choosing victimhood by blaming the powerful “Black Hats” for our intractable predicament. Victimhood, however, can only choose to passively await the powerful “White Hats” to come clear up the mess. I see that as a sugar pill to more of the same a little way down the line. 

Only we – each last man, woman and child of us – can do what it takes to evolve the quality of our consciousness. That’s up to us. That’s our job. We are responsible for how we react to reality. After all, no one else can react to reality for us.

It follows, then, that we can ‘want’ totalitarianism by default. By refusing to summon the courage and desire required to look ourselves in the eye and face what we have become, we fail to develop the drive to do what it takes not to slip into totalitarianism. 

And yet at the same time, I’m convinced we don’t really, actively want that vector. Sadly, though, it seems we can only discover this by walking – sleepwalking – into it, then awaking to find ourselves in a nightmare.

So what if we do find ourselves in global totalitarianism a few years from now? Will we see it, clearly and honestly, for what it is? Perhaps not initially – not openly anyway. But we’ll feel it in the pits of our stomachs. It will be a regretful, guilty knowing working away at us in our depths. For how long will we remain ‘sane’ soothing ourselves with the mantra, “This is fine”?

Our choices are investments in the future they yield. The longer we persist in repeating choices of the quality we’ve tended to make thus far, the more invested in that quality of ever-unfolding future we become. As the saying goes, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. This applies individually and collectively, where collective ‘old dogs’ are far harder to teach. 

Globally, then, we are about as invested in narcissistic consumerism as it is possible to be. We have flunked every single opportunity available to us these past 60 years to correct our deep dependency, our systemic and personal addiction, to this decaying vector. The correction, therefore, will be mighty, is mighty; I suspect it is well underway. In the end, though, it is understandable that we have so feared it, kicked it down the road for our children to face. 

Well, here we are.

Correction back to health perceived as ‘virus’

Correction is sickness. Sickness is the presentation of symptoms. Symptoms are the body’s mechanisms for leading itself back to health. For those fearfully opposed to going through a needed correction – symptoms are hardly pleasant experiences –, that which triggers the onset of symptoms is the enemy, something to be assiduously avoided. 

So then what would the ‘successful’ installation of global totalitarianism mean for those of us who have committed so much to preventing it? After all, we, too, would be its subjects, its serfs.

My obvious yet important answer is that we would then have the more difficult challenge – the exquisitely difficult challenge – of healing humanity from within totalitarianism. Humour, love, humility, compassion, strength, courage, gentle cunning, wisdom, art, poetry, logic … all these things and more would be needed, as now, but with yet greater subtlety and firmness. I suspect the hysterical-allergic response to potential correction would intensify; the perception of that which attempts to heal the dysfunction would be experienced as a ‘virus’ by the dysfunctional system: a thing capable of replication within, and thus infecting the entire body of, totalitarianism. Of course, it’s like that today to a large degree, but would be even more so should all planned control infrastructure be installed. It would be far harder to effect resistance, for example, with the very targeted and effective control of our behaviours and actions made possible by digital central-bank money. Harder, but not impossible. 

The more gently and humbly we love those around us, the harder it is for them not to trust and respect us. All living beings can pick up on that quality of love, feel it in those from whom it radiates. Just as now and always, this is the healthiest and most effective foundation any resistance to tyranny can work from. In other words, the difficulty of the challenge would change, but not its essential quality: gently coaxing a frightened but deadly child from its secure hiding place, out into a larger, more open, richer reality.

Conclusion

No system of control can be total. Life is, in essence, the unstoppable drive towards freedom of expression. Opposed, it always finds a way to reassert the freedom that is its spirit. I like the analogy of a teacher confronted with a classroom of children. Every rule laid down as The Law can be ‘innocently’ misinterpreted by her students, or bent, or kinda-sorta breached, recalcitrantly ignored, etc. 

Total control is impossible. Indeed, I’m not embarrassed making the tautological assertion that the ‘successful’ implementation of total control is the guarantee of that system’s demise because total control is impossible. 

As you do unto self, so you do unto other. 

For example, the education systems of the world are designed to dumb us down, to break our wills. Those who designed them likely thought it was ‘for the greater good’ – industrialisation, economic growth, writing, arithmetic, etc. We are educated towards narrowing stupidity by standardisation, measurement, curricula, specialisation, promotion of efficiency at the cost of resilience… And yet the ever-repeating processes initiated by upper-echelon groups against the rest of humanity harm the whole, not just the unwashed masses Out There. Global education systems produce a particular quality of population, nation by nation, spawn peoples decreasingly capable of wise, creative decision making, manufacture citizens too obedient and dependent to build and sustain healthy lives in any meaningful way. Which poisons the whole, poisons the upper echelons, who become spoilt, ego driven, seduced into seeing themselves as Natural Rulers, as gods among men, etc. This further poisons the whole by exacerbating the situation in a positive feedback loop whose bitter fruits are falling from the trees today, in abundance. The pattern repeats across media, business, law, politics … everywhere. It is a civilisational pattern called Us Against Them

As simple as all this sounds, it is our most fundamental blindspot.

So I don’t care who you are, you cannot beat life itself. You are, we all are, expressions of life. Trying to control life Out There is as futile and absurd as trying to live meaningfully while obsessed, 24/7, with forcing your shadow to behave abnormally.

In other words, hope springs eternal. 

With the exception of suicide, we don’t choose how and when we die, but we do all die. Fearing that beautiful inevitability, that beginning of a new chapter, is obviously not worth the effort. It is therefore how we live that is worth infinitely more than how long we live. By this simple logic, love, not fear, is the answer.

What I find fascinating about all this is how healthy processes become ‘virus’ from the perspective of the dysfunction; correction becomes dysfunction’s terrifying, karma-like momentum back towards health. This is because dysfunction is experienced as ‘normal’; it emerges too incrementally, too organically, to be discerned. Health-restoring, corrective information – the truth – is thus perceived defensive-aggressively as ‘virus’: disruptive, traitorous, terrifying. Today, modernity sees ‘virus’ everywhere it looks, and does everything it can to avoid it, come hell or high water.

On the whole, then, being a truth teller is a thankless task. But that’s no biggie; love, like health, is its own reward. 

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