Musings from Mark

It is time for me to once again talk about Covid-19. Before I begin, I want to acknowledge that it is a real and sometimes harrowing illness that can and does cause death and lasting damage. I would not wish it on anyone. When I question the official fear-narrative, it is not because I value the economy over human lives, or my personal freedom over others’ personal safety. Those are narratives projected onto me and others like me by the official narrative, in order to discredit us and subject us to judgment.

When I question the official fear-narrative, it is because I feel strongly that it does not stand up to careful scrutiny. The measures prescribed to stop the spread do not, on the whole, appear to be effective. This is immediately clear when comparing states and countries which have and have not adopted these measures for periods of time, and it is a topic that the official narrative carefully avoids. Furthermore, the metrics used to publicize mortality and risk seem designed to vastly inflate the danger. In surveys, nearly everyone exhibits a level of concern out of proportion to their personal risk.

I don’t listen to mainstream news, nor do I read their websites. Their fearmongering put me off from the beginning. Instead, I follow pandemic data directly: published summaries of deaths and hospitalizations from Covid-19 from states and the CDC. I follow independent analysts who examine trends in Covid deaths, all-cause deaths, and deaths likely attributable to lockdowns (loneliness, mental illness, suicide).

Personally, I mostly stopped worrying about Covid-19 after it passed through my godmother’s senior living complex without major incident. Out of 36 women mostly in their 80s, eleven tested positive, three had symptoms, and one was hospitalized and recovered. Perhaps they were lucky, but those odds seemed a lot closer to the flu than to the Black Death, and they also matched the statistics I was seeing. Even among vulnerable groups, Covid is still largely survivable and often not even severe.

That’s not to say that no precautions are warranted, but it is worth questioning at what level these precautions should be determined. Federal? State? Local? Maybe even the residents of a senior living complex should be allowed to decide for themselves how careful they want to be? During the last major pandemic, in 1918-1919 (which was several times worse than Covid-19 and also killed many children and young adults), people had many of the same debates regarding masks and business closures, but nearly all of them happened at the local level. Then-president Woodrow Wilson never even mentioned the pandemic, focused as he was on national defense during World War I.

It seems to me that one’s level of comfort with disease risk is a personal decision, and when that risk extends to others (in interpersonal interactions, or in terms of hospital capacity) it becomes a community decision. A city-level decision. A county-level decision. In the beginning, perhaps, when there is a chance of keeping a new disease out of a nation, then it should be a federal matter, but once it is firmly entrenched with no real hope of eradication then it becomes a personal and local matter. A useful federal government would seek to support its citizens in making personal choices to stay healthy – perhaps by deploying the military or national guard during outbreaks to fill essential service roles while offering paid vacation to vulnerable elders who normally work those jobs. An authoritarian federal government – like many around the world and increasingly our own – would instead enact a bunch of emergency laws and criminalize or stigmatize citizens who break them, while doing little of substance to support vulnerable or impoverished people in their own health choices.

The whole Covid saga is full of ideological truths that are either oversimplifications or are largely unsupported by real-world evidence. It’s worth asking exactly how that occurred – is it some sort of conspiracy or is it simply what happens when a new virus appears and spreads rapidly around the globe, with an apparently-high mortality rate (due to only testing the most seriously ill), and the panels of experts at the WHO and CDC need to make decisions with insufficient information? Perhaps these “experts” know that they over-reacted, but given the level of fear in the population and their need to keep their “expert” status they can’t admit that now? I don’t really need to know how it happened. I just want it to end.

It seems certain to me that if we had understood the full risk profile of Covid-19 from the beginning, our governments would never have enacted the suite of emergency measures begun last spring. In particular, we now know that governments that never imposed lockdowns on their citizens (e.g. Sweden) did not experience significantly more illness and death than countries with strict lockdowns (e.g. Spain, UK), and also that states that relaxed all pandemic measures early (e.g. Florida) did not experience a higher rate of illness or death in the ensuing wave than states that maintained and strengthened such measures (e.g. New York, California). We also know that no state or country, regardless of control measures, has yet experienced an overall Covid mortality rate greater than 3000 per million – or three out of every 1000 people, or one out of 350. Most places have been closer to half that number – one out of 700.

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Take a minute, if you will, to set aside all of the events and news stories of the past year and a half. Imagine that you live in a small town in the pre-Internet age, population 350, with a tight-knit community and people of all ages. As the town is gathered for their annual summer celebration, an official government vehicle drives up and a man gets out, demanding an urgent audience with the entire town.

He faces the crowd of 350 people solemnly and begins to speak.

There is a new and deadly virus among you.

If you do not act, one among your number will likely be dead by the time a year has passed, in addition to the four or so people who will die of natural causes during that time. In all likelihood, the one who succumbs will be elderly and already seriously ill.

More than half of you will be infected. Some will not even know it. For some it will be like a mild cold. For many it will be rather unpleasant – like a bad flu that lasts 1-2 weeks. Around five of you will develop pneumonia and require medical treatment. Up to ten of you may experience longer-term symptoms after recovery – fatigue and a changed sense of smell are most common – and for one or two these symptoms may become chronic.

In order to prevent this death and disease, you must change your lives effective immediately. All school buildings will be closed for a year, and children will learn at home. All restaurants must transition to take-out only. All nonessential travel is strongly discouraged. All work that can be done remotely must be done from home, with offices closed. Thirty of you will be out of work effective tomorrow.

All public events must be cancelled. There will be no celebrations like this one, no sporting events, no dances, no big weddings, no funeral gatherings for a year. People from different households must remain six feet apart whenever possible, and masks must be worn over the mouth and nose in all indoor environments away from home. In-home gatherings must be limited to two households, wearing masks.

All close contact with people outside your immediate household, including hugs, kisses, sex, holding hands, dancing, and singing will be strongly discouraged or prohibited.

Hands should be washed as often as possible, or sanitized with alcohol. Avoid touching your mouth, nose, and eyes.

Visits to elder care facilities and hospitals will be strictly prohibited. All who are ill and dying in this time will have those experiences alone. This is unfortunate but necessary for your safety.

We assure you that if you take these actions you will be safe. We make this assurance despite evidence that communities that take all of these actions often experience comparable levels of illness and death to those who simply adhere to standard flu season hygiene recommendations.

After a year we will return with a vaccine. We assure you that this vaccine will be safe and effective. However, we will still discourage vaccinated people from resuming normal activities because some level of viral spread remains possible. Furthermore, this vaccine will utilize a new technology not previously deployed in vaccines, and will have been tested in a small group of volunteers for around six months before we are confident that it is safe enough to be given to everyone on the planet.

We trust that you find this approach reasonable, and we kindly request your cooperation, for your own safety. Good night.

At which point the crowd probably erupts in a mixture of laughter and anger, picks up their pitchforks and canes, and chases the poor fellow back to his car, with a stern message that any government which dares to impose such madness has no authority in this town.

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The disconnect between the narrative and reality here is so extreme that I find it difficult to operate in both worlds. I understand that most of these actions were initiated at a time when we thought we might be dealing with a much more dangerous virus, and when we thought that a lockdown could drive cases to zero in a few weeks at which point we could more or less return to normal. But it turned out that we were dealing with a virus that killed around 1 in 200 people it infected, that it primarily killed those who were already approaching natural death, and furthermore that no amount of lockdown could drive cases to zero, and reopening didn’t seem to result in a sudden case spike either.

We realized all of these things, but we were still afraid. A few small studies showed that masks might be effective, so we made them mandatory as a condition of reopening businesses. When later studies and comparisons between masked/unmasked communities revealed little to no effect on a larger scale, we pretended that didn’t matter and continued to believe that our masks were keeping us safe.

The amount of ideological truth in play here is immense, to the point where I imagine the cognitive dissonance must soon begin to break under the strain. This is not unprovable ideological truth regarding the existence of God or when exactly during fetal development human life begins. This is ideological truth that is directly contradicted by observable physical reality. And yet somehow it persists.

Ideological truth: Covid-19 is a uniquely dangerous virus with a catastrophic death toll.

Physical truth: Covid-19 is substantially less deadly than the Spanish Flu of 1918-19, which was itself vastly less deadly than earlier smallpox and bubonic plague pandemics. It is true that in the vaccine and antibiotic era we are no longer willing to accept large death tolls from infectious disease. That said, the way that deaths have been reported (as raw numbers for a country of 330 million people), and the way that these numbers have been compared to wars and terrorist attacks, seems unnecessarily designed to inspire fear. A nationwide death count of 550,000 can be equally represented as 1 out of every 600 people, which better matches most people’s lived experience of knowing one or two people who have died of Covid-19 over the course of the pandemic. It is also true that only one out of nine people who died in the US in 2020 died of Covid-19 – a 13% increase in all-cause mortality.

Ideological truth: Covid-19 deaths would be much higher if we hadn’t locked down.

Physical truth: This is possibly true for places that used a temporary lockdown as part of an early and effective strategy to prevent the virus from becoming widespread, including New Zealand and Australia.  It is almost certainly untrue for places that experienced a significant outbreak including New York, California, and the UK.  The primary evidence for this is simply that places that did not lock down (e.g. Sweden) or that lifted restrictions entirely (e.g. Florida) did not end up with runaway case growth, overflowing hospitals, or even comparably higher death rates.

Ideological Truth: Masks prevent transmission.

Physical Truth: Small studies have shown that masks should be effective in preventing transmission, but epidemiological data have failed to reveal a consistent and dramatic difference in viral transmission and prevalence between locations with and without mask mandates. If masks do have a real-world effect, the magnitude of that effect is likely small, in the range of 20% or less. Which means that while they may not be useless, masks are hardly the magic shields that we believe them to be, nor are maskless people the walking biohazards that religious mask-wearers believe them to be.

Ideological Truth: There is no effective treatment or prevention for Covid-19.

Physical Truth: There are several promising options which have – for inexplicable and quite likely profit-oriented reasons – never been examined in sufficient depth to be endorsed by the WHO or FDA. A constantly-updated meta-analysis of small studies and clinical reports reveals, for example, that ivermectin treatment is correlated with a 76% reduction in Covid-19 mortality while hydroxychloroquine treatment, if applied early, is correlated with a 64% improvement in mortality. It has also been observed that people who have adequate to high vitamin D levels very seldom suffer from severe illness, and that treatment with vitamin D appears (based on small studies) to reduce mortality by around 69%. These are dramatic and repeatable effects that warrant the same level of investment being applied to designer drugs and vaccines, in order to establish whether and under what circumstances these treatments are effective. Instead, the response of the medical establishment has been to identify at least one study showing no effect which is then cited as definitive proof and a reason to avoid further investigation. In the case of hydroxychloroquine, there was even a study purportedly showing no effect published in a leading journal that was later retracted for using questionable data. Clinical trials are complete or ongoing for a wide variety of “repurposed” medicines (developed for other conditions and used to treat Covid-19), and several show preliminary mortality reductions in the 90% range – rivaling the reported effectiveness of vaccines.

Ideological Truth: Covid-19 vaccines are safe and effective.

Physical Truth: This could well turn out to be true (and I certainly hope it does), but it is being marketed with a level of confidence that borders on religious faith and is far from justified by the science. All three of the vaccines released in the US so far utilize novel technologies (mRNA and viral vectors) that have not been previously employed in widely-available shots. While clinical trials (and emerging real-world data) have found them to be effective at preventing severe disease and also reasonably well tolerated (albeit with substantially stronger side effects than most vaccines to the point that recipients are advised to take a day off of work), we do not yet know anything about their long-term safety or effectiveness because no human being has yet lived for more than a year since receiving the vaccine. A typical vaccine development timeline requires 5-10 years before receiving FDA approval. The Covid-19 vaccines are not FDA approved via the normal process but were instead released under an “emergency authorization.” To claim that these vaccines are as safe as any other vaccine is to claim that the standard 5-10 year testing and approval timeframe is totally unnecessary, which would be absurd. The only honest statement here is that the vaccines proved to be safe and effective in limited short-term clinical trials, but that the level of certainty remains low particularly with regard to long-term immunity or long-term adverse effects.

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As we become mired in ideological truth, our societies become less able to respond to the crises of our time, even as an effective response becomes increasingly critical. We remain one small radar error or human miscalculation away from a global nuclear war that would threaten all lives, and yet we confidently scrap our nuclear treaties while cowering in fear and shutting down society over a virus that will be a barely-observable blip in the mortality tables of our history books. Fifty years from now, historical journalists will be much more likely to write about “The Covid-19 Panic of 2020” than “The Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020.”

Global capitalism continues to drive the planet and the working classes into the ground, and Covid-19 has given us another great distraction – a reason to hunker down and fear for our personal safety, a reason to ask the corporate experts for protection rather than to demand their resignation, a reason to shift our buying habits from small-town businesses to multinational online retailers. Whether produced intentionally or not, the fear narrative surrounding Covid-19 serves the interests of the corporate elite – in distraction from grassroots campaigns, in eliminating competition, in moving us away from democracy and toward an authoritarian state.

I have come to believe that if we are going to break free from this madness, we must reclaim control of the narrative. The corporate media – whether left or right – has effectively become propaganda that seeks to keep us afraid, keep us wishing for protection and willing to support emergency measures to achieve it, prevent us from looking within ourselves and becoming the people we wish to be, prevent us from mounting effective opposition to the disempowerment, wealth inequality, and ecological destruction wrought by global capitalism.

We must stop looking outward for truth. If we continue looking for truth out there somewhere, when we give up on NPR and CNN we become vulnerable to InfoWars and QAnon. I would not be at all surprised to learn that QAnon was an intentional dead-end cleverly devised to lure would-be truth seekers away from confrontation with real power.

We need to start trusting in ourselves, in our communities. Linking those communities together to rebuild democracy from the ground up. To put candidates on the ballot who are not beholden to corporate dollars, and who will put the interests of ordinary people first.

We need to stop seeing each other as biohazards, as potential threats. That, in and of itself, is immensely distancing and immensely destructive to the sort of community-building that is needed to enact change. This can’t just be a carefully managed reopening, along the lines of “fully vaccinated people may now meet in groups of up to 25 without masks.” At some point it must instead be a wholesale rejection of the fear mentality – “we are going to live our lives as we choose, thank you very much, rules and guidelines be damned.” We cannot enact the change we need while we are afraid – especially if we fear each other more than we fear the corporate authoritarians making the rules.

It always comes down to fear, it seems. Fear drives us apart, makes us open to suggestion. Trust brings us together, builds strong movements from the ground up. If we are to change this crazy world for the better, we must somehow let go of fear and rebuild trust. And we must do this in the face of manipulative systems that are doing their level best to keep us afraid. That’s a tall order, yet somehow I remain hopeful.

Into a new day I go. Into a new day we go. Together.

Inclusive Authoritarianism is Still Authoritarian

I recognize that my posts about politics get fewer likes than my poems. I am an odd duck, it seems, in my unwillingness to accept mainstream narratives of any stripe. Perhaps it would be easier for me if I just trusted the experts and went along with the story.

But I can’t do that. I have never been willing to play anyone else’s game, or to believe anyone else’s story because they said so, no matter how impressive their credentials. I am both a spiritual person and scientist. My spirituality informs me about the nature of consciousness, of the universe, of change and evolution through deep time. I don’t speak or write much about my spirituality because it is personal, I can’t prove it to anyone, and I have no need to convince others of its validity, and yet it is very important to my sense of myself. My scientist nature informs me about the here and now. I understand that science is almost never “settled,” and that what is true in some contexts is very often untrue in others, and vice versa.

I am befuddled – and, frankly, angered – by my observation that many of the very same scientists who have been loudly denouncing religion for preaching dogmatic truth are now preaching dogmatic truth themselves. “Based in science,” they say, and yet utterly unwilling to admit nuance or to change their minds when actual science casts serious doubt on their claims.

Most of my essays have been idealistic in nature – illustrating my perceptions of what is wrong with our society and what “we” could do to make it better, more harmonious, more egalitarian, more sustainable. This is not that, though it covers some of the same territory. This is a personal essay, full of personal emotion. This is me saying that I am not OK with the way the world is changing. I am not OK with the culture of fear that has overtaken our society. I am not OK with the rifts this is opening within communities, between family and friends. I am not OK with the way in which people with naturally high anxiety have been disproportionately impacted – wearing double masks on remote mountain trails and sanitizing hands until they are red and raw. I am not OK with my observation that our society is becoming increasingly prone to groupthink and unreason, and less able to pursue effective solutions to the serious problems that we face.

I do not wish to be an activist or a warrior. I wish to be a critical thinker, a problem-solver, a friend, a loving partner, a contributor to a resilient and interconnected human community. And yet I am increasingly feeling unwelcome. Mainstream media sources are now disparaging critical thinking itself, suggesting that we only engage with information that has traveled through approved, mainstream channels.

The famous quote by Martin Niemöller was often cited in leftward politics during the Trump years:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niemöller, 1946 (translated and edited)

The feeling at that time was that Trump was leading the nation dangerously in that direction with his “criminals, drug dealers, and rapists” statement (in reference to undocumented immigrants) and his ban on all travelers from a number of Muslim-majority nations. First they came for the undocumented immigrants…and then for the Muslims…and then for the trans people…and the Black people…and then for me.

Those writers were absolutely correct to call out this intolerance and its dangerous historical parallels, but at the same time it is very easy to move from calling people out to condemning them for their beliefs and thereby participating in an analogous process of ratcheting intolerance. And it is quite clear, as illustrated by Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment and many others from left-leaning pundits, that it was usually people – rather than beliefs and ideas – that were being condemned.

If such condemnation were limited to people espousing racist or xenophobic views, I might not approve but I wouldn’t be writing this. But the basket of deplorables is getting bigger. It now includes mothers whose children were injured by vaccines, and who are fighting the doctors and lawyers who claim without proof that such injuries are impossible. It now includes naturopaths and chiropractors who aim to treat the whole body to maintain health rather than following the pill-pushing symptom-abatement approach of mainstream corporate medicine. I owe a great debt myself to one such practitioner, who was able to quickly solve a vexing digestive issue of mine that had flummoxed the MDs. It now includes journalists who dare to question US imperialism, to take a stand against online censorship, or to expose US war crimes. Under this paradigm all races, religions, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations are equally welcome, provided that they don’t rock the ideological boat.

First they came for the Proud Boys…and then for the anti-vaxxers…and then for the anti-maskers…and then for the herbalists and naturopaths…and then for the independent journalists…and then for the critical thinkers…and then for me.

The “me” at the end there now clearly includes not just some hypothetical version of myself, but the actual “me” with my own thoughts and ideas. I can be quite sure that if my blog had ten million readers instead of just ten, that I would be actively deplatformed, canceled, smeared, discredited, and – if that didn’t work – quite possibly disappeared. Our society’s tolerance for dissenting opinion is rapidly declining, and I am very much not OK with that. At the least, let it be said that I cast my lot with those who would fight for personal freedoms.

Our long-divided, gridlocked, dysfunctional democracy is rapidly transforming itself into something much less democratic. At the same time, it does not look to be following the path of the Weimar Republic. From my perspective, the process is captured in these flow charts:

For quite a few years I have written about the ways in which working people are devalued and disrespected under global capitalism, and the way this has been feeding into a growing populist movement. I had hoped that this movement might find a champion – a modern-day FDR – who would push back hard against corporate influence and enact policies that would redistribute wealth down the ladder and restore respect and dignity to a hard day’s work. Instead it found Donald Trump – a wealthy world-class con-man who used psychological trickery to form a bond of solidarity with that pent-up working-class anger. Then, instead of instituting much-needed change, he undertook a campaign of scapegoating: “punching down” to blame their suffering on undocumented immigrants, on welfare recipients, on “worthless liberals.”

While I never believed that Trump had Hitler potential, or that we would really go very far down the road of identity-based authoritarianism, that opinion was not shared by many in the left-leaning mainstream media, who insisted day after day that Trump and his supporters had to be stopped and silenced if we were to “preserve our democracy.” Never mind that it is logically impossible to “preserve democracy” by silencing dissenting opinion. Never mind that “fighting authoritarianism” in this manner is itself an act of authoritarianism. Never mind that the only real way to preserve democracy is to rebuild trust, to bridge divides, to find common ground even with those who hold different (and in some cases personally offensive) views, as I have written about before.

And so I find myself in the United States of America in the year 2021, under a new president with old ideas, in a world that is pretending to return to normal after a year of pandemic, social protest, and electoral upheaval. Emergency-authorized vaccines will soon be available to everyone, with intense media and social pressure to accept the jab. College basketball goes on. Life proceeds apace, but with strange abnormalities and discontinuities. Trump has been silenced, and every day Google hides more search results and Facebook flags more “misinformation.” The number of people affected is not small, and the pressure and anger must be building. Some supplies are still missing from shelves, and the price of lumber has quadrupled. Houses are selling like hotcakes at insane prices, and investors are piling millions into cryptocurrency and “non-fungible tokens.” The money seems fake somehow, having been generated by a booming stock market magically detached from the pandemic-shocked real economy. In short, it feels like a calm before a storm, and I can only hope that the storm – if and when it arrives – moves us back in the direction of true democracy and away from our headlong rush into authoritarianism.

At the moment, it seems clear to me that we are moving rapidly toward an authoritarian government less reminiscent of Nazi Germany and more reminiscent of the former Soviet Union. I must say it is rather disconcerting to see a Soviet-born US citizen posting things like this:

I would like to point out that there is no difference between the Soviet propaganda of my childhood and today's propaganda in the West. None. Even the visual style is eerily similar. That's all.

— Tessa Lena a.k.a. Tessa Fights Robots ❤️ (@TessaMakesLove) April 2, 2021

This phenomenon is by no means confined to the United States. It appears to be nearly global, although it is most dominant in the wealthy, strongly-capitalist nations of the Anglosphere and Western Europe. After decades of increasing corporate influence in government and a revolving door between corporate and civil leadership positions, national governments are beginning to function more like corporate headquarters than like representative democracies. That means that we the people are transitioning from the role of sovereign citizens to that of employees, subject to the whims and dictates of upper management.

Upper management, in this case, consists of the array of unelected governmental agencies, NGOs, international organizations, think tanks, and corporate lobbyists that collectively guide policy. I am not a conspiracy theorist in the sense that I think these people are evil and working together in some dastardly scheme. Rather, I suspect that most of the people involved see themselves as working toward a better world. The problem is that “better”, for them, involves increased corporate profits along with improvements in abstract statistical measures of human well-being. So they might want to see reduced deaths per million from a particular disease, or reduced highway fatalities, or a decrease in the percent of people below an arbitrary poverty line. What is clearly missing from this calculus are all of the non-measurable variables that make life worth living: happiness, life satisfaction, self-determination, friendships, community, resilience, etc., as well as any meaningful representation from the the “employees” in the decision-making process.

Furthermore – and here the balance starts to tip toward actual evil – giant corporations have a much louder mouthpiece than practitioners and the general public, which naturally means that when there is a conflict between corporate benefit and public well-being, policy decisions too often favor corporate benefit. So it is that we see over-prescription of opioids heedless of their addiction potential. So it is also, I would argue, that we see billions of dollars invested in vaccines and designer drugs for Covid-19 and almost zero interest in nutrition-based prophylactic strategies or treatment protocols utilizing widely-available generic medicines. So it is also that we see a big push toward electric vehicle purchases instead of a movement toward using less energy and buying less stuff.

When ideological authoritarian governments seize control of the narrative and dissent is effectively silenced, we enter a world controlled by ideological truth. In this context, ideological truth is a firm belief in the reality of a particular narrative, which persists in the face of firm contradictory evidence and seeks to preclude the discovery and publication of contradictory results. When ideological truth differs from actual scientific or common-sense reality, the inevitable result is bad decision-making that costs lives and livelihoods while (usually) benefiting some corporate interest.

Ideological truth gives us outcomes in the yellow and red boxes far too often. In response to real, crisis-level problems, we willfully ignore potential solutions which would fail to maximize profits, or we invest our limited resources in non-solutions like corn-based ethanol and fancy electric cars. In either case, resources are wasted, dollars are spent and collected, and the problem remains unsolved.

The crisis of the year, of course, remains Covid-19, and not surprisingly our response to it is full of ideological truths, of wishful thinking and willful ignorance that too often lead us in unhelpful and even harmful directions. But that’s a topic for another essay.

For now I will close by saying that this is not the future I ordered – and I don’t even mean that in the sense of an entitled consumer coming to terms with peak oil and resource scarcity and climate change, which is the future I was expecting. I mean it in terms of a movement toward authoritarianism, toward censorship, toward discouraging critical thinking and creative solutions, and toward corporate-corrupted ideological truth that distorts reality and leads to poor crisis response. I can only hope that when the inevitable “correction” arrives, along the lines of 1929, that we might see a real movement back toward democracy and community resilience.

 The Ever Given has run aground in the Suez Canal
 One of the world’s largest container ships
 En route from China to the Netherlands
 Wedged diagonally in the sand
 Two hundred thousand tons
 Bearing on saturated earth
 Refusing to budge against the tugs and winches
  
 A box full of boxes of boxes is boxed in
 The global economy has an arterial blockage
 And health points are ticking away
 Measured in GDP growth
 Or billions of dollars
  
 We read about the dollars
 About the hundreds of ships waiting
 But we seldom hear about what is in those ships
 What is in those ten thousand boxes of boxes?
 How many lifetimes of human labor does that represent?
 Shoes?  Clothes?  Tires?  Computers?  
 Toilet paper?  Canning jars?  Spices?  
 Hopes?  Dreams?  Proud creations?
 Or just products, commodities, dollars?
  
 The web of global commerce is beautiful
 Trucks rolling over mountain passes
 Trains snaking through wooded valleys
 Barges plying the waters of deep canyons
 Giant ships gliding through canals and rocking on high seas
 Electricity crossing mountains and plains
 Changing voltage, becoming smaller, spreading out
 From the great steel-pyloned arteries
 To the little capillary wires that power our homes
 Keep us warm, our batteries charged, our screens lit
  
 I am different perhaps
 In that I notice this always
 Watch the trains
 Observe the patterns
 Follow the web of wires and pipes
 See the steady flow of wood chips and recycled boxes
 Carried to the maw of the great mill to the west
 Returning as giant rolls of kraft paper
 In boxcars and box trucks
 Day in and day out
 To become boxes again, in places around the world
 Boxes of boxes-to-be
  
 For most of the rest of humanity this web is invisible
 Until it breaks
 And then we realize that there is a canal in Egypt
 And a hundred ships
 Carrying thousands of entire lifetimes of human labor
 Of blood, sweat, and tears
 Pass through it every day
 With no fanfare and hardly any notice
  
 It is an immense sadness to me
 That the outcome of this great global dance
 This flow of lifeblood involving billions of humans
 Is a mundane, meaningless sameness
 The same products for sale in the same stores
 The same Amazon and Walmart warehouses
 In every corner of every country
 Marketed with empty slogans
 And handed over for dollars
 Purely transactional
 And devoid of humanity
 Devoid of story
 Devoid of recognition, appreciation, thanks
  
 Have you ever given this much thought?
 Have we ever given our consent to this way of being?
 Could it, please, be otherwise?
  
 A commodity is an abstraction
 Function abstracted from creation
 Product abstracted from process
 Wheat from the South Dakota plains
 Wheat from Ukraine
 Farmers cutting swaths of rolling hills
 Praying to different gods for rain
 All just wheat
 All just dollars
  
 Oil from Venezuela
 Oil from Saudi Arabia
 Oil from deep below the Gulf of Mexico
 Raised from the Earth by proud and gritty crews
 Carried around the world by skilled sailors
 Under resplendent sunsets and circling albatrosses
 All just oil
 All just gasoline
 All just dollars
  
 Shirts sewn by Marisol in Mexico
 Shirts sewn by Nguyen in Viet Nam
 Shirts sewn by Ikenna in Nigeria
 Shaped proudly by skilled hands
 Of people who have children and stories
 Hopes and dreams
 Packed into boxes in boxes
 To be sold in big boxes
 All just shirts
 All just dollars
  
 Our global society has built a beautiful web
 Of interconnectedness
 But has abstracted it
 From reality, from humanity
 And so this web is invisible
 Trillions of hours of human labor unnoticed, unappreciated
 Commerce divorced from culture
 Story and meaning scrubbed from the business of making and being
 So that we seek instead in fiction and fantasy
 In a cult of celebrity
 In escapism rather than presence
  
 A great rift is opening
 Between those who buy boxes from big boxes
 And those who fill the boxes
 Those who move the boxes 
 Those who work with their hands and bodies
 A great rift that threatens to swallow the world
 Into violence and chaos perhaps
 A great clash of politics and ideologies
 And the basis of that rift
 Is the fundamental absence of reciprocity
 “You produce, I pay, I consume
 I have no idea who you are
 And I don’t care”
  
 I wish to declare “commodity” a curse word
 I wish to de-commodify the world
 So that the global web of commerce
 Becomes a global web of story
 I wish to know the stories
 Of Marisol, of Nguyen, of Ikenna
 Not merely some fake advertising copy
 I wish to feel connection with those who grow my food
 Those who make my clothes
 Those who bring the electricity to my house
 The gas to my car
 Those who captain the ships, the barges, the trains, the trucks
 And I wish to thank them
 Not merely with dollars
 But with my heart
 A deep feeling of gratitude
 For their labor which nourishes me
 And I wish also that my labor can
 In some small way
 Nourish them as well.
  
 I do not wish to produce and consume
 I wish to co-create
 And in so doing
 I wish that all who create
 Are both compensated fairly 
 And appreciated
  
 When I build my Winnow Wizards
 The sale price pays the bills
 But it is the stories that feed my soul
 A window into the world of small farms
 Interesting and unique human lives
 Who appreciate my creation
 And I appreciate them in turn
  
 When I organize the Soil Amendment Sale
 It is the human connection that pays dividends
 Bina’s lemon cake for trucker Dale
 Volunteers working together
 Conversations with hundreds of farmers and gardeners
 Getting what they need to grow
  
 I wonder what it might take to re-humanize the economy 
 On a larger scale?
 Perhaps it could be done
 Without the permission of corporations
 What if instead of the royal drama of Meghan and Harry
 We were to read the stories of Amazon workers
 Of oilworkers, of farmworkers, of garment workers?
 What if we could begin to know these people as people
 Rather than invisible cogs in a giant machine?
 Could we begin to de-commodify the great web
 To give thanks where thanks are due
 To ensure that all are paid enough to survive and thrive
 To heal the rift of inequality, of disrespect
 That divides us
 To imbue the great web with story and meaning
 To celebrate presence
 And all who are present?
  
 That may be a tall order
 But I wish to work toward such a world
 In my own small ways
 And I wish that I may live
 To see it happen 

We stand firmly against the use of fear to motivate or manipulate.

We oppose all media and political fearmongering.

We accept our existence as mortal animals on a finite planet.

We embrace technology that improves and extends our lives, but we do not oblige technology or government to save us from disease and death.

We believe that all people are created equal and have equal rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. We stand opposed to all forms of prejudice and discrimination.

At the same time, we do not condemn, cancel, or dehumanize those who hold prejudiced beliefs.

We see the dignity and humanity in all people.

We understand that people who are suffering economically or psychologically are vulnerable to radicalization. We fight against harmful ideas and ideologies while aiming to help those who espouse them, so that they might learn another story.

We do not collectively take a position on the time at which a fetus becomes a human being, which firearms should be legal and under which circumstances, or any of the other battles of modern culture wars. We acknowledge that these are important issues on which compromise is necessary at all levels of government, but we agree to set aside our differences in order to confront fear and escape from the present mass psychosis.

We aim to reverse the trend of increasing economic inequality.

We believe that no one should live in poverty.

We believe that health care and housing are human rights.

We support social programs which recognize human dignity and empower those who are struggling to regain pride, autonomy, and self-determination. We do not support social programs which perpetuate stigma and dependency.

We stand opposed to false certainty and enforced conformity. In the present context, we understand that it is far too early to say with certainty that covid vaccines are safe and effective, or alternatively that they are more dangerous than the disease itself. We understand that “known” safety profiles of new technologies frequently shift over time as problems become apparent (see: thalidomide, DDT, CFCs, leaded gasoline, asbestos). In situations with uncertain risks and benefits, we support individual choice and informed consent, and we stand firmly against fear-based coercion.

We stand opposed to broad state/national restrictions on personal liberties in the interest of public health and safety. While we acknowledge that there is a necessary compromise in this arena, we believe that these decisions should be made at the local/regional level whenever possible.

We stand firmly opposed to censorship of ideas and “misinformation” that oppose mainstream narratives. We believe that the Overton window should be established through open and rational discussion rather than through enforced consensus.

We stand opposed to the “Great Reset” and to wealth-led global strategy more broadly. We do not believe that those who have risen to the top of a capitalist system that rewards greed, ruthlessness, manipulation, and narcissism – and who have effectively extracted their wealth from others who are inadequately compensated – should be allowed to guide the future of humanity and the planet.

We accept that billionaire philanthropy can sometimes have positive results. At the same time, we stand opposed to all initiatives that claim to know what is best for a population without consulting those most affected. We acknowledge that most billionaire philanthropy is predicated on expansion of capitalism, which by nature disempowers grassroots organizations, extracts wealth, and exacerbates inequality.

We assert that avoidance of death and illness are not the only or highest objectives guiding society and governance. We assign equal value to mental health, spiritual wellbeing, happiness, life satisfaction, a sense of meaning, community, dignity, compassion, empathy, and solidarity.

We embrace all identities while standing opposed to identity politics, which seeks to sow fear and division and to prevent marginalized populations from making common cause against the true oppressors.

We support efforts to acknowledge historical injustice, while standing opposed to ideologies which project guilt and blame for historical injustice onto those currently alive.

We accept that we exist in world with deep-seated, systemic inequality. We accept that we may sometimes cause harm without intent. We strive to become better humans, and we see this as an opportunity for growth and learning rather than an occasion for judgment and guilt.

We support democracy. We believe that every citizen is entitled to an equal vote and an equal voice. We support a revitalization of democratic institutions at local levels, and we stand opposed to all mechanisms that allow moneyed interests to influence politics.

We envision thriving, resilient communities. We understand that resilience and efficiency are often at odds, and we choose in favor of resilience, supporting initiatives to improve local and regional self-sufficiency in food, education, medicine, and other goods and services.

We claim no allegiance to or association with either of the dominant political parties.

We are watching and waiting to arise as the old system collapses around us. We may not have long to wait.

Toward a More Equal America, Part 12

Fear
 False Evidence Appearing Real
 That which we believe keeps us safe
 Makes the world far more dangerous
 While keeping us small
 Keeping us miserable
 Diminishing our confidence
 Diminishing our power.
  
 Fear controls us
 So that we wish for control
 And when we wish for control
 Those who wish to be in control
 Have their wish granted.
  
 Fear occupies a strange place
 In our collective psyche
 Not revered
 Yet not questioned
 We might view it as harmful
 Yet we do very little
 To speak against it.
  
 We chastise those who incite violence
 Or who incite hatred
 While those who incite fear
 Spread their fright-words far and wide
 From Twitter accounts
 And news hours
 And halls of Congress
 To nary a peep of dismay.
  
 If we are going to have a chance
 To rebuild trust in each other
 Trust in democracy
 We are going to have to do something about fear.
  
 This doesn’t mean pathologizing it
 Judging those who are frightened
 Or anxious or stressed
 There is no shame
 In being afraid.

 At the same time
 It is high time
 That we recognized
 That fear is bad for us
 Like cholesterol or corn syrup.
  
 Fear is both addictive and harmful
 A psychological nicotine
 That can be added to ads
 Stuffed into stories
 Ramping up ratings
 And inspiring us to buy
 What we do not need.
  
 Contrary to popular opinion
 We do not need fear
 To keep us safe.
  
 We do not need to fear a virus
 To make choices 
 That will prevent it from spreading
 But if we fear it
 Then we will fear each other
 And our fear will tear us apart.
  
 We do not need to fear death
 For there is nothing that we can do
 That will grant us immortality
 And so our fear
 Can only diminish our experience of life
 In our days in the sun.
  
 Politics has become infused with fear
 On both sides
 And so we seek to control and destroy
 Bringing ourselves ever closer
 To the fascism and socialism we fear
 Those being two sides of the same coin
 The Nazis were socialists, after all.
  
 Driving ourselves closer to a loss of democracy
 Dividing families and communities
 Straining the fabric of society
 So that even fires and floods 
 No longer bring us together.
  
 It is time for us to recognize
 That this fear does not serve us
 That it will not help us to accomplish our goals
 That it will not bring us closer
 To the equitable society that we seek.
  
 In fact, it seems quite clear to me
 That this fear is intended to divide us
 That this is not just about sales and ratings
 But about keeping us small
 Keeping us divided
 Keeping us from rising up
 And demanding our democracy back
 From those who seek only wealth and power.
  
 So, I say
 I am done with fear
 Will you join me?
 Will you accept that I do not wish to harm you
 Even if we disagree?
 Will you accept
 That this world is big enough
 For all of us?
  
 Can we begin instead to rebuild trust
 Starting local, bridging divides
 And breaking free
 From this two-headed political monster
 That seems determined to steamroll our humanity
 Beneath the wheels of the corporate wealth machine?
  
 Can we begin to elect those 
 Who are simply citizens
 Who are not career politicians
 Beholden to moneyed interests?
  
 Can we tell the Davos crowd
 That we don’t appreciate their meddling
 Their meetings and schemings
 To design a future
 In which they feature prominently
 And we are controlled and pacified?
  
 We inhabit a representative democracy
 A constitutional republic
 So we need not change the laws
 Or stage a revolution.
  
 We need only slough off the fear
 Escape from the narrative matrix
 Reclaim our voice
 And choose only those
 Who speak with that voice
 To represent us.
  
 It is time to see where we are headed
 A world in which we sacrifice liberty for safety
 And in the end have neither
 A world that Democrats and Republicans alike
 Are leading us toward.
  
 It is time to build a government of, for, and by the people
 With an economy of, for, and by the people
 With liberty, equality, and justice for all
 We cannot do that if we are afraid
 Of each other, of death, of climate change
 Of ourselves.
  
 If we are to build a better world
 We must choose love
 And let go of fear.
  
 Let us begin. 

Toward a More Equal America, Part 11

In Part 10 I introduced the political plane and situated the United States within it: approximately halfway between democracy and authoritarianism, and with more private ownership than public ownership.

At this point, I want to take a closer look at where on this plane we are headed and where we might prefer to go instead. To get a sense of that, it’s helpful to consider which other axes are collinear with the spectrum from democracy to authoritarianism.

It is quite clear to me that the United States is currently moving toward the right along most of these axes, with larger movements justified by “attacks on democracy” such as 9/11 and the recent Capitol riot. This is being supported by both major parties, which differ on the political plane primarily in their allegiance to unrestricted capitalism (Republicans) or to a rather bureaucratic and centralized vision of providing a basic level of social welfare to the lower classes (Democrats). Republicans blame individuals for failure to succeed, while remaining stubbornly unwilling to examine the structural factors (e.g. outsourcing, downsizing, benefit-cutting, discrimination, etc.) that render success impossible for many, and actively supporting a perpetuation of those factors. Democrats blame systemic failures, but offer handout-type solutions that only create dependency while disempowering individuals and strengthening those same corrupt systems. Libertarians, a minority, are vocally opposed to this movement toward authoritarianism, but their vision of a world structured on unregulated capitalism and personal autonomy leads into the unstable gray zone.

Republicans fear “socialism”, by which they mean authoritarianism imposed by Democrats. Democrats fear “fascism”, by which they mean authoritarianism imposed by Republicans. When in power, both sides – in an attempt to impose their will on their opponents by force – enact laws and executive orders that move our nation closer to an authoritarian reality.

For the past fifty years or so, and accelerating in the current time, we have been following a zigzag path toward greater corporate influence, greater government secrecy, less personal privacy, increased rules and regulations, increased surveillance, and decreased faith in representative democracy – even as we oscillate back and forth between right-leaning privatization and left-leaning public provision. The Great Reset is simply the logical endpoint of this progression, warmed over with a patina of orderliness, climate justice, and “happy people” who own nothing and don’t think too hard or dream too big. Such a world would be not unlike modern China with its social credit scores and all-encompassing surveillance, except with a bit more corporate power and less government control.

Before I address how we might put a stop to this agenda, we need to look at the societal factors that drive movement on the political plane. From my perspective, it looks like this:

Our desire for competition leads us to innovate and create under private ownership, while our desire for cooperation leads us to build systems that provide public utilities and public goods. To thrive we must find a way to balance those desires, but it is the horizontal axis that is more concerning in this moment.

Fear is the path to the dark side.

Fear leads to anger.

Anger leads to hate

Hate leads to suffering.

Yoda

We inhabit a world awash with fear. We fear those who have guns, those who would take our guns away, those who don’t wear masks, those who would force us to wear masks against our will, those who are immigrants, those who dislike immigrants, police who use lethal force without just cause, protesters who torch and loot, those who refuse vaccines, those who would force vaccines upon us, those who voted for Trump, those who voted for Biden. We fear each other. And so we are angry at each other. And so we hate each other. And so we all suffer.

It is especially telling that neither of the two political poles devotes much energy to developing policies that would improve lives, preferring instead to mount a series of never-ending attacks against the other side. We no longer seek to build coalitions, to find common ground, to seek compromise. Instead we seek to win, and when we have “won” by the narrowest of margins, we proceed to impose our will, by force, against the losing side. The current “domestic terrorism” mania on the left which seeks to punish the entire right-of-center populace based on the actions of a few unhinged rioters – and to assume that these people could only be motivated by such negative ideals as white supremacy and bigotry – is simply the latest manifestation of this trend.

Countries with authoritarian governments tend to be those with opposing factions which cannot establish dialogue. Sunni and Shia Muslims in Iraq. Islamists and Anti-Islamists across the Middle East. Authoritarian regimes which effectively quashed opposition all began with this sort of conflict. The Nazis against the Communists in 1920s Germany. The Bolsheviks against the Russian Republic. Anyone who wishes to avoid this sort of authoritarian future ought to see the warning signs in current events. No matter how much we might fear the other side, following our fear-based desire to impose our agenda against them by force can only lead farther away from democracy and closer to authoritarianism.

In order to put an end to our collective movement toward authoritarianism, we will have to provide an alternative to fear. We will need to begin to rebuild trust in each other – not fragmenting by identity or party lines, but recognizing the humanity, the unique and irreplaceable value, in each of us. We will need to let go of our desire to control how others live, what choices they can make, what thoughts they can have – while encouraging them to also let go of their desires to control us.

We do not all need to agree. We can continue to debate exactly when a fetus becomes a human being, which guns should be legal to own, how much immigration is good for our nation and how much is problematic, how best to balance timber jobs with a desire to protect remaining forests. The only route to a homogeneous pseudo-utopian future lies through war and genocide, and I hope that we all can realize that before we continue much further down our current path. If we wish to change minds, we must first build bridges. One who is our enemy is closed to us, hardened against our message, unchangeable except through annihilation or imprisonment.

We need to rebuild trust and cooperation to begin to move in a direction that no current political forces are leading us – back toward democracy and also toward greater cooperation and recognition of public goods, against the forces of unbridled capitalism.

If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, he would surely be disappointed by the direction our nation is heading. Let us heed his wisdom as we seek to build bridges, to restore trust, and to move our nation back toward true democracy.

I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about “where do we go from here?” that we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society…

Now, don’t think you have me in a bind today. I’m not talking about communism. What I’m talking about is far beyond communism. …Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated…

And I must confess, my friends, that the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. And there will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again, with tear-drenched eyes, have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. But difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future….

When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. 1967. “Where Do We Go From Here?”

Toward a More Equal America, Part 10

We tend to think of politics in terms of voting on bills and taking positions on issues: debating, for example, exactly under what circumstances abortion or capital punishment should be allowed, or what types of guns are protected under the Second Amendment, or how much money to allocate to highway maintenance or education. In normal times, only a minority of citizens engage deeply with these matters, with most preferring to trust their representatives to sort things out while getting on with their lives.

At a deeper level, however, politics is about collectively deciding exactly what sort of society we wish to inhabit. At times like the present moment, when the structure of society is unstable and shifting, more people begin to tune in and take part, aware that the rules of the game of life are changing.

To make sense of where we are, where we are headed, and where we might be better off going instead, I find it useful to look at human societies along two axes – a plane of political possibility.

On the horizontal axis, societies can range from fully democratic – in which every person is granted a voice and a vote – to fully authoritarian – in which most people have no input into governance. On the vertical axis, societies can range from complete public ownership – in which all private industry is prohibited – to complete private ownership – in which the free market is viewed as the highest ideal in all circumstances.

Most of us, if given a choice, would prefer to live in a democratic society in which our concerns are heard and our voices are valued, rather than in an authoritarian society where the dictates of government must be obeyed under penalty of death. The ideal position on the vertical axis is somewhat more up for debate. Communists and socialists cite Karl Marx and wax poetic about egalitarian utopian “workers’ paradise” societies in which everyone works for the benefit of the whole. At the same time, libertarians and free-market devotees cite Ayn Rand and wax poetic about societies in which healthy competition drives innovation and assures that all of our needs and wants are fulfilled.

My perspective is that the ideal society is somewhere in the middle. Private ownership leads to competition, motivation, and innovation. Public ownership carries a mandate of acting in the common interest but can also lead to bureaucratic ossification and stifling of creativity. Which of these is preferable depends on which aspect of the economy we are talking about.

Back in Part 3 I introduced ethical red flags in the development of a market economy.

Ethical red flag #1: People will pay almost any price within their means to meet their basic needs, if there is no other option.

The upshot of this is that private enterprise – with its associated profit motive – will only work toward the common good when businesses are in competition AND demand is flexible.

Consider, for example, car manufacturers. Any business that can build vehicles can compete, and if prices are too high no one will buy them – they will move closer to work and take the bus. The result is that cars are priced reasonably relative to the cost of construction, and there are many options available catering to all niches from saving money to saving fuel to hauling large families to showing off status. A government-owned car manufacturer, on the other hand, would be tasked with providing the greatest utility to the greatest number and so would churn out millions of identical, no-frills models that would give little joy to their owners, and costs might even be higher without a competitive drive toward greater efficiency.

On the other hand, consider our water supply. It makes no sense for a town to have more than one set of pipes, so competition is not an option. Furthermore, without it we cannot survive, so we would buy it at any price even if it drove us to bankruptcy. And it’s just water; we don’t really want the option of extra-fancy oxygen-infused water, or blessed holy water, or 99.999% pure deionized water piped into our homes. It’s easy to see that private industry in this circumstance would be motivated to gouge buyers on prices and maintain infrastructure at a bare minimum level to maximize profits, while public ownership tasked with supplying a common good at a fair price would work much better.

So it is that most countries have private car manufacturers and publicly-owned municipal utilities tasked with delivering clean water. Unconstrained by ideology, democratic societies naturally adopt this blend of public and private ownership. Societies – or groups within society – that go religiously all-in on public or private ownership are either short-lived or else must become authoritarian to enforce their ideology against the will of the people who quickly realize its failings.

Very few of the communes of the 1960s and 70s lasted more than 10 years, and an attempted libertarian utopia in Vermont went predictably and somewhat hilariously awry. Communes must decide everything as a group, which leads to endless meetings and ultimately to conflict when some people’s creative or innovative ideas threaten cohesion or serve to privilege themselves above others. Libertarian communities cannot come together to solve shared problems, and so descend into spirals of blame and neglect.

This phenomenon – that attempts to organize democratic society around purely public or purely private ownership are doomed to failure – also helps to explain why there are no socialist utopias. Human nature aspires to some level of competition, innovation, and individual uniqueness, which inevitably leads to a greater level of autonomy and private enterprise unless this is forcefully forbidden by an authority under threat of punishment. Societies that follow an ideology into the gray areas of the political plane either relax their ideology and embrace a balance of public and private ownership, or else move rapidly toward authoritarianism to preserve the ideology against the countervailing force of human nature.

I have attempted to place various nations onto the plane of political possibility. While I’m fairly confident about where the United States of America is at presently, I don’t have first-hand experience of other nations and so may be making assumptions based on media bias. Feel free to let me know if you feel your country is misplaced here.

On the horizontal axis, the United States is currently in between democracy and authoritarianism. It is also moving in the direction of authoritarianism, which I will address in the next chapter. In theory, we have a representative democracy with checks and balances, in which the right of participation has been expanded over time from a privileged subset of the population to all citizens. In practice, this remains true only at the local level. At higher levels it has become virtually impossible to get on the ballot and to obtain fair treatment in the media without the endorsement and support of entrenched unelected power structures – what might be called the military-industrial-medical-pharmaceutical-technological-educational complex, or something like that.

On the vertical axis, the US is out of balance in the private-ownership direction. We still have functional public utilities and a concept of public goods, but we also have privatized sectors of the economy that objectively function better when managed as public utilities. Perhaps the best example of this is our medical system, which leaves millions of people without affordable access to essential care, while collectively costing us more than twice as much as in comparable nations with public health care, with inferior outcomes in terms of population health and life expectancy.

Increasingly we are seeing calls for a “Great Reset” of the world economy, accompanied by flowery language about addressing climate change, investing in our future, and improving our lives. What is notably missing from this grand vision is any mention of democracy. It is entirely the product of extremely wealthy influencers like the World Economic Forum who wish to believe that they can save the planet while maintaining their privilege and creating happy lives for the peasants in a world with no privacy and a much-reduced concept of personal property.

The peasants, of course, don’t get much say in this, and those who don’t look forward to this sort of nouveau urban digital feudalism are viewed with a mixture of disdain and pity. We have so far seen disastrous results from handing the reins of government to those who seek profit and self-enrichment, and it is difficult to imagine that an authoritarian Great Reset will truly benefit anyone outside the circles of privilege that are promoting it.

On the right-hand side of the spectrum, the vertical axis becomes far less important. Once a small and unelected group of people gains complete control over government, it doesn’t matter that much from the perspective of the common folk whether that group of people is ideologically communist or ideologically capitalist. The effect, in terms of decisions that benefit the ruling class at the expense of those outside of it, is inevitable under all forms of authoritarianism.

Many volumes have been written about political theory, seeking to make the case that one particular structure of society is preferable above all others. As for myself, I would much prefer to inhabit a world in which every citizen has a voice, and in which we have a balance of public ownership and private enterprise. In Part 11, I will examine what might be necessary to arrest our current movement away from that ideal, and how we might begin to reclaim our representative democracy.

Toward a More Equal America, Part 9

When I started this series last spring, I had no idea that would continue for what is looking to be 12 installments. Although my writing style may come across as prescriptive at times, it is really a journey of self-discovery: the result of my own thought process as I ponder the sort of world I wish to inhabit as we move through a tumultuous and chaotic collective period in which transformative change is not only possible but perhaps inevitable.

The first four essays focused on economics: specifically how inequality increases over time, and how we might begin to envision an economy of, for, and by the people.

The second four essays focused on neoliberalism and social justice, and in particular the ways in which the modern social justice framework is gaslighting us into believing that we are building a more equitable society as poverty and unemployment rates climb and wealth disparity reaches new heights.

I have so far mostly avoided writing (and thinking) about politics, but in light of recent events and the cultural divide threatening to do irreversible damage to our nation’s founding principles, I can avoid it no longer.

Politics is, at its core, a discussion of the structuring of society. What is the role of government? What is a public good? What should be privately owned? How much censorship is OK, and how do we compromise between the individual desire for autonomy and the collective desire for security?

The culture wars, as exacerbated by social and mainstream media echo chambers, have made any discussion of politics difficult, because we can no longer agree on the meaning of important words. So before we can launch into a political discussion, we need to talk a bit about this abuse of language.

Communism is, according to an established definition, a sociopolitical system centered around public ownership of the means of production. True communism in this sense has never had a particularly strong presence in US politics. However, according to Republicans, “communism” is a cold prickly word that can be used to describe everything they dislike about the leftward end of the spectrum, almost none of which fits into the definition of the word. It is used to put an end to discussion, to discredit an idea without even beginning to consider it.

Similarly, fascism is a hypernationalist, dictatorial sociopolitical system that has also never had a strong presence in the US, which has morphed into an equivalent hate-word on the political left. Democrats talk righteously about fighting “fascism” when they are really opposed to discrimination, immigration control, xenophobia, gun rights, and any number of positions which are not by any means the sole province of fascist governments.

Words like these serve, in modern political discourse, as virtue signals and emotion-laden buzzwords. Using them signals camaraderie with members of the same political tribe and hatred of the opposing tribe, while carrying virtually no meaning with regard to particular policy positions.

Furthermore, media echo chambers have hyperbolized discourse so that a mostly-nonviolent Capitol takeover with zero chance of overturning government becomes a “coup”, or alternatively mostly-nonviolent Black Lives Matter protests become hostile occupying forces. An observer reading the headlines would think we are a nation at war, when in fact we continue to exist in relative safety and with a bare minimum of actual bloodshed.

If we are to have a meaningful conversation about politics – about where our society is headed, how we feel about that trajectory, and what we can do to change it – we are first going to have to overcome our language barrier, to re-engage across our arbitrary battle lines.

As we begin to explore the political landscape in Part 10, I’m going to avoid “isms” and emotionally-loaded buzzwords as much as possible, in the hopes that folks from both camps are able to engage without being triggered into cold prickly mode.

It’s been a while since I’ve offered my thoughts on Covid-19, which has receded from the center of our national consciousness even as schools remain closed and infection numbers reach all-time highs.

I am an avid observer. Whether it’s tracking the weather, understanding flows of goods and energy, following planetary conjunctions, or monitoring the progression of a global pandemic. When something is afoot in the world, I watch – sometimes a bit obsessively – to feel like I am being present with the unfolding of reality.

As I have watched this pandemic for the last eleven months, I have been surprised that very few others – in science or in the media – have adopted this approach. Most of the “experts” have assumed that case counts would be immediately responsive to human actions – lockdowns, school closures, masks – and that exponential growth would hold sway until we either drove the much-vaunted R number below 1 or we reached a high level of population immunity. That is not an unreasonable epidemiological assumption, but it needs to be tested against large-scale disease trends over time, and if it fails to adequately describe reality then it is time to consider alternative approaches.

If disease transmission is primarily a function of human behavior and government decisions, we would expect a chart of disease over time to look something like the stock market. Furthermore, we would expect to see vastly different numbers in different states, based on variation in government policies and “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs) like business closures, mask mandates, etc.

On the other hand, if disease transmission is primarily beyond human control, we would expect a chart of disease over time to follow a smoother pattern – in time with natural oscillations.

Importantly, in this case, the existence of a mechanism of human influence – the fact that a virus spreads from one person to another – does not assert the primacy of this mechanism when examining disease trends across time and space.

With that in mind, let’s examine where we’re at in the Covid-19 pandemic, as of late January 2021.

These are nationwide numbers of people in the hospital with Covid-19. Unlike case numbers, which reflect rates of testing, hospitalization numbers reflect the actual number of people sick at any given time. It’s worth noting that these are surprisingly smooth curves, rising and falling on a scale of several months. There are no obvious holiday bumps or reflections of policy changes. Despite a rather intense nationwide lockdown in March, illness continued to climb to a peak in mid April. As economies then reopened in May, cases continued to fall. The decline in illness from August through September does not reflect citizens being more careful than they were in July. The current peak and nascent decline of illness does not reflect people being more careful than in December. I simply don’t see evidence of nationwide large-scale behavioral change that could be driving this. Nor have we yet vaccinated enough people that we should be seeing illness declining for that reason.

As a further illustration of this phenomenon, here are recent hospitalization trends for a few selected populous states:

It’s worth noting both that all of these states peak and begin to decline nearly in unison (Upper Midwest states peaked a few weeks earlier), and also that California – with among the strictest NPIs currently in effect – has a higher hospitalization rate than Florida – which has no NPIs at present.

My primary conclusion after eleven months of tracking this pandemic is that we don’t have anywhere near the level of control that we think we have, and some scientists are beginning to notice this as well. If we look at a graph of the 1918-19 flu pandemic, we see very similar waves on very similar timescales.

As to exactly why we don’t have that much control, and what factors are driving these cycles, those are important questions to ask. Perhaps noncompliance and human nature are at fault, or perhaps the virus spreads in ways that cannot be effectively contained while preserving a level of human interaction required for a functioning society. There appears to be a strong seasonal signal – with the most illness in the winter months – and perhaps some other natural oscillations are also involved in ways that we don’t yet understand.

We don’t have to answer those questions, however, in order to begin to apply a historical or observational approach to prediction. We have experienced two smooth waves of Covid-19, rising for 1-2 months and then falling for 2 months. The third and largest wave has now reached a peak following three months of rise and is beginning a clear downward trend across the contiguous US.

I view this as the most significant positive development since the pandemic began – a likely inflection point after which we will probably no longer see days with 200,000 new cases nationwide, or 4,000 daily deaths. I say this for two reasons:

1. If, as we have long suspected, there is a seasonal component, we would expect the worst time to occur in the winter, and so – unlike in the April and midsummer peaks – we no longer have reason to believe that a future wave will be more severe.
2. Based on antibody tests and other prevalence estimates, it is apparent that many parts of the country are approaching 50% infection – at which point half of the population has developed some level of resistance through exposure. This doesn’t mean that we are “less than halfway there”, however – because those who are now immune tend to be those who are most exposed and who are most likely to expose others – essential workers, delivery drivers, etc. – while those who have avoided infection tend to be those who have been able to carefully isolate. And as population-level disease prevalence declines, it will become easier for those who have been successfully isolating to avoid infection.

Perhaps the somewhat-more-infectious UK strain could change this, but it’s worth noting that – in terms of population level death and infection rates – the UK and US are not that different, and also that cases and hospitalizations have begun to decline in the UK. There is always some risk that a pathogen can mutate to become more virulent or more infectious, but this is historically uncommon on short time scales. Once a pandemic has passed its peak and infected millions or billions globally, it tends to fade away until the next pathogen emerges, or the same bug returns changed and stronger years or decades later.

This is all to say that I have a hopeful Covid outlook at the moment that I have not had since the earliest days, when it seemed that our lockdown might actually lead to effective suppression as in China or New Zealand. I don’t wish to diminish the very real suffering of anyone who has lost a loved one, or suffered a prolonged illness, or is experiencing lasting chronic symptoms with no end in sight. At the same time, I have a strong sense that it will be mostly downhill from here – in the positive bike touring sense of that term. That we will no longer be breaking records in terms of daily new cases or daily deaths in the weeks and months ahead. That we might begin to discover that we can relax our NPIs without returning to an upswing. That this natural peak, perhaps aided by increasing vaccination and a return to warmer weather, will be followed by the gradual return to normalcy that we have all been waiting for.

 1991
Early spring
Jim’s hills, I think?
Little Mark at five years old, Ed at 53
Who took this picture?  
Such a perfect composition
Such a perfect meditation
On presence and impermanence
The pasqueflowers, long awaited through winter’s cold
Bloom only for a few days
The feather cast off and soon to return to the Earth
But as yet unblemished by time
And ourselves, fully present and immersed
Sharing a moment of joy together
On a river of time

So many years ahead, yet unknown
Stanton and Frances still alive
Twenty-five more cycles for Ed
Twenty-five more springtimes
Twenty-five more seasons of that hat
A very finite number
Yet seemingly infinite and indefinite
In each passing day and year
Floods, gardens, Christmas celebrations
Graduations, weddings, travels
All unknown and unknowable in this moment
All unimportant in this moment

So much time we spend
Seeking for truth
Examining the nature of reality
Pondering ideologies
Debating with anger and passion
Experiencing others’ stories in the news
Interacting with a virtual world through our screens

It all seems so meaningful and important
And it is, in a way
Creating this collective experience together
And seeking to find our home and our truth within it
And yet in a world of seven billion human souls
There is little we can change 
And we should perhaps take solace
In our individual insignificance

We can read the writings of Greek and Roman philosophers
Heed the teachings of Jesus or Mohamed
Honor the founding fathers of our nation
Read the autobiographies of former slaves
Pick our way through competing narratives
And campaign for a better world
That is important for our evolution
For our betterment

And yet narrative and thought exists outside of time
All of history available in the present
All of the present available in the cloud
All of that removed, abstracted, separated
From the pasqueflowers and feathers
The explorations and gatherings
The gardens and harvests and births and deaths
The singular uniqueness of each moment
The bittersweet inevitability of change
And the inevitable finiteness of human life

To step too far into the cloud
To spend too many hours on our screens
Is to step into a timeless existence
Unaffected by the weather
Unnoticing of the pasqueflowers
Unchanging with the seasons
Outside the river of time
Which flows on regardless
Carrying us from cradle to grave
Whether we are awake
Or inured to the wonders around us

So let this be a reminder to me
In times of collective anxiety
Of competing narratives
Of unrest and upheaval
To find the pasqueflowers in their short season
And the daphnes and the lilacs
To plant the seeds
To watch them grow
To harvest in its time
To look in the eyes of those I love
And see them as who they are in this moment
An alive, experiencing presence
Not merely a collection of stories and ideas and memories
Of narratives and perceptions and arguments past
To be present in each moment, in each day, in each year
Knowing that what is will not last
Which is both bittersweet and cause for celebration

And perhaps if we can all be more present
Away from our screens and echo chambers of thought
Then we might be able to begin to agree
On what is real
We might be able to share experiences
To build connections
To find our way forward together
In a chaotic, uncertain, tumultuous
But ultimately beautiful world