The Western world has been caught in a spiral of self-harm and debasement for the past three years.
Aspects of the underlying psychology have been discussed in abstract terms, regarding mass anxiety and the actions of crowds. Little has been said about the possibility that we are simply terrified of death. This is a fear we may need to address, if we are to stop acting like fools.
Death in life
Death was once part of life. A visit to an old cemetery will reveal that many earlier gravestones are memorials to young children and women of child-bearing age. This is because, obviously, a large proportion of children died before they turned five, and about one in ten (or more) women died in childbirth. Death happened, and people also traveled, had parties, went to concerts, and lived fulfilled lives.
In wealthy countries, better hygienic conditions, better food, antibiotics and surgery have largely removed the barriers to a long life. Elsewhere, people still face these threats. However, the average person in Africa or South Asia is not cowering under their bed, obsessing about the latest virus, terrified of going outdoors or of meeting neighbors. That is a modern, affluent population obsession. Recent lockdowns in African and Asian countries were mostly responding to external pressure from very wealthy individuals and institutions, or local grabs for increased authoritarian control, rather than genuine fear of a new and deadly threat.
Many in the West now reach adulthood without ever seeing someone die, or even seeing a dead body. Most have never experienced a friend dying, and many have not even been to a funeral. Very few have sat with someone as they passed from life. Death is rarely talked about, and coping with a kin’s death is often left to the individual and the support of professional ‘experts.’ Public mourning is unfamiliar, and can be an embarrassment. If we believe the lie that humans are merely organic constructs, then death may also be a terrifying blankness of nothing.
Coping with our response to Covid
Enter Covid-19. At its height in the United States, despite financial incentives to boost reporting and definitions including a positive PCR test a month prior, Covid was associated with less annual mortality than cardiovascular disease or cancer. Our society responded by putting it front and center of our lives, wrecking economies and livelihoods. We even used children as human shields, injecting them with novel pharmaceuticals in the vain hope of protecting ourselves.
We can indulge in inquiries on the origins of Covid-19, and on the pros and cons of aspects of the response. We can call for Nuremberg II tribunals. We can debate the actual causes of increasing excess death. These are important discussions, but they are missing the point. We need an inquiry, particularly self-inquiry, on why we, or those around us, were open to being led by obviously self-interested people into deeply irrational actions.
Our deaths belong to us, not to tyrants
Rather than relying on more government panels to tell us what went wrong – what others did to us – we need first to understand what is wrong with ourselves and our communities. This will involve familiarizing ourselves with forgotten aspects of life, including death.
We need to stop transferring mourning to the professionals, undo the taboos about the fact that life on earth ends for all of us, and bring it into conversation. Then we can start putting it into context, rather than running from the whole idea. That may help to face the difficult issues of what kills us more or less, and how such risk stacks up against going out, seeing the world’s wonders, and sharing time and intimacy with those we love.
Understanding the reasons for society’s loss of grip during Covid matters, because the intent of those who profited from Covid is to do it all again. They are building an international bureaucracy whose sole purpose is to identify more ‘novel’ viruses, claim they are an existential threat, and repeat what we have just been through.
Over and over again. This relies entirely on people believing the false premise that the threat of deadly pandemics is increasing, that they are killing more than before, and are an existential threat to all of us regardless of age and underlying health.
We are not asked to fear the predominant causes of death, such as obesity; we are encouraged to embrace that as beautiful. We are, rather, being asked to believe many obvious lies. We need to build understanding and resilience to withstand such manipulation.
Saving society from eating itself with fear and stupidity will rely on us educating ourselves. Society’s ‘experts’ are doing very well from pandemics, and have no incentive to provide such education. This will require each of us to find time. Time for discussion, time for self-reflection, and time for thought on what life actually is. We need to calmly sum up what is happening around us, and take the risk of exploring what it is that we really value. Then we can stop others from abusing our ignorance.
Image credit: Mario Wellner
An excellent point that is well made. No government on this earth is going to save any one of us from death. But odds are, they will almost certainly hasten it with corrupt officials preying on the fear of the people to keep them in terror and offer them their poisonous chalices. Don’t let them.
Bill Gates is on Youtube saying how ‘plunging a needle into every arm should reduce the population of the world by ten percent’ yet he is still walking around a free man. His vaccines have either killed or rendered infertile thousands of people and he was banned from India for what he did, yet he is still walking around a free man.
Reducing world population was engraved in stone on the Georgia Guidestones.
Yuval Harari, Schwab’s little henchman, is on record stating the world has too many useless eaters.
Schwab wants us to live in cupboards, be forbidden to travel more than fifteen minutes away from our cupboard, and eat insects, because there are too many of us damaging ‘his’ planet. Yet for all that, people are still wondering what happened? And won’t believe that the last three years was a planned and executed programme of extinction even as they watched healthy young men dropping on the sports fields?
Such stunning levels of credulity over such a long time are an indication of what will happen with the next ‘gathering in’ when the propoganda is more intensive and drives the fear to higher levels.
Free enterprise attracts a lot of crooks. They WILL be held accountable to the rule of law!
I really liked your article David. Very well said. We were lucky enough to go on a holiday to Rarotonga a number of years ago and just before we left my partner’s mother gave us some well intentioned advice to watch out for stone fish when swimming. Unfortunately, with some newly acquired information on this previously unheard of fish, it was enough to stop my partner from going snorkeling and missing out on seeing some cool fish. We laugh about it now but it’s not really funny when it seems the entire world is acting the same way.
Great article, David. Thanks