Will pitting accurate data against faulty data ever get us out of the epistemic impasse that we agreed to enter in March 2020?
Citing data to question public health mandates and the authority behind them is playing a language game we shouldn’t be playing in the first place—accepting faulty premises and frames. It’s like playing tic tac toe on a chess board to prove to the other side that we should be playing chess.
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Anyone with a functioning common sense knows, is able to discern what’s right and what’s not. If Joe Schmo tweets about it nobody cares. But when a credentialed person writes the same thing it’s a whole different ball of wax.
Why is that?
If we can only defeat (corrupt) authority with appeals to (uncorrupt) authority where does that leave us? Doesn’t that prove that facts (purveyed by the experts) still matter more than the truth?
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Data has as little to do with truth as knowledge with wisdom.
Facts may help navigate but they won’t delineate the right way. Facts are to the truth as maps are to the territory.
Till information trumps intuition we haven’t got much of a chance at a leap of evolution.
—this is one of the most important yet least appreciated aspects of the issues we are confronted with as humans. What holds true on one level of analysis may not translate as truth on another.
Think of the is-ought fallacy, for instance.
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If doing X or enhancing the function of Y in our body effectively facilitated our affinity or alignment with a desired collective end (posited by the particular powers that be): does it mean we should (be coerced to) do or adopt or sustain or retain it?
Is the principle of bodily integrity negotiable if it is deemed perfectible?
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Take the putative climate emergency gaining traction on the heels of the recent Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
Even if the dire prognostications of the climate (computer) models were accurate, that wouldn’t justify the implementation of policies “recommended” by unelected board members of supranational bodies—foisting, as it were, a “green” technocratic yoke and a “climate-smart” de-growth ideology on the public.
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Even if government mandated public health measures could save lives (which they cannot, at length, consistently do) they belong in authoritarian regimes, and not in liberal democracies where civil liberties are the name of the game.
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So much of the vexatious vaccine controversy today revolves around the question of efficacy when much deeper issues are at stake.
Again, if the novel mRNA technology worked that wouldn’t mean that we all should (be coerced to) take them—as if natural immunity and informed consent and freedom of choice were superannuated things of the past.
“This war was no whim of Mussolini’s, nor of Hitler’s. This war is a chapter in the long and bloody tragedy which began with the foundation of the Bank of England in far-away 1694, with the openly declared intention of Paterson’s now famous prospectus, which contains the words already quoted: ‘the bank hath benefit of the interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.’
from Gold and Work (1950) by Ezra Pound
In 1945 poet Ezra Pound was arrested in Italy by the US military on charges of treason. He was put in a cage in a prison camp near Pisa—exposed for weeks to the elements. Later he was transferred to the St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane in Washington, D.C.
Why?
“Usurocracy makes wars in succession. It makes them according to a pre-established plan for the purpose of creating debts.”
He attacked Roosevelt for entering the world war and promulgated fascism and antisemitic sentiments on Italian radio—spreading disinformation about a global cabal of bankers (the “usurocracy”) which the Rome-Berlin axis he cheered for taking on.
It’s a short account of his haemorrhoidectomy and it’s quintessential Buk.
It goes:
the month of March is over. I went into the hospital on the 2nd., was sliced on the 3rd., and there was a bit of horror and disbelief—locked in with the whining crowd. and their T.V. sets and many of them with imagined ills, only wanting the great Mother because society has cut their balls off and they have lost touch with the undiscovered and important gods. no souls—just mouths, bodies pewking the misery of the sell-out. the bit of pain from the knives was nothing compared to being locked-in with them! at least on the job, you know that in a dozen hours you will be walking down the street alone—4 a.m.—with the last of the moon sinking into your skin and bones, the quiet air giving you no con-game… you slowly fill again, you go home. the mirror is hell, but that’s where you came from. but there’s always that stirring inch LEFT! that something you held all the way through. a seed. a lucky charm. love. guts. spinach. you name it. you know it. but in a hospital—that’s it. they’ve got you—(the docs and the nurses and the patients)—to talk to, fondle, slice, arrg. but I found me a little Mexican mop-up girl—all eyes and sadness, we had some laughs, corny stuff, I’d say, “Hey sweetie, you come to mop my white socks again?” “do they need it?” “oh yeah, once lightly!” and the little wench mopped my socks again! laughing. I always seem to meet these little Mexican girls working at dirty jobs, for nothing. beautifully real and easy. “If I could get out of this bed I’d chase you all around the room!” “why don’t you try it, you might catch me!” silly stuff, I guess. she’s 25 years younger than I am. old horny goat, Buk. but a lift. sure. she brought me a new pair of stockings when I left, threw them on my chest. “here! for your big stinky feet!” I didn’t have the guts to ask for her whereabouts when she wasn’t working.
Note: the Mexican mop-up girl he talks about is around 75 years old today—if she is still around somewhere.
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I wonder…
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Did she get the COVID jab?
Where does she live?
Does she remember Buk?
Does she have kids?
What is her go to ice cream flavor?
When was the last time she laughed and about what?
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speaking of favourites…
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I like to prowl ordinary places and taste the people— from a distance. I don’t want them too near because that’s when attrition starts. but in supermarkets laundromats cafes street corners bus stops eating places drug stores I can look at their bodies and their faces and their clothing— watch the way they walk or stand or what they are doing. I’m like an x-ray machine I like them like that: on view. I imagine the best things about them. I imagine them brave and crazy I imagine them beautiful.
I like to prowl the ordinary places. I feel sorry for us all or glad for us all caught alive together and awkward in that way.
there’s nothing better than the joke of us the seriousness of us the dullness of us buying stockings and carrots and gum and magazines buying birth control candy hair spray and toilet paper.
we should build a great bonfire we should congratulate ourselves on our endurance
we stand in long lines we walk about we wait.
I like to prowl ordinary places the people explain themselves to me and I to them
a woman at 3:35pm weighing purple grapes on a scale looking at that scale very seriously she is dressed in a simple green dress with a pattern of white flowers she takes the grapes puts them carefully into a white paper bag
that’s lightning enough
the generals and the doctors may kill us but we have won.
What’s more interesting than the polarization intensifying in the culture right now is the fact that there seems to be two major types of humans—each with their respective strengths (virtues) and weaknesses (sins).
To wit: while some of us lean more toward socialism others of us tend more toward individualism. Apparently.
The problem with socialism (as I see it) is that it is based on the dynamics of codependence: Wherein the parties are at the mercy of those who become the dominant members of the group. And the problem with individualism (in my view) is that it is based on the psychology of separation and distrust.
In codependence the parties can abuse each other to the extent they are reliant on one another. In independence the individual is left to their own limited devices and is exposed to the elements on their own.
These are the psycho-energetic poles we are magnetized around when operating from existential anxiety. We either seek solace in the crowd or in the illusion of control of a self-directed life.
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Polarity is not something to be resolved, though. Polarity is a creative tension or force that drives development and growth.
It is the inter-personal conflicts between different temperaments that sets intra-personal growth in motion. This is why individualists need socialists (and vice versa): in order to grow and continue to align and mentally evolve.
In a way we were all waiting for the present stir of events. That’s why it’s here. And all that we can do is embrace for impact.
Effort of attention is … the essential phenomenon of will.
William James
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The way Social Media can in effect anti-socialize us and Smart technologies dumb us down is the way that our capacity for discerning attention is under great threat in the Black Hole Glut of the Attention (=Distraction) Economy.
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And it all happens when we have no distinct idea about who we actually are and what we actually stand for.
Absent clarity of intent and intuitive self-reliance we’re bound to forfeit our agency and to defer to what (ever) is being curated for us.
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Free will then is not exempt from causes and conditions but is rather the flexible coordination of attention, intention and emotion in skillful action. That’s what it means to be free from a psychological and phenomenological perspective.
Evan Thompson
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Which reminds me of a profound poem by A. R. Ammons—which arrested my attention the very first time I read it:
“Honesty’s on short supply and we subsist on mendacities in times of grave crises. We cannot afford such luxuries as truth or common sense in drastic times.”
Norman Spineles
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they are worse than zombies. they are holier than thouing their willfully blind way through the china shop of your conscience.
The Prancing Apprentice 