Author: Simon Sheridan

Last time I read Dostoevsky, I was at uni. One of my main recollections was that I found his works somewhat melodramatic. I still do. The Brothers Karamazov is an unrelenting melodrama. But it’s not melodrama for its own sake and it’s certainly not the soppy melodrama of a television soap opera. Rather, purpose of the melodrama in Karamazov is to convey an intensity of emotion that couldn’t be achieved otherwise. Furthermore, the melodrama is contrasted against a backdrop of religion in the first half of the story and criminal justice in the second half while the hero of the story, the youngest Karamazov brother, Alyosha, provides the calm, virtuous and loving anchor around which it all swirls. He is the ground and frame for the drama of the story.

Having said that, the plot of Karamazov does seem exaggerated.

A wanton wretch of a father who seeks nothing in life but money and pleasure, had all but abandoned his three sons from the day they were born. The sons, born to two different mothers who died when they were young, were raised by other people. Now all in their 20s, they have returned to the small town where the father still lives.

But the old man has not changed his ways. On the contrary, he is trying to steal the mistress of his profligate eldest son, Dmitri, while also short changing him on his inheritance. The hot-headed Dmitri knows what his father is up to and has threatened to kill him over the matter. Meanwhile, the girl they are pursuing is having a great time stringing them both along and delighting in watching them fight over her. To top it all off, the middle son, Ivan, is in love with the woman who Dmitri is engaged to. That’s just the basics of the story!

All of this sounds like the kind of thing you might see on one of those American talk shows where the father and sons spend the whole time screaming at each other and end up coming to blows while the audience cheers. This comparison might seem flippant and yet it captures, I think, a crucial point about the novel and what it says about modern western society.

The characters in Karamazov would never in a million years take their personal issues onto a television show for the whole world to see. That would be a punishment worse than death for them and the reason is a concept which has become almost wholly foreign to us in the modern West: shame. The modern West is, in a technical sense, shameless and this is no accident. It’s a result of ideas that were taking hold when Dostoevsky wrote his masterpiece and which he introduces as one of the main themes of the book.

Dostoevsky shows us an old-fashioned kind of shamelessness in the character of the father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. He represents a character that occurs a lot in 19^th century literature but which I used to think didn’t exist in the modern world; namely, the man who spills his guts to all and sundry and blurts out the most intimate details of his mind to complete strangers. I say I used to think that because the last time I read Dostoevsky social media was in its infancy.  But social media has shown that the psychology of Fyodor Karamazov is still with us.

It’s a daily occurrence on social media to see people still blurt out whatever is on their mind for all the world to see. Often what’s on their mind is some rather vile thoughts about some person or group; the kind of thing that would be much better kept to yourself. Such posts quickly get deleted, but it’s normally too late by then. Some troll has already taken a screenshot of the offending post and happily re-posted it to the internet to remind the world.

What’s behind all this is the concept of shame. People delete a social media post because it revealed something about themselves that they didn’t want revealed. Even in our shameless culture, there are still some boundaries left. We’re tempted to say that the novelty of social media has tricked people into such dumb behaviour; that it’s made it too easy to type in anything and press send. But Dostoevsky shows us the psychology in great detail in The Brothers Karamazov which is full of characters blurting out things that are not in their interest or their conception of self.

The novel takes place in a second tier town in a second tier province at a time before even local newspapers. As a result, everybody in town knows everybody else’s business. But more than that, for the main characters in the novel, the town is their world.

From our vantage point at a time of instantaneous global communication, we might think of this as limiting or even suffocating. But Dostoevsky doesn’t. On the contrary, he repeatedly pokes fun at the several characters in the novel who make a pretence of being wise and learned simply because they’ve read the latest stories in the Moscow or Petersburg press or, even worse, the latest ideas from Paris or Berlin. Such characters want to come across as learned, rational and objective. But that is just pride. And it’s an inferior kind of pride than that which leads to interpersonal conflict because sitting in armchair and reading a newspaper or some sociological treatise cannot activate the conscience and therefore cannot be a (real) provocation to ethics and self-knowledge.  

Dostoevsky would not have been surprised at the posturing and preening and the virtue signalling which is endemic on social media. It is just a more extreme form of the psychology that was already there in the late 19^th century. It’s a way to escape “the real world” i.e. the flesh and blood world of family relations, friendships, messy love affairs and all the other “melodrama” that makes up real life. In small towns of the past like the one in Karamazov there was no way to escape that except by moving to the big city. But, nowadays, it’s possible anywhere. You can escape without leaving the comfort of your own home.

Our public discourse provides the pretence of objectivity and rationality. But as we’ve seen in the last two and half years, when the pressure is on, the veil is lifted and we see that what sits just beneath the surface is the same human emotions and feelings. For most people, the public discourse is nothing more than a screen on which to project their own issues. Dostoevsky already knew that in 1880 and he captured it most clearly in the character of Rakitin in the novel. Even the wretched Fyodor Karamazov is superior to a Rakitin because the old man makes no attempt to cloak his real self (his will, emotions, feelings) in “objectivity” and “modern ideas”.

I use the word cloak here deliberately because the etymology of the word shame is related to the idea of covering up. We want to “hide our shame” because shame is a revealing (an uncloaking) to the world of something about ourselves that we do not want the world to see. The drama in Karamazov revolves around pride, honour and shame and the misunderstandings and misinterpretations of people’s motives as they inevitably read their own biases and prejudices into others. All of these misunderstandings cause their own trouble in turn. That’s what happens in a small town. When you misinterpret somebody, you hurt their reputation. That has consequences for them and for you. Unlike exchanging the latest acceptable opinions on social media, everybody has skin in the game.

The source of the shame for the characters in Karamazov, however, is not vanity and this is a crucial point to make. All of the main characters, even the old drunken letch, Fyodor Karamazov, have a conscience. Their shame comes from this internal sense of right and wrong and, even though they are often driven by vanity or other base emotions, they ultimately stand before their conscience.

To will, to desire, to strive and to act are revealing. Obviously, by acting we reveal ourselves to the world. But what’s less obvious is that we also reveal ourselves to ourselves. “How do I know what I think until I hear what I say,” said E.M. Forster. That is what is going on throughout Karamazov. The characters are ashamed for their behaviour in front of others but they are also ashamed in front of themselves, in front of their own conscience.

Pride, honour and shame are the exoteric, public-facing, dimensions of right and wrong. To defend one’s honour is to defend an ethical conception of the good. Even in vanity, there is still an ethical claim. I claim this thing is good and that I am an exemplar of it. If you prove that I am not and bring shame on me, we still agree on what is good. In this way, even vanity can lead to the good as long as it is tied to conscience.

Conscience is the esoteric, inner-facing dimension. Note that the word conscience is very similar to the word consciousness. In fact, they both have their origin in the Latin word conscientia meaning to know thoroughly (the word “science” is related).

This is, I think, Dostoevsky’s point. So-called objective, rational knowledge that does not have an esoteric, personal component is almost valueless. Only through direct knowledge, gnosis, can you bring your conscience to bear and only then can you know in the fullest way possible. This is why know thyself is the basis of all knowledge.

How do you know who you are until you see what you do? To challenge oneself is exactly to put yourself in a situation where you don’t know what you will do. Will you crumble? Will you bring shame on yourself?

The main characters in the novel, Fyodor and Dmitri Karamazov, are driven onwards by passions they can barely control. This leads them to do things that are disgraceful, dumb and completely against any pragmatic self-interest they might have. What redeems them (moreso for Dmitri than his father) is their conscience i.e. that they have not lost sight of the good. Though they might slip back into vanity and pride, they do not lose the higher conception. That is the primary difference between them and the characters who are purveyors of modern ideas, including the middle brother, Ivan. These have swapped passion, emotion and feeling for a lukewarm objectivity that in the lesser characters is nothing more than a cover for pride and self-interest and, in its purest form in Ivan, unleashes evil.

If this interpretation is right, Dostoevsky counts among the writers of the later 19^th century who foresaw the tidal wave of evil that was threatening to be unleashed by the new ideas. Of more relevance to the post war years, he also foresaw the vacuous, comfortable bourgeois ethic which reaches its apotheosis in social media. One no longer even needs to leave the house to propagate the latest thing, the new ideas, the acceptable opinions. All of this is the flimsiest cloak for petty and shallow moral grandstanding.

That cloak doesn’t hide shame for there is nothing to be ashamed of. The fact that there is nothing to be ashamed of is the whole problem because it implies there is no esoteric content involved; no heart, will, passion, desire or emotion. Accordingly, there is no chance to activate one’s conscience. It’s all a hollowed out, empty shell of reason that will crack and disintegrate with the merest touch of emotional and intellectual honesty.

I suspect many people know that at some level. The hysteria we see on social media and in modern public discourse in general is also present in Karamazov but it is reserved for the times when people are desperately trying to cover themselves up. Jung and Dostoevsky would be in agreement on this: people really, really hate to self-reflect and will go to great lengths to avoid the task. In Karamazov, that might mean getting drunk in a tavern and starting a brawl, fainting on the couch or perjuring oneself in court. Nowadays, you can simply distract yourself with social media or an infinite number of other electronic diversions.

Ultimately, though, these are all short term measures and in the long run you will have to face the music. Karamazov shows that in the form of a court case representing the exoteric “conscience” at work. But the highest judge in Dostoevsky is one’s own conscience. That is also the highest form of truth. If he’s right, then our modern world, which systematically denies the conscience as the arbiter of truth, is missing something fundamental.

Clark’s assumption was that great art provides the truest form of expression of a civilisation because it is not caught up in the triviality of fashion, the hysterics of day-to-day politics or the dogmatic belligerence of religious dispute. Great artistic movements also transcend national boundaries and so provide an object of study that corresponds to the level of civilisation, which is almost always supra-national.

Recently, I went back to the final episode of Clark’s series to find a reference and realised something I hadn’t fully grasped the first time around. Clark called the final episode Heroic Materialism and it is the one episode in the series where he expressly forgoes an analysis of art for something different. That something different is the railways, bridges and skyscrapers that we all take for granted in the modern world but which originated in England in the 19^th century. The building of these enormous objects required genuinely heroic effort and they also implied a worship of mammon. Put the two together and you get Heroic Materialism.

Clark differentiated engineering from science because this was also the time when science, through Einstein and quantum physics, had begun to detach itself from everyday life and had even, both metaphorically and literally through the atomic bomb, become a threat to life.

Now you might say to yourself that a rail bridge is built for practical, utilitarian reasons and that is exactly how the government here sold them to the public. But I can tell you from direct experience that this is not true. The reason I had time to sit in my car and peruse the giant chunks of concrete across the road was that, despite the newly built rail bridge, the traffic at the intersection where I was sitting has only gotten worse in recent years. As far as I can tell, the rail bridge has made no noticeable difference to traffic flows and, in fact, the changes in the local roads that were made in order to build the bridge have made my general commute around the neighbourhood worse. By utilitarian criteria, the bridges are a failure.

What if we don’t really judge such bridges by utilitarian criteria at all? What if the bridges are built precisely because they are the expression of our deepest values, of Heroic Materialism itself? Here in Melbourne, we have spent tens of billions of dollars on rail bridges in recent years and have increased the state’s debt in order to do so. The official reason was to save people time driving in their cars. But any time that might have been saved by the bridges was quickly eaten up by the increases in population which means more cars on the road and more time sitting at traffic lights. If we actually cared about making people spend less time in cars, a cheaper and more effective way would be to have smaller cities but smaller cities contradict the bigger is better ethos that underlies Heroic Materialism.

The truth is that Clark was right, the bridges are built because they are an expression of our values. The State Premier here in Victoria, the man who became world famous during corona for telling people not to watch the sunset, has enjoyed great popularity in recent years and looks set to win an election again this year despite having given Melbourne the longest lockdown in the world. How is this possible? Because he gives the public what they want and what the public wants are large, public demonstrations of power in the form of rail bridges, rail loops, huge underground tunnels and skyscrapers.

The link here to corona is not accidental. The lockdowns and vaccines were also Heroic Materialism in action. They were Heroic Materialism applied to a domain where it doesn’t belong and doesn’t work but, again, that was not the point. The point is the expression of values. In that way, it was fitting that Melbourne had the longest lockdown in the world. That was only ever possible because people here really believe in the underlying ethic.

The modern environmental debate now revolves around which ginormous technological solution will save us. On the right side of the political spectrum are those who say we should stick to coal and gas and on the left are those who think wind farms and solar panels will do it. Underlying it all is the assumption that heroic feats of engineering must be deployed.

One of the side effects of Heroic Materialism is the feeling of powerlessness at the individual level. Heroic Materialism dictates that we formulate problems of such enormous scope that there simply isn’t anything a single person or even a small community can do about them. So, we must leave it to “the experts”. Gigantic projects also require gigantic injections of capital and thus behind the scenes are Mr Burns and his friends who fund the whole shebang and from whose point of view bigger really is better because their cut is directly proportional to the size of the transaction.

It’s the bankers and technocrats who run Heroic Materialism and always have. The de-humanising aspect of the ethic has always been its scale which seems expressly designed to make the individual feel as small and insignificant as possible. Just a cog in a machine. I noted with interest that the new Italian Prime Minister said almost exactly that during the recent election campaign in Italy. She spoke of “identity” and not being a “consumer slave” beholden to financial interests.

Those with a knowledge of history will recognise the tone of those words. Last time we tried to combat the problems of Heroic Materialism through politics it turned into an even worse version of Heroic Materialism much like the environmental movement has since it sold out in the 1980s.

And this is where we come back around to Kenneth Clark and to art. Art has always been concerned with the individual. Art took a backseat in the 20^th century because the 20^th century was the turning away from the individual and towards the mass, the crowd, the aggregate. As Heroic Materialism continues to falter around us every day, one of the silver linings for those of us who care about art is that we may see an artistic revival and along with it a return to the human and the humane.

The group stops overnight at a hotel in a small town where the Prussian officer who is in charge demands to spend a night with the prostitute. Being a patriotic woman, she refuses to sleep with the enemy. The officer seems to take it well. He doesn’t resort to violence or intimidation. But he does inform the group he will not let them leave the hotel until his desire has been satisfied.

After a couple of days of sitting around bored, the elites get sick of the situation and form a conspiracy (Maupassant’s word, not mine) to convince the prostitute to do as the Prussian officer wishes so they can leave the hotel and reach their destination. One-by-one they try to talk her into doing what is desired using a variety of arguments including appeal to religion, to self-interest and also to the fact that what the officer is asking is simply for the woman to practice her profession. It’s not like she can object on moral grounds. So, what’s the big deal? Just do your job and let us be on our way.

It occurred to me while reading the story how well it describes the situation we are still in to this day. Maupassant had forseen the modern world; a world in which the supra-national elites have more in common with each other than the people of their own country.

But there’s a more specific correspondence. Our modern elites are the equivalent to the French elites in the story. They use a variety of tactics to get the public to acquiesce. Behind that facade, even though we don’t talk about it, is the raw politics of the situation. We don’t have Prussian soldiers in our hotels and towns but we do have an invisible empire, the US Empire – aka the “liberal world order”, to whom our elites are bound.

The elites in Maupassant’s story simply have different priorities to the common folk and one of those priorities is not patriotism. This makes logical sense.  When a foreign power dictates the rules to your country, anybody who is a genuine patriot is not going to last long at the top and wouldn’t want the job anyway as they would have to be aware that the rules are not in the interests of the country. Almost by definition, the elites must be conspirators, although it is quite likely that they are not consciously aware that this is the case.  

Let’s call Maupassant’s story, and those like it, the Conspiracy Story (yes, I’m following the same form of analysis as I used in my book The Plague Story).

There are a couple of important facets to the conspiracy story. Firstly, the bad guys are out in the open for all to see as is the injustice they are perpetrating. Because of this, the Conspiracy Story implies the possibility that justice may be served at a later time. The conspirators are obviously in the wrong and they can be captured and held to account.

Another important facet of the Conspiracy Story is that there must be a power imbalance. This power imbalance means that a moral imperative has also been breached alongside any legal one. The “elites” are stronger and they use their superior strength to gain at the expense of the less powerful.

So, we can sum up the Conspiracy Story as follows: a small group of conspirators unite to use their position of strength to gain at the expense of a less powerful group or person.

If corona were a fictional story or movie, Klaus Schwab could never happen because he is too cheesy even for Hollywood. You can imagine the conversation in the writer’s room as the screenplay was being developed:

Head Writer: Ok, folks, we need a villain for the story. Gimme some ideas.

Junior Writer: I’ve got it! How about an old, bald man who talks with a thick German accent and who wears glasses that look like monocles. He plots world domination from a chalet in the Swiss Alps. Oh yeah, and his ancestors were Nazis!

Other Writer (sarcastically): Whaddya gonna call him? Hans Gruber?

Junior Writer (proudly): We’ll call him Klaus Schwab.

One of the defining features of postmodern literature is its use of irony. Well, clearly we live in a postmodern world. It’s a world where Klaus Schwab ironically (and unironically) exists. And it’s true. It’s true that there is a conspiracy going on right before our eyes. It’s true that the conspiracy is not in the interests of the common folk. It’s true that our so-called elites fly up to Davos for the privilege of taking part in the action. All the elements of the Conspiracy Story are right there out in the open.

But just to be even more postmodern, the Conspiracy Story is given the name Conspiracy Theory and thereby neutered. You’re now a crank for pointing out what’s exactly in front of everybody’s eyes. “So, there’s this guy who wants to take over the world, huh? And he’s German too. Wow. Cool story, bro (eye roll).” That’s multi-dimensional irony. Welcome to postmodernism.

In the spirit of postmodernism, where just because one thing is true doesn’t mean there aren’t other equally valid truths, I’d like to introduce another kind of story that is prominent in the modern world: the Horror Story.

We can summarise the Horror Story as follows: a powerful force is out there. You know it’s there but you can’t really identify it. It doesn’t care about you. You can’t communicate with it. You can’t reason with it. And it might kill you.

Immediately we can see that there are strong parallels between the Horror Story and the Conspiracy Story. From the point of view of the less powerful, the elites are a powerful force. They don’t care about you. You have very little ability to communicate and reason with them and, in extreme cases, they may kill you.

The main difference between the Conspiracy Story and the Horror Story are the properties of identity, agency and control. In a Conspiracy Story, the elites might be screwing you over but you know who they are and how they are doing it. In the Horror Story, you don’t know what the force is or how it is working. You just know it’s out to get you. We can plot the Horror Story and Conspiracy Story on a continuum as follows:

In psychological terms, the Conspiracy Story belongs to consciousness while the Horror Story belongs to the subconscious. The primary emotion of the Conspiracy Story is anger at injustice while the primary emotion of the Horror Story is fear caused by an absence of knowledge and understanding.

It is no coincidence that pandemics are prime examples of the Horror Story with viruses playing the role of the amorphous, indifferent force that might kill you. What the conscious mind wants more than anything in a Horror Story is to remove fear and doubt. Thus, the protagonists in such stories spend their time trying to identify what is afflicting them.

I think a big part of the reason why covid tests remain so popular is that they (claim to) identify the invisible enemy who would otherwise be lurking in the cellular shadows. The tests and the vaccines are the attempt to bring to consciousness what would otherwise remain in the subconscious. They fulfil this psychological need independently of any technical or scientific value they might have.

Identity, agency and control. These are what is missing in the Horror Story and their absence drives fear. We tend to think the fear is caused by the Horror Story. But what if the causality is the other way around? What if it’s underlying fear which makes Horror Stories popular?

If this is true, we can surmise that the increasing popularity of the Horror Story is because of an increase in fear caused by a perceived lack of identity, agency and control in the lives of many people. We can then go back one step further and ask what has caused people to feel that their identity, agency and control was slipping away.

The first thing to note is that this problem has been around since the start of the industrial revolution and has only been getting more pronounced since then. The speed of change in modern society means that people can never feel that they are standing on solid ground. This dynamic has been given the name anomie and it has been around for a couple of centuries.

With the neoliberal reforms of the 1990’s, the level of anomie has gone into overdrive. Thus, it’s fair to say that “forces of globalisation” have been driving the rise in the popularity of the Horror Story via increased anomie in the population. This makes sense. The “market forces” of the global economy don’t care about you, you can’t reason with them, and they might cause you to lose your job and break up your family. That sounds like a Horror Story to me and it has been a real life Horror Story for a great many people in the last thirty years.

And here we come back around to the Conspiracy Story. The neoliberal agenda was implemented by the supra-national elites who convinced the voting public in each country to go along with it. In that sense, it was a Conspiracy Story. Neoliberalism was quite clearly in the interests of the US Empire because, among other things, it financialised the public assets of most countries thereby increasing the amount of dollars flowing back to the US. The elites in those other countries, including here in Australia, dutifully got on board the program and sold the idea to the public as being all about free markets, competition, globalisation and the liberal world order. In other words: ideology.

In Maupassant’s story, the ideology used to convince the reluctant prostitute took the form of religion. As Napoleon once said, religion was the only thing preventing the common people from stringing the elites up from lampposts. We don’t have religion anymore and so the elites need new kind of ideology which is dutifully churned out by modern universities and think tanks (another term dripping with postmodern irony).

But, unlike Christianity, the new ideology has no basis in what was once a vibrant religion and its associated symbolism. The ideology produced by the modern university is untethered from history and from reality in general. This is a feature, not a bug, because it means that the ideology cannot be reasoned with. It is specifically designed not to be thought about.

Thus, the modern ideology is a Horror Story in and of itself. To make matters worse, that ideology is then promulgated through a propaganda apparatus the size and scope of which the Church could never have dreamed of. The underlying purpose of that propaganda apparatus, however, is still the same. It is there to convince the common folk to acquiesce. These days it does so more through bewilderment than anything. But that bewilderment is ambiguity and amorphousness; the properties of the Horror Story.

As I have noted in recent posts, the modern propaganda apparatus also no longer focuses exclusively on ideology but directly targets the subconscious. This is the big change that has occurred in the Conspiracy Story since Maupassant’s time. The combination of meaningless ideology and Magic means that the propaganda of the elites is no longer understandable by the conscious mind, even the conscious mind of the elites themselves. Therefore, it exists purely in the subconscious causing the Conspiracy Story to become a Horror Story.

Prior to the neoliberal reforms of the 90s, the two main political parties in most western countries represented labour and capital. You knew what they stood for. You knew whose interests they served. Identity, agency and control were well defined and plain to see. This system was then dismantled from within and the labour parties were convinced to sell out; the same betrayal we see in Maupassant’s story.

This absence of identity, agency and control leads to fear and explains the popularity of the Horror Story in the modern climate debate as well as the various apocalypse fantasies of which corona was the most extreme example. What we saw from the start of corona was a deep-seated desire on the part of a large section of the public for politicians to take charge, to be identifiably in control and to show that they had agency. It didn’t matter that what the politicians were being asked to do (“control” a respiratory virus) was impossible. The psychological desire was the end in itself.

Viewed in this way, there may actually be a deep-seated wisdom at play here. It seems almost certain that corona has brought neoliberalism to an end and probably also signifies the end of the “liberal world order”. To the extent that the liberal world order had morphed into a Horror Story, corona could be seen to represent a demand for a return to identity, agency and control. It’s the demand for real human beings as leaders who don’t hide behind ideology, who govern over things that they do actually control and therefore must take responsibility for.

We’re not there yet, of course. There will be a whole lot of ducking and weaving, a lot of propaganda aimed at keeping the ship afloat as long as possible. But we are looking at a reset. I very much doubt it will be the one that Herr Schwab wants. Instead of increasing de-humanisation, I expect we’ll see the opposite. For better or worse, it will be a return to humanity which is to say identity, agency and a less hallucinogenic and far more humble level of control.

Ask the average person in a western nation what it means to cure a disease and what will they answer? Chances are they think a cure means a solution. You get sick with something, you take a treatment, then you’re no longer sick. Ask the same person how many diseases have been cured in the last century or so and they’ll probably think there were quite a lot. And yet, by the definition of cure just given, there have been very few actual cures developed.

Here’s a good example of the schizophrenic nature of our cultural understanding of what it means to cure. The headline reads “12 Deadly Diseases Cured in the 20^th Century”. The average person would interpret this to mean that once upon a time there were 12  deadly diseases in the world and then the 20^th century came along and now those diseases don’t exist. But the very first disease listed in the article is chickenpox and the article specifically states that chickenpox is not a deadly disease, is not cured, and is, in fact, a rite of passage for most people.

This kind of disconnect between the headline and the actual content of an article is extremely common these days and, once you get an eye for it, you can start to discover some interesting things about our culture. The pattern is as follows: the headline refers to the deep-seated cultural script while the body shows the “reality”. Many people would call such articles propaganda. But even if it is propaganda, it’s very subtle propaganda that works by reinforcing a cultural script that is perfectly familiar to the average reader. In this case, the cultural script is that we have cured lots of diseases through the wonders of modern medicine. If we dig a little deeper into that script, we find that it revolves around the word cure.

Fittingly, the word cure has its etymology in religion. To cure is to make healthy and healthy is related to holy. In French, curé still means priest or chaplain. In Latin, curare means “to take care of”. In the original meaning, you cured a person and you did that by taking care of them i.e. nursing them back to health (which could also have meant spiritual health).

Whether you think that medical “cures” are largely about returning a person to wholeness (and holiness) through healing or whether you think a cure is the medical equivalent of carpet bombing the invisible enemy into oblivion will in large part predict your reaction to corona. As a member of the former group, I was horrified. But most people in our society follow the latter cultural script according to which the Dr Faucis of the world are the great generals leading us into scientific battle and we must play the role of obedient soldiers.

How does the leader of the free world say that with a straight face, especially given that he himself is vaccinated up the wazoo and still got covid? Well, that’s between Biden and his curé (his priest) and I hope he’s got a good one. But, in fairness, Biden probably believes what he’s saying and so do a great many people in western nations. What’s going here, despite how absurd it might look to those of us who are apostates from this strange religion, is not actually anything new but a basic element of human psychology.

The phenomenon of disregarding what looks to non-believers as overwhelming evidence permeates even the domain of science. As the saying goes, science progresses one funeral at a time. Even some of the greatest scientists have gone to their graves denying what later became standard theories of how the world works. Gerald Weinberg gave this phenomenon the name The Law of the Conservation of Laws:  

“When the facts contradict the law, reject the facts or change the definitions, but never throw away the law”.

That’s not the way science is supposed to work, but it’s the way science does work because it’s the way humans work. A vaccine is a cure and cures are safe and effective. That is the cultural script or law that must be preserved in our culture and it will be preserved until it can no longer be preserved. If this means disregarding obvious facts and changing the definitions of words, then that’s exactly what will happen and it’s exactly what has happened in the last decade in order to get more “cures” onto the market.

Many dissenters analyse corona as a one-off mass formation psychosis where people were so traumatised that they continue to behave irrationally. This line of thinking puts corona in a box with a nice bow around it and places it in the crazy basket alongside historical episodes like the Dutch tulip craze or the South Sea Bubble.

But that’s not correct. Corona follows the Law of the Conservation of Laws. We acted according to some of our most deep-seated cultural scripts and, though they were a complete failure, we have not thrown away those scripts and we continue to act by them. I would add to Weinberg’s law the qualifier that the more blatant the disregard for the facts, the more fundamental must be the law that is being protected. Right now, so many deep-seated beliefs of western culture are under threat that our entire public discourse is completely dissociated from reality. That’s not a state of affairs that can continue for much longer.

I tried to unpack the main cultural scripts related to corona in my book The Plague Story. It’s because the modern west thinks of itself as undogmatic (part of our ongoing rebellion against religion) that we are unable to see that we are just as dogmatic as any other society, perhaps even more so because we are unaware of our dogma. Because we never hold our dogma up to critical review, it doesn’t change. Thus, when faced with such an obvious failure as the corona vaccines, the modern west not only doesn’t acknowledge the failure but doubles down on it. That’s what Biden’s recent announcement amounts to.

There was one other thing that Biden shouted in his speech that I thought was telling as it relates to another core cultural script of the modern west. He said an mRNA vaccine for cancer “could be used to stop cancer cells when they first arise”. You know what else stops cancer cells when they first arise?: our immune system.

It’s worth remembering that the scientific discipline of immunology is very young. Almost everything we know about the immune system at a technical, analytical level has been learned in the post war years (although we had a tacit understanding of the principles of immune response well before that). We now know that the immune system is constantly on the lookout for cancer cells which it will destroy. This is the normal state of affairs. The abnormal state is when the cancer cells evade the immune system and the chances of this happening increase with age as the immune system begins to degrade along with the other systems of the body.

From a systems thinking point of view, the immune system belongs to the category of medium number systems i.e. those systems which display organised complexity. Biden is calling his cancer-cure push the Cancer Moonshot. But this analogy is a category error. The moonshot, sending a rocket to the moon, belonged to the domain of classical physics and is therefore in the organised simplicity category. A cure for cancer, whatever that means, must come from the domain of organised complexity.

But this implied definition of “science” is just another of our most deep-seated cultural scripts. “Science” means reductionist science. It’s true that reductionist science gave us the moonshot of which we are so proud. But reductionist science does not work in the domains of organised complexity of which medicine and biology are two prime examples. We can see another example of this category error in the executive order Biden released a couple of days ago in relation to the cancer moonshot. Here is an excerpt:

We need to develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers; unlock the power of biological data, including through computing tools and artificial intelligence; and advance the science of scale‑up production while reducing the obstacles for commercialization so that innovative technologies and products can reach markets faster.

Huh? Write circuity for cells? Program biology like a computer? As somebody who works in the IT industry, I don’t whether to laugh or cry at this statement. I will say this, I wouldn’t let a computer programmer anywhere near the “circuitry” of my cells. In these metaphors we see the same old category error. Electrical circuits and computer code belong to the domain of organised simplicity. Biology belongs to the domain of organised complexity.

Let me give an alternative metaphor which I think better captures what is going on with “cures” for diseases.

The body is a system and the immune system is a sub-system. Both systems interact with the larger systems that are the “real world”. The domain of study most relevant is ecology, which investigates the relationship between livings beings and their environment.

When we treat somebody with a “cure”, we are bringing a new element into the ecosystem of the body. It is assumed that the ecosystem is out of equilibrium (in a state of disease). We hope that the new element will trigger a process that brings the ecosystem back into equilibrium. mRNA vaccines are a novel element we have now introduced into the ecosystem of individual human bodies as well as the population of human bodies. Unlike programming software or wiring an electrical circuit, such an introduction of a novel element can, in fact almost certainly will, have unforeseen effects.

Sounds like a good idea. What could go wrong? Well, it turns out cane toads will eat not just insects but pretty much anything (including snakes!). This fact, combined with a lack of any natural predator to keep the population in check, meant that cane toad numbers exploded and are an ongoing problem to this day in the tropical north of Australia.

Now it must be said that there were many other species introduced to Australia that didn’t backfire as spectacularly as rabbits and cane toads. Nevertheless, the lesson holds. The use of any new kind of medication is broadly equivalent to introducing a novel species to an ecosystem. The metaphor breaks down somewhat in that most medications will exit the “ecosystem” by natural excretory processes; although the mRNA concept was always more dangerous in this sense because the process by which it would exit the system was less obvious. Nobody predicted the cane toad population would explode in Australia and cause huge problems because such things are not predicable. 

This is the main difference between the domains of organised simplicity and organised complexity. The science of organised simplicity eg. classical physics, produces predictable results. That’s the whole point of it. Reductionist science always aims for an “if A, then B” formulation. That works fine in the domain of organised simplicity. It does not work in the domain of organised complexity. In the domain of organised complexity there is always the risk of a cane toad-like phenomenon. In relation to medication, we mitigate that risk by testing extensively before releasing the medication “into the wild”. Well, we used to. Now we rush medication through testing and next thing you know it’s curing cancer. Even Jesus would be like “dude, that’s totally a miracle.”

Immunology and medicine are not like flying to the moon or writing computer code or wiring up electrical circuitry. They are qualitatively different disciplines. But the people running our society do not understand this. Until we acknowledge this fact, we are going to keep repeating the same errors of the last two and a half years. And that’s exactly what we are doing and will continue to do because of the Law of the Conservation of Laws.

If science progresses on funeral at a time, then at the generational level it progresses as the generations pass. The generation running society at the moment will continue making the same errors. As the consequences of those errors mount, they will continue to try and use their political power to silence dissenting voices. But eventually all that will pass. It will be the upcoming generations who are not blind to the abject failures of their leaders who will finally start asking the right questions and finding the right answers. Well, it better be, or we’re in real trouble.