Category: covid-19

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 26: The Devouring Mother

All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement. Then, the archetypes begin to function, as happens, also, in the lives of individuals when they are confronted with situations that cannot be dealt with in any of the familiar ways.
Carl Jung, Essay on Wotan.

Way back in the very first essay in this series, I stated that my position on corona was that it was a mass hysteria facilitated by the internet. The cornerstone of my analysis was that we invoked what I call The Plague Story even though corona is clearly not in the magnitude of a plague (pandemic). This raised the question of why that happened and throughout the other posts in the series I have been working through a number of different answers to that question some of them cultural, some political and some psychological. But I have always had the nagging feeling that I was missing something fundamental. Then recently I finally got around to reading Carl Jung’s essay on Wotan, which was his explanation for the Nazi phenomena, and suddenly it clicked. It was the above quote which really struck home not least because Jung uses the phrase “mass movement” which is almost the same as my “mass hysteria”. It’s in a mass movement that the archetypes begin to function according to Jung. For WW1 and the Nazi movement he identified Wotan as the driving archetype. So, I started to think about what archetype has been driving corona and now I think I may have the answer or at least the beginnings of an answer.

Jung believed the archetypes to have an autonomous existence. They existed independently of humans but were the driver of much human behaviour. When Jung asserts that Wotan was driving the events in Nazi Germany he means that literally. In less secular ages, one would have said that Hitler was possessed (by the devil) and that’s kind of what Jung meant too. Because we cannot say that Hitler was possessed by the devil, we have simply turned Hitler into the devil. What earlier societies would have called “evil” we call “Nazi” or “fascist”. The meaning is identical but our words have a quasi-secular ring to them. Jung’s way of thinking is at odds with the extremist materialist philosophy that dominates current Western thought. The archetypes are not testable and not amenable to the scientific reductionism that is our default criterion for truthfulness. Of course, corona has revealed the deep flaws that exist in applying scientific reductionism to the living and breathing biological and psychological world that we all live in. What better time to expand our criteria for truthfulness.

I got my first inkling that corona was touching on something deep and dark down in the depths of the psyche from a couple of direct encounters with some people I know. Obviously, there have been all kinds of crazy things to be seen on television and the internet throughout corona, but it was two face-to-face conversations that really struck me as odd early on. The first one took place at the end of the first lockdown here in Melbourne. During a conversation with a person I have known for quite a while the subject of corona came up. I said something that contradicted the dominant narrative. I didn’t say it in a confrontational manner or to make any kind of broader point. It was just an offhand comment delivered in a very casual and non-threatening way. Nevertheless, the person I was talking to raised their right arm over their chest in an involuntary protective gesture as if I was about to punch them. What was especially weird about it was that they seemingly did not realise they had done it. It was a purely unconscious reaction and something I had never seen from this person or any other person that I can recall in my life. It struck me as deeply weird at the time but I didn’t really think much more about it.

A second example was another person I know who was, up until 2020, a logical and rational person; arguably too logical and too rational. The subject of corona came up in a conversation and with this person I was more forthcoming in my views as he was somebody I thought I might be able to have a rational conversation with. I was wrong. But what was notable was not that we disagreed but that his argumentation was completely illogical. This is a person who makes his living from logic and would in any other circumstances be fully aware that he was speaking basic logical fallacies. As the conversation proceeded, nothing he said made sense. It’s one thing to disagree with somebody, it’s quite another when their entire argument is clearly illogical. It was like talking to a different person or, rather, like talking to a zombie. In both of these cases, I got a very strong sense that something had ‘possessed’ these two people. I simply wasn’t dealing with the same person I had once known. It is only in the last few weeks that I have started to think more about Jungian psychology and have taken seriously the idea that these people and millions more like them really have been possessed by something. In and through them, a force has been at work. An archetype has taken over our lives in the same way that an archetype took over at the beginning of WW1 and continued right on through the Nazi regime until the end of WW2. Unlike Jung, I am not familiar enough with mythology to come up with a Wotan equivalent, so I’ll just use one of Jung’s own archetypes to explain it: The Devouring Mother.

We all know The Devouring Mother at some level as it is an extension of the natural relationship between child and mother which needs to exist in the early stages of life when the infant is completely reliant on the mother for its existence. In the normal course of development, the child learns to become successively more independent of its mother but along the way there will be times when the mother is too over-protective. Mostly, the child will try to assert independence and the mother hopefully will yield it as appropriate. It’s when the mother does not yield that things can start to go wrong and if the mother is not yielding due to her own insecurities leading to her not wanting to let go at all, she can become a Devouring Mother. The Devouring Mother archetype occurs when both mother and child are in a dysfunctional relationship of co-dependence in which the mother is just as trapped as the child. The guilt, however, lies with the mother as it is the parent’s duty to ensure the child’s proper development. Of course, the process of letting go is not easy. Many mothers cry, for example, on the first day the child goes to school for this occasion represents the growing independence of the child. Similarly, in tribal societies, when the male child (for it was almost always the male) was taken away for initiation the mother would wail and cry as the boy was now becoming a man and the mother’s role in his life was about to be changed forever.

It is precisely this autonomy that The Devouring Mother prevents her child from attaining. She wants it to remain perpetually dependent and she does this out of her own insecurity and selfishness. The key reason why The Devouring Mother is relevant to our context, however, is because one of the main ways The Devouring Mother attempts to hide her intentions is on the pretext of protecting the child. This protection is necessary when the child is an infant. The problem occurs when that protection turns into over-protection and hampers the child’s development but that is something that will happen slowly and almost invisibly until one day you wake up and you’ve got a 30 year old grown man living in his parents’ basement playing computer games all day. Just last week, the Prime Minister of Australia, whose Treasurer had just delivered a “woman’s budget” (perhaps we should call it a “Devouring Mother’s budget”), said that his primary mission was to “keep Australians safe”. But that is exactly the excuse that devouring mothers use. Is that just a coincidence? Not according to Jung. According to Jung it would be a synchronicity and evidence that an archetype is at work.

A feature of The Devouring Mother is that she gaslights her children. This happens in two seemingly contradictory ways. On the one hand, she won’t allow any criticism of them at all even when it is necessary and justified. Rather, she suffocates them with false praise. The author D H Lawrence, who wrote a lot about the devouring mother phenomenon as he believed his mother to have been a prime example, once wrote in a letter “I feel I am all the time rescuing my niece and nephew from their mothers, my two sisters; who have jaguars of wrath in their souls, however they purr to their offspring.” One sees this purring in the modern world in corporate marketing. One of the weirdest examples I ever saw was a tweet saying how much Corporation X really loved “you” from the bottom of its heart. You may write this off as marketing bullshit, but it’s bullshit that sounds exactly like a Devouring Mother.

While dishing out false praise and empty promises of eternal love on the one hand, The Devouring Mother will be extremely critical, even violent, with her children if ever they should say or do something that threatens the co-dependence relationship that the mother seeks. This gaslighting has the effect of preventing the child becoming intellectually and emotionally independent, a key part of its overall development. Remember when you were told that if you didn’t support the lockdowns it meant you wanted old people to die? That kind of emotional manipulation is par for the course with The Devouring Mother. There are a thousand and one other ways to keep the elderly safe that don’t involve locking healthy people in their house, but those are never discussed. The Victorian Premier, Dan Andrews, showing that The Devouring Mother can take male form, gave what I think might be one of the most succinct expressions of this kind of gaslighting last year. He was asked by a reporter whether he was concerned that his measures, which included curfews and five kilometre travel restrictions, were a violation of human rights. He replied “would you prefer to be on a ventilator?” This was a complete non sequitur. Only the tiniest fraction of the population had any chance of ending up on a ventilator but one hundred percent of the population had had their humans rights removed. The Premier could have answered in a logical, rational way. Instead, he chose to gaslight. That’s how The Devouring Mother operates. None of the governments in Australia has ever, as far as I know, released the “science” they have supposedly been using to justify their decisions. In the adult working world, we communicate to each other based on facts and models. A democracy is supposed to involve public debate about those facts and models. But in the sickly sweet world of The Devouring Mother, we are kept in the dark and given only one option: to acquiesce.

For those who don’t acquiesce, The Devouring Mother is also perfectly capable of violence as our police forces have shown us. What was particularly interesting about the police response, certainly here in Australia, was that it was unnecessarily brutal and heavy-handed to the point where it seemed counter-productive. The police seemed to be going out of their way to generate resentment. Their behaviour, like the behaviour of my two conversation partners, seemed out of character as if having a source somewhere other than reason. Were the police also playing the role of The Devouring Mother and lashing out against minor indiscretions out of a sense of insecurity? The most heavy-handed policing has been employed against otherwise law abiding citizens who happened to disobey a corona commandment. One Australian example which went viral was a pregnant woman being handcuffed in front of her children in her own home but there were countless others. Meanwhile, mass protests such as BLM were seemingly given a free pass. At a time when politicians were calling for unity, they engaged in favouritism. It doesn’t make any logical sense but it does make sense within The Devouring Mother archetype. The Devouring Mother is happy to play her children off against each other. Such emotional manipulations help her maintain the co-dependence relationship.

To my mind, one of the defining features of corona is the seemingly complete disregard for the effect of our response on children. This is even more puzzling as it’s a simple statistical fact that corona is less dangerous to children than the average flu. This should have been a matter for rejoicing. Instead, in many places children have been kept out of school and, even when allowed to go to school, forced to wear masks and undergo other unnecessary interventions. In Germany, children are now forced to test themselves for corona at the start of the school day. Just this week, a video went viral of a ten year old boy explaining what he has had to go through at school in the US. What he describes is Devouring Mother behaviour coming from his teachers. This is yet another synchronicity and evidence that the archetype is at work. The Devouring Mother only pretends to be acting to protect her child but with corona there was essentially nothing to protect them from. That would have made a difference if logic was at play. But logic was not at play.

In a similar vein is the mask. The mask is perhaps the ultimate symbol of The Devouring Mother. It purports to keep the wearer safe even though there is no scientific evidence for this claim and plenty of randomised control trials that show masks are useless. Worse than useless in fact, as we are only now starting to see some evidence of the effects of long term mask wearing which causes the wearer to inhale more carbon dioxide than is considered safe among other problems. In any case, you didn’t need scientific studies to see that the authorities were making it up as they went. We were initially told that masks were counterproductive and could actually cause more spread of disease as they would be used improperly. Then they became recommended. Then mandatory. Then the recommendation was to wear two. Arbitrary dictates given without rhyme or reason are a feature of The Devouring Mother. What she desires is simple subservience and that’s what the mask represents: a very public display of obedience. With mouths covered, the children of The Devouring Mother will not answer back, will not demand their rights, will not ask awkward questions. Silent obedience is what The Devouring Mother wants and, at least symbolically, the mask gives her that. Once again, I must quote the State Premier of Victoria who gave us another perfect example of The Devouring Mother at play on the subject of masks. After four months of lockdown and with cases finally back at zero, restrictions had eased in Melbourne. We were heading into summer but masks were still mandatory in enclosed spaces. Some people, perhaps looking to other Australian states where nobody had to wear a mask, started relaxing their behaviour and wearing their masks below the nose. Andrews tweeted on a Sunday morning something like “Good morning to everybody, except those wearing their masks below the nose.” Why was the Premier engaging in unnecessarily divisive behaviour? The risk was over and, even if it wasn’t, his tweet was not going to convince a single person to cover their nose. It was inexplicable as a political tactic unless the point was not achieve an outcome but simply to reward the ‘good children’, to make them feel good and to separate them from the ‘bad children’.

The Devouring Mother has been ascendant in the West for several decades. We see her in the metastatic bloat of the modern medical industry especially in the United States where The Devouring Mother will happily bankrupt you for a simple trip to the hospital. We see her in the relentless gaslighting of the modern media, the ideological drivel that comes out of the universities and our hallucinatory political debate which somehow manages to avoid all contact with reality and all genuine issues of politics. We also see her in a less obvious place, which is the rise of Jordan Peterson from being an obscure Canadian professor of psychology to being a worldwide phenomenon. His rise to fame touches on the other half of The Devouring Mother relationship: the children. If Dan Andrews was appealing to the ‘good’ children with his tweet, he was also singling out the ‘bad’ children. In fact, these are the only two pathways available to the child of The Devouring Mother: to rebel or to acquiesce. Jordan Peterson has offered an entire generation, in particular the young men of that generation, raised by The Devouring Mother a way to rebel primarily by the simple act of striving for autonomy and independence. That Peterson would be considered a revolutionary figure speaks to how far The Devouring Mother has become dominant. Most of Peterson’s teachings are what would once have been considered plain common sense but in the world of gaslighting and emotional manipulation that we now find ourselves in, common sense threatens the entire order. Whatever one thinks of Peterson and his ideas, there can be no doubt whatsoever that he tapped into a deep emotional vein. His book “10 Rules for Life” could just as well be called “10 Rules for Breaking Free of The Devouring Mother”. Rule 1: clean your bedroom. Do something for yourself. Show some initiative. In an older time, you cleaned your bedroom or you’d get your backside smacked. But now cleaning your bedroom becomes a political act. It shows the first inklings of individual will, the development of autonomy that so terrifies The Devouring Mother. Peterson’s infamous interview with Cathy Newman was a direct symbolic confrontation between The Devouring Mother and a strict disciplinarian father. It had a surreal feel to it. It barely existed on the logical and rational plane but seemed like a battle between archetypes in the unconscious itself. Much more could be said about this because if The Devouring Mother is dominant, where exactly is the father and what sort of father is he? But that would lead us too far astray for now.

If Peterson offered a way out to the children who wanted to rebel, what of the other children; the ones who have acquiesced? Such children have been given false praise while being protected from any and all criticism about themselves and their work. On the other hand, they have become exquisitely sensitive to the veiled barbs and emotional warfare that goes on in the household of The Devouring Mother. For them, objective reality is of no concern. They are apt to see a psychological and political agenda behind every utterance because that is exactly what has been behind their relationship with their mother (where ‘mother’ can be both literal and symbolic for the state). When they are eventually forced to confront the real world with all its messiness, it is no surprise that they demand ‘safe spaces’. It’s also no surprise that their politics does not seek any actual outcomes but rather is all based entirely around establishing the ‘good people’ and the ‘bad people’ where there are no shades of grey but only absolutes, including an absolute assurance in one’s own self-righteousness.

Children who acquiesce and become part of the co-dependent relationship with the mother can be expected to have not developed into fully autonomous adults. One would expect them to have problems with exercising their will and finding motivation from within rather than without. As it happens, a random social media post I saw during corona provides the perfect example of that. It was during the Melbourne lockdown that happened right in the middle the Australian Open tennis earlier this year. On the Saturday morning on which the lockdown began, a young woman posted how nice it was to wake up during lockdown because it meant she had nothing to do and could happily lie in bed. Such a statement reveals a complete lack of willpower and autonomy. It takes almost no willpower to organise to do nothing on a Saturday but even that simple task must be beyond this person. When the government did it on her behalf, she apparently breathed a sigh of relief. Some have called this attitude Stockholm Syndrome but it is just another aspect of The Devouring Mother archetype. More specifically, the child who has acquiesced and almost doesn’t exist as a separate, adult person separate from the mother. Praising the government for allowing you to sleep in on a Saturday morning is surely one of the most surreal expressions of that mentality. When given in this form it reveals, I think, very clearly the psychological aspect of what is going on deep down: the attachment to the “mother” in the form of the state.

The phrase Nanny State was coined about fifty years ago in Britain to describe the prevailing form of government which took hold post WW2. Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada all share this kind of interventionist government, far more than the USA and so it can be no surprise that The Devouring Mother found the most fertile soil in those countries and perhaps nowhere more than here in Australia. We have let The Devouring Mother run rampant. I’m not aware of any other country which is preventing their citizens from leaving the country. Even New Zealand, with nanny-in-chief, Jacinda Ardern, at the helm, allows that. In Australia, we have had internal state borders closed and even the ‘borders’ around Melbourne shut for four months in one of the longest lockdowns in the world. State Premiers have left residents stranded and unable to return to their houses with snap border closures. Australian citizens languish overseas unable to get home and recently we went an extra step and even made it illegal for our own citizens to return if they have been in India recently. Once again, none of this has a basis in logic or reason. It is the vindictiveness of The Devouring Mother on display. The ‘bad’ children who left the state or the country apparently don’t deserve our ‘love’.

Right from the start of corona, our tinpot dictator State Premiers acted like all their Christmases had come at once. In a tweet quickly deleted, Dan Andrews expressed his delight at a photo of an empty freeway that would normally have been full during peak hour. He later felt the need to assure us that he wasn’t “enjoying this” as he gave his daily press briefing where, like a good Devouring Mother, he was most anxious to let us know just who was responsible for keeping us safe. He was also not averse to blaming us when things went wrong, including when the wrongdoing was clearly the fault of the government. No surprise then that while much of the US is returning to normal, Australia is in limbo and Canada has decided that now is the time for strict lockdowns to try and control a virus that is endemic. Americans have been up in arms about the liberties they have forgone but they look on with horror at what has happened here or in Canada. On this front, the cultural differences between us and the US are very pronounced. Of course, the US once went to war against its “mother” and it celebrates “Independence Day” as a result. One can see why The Devouring Mother would not get as much hold there.

It is a final and telling synchronicity that with corona we were locked in our houses. The household has always been the domain of the female and especially the mother. As a boy, I briefly shared a house with my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother as well as their respective husbands. It was the women who ruled the household. Woe betide the man who dared step foot in the kitchen. The men were usually elsewhere, at work or at the club. If they were home, they were in the shed. The household was very clearly the domain of the woman and children. The development of the individual takes place as they successively remove themselves from the household, firstly with schooling, then a social life and finally as they move out and become autonomous adults. With corona we were all returned back to the household, back to childhood, back to our mothers. Defenceless as we were supposed to be against the virus, we once again needed the care and protection of our surrogate mother: the State. “I’m sick of being treated like a child” is a refrain I’ve heard many times over the past year but that opinion is apparently in the minority.

What does all this portend for the future? The strange thing about The Devouring Mother is how powerless she really is. All her gaslighting is just sound and fury, signifying nothing. If it were to end tomorrow, we would remember it as nothing more than a delirious fever dream. Her power depends entirely on the willingness of the child to put up with it. Once the child is big enough to decide to go its own way, there is nothing much the mother can do about it. Right now in western society, the actions of The Devouring Mother are on full and open display. But, almost by definition, that implies the strain in the relationship. When things are good, The Devouring Mother relies on false flattery and feigned niceness. Right now, we are in full on vindictive mode. 24/7 media gaslighting, censorship of even the most tame dissenting opinion and de-platforming are now daily occurrences. There is an element of desperation in the whole thing and there should be because the pathway we have taken has no endpoint. That is not a problem for The Devouring Mother. She does not want an endpoint. She wants the co-dependence to continue indefinitely. That’s why the case of Australia is so fascinating because our Devouring Mother did her job and kept us safe. But now there’s no way out of the house. We are permanently grounded. It will eventually have to be acknowledged that we must open the borders and expose ourselves to danger once again. How that can be done while keeping up the illusion of safety is a massive political challenge that our current Prime Minister clearly has no idea how to solve because it is not solvable. It is not solvable until the children demand their independence. That can happen at any time. It is what has happened in Texas and Florida and other states in the US. As soon as the public demands that this be over, it will be over. There may be vindictiveness and even violence, but it will be short lived. Each country will now have its own dynamic about how this plays out. The USA is already on the way. Canada, Australia and New Zealand not so much. If Australia has provided the most fertile ground for The Devouring Mother archetype to take hold in the last year, it’s also true she will not so easily relinquish her grip here. But eventually reality will have to be reckoned with. In the process, we could see some serious psychological-political meltdowns. Then there is the larger question of where The Devouring Mother goes from here. If she has been ascendant in the last decades and if corona represents a brief takeover, does she relinquish the newfound power or try to hold onto it? If she does relinquish it, do we go back to where we were or does she lose hold altogether? Again, this is not really going to be determined by the mother. We know what she wants: never ending co-dependence. The question is what do the children want. Is their spirit broken or will they find the will and the energy to demand their autonomy? I fear the former is more true than the latter but only time will tell.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

Back in the first year of my linguistics degree there was an exchange between our lecturer and one of the students in the class. The lecturer had asked a question and the student had given an answer. The answer was correct and was, in fairness to the student, a succinct and elegant single sentence. The problem was that lecturer clearly wanted a one word answer where the word was one of the technical terms that we had been studying. That word was polysemy, which denotes the state of affairs when a word carries multiple meanings. The lecturer bluntly told the student his answer was wrong and that the correct answer was ‘polysemy’. The student objected to this saying that even though he hadn’t recited the word he had got the meaning of the concept right and that was what was important. The lecturer, a little annoyed at this show of impudence, informed the class that we were students of linguistics and one of our main tasks was to learn the technical terminology of the field as we might one day become scholars and we would be expected to use that terminology to enable precision in our work. In one sense, the lecturer’s rant was a little over the top. One in three people now get a university education and only the smallest fraction of those will ever become scholars. But she was dead right about the precision part. Especially in the sciences where maths is not the main language of communication, it is vital to define terminology. It is because polysemy is very common in natural language that science must use words which are disambiguated as much as possible so that you don’t have to continually ask whether a scholar meant meaning one or meaning two when they use a word.

This issue of precision of language carried over from my linguistics studies into my current job as a software tester. The job of the tester is to find bugs in the software and beginner testers are very happy to find bugs as this demonstrates that they are doing their job. But after some years you begin to notice patterns in the errors. For example, incompetence or laziness on the part of the programmer (both of these are relatively rare, at least in decent software departments). One of the most common causes of errors is imprecision of language. As such, experienced software testers tend to become sticklers for meaning. This is partly because vague terminology leads to extra test cases. By excluding meanings of words you also exclude the need to run test cases for those extra meanings and you therefore reduce your workload. That’s the personal benefit a tester gets from clarifying meanings. But a second reason is that vague meanings lead to miscommunication and that’s where errors come in at the team level. Person One thinks the requirements mean this but Person Two thinks they mean that. Unless the two of them get together and talk through the meanings of the words, there will be errors. Experienced software testers who are good at their job know that making people clarify language upfront will reduce bugs later on.

Ever tried to cutting meat or vegetables with a blunt knife? It’s difficult and the result is usually not pretty. Sharpen that knife up and the job becomes easy, even pleasurable. Same with words. In domains where logic and rigor are required, such as science and software development, words must be sharpened to a fine point. But a surprising number of people take the attitude of the student in that first year linguistics class. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have been told “it’s just semantics” by people who should know better. It’s not just semantics. Choice of words and meanings directly affects outcomes. This is true even in politics where the battle is usually over language. Politicians wouldn’t spend so much time and energy fighting over the meanings of words if those words didn’t make a difference.

The words used during the corona event to denote the foundational scientific terms that should, in theory, be guiding our understanding have ranged from ambiguous to blatantly corrupt to nonsensical. This is partly just because of the contortions imposed by politics and media and partly because there are some genuine philosophical issues in the underlying science. Let’s do a lightning overview of some of the key concepts that have been at play.

Virus

Viruses are deeply strange things. They are not alive and do not reproduce sexually. This makes them an edge case within the field of biology where the existing taxonomy implied sexual reproduction. This difficulty is reflected in the fact that the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses has changed its criteria for categorising viruses three times in the last twenty years. The most recent change was in 2012. As I pointed out in post 8 in this series, there was strong dissent about that change. Many virologists believe that the whole concept of species does not apply to viruses. They say that Wittgensteinian family resemblance is the best way to categorise viruses. This means that no single criterion or discrete set of criteria can define a virus and you could theoretically have two viruses that are ‘the same’ even though they do not share all the same properties. This breaks the rules of logic (more specifically, Wittgenstein was challenging the validity of logic) and is not what we think of as ‘hard science’. It’s easy to see why virologists would prefer a system which seems more rigorous even if the rigor is largely illusory.

Bear in mind that, within the current rules, sars-cov-2 is a strain of the sars-cov species of virus. If, as some virologists argue, the species concept does not apply to viruses then strains are even less valid and all these variants we keep hearing about are just illusions. Even if you believe the species concept applies, currently the boundaries are worked out by mathematical analysis. That is, the difference between variant A and variant B is a genetic analysis alone. Who gets to define the boundaries? On what scientific basis is somebody allowed to declare a ‘new’ variant? Is there any disagreement? Any peer review process? Any way to test if the boundary is wrong?

2) Disease

Cambridge dictionary has several definitions for disease but two are most relevant to our purposes.

An illness caused by infection or a failure of health rather than an accident;

a condition of a person, animal, or plant in which its body or structure is harmed because an organ or part is unable to work as it usually does

Straight away there are all kinds of problems with these definitions. In the first, an attempt is made to distinguish a ‘failure of health’ and infection from accident. But surely viral infection is accidental. Viruses are not alive. They have no will of their own as far as we know. Being infected with a virus is accidental according to the dictionary meaning of that word.

The second meaning, which refers to damage to cells and structures of the body is not much better. The cells of our body are ‘harmed’, in fact, destroyed all the time. You’ve probably heard the bit about how all the cells in your body are replaced every seven years. It’s not quite as simple as that but it’s a good approximation. Some cells, such as skin cells and cells in the stomach lining die and are replaced every few days. If cells ceasing to work is the criterion for disease, we are in a permanently diseased state by nature. When a weightlifter goes to the gym, they are deliberately ‘harming’ the cells and sub-structures of their body. Lifting heavy weights tears the muscles but the weightlifter knows that it’s the response of the body to repair the damage which leads to muscle gain. Given enough food and rest, the body will not just repair the muscles but make them thicker and stronger for next time which means that the weightlifter will be able to lift heavier weight. According to the above definition, weightlifting is a disease.

These simplistic definitions quickly lead to nonsense unless we understand our body as a system responding to the larger systems that comprise its environment. The body attempts to achieve equilibrium or what is called homeostasis. The fluctuations around homeostasis usually occur within regular boundaries and this is called health or the state of being healthy. When the body is pushed outside of those bounds it mounts a response to return to homeostasis. In the case of the weightlifter, this response involves the rebuilding of muscle and ligament. In the case of a broken bone, the healing of that bone. In the case of viral infection, antibodies and other immune system adaptations. Viral infection provides a nice case study here. The body is exposed to viruses all the time and deals with them without trouble. If a virus gets out of control, it throws the body out of homeostasis. The body responds by causing fever and other symptoms. In essence, it diverts resources away from other sub-systems so that as much metabolic energy as possible can be used to fight the infection. That’s why the best thing to do is go to bed and wait for the fever to pass. Other symptoms such as coughing and sneezing are part of the body’s response.

What the dictionary meanings are missing is the element of time. Nietzsche famously said that what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. A less poetic but more accurate version might be ‘whatever I recover from makes me stronger’. On the other side of a heavy weightlifting session, you are back to homeostasis but with thicker and stronger muscles and ligaments and denser bones. On the other side of a viral infection, you are back to equilibrium but now armed with antibodies to fight that virus and related viruses in the future. In both cases, you are better adapted to your environment; the artificial one you created with your weightlifting and the natural one that your body must deal with every day in the microbiological world.

3. Feeling Sick

Disease would be complicated enough but a big extra layer of complexity is added due to psychological and mental factors that accompany it. It is possible to be diseased and not know it which is called anosognosia. Errol Morris has a brilliant series of essays on the subject. Conversely, it’s possible to think you are sick even though you aren’t which is called somatic symptom disorder. Isn’t it funny how children start to get sick right before having to go to school? Or what about the employee feeling down in the dumps just before having to go to work on a sunny Monday morning. Both of course will make a miraculous recovery mid-morning. These cases are not just outright lies (well, sometimes they are). It is possible to make yourself feel sick. It is even possible for the mind to create the physical symptoms themselves. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this is phantom pregnancy where the women in question show all the signs of pregnancy without actually being pregnant. I once met a doctor from India at a social function and I asked her what was the main difference she noticed between Australia and India. “In India, my patients were actually sick,” she said. She estimated about half her patients were not really sick but were making it up whether at a conscious or, more commonly, subconscious level. This observation fits with the official statistics which state that most disease in wealthy countries is neuropsychiatric in nature.

The point is that feeling sick and being diseased are not the same thing. Again, weightlifting provides a nice example to explain this. The day after a heavy training session you might feel tired, lethargic and sore. You may even feel pain. Part of learning weightlifting is learning to distinguish between genuine injury (disease) and ‘normal’ pain that comes from adaptation. Similarly, once you’ve had the flu a couple of times, you learn to recognise it and you don’t worry about it. You know that if you go to bed for a few days you’ll be fine. But when somebody tells you you’ve got a brand new disease you’re going to worry. How much that worry contributes to outcomes is a question our science doesn’t want to answer. We look for physical causes alone and consider all that psychological stuff to be just epiphenomena. Except we know that it isn’t just epiphenomena. Mass hysteria is a real thing and there are countless examples of groups of people all thinking they were sick when they weren’t.

4. Viral Disease

Technically, viral disease occurs whenever a single cell in your body is infected by a virus. Some have noted that with the corona event we are all sick until proven healthy. More specifically, our public health bureaucrats consider us diseased if even a single cell is infected with a virus. There are all kinds of problems with this:-

The PCR test does not prove a current or past infection
Even if you have an infection, it doesn’t mean you are or will get sick
Even if you have an infection, it does not mean you are or will be infectious or how infectious you will be
Even if you are infectious, it does not mean other people will actually get infected. (That depends on all kinds of environmental factors)
Even if other people do get infected, it doesn’t mean they will get sick or become infectious

Note how the technical definition here differs from the lay definition. The thing any of us care about is feeling sick i.e. coming down with a fever or a cough or, in a worst case scenario, a pneumonia. These are what we can call ‘system level’ issues. With an asymptomatic rate of about 50%, most people would have sailed through corona blissfully unaware that they were ‘diseased’. Nevertheless, a public health bureaucrat considers them diseased and that’s true by the dictionary definition. Prior to corona, a public health bureaucrat only cared about you if you showed actual signs of disease (system-level symptoms). Now they care about you at the cellular level. That is the wonderful bit of ‘progress’ that the misuse of the PCR has brought us.

5. Pandemic

For all of human history until 2020, a pandemic was recognised by external symptoms of disease (note: PCR tests were widely available for the 2009 Swine Flu false alarm but there was not enough to go around and the US CDC had to restrict their use to those who were hospitalised). The corona event started in the traditional fashion i.e. some doctors in Wuhan thought they noticed something unusual in their pneumonia patients. Those doctors reported their concerns to the China CDC who showed up and, within a couple of weeks, were using the PCR test to diagnose ‘infection’. The rest, as they say, is history.

The dictionary meaning of pandemic is a disease that has spread across a wide geographical area. According to this definition, there is therefore a permanent global pandemic of cold and flu viruses including coronaviruses. That is why, prior to 2009, the WHO’s definition of pandemic included a criterion for ‘enormous numbers of deaths and illness’. This criterion enabled us to separate a genuine pandemic from the usual cold and flu cycles. But in 2009, that criterion was dropped by the WHO. Because of that change, we are technically in a permanent pandemic of every cold and flu virus. Because the symptoms shown by sufferers of these viral diseases are indistinguishable, we lump them all, including the known coronaviruses, into a category called influenza-like illness. But in 2020, the WHO decided that this ‘new’ coronavirus would not be lumped into that category but would have its own category called ‘covid’ even though the symptoms of ‘covid’ are no different to any other cold or flu virus. Was there a formal process to make the decision? Were the reasons made public? Is there a procedure to object to the decision on scientific grounds? The answer seems to be: No.

These changes are groundbreaking. Public health bureaucrats now reserve the right to declare any new respiratory virus a ‘new’ disease and to label you as diseased based on a PCR test result for that virus. They then reserve the right to label infections of that new virus a pandemic even if the level of serious illness in the community is not severe. If ever there was an example to show why semantics are important it has to be that. In 2020, we were locked in our houses because of semantics.

6. Herd Immunity

Way back at the start of corona some old fashioned epidemiologists came out and said that lockdowns were the worst thing we could do. What we should do, they argued, was protect the old and immuno-compromised. The best way to do that was to have them stay at home while everybody else got infected as quickly as possible leading to herd immunity. For reasons that I still don’t understand, the counter-message floating around at that time was that we didn’t know that herd immunity could be achieved for a new virus. That was an extraordinary claim. It’s a bit like saying we don’t know whether gravity would exist on a new planet. Herd immunity is not just one of the foundational concept of epidemiology, it’s straight up common sense. Humans have only survived to this day because of herd immunity. How else could it be so?

But not any more according to the WHO which changed the definition in October 2020 so that herd immunity is now all about vaccines. They now say that herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus not exposing them to it. Note the choice of language here. The wording somehow implies that humans now have the power to choose whether we are exposed to viruses or not (I touched on the importance of this change in my post on Acts of Nature). Of course, even if you somehow had individual choice and you chose to expose yourself to a virus rather than get vaccinated you would not be contributing to herd immunity any more. That can only happen by vaccination from now on.

This change of definition seems to me completely indefensible on scientific grounds. I was prepared to cut the WHO some slack early on in the corona event but no longer. It is clearly a corrupt organisation.

The result of this? Public health bureaucrats reserve the right to declare you diseased even if you aren’t sick and to say that the ONLY way to cure your ‘disease’ is by administration of a vaccine.

7. Cause of Death

The first thing to be said about cause of death is that, even in normal times, it is wrong about 1/3^rd of the time. That is, the cause of death put on a death certificate by a doctor or pathologists is incorrect in about 30% of cases that are reviewed by an autopsy. Now, add to that baseline level of inaccuracy the psychological biases caused by a purported pandemic then add to that the political pressures. For example, there have been countless anecdotes floating around about how some family member died in the last year and the family was asked if corona could be placed as the cause of death so that the institution in question could receive the extra government money paid for corona cases. Cause of death is often difficult to determine and a PCR test doesn’t help. All the problems with the PCR as a tool for diagnosing infection apply to the cause of death. Just because you tested positive does not mean the infection played a meaningful role in your death and, even if the infection was serious, we know that in about 95% of cases there is at least one other co-morbidity. I recall early on hearing a statistic that about 50% of ‘corona deaths’ had four or more co-morbidities. This makes sense when you consider that the average age of death ‘from corona’ is the average life expectancy in most places. The people dying are the elderly and the elderly have co-morbidities.

Dying with four co-morbidities is like a zebra being killed by a pack of hyenas. Sure, it might be one of the hyenas that delivered the bite that finally ended the struggle but that hyena on its own wouldn’t have killed the zebra. It took the whole team. But with corona we have pretended that the hyena that delivered the killer bite was really a lion.

8. Excess Mortality

Excess mortality implies an average and the first question of any average is what is the standard deviation. But even if you know the standard deviation, that doesn’t give you certainty. The stock market deviates around an average most of the time and then it crashes. In Australia, the bushfire season deviates around an average and then you get a major inferno. There are things that can be done to prevent the size of a stock market crash and the size of a bushfire and those things absolutely should be done but what you can’t do is prevent them altogether, not without destroying the system i.e. preventing a free market or chopping down all the trees. The same goes for viral disease. There absolutely are measures that can and should be taken but those measures should not destroy society. That is the line we crossed in the last year.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

One of the many curious (to use the politest word possible) features of the corona event has been how seemingly all the institutions of society failed at the same time. Governments failed to use their power to counteract the hysteria leading to a panic response that has made everything far worse than it needed to be. Opposition parties failed to critique the government’s failure. The media has resembled a rabid mob egging on a fight in a high school playground. With a few exceptions, the courts have done nothing to protect civil liberties. And the public has also done nothing to stop the worst excesses of the government response, although last weekend’s huge march in London may signify a change there.

As somebody who works in a field where we build systems, I can say from experience that what you really don’t want to do is to change too many things at once. Too much change creates uncertainty and uncertainty itself creates its own problems in what becomes a positive feedback loop. Uncertainty is where we are now. Politicians, who have been making it up as they go for more than a year now, are still flailing around for something to say that will alleviate the anxiety caused by uncertainty. This is leading to radically different rhetoric depending on where you are. In Texas and other US states, things are pretty much back to normal. Meanwhile, Canada has gone into an ultra-strict lockdown apparently having decided to wait for the virus to become endemic before doing so. In Australia, we continue to plumb new depths as the government made it illegal for citizens of the country who have been in India recently to return home adding to the large list of Australians waiting abroad to return to the country that is supposed to protect them. At this point, being the holder of an Australian passport probably affords you less rights than the average North Korean.

In a story that I found mildly amusing, the Mayor of Melbourne this week announced her intention to continue wearing a mask even after corona is defeated (whatever the hell that means). Her reasoning? People are not returning to the Melbourne CBD and it must be because they are still afraid of viruses. So, the Mayor will encourage continued mask wearing to get people to return. Of course, as I noted in my post on the economics of pandemic, the real reason people aren’t returning to the Melbourne CBD is because the Melbourne CBD has been an unpleasant place to go to for almost a decade. Well before corona hit, I was having discussions with co-workers about how you couldn’t get on public transport and you couldn’t even walk on the footpath anymore because there were simply too many people in the city. I’m sure that was great for business and great for the council’s revenues, but it wasn’t good for the workers. They had to keep coming though because of a peculiar quirk in Australian culture which holds that if you are not in the CBD of a capital city, you pretty much don’t exist and can’t possibly make a meaningful contribution to national life. Now that workers have an excuse not to go to the CBD, they are gleefully refusing to go. This has actually led to a boom in business for suburban cafes and restaurants who are more than happy to provide newly localised office workers with their daily food and drink. But the Mayor of Melbourne is being paid not to understand such facts. Being unable to face reality she will continue to wear her mask. Who knows what will come next? Perhaps we will have the Mayor sacrificing a chicken or doing a “people dance” to try and get the consumers to return and once again fill the cash registers of Melbourne city traders.

Of all the institutions of society that have failed us recently, I actually feel for the politicians who have an almost impossible job to do at the moment. The reason why Texas and Florida can do what they have done is because the citizenry in those places allow, if not demand, it. It’s possible the Mayor of Melbourne hates wearing a mask but that is the only thing to be done politically in the current climate.

There is one other group that I believe have found underwhelming in their response to corona and that is the public intellectuals. I exclude from this group the op-ed writers who earn their living from the mainstream media as they are part of the general failure of the media. What interests me more are the independent intellectuals and there are three I will single out here as I think their response to corona possibly reveals something interesting about making predictions. Note that this selection is a very specific set and I make no claim to its general validity, although, with a few exceptions, I have found very few public intellectuals who have done well at helping the public contextualise events. Rather, this group simply represents a few of the intellectuals that I happen to follow. The three in question are Nassim Taleb, John Michael Greer and Chris Martenson.

The latter two of these are members of the peak oil scene, that group of intellectuals who reason about the downward trajectory western civilisation is on caused by the fact that we are still wholly dependent on the finite resource of fossil fuels. Within that scene, Greer is a member of the ‘slow decline’ group while Martenson, if I remember correctly, is more of a ‘fast collapser’. The end result is the same, the difference is merely on whether you believe things will fall apart quickly or slowly. Taleb gained fame partly due to being one of the people to predict the GFC and, apparently, to profit handsomely from it by shorting the market. I outlined Taleb’s response and my main problems with it in part 3 of this series.

Let’s very briefly summarise the position of the three. Martenson responded to corona early on by starting up a daily youtube channel where he spent half an hour or so running through the latest ‘case’ numbers as they grew in various countries. This was in line with his numbers-based approach to collapse. His weekly newsletter at Peak Prosperity features a list of articles each week all showing data points as evidence to why collapse is right around the corner. He used the same format to report on corona. In doing so, he didn’t, as far as I saw, question what a ‘case’ was, how an increase in testing might affect case numbers or what it meant for the virus to be ‘new’. He simply took these as given and began counting. He was doing this well before the mainstream media took it up and as a result was at least somewhat responsible for fueling the panic early on.

Taleb also took the news that the virus was ‘new’ at face value. In his mind, it was because the virus was ‘new’ that no chance could be taken and his interpretation of the precautionary principle was that because the virus could in theory kill you, you must act as if it would kill you. Accordingly, he recommended the public to panic. He showed pictures of himself in an aircraft wearing an N95 mask and face goggles and excoriated anybody who dared suggest that we were overreacting. In so doing, he also contributed to the panic early on.

Greer’s position was more nuanced but could best be summed as silence. In one of his monthly open posts, he even forbade discussion of corona. He suggested that a couple of weeks lockdown would do people good and encourage them to reflect on their lives and maybe even lead to meaningful change for the better. He also predicted that the matter would be over quickly, a prediction with some basis in epidemiology (in fact, some epidemiologists pointed out that it would be over quickly if we didn’t lockdown and that the lockdowns would only drag things out unnecessarily. In hindsight, they were correct). All three positions were wrong but it’s not the fact that they were wrong that I think is interesting. After all, who could possibly have gotten it right? Rather, what is interesting is that they were wrong in quite specific ways relating to predictions that each man had made.

I’m not aware if Martenson made any specific predictions about a pandemic or about the year 2020. He is, however, a part of the fast(-ish) collapse school and so when things started to take off he applied that lens to what was happening. Accordingly, he predicted supply chain breakdowns and other disastrous outcomes. This was in accord with many other members of the doomer-prepper community for whom corona was finally the thing that would prove them right. The GFC didn’t quite do it. The housing bubble didn’t quite do it. But it would be a pandemic that would do it and trigger a global collapse. Taleb is on record as having predicted a global pandemic, something he was not shy about reminding us all about early last year, while Greer has made it a habit for some years of predicting the year ahead and he also does astrological readings about the fates of different countries. Unless I missed it, there was nothing in either his predictions or his astrological readings that suggested something like corona would happen early in 2020. Thus, all three men interpreted corona according to their predictions. Greer’s insistence that it would be over quickly and we would return to business as usual was in line with his predictions for 2020. Taleb’s insistence that a Spanish flu-style global pandemic was breaking out was in line with his prediction. Martenson’s insistence that supply chains were about to break and financial markets with them was in line with his broad predictions.

To be clear, my point here is not that they were wrong but how they were wrong. Taleb and Greer are the more interesting examples because their position was also out of character. Taleb could normally be relied upon as a consensus-breaker. Especially in the case where klueless government bureaucrats and other establishment ‘experts’ are running the show, Taleb for years would apply rigorous critical thinking to a subject and often find the main point of weakness where the argument would collapse. In the case of corona, that weakness is primarily the whole concept of a ‘new’ virus and the PCR test which purports to find that virus. Instead of finding those weaknesses, Taleb took it for given that the virus was ‘new’ and then went way off the deep end by promoting panic.

Greer, on the other hand, could have been forgiven for engaging in a massive exercise of I-told-you-so. Having been one of the most acute observers of the decadence of western civilisation in the last decade or so, all of a sudden all the neuroses, political corruption and propaganda came together at once. Many of the themes that Greer has talked about over the past decade were right at the fore most notably the corruption of institutionalised science, the rising fear and paranoia among the population and the grasping after solutions that benefitted large corporations at the expense of the general welfare. I initially thought Greer’s dismissive response was therefore an act of humility on his part. Rather than sink the boot in, perhaps he was choosing to remain silent and allow his past writings to speak. Another explanation, thoug, is simply that he had not predicted such a world changing event and his position was therefore to downplay the matter.

Of course, this is largely speculation. There may, of course, be all kinds of personal reasons that explain the behaviour of each man but those are not possible to know. Rather, it looks from the outside like a case of rigidity of thinking caused specifically by being a public intellectual engaged in making predictions. To be sure, this is one of the occupational hazards of that job. I have seen this play out on a small scale within my occupational field. What always seems to happen is that a public intellectual gets surrounded by a group of sycophants. This causes a number of problems. Firstly, the intellectual is given levels of adoration or respect that are almost guaranteed to cause ego problems. Secondly, the intellectual is never exposed to dissenting opinions and over time loses the ability to engage in critical thinking. Thirdly, the intellectual is drawn into having opinions about things outside their realm of understanding. Imagine being able to say anything and have a group adoring fans tell you you’re a genius every time. That is certainly a psychologically dangerous position to be in and it’s not hard to see how people might go off the rails or at least be led into error. Taleb definitely seems to have fallen into that trap.

It’s a dangerous business to make predictions and one of the reasons is that in the real world you can get state changes where all the old rules become redundant. Unless you know in advance what those rules are, any prediction you made is likely to be radically wrong. To my mind, this is what is behind the error made by Chris Martenson and others who try to predict what life will be like as peak oil bites. They tend to extrapolate forward based on the current rules. However, what is almost certain to happen is that the rules will be changed. Corona has already shown that as governments have implemented rules nobody would have though possible beforehand. What is perhaps the most surprising is how quickly many people treat the new rules as perfectly sensible and rational. One of the most ridiculous justifications I have heard to defend the current behaviour of the Australian government in leaving our citizens in the lurch overseas is that those citizens knew they were taking a risk by going overseas and now they have to wear the consequences. Really? Who on Earth could have predicted the government would arbitrarily make it illegal for certain citizens to return home or that State Premiers would close borders preventing people within Australia from returning to their own houses? Nobody could have predicted that and nobody did. To pretend otherwise is to engage in the most egregious form of post hoc rationalisation. But that is what is going on now. People are furiously making up stories for why the new rules make sense. They don’t want to admit the truth which is that the world is a chaotic place and becoming more chaotic. For that reason, it’s impossible to know what is going to happen in the next little while. All of the old rules are up for grabs and God knows what new ones will fill their place. This was, in fact, exactly Greer’s message in a post towards the end of last year. Now more than ever it’s wise not to become attached to predictions but to stay mentally lean and be ready for anything.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 23: Acts of Nature

A couple of months ago I was visiting friends when a eucalyptus tree fell on my car. I had parked on the street next to a park. It was a very windy day and from the kitchen of my friend’s house we heard a loud crack. This was not the sound of the tree hitting my car but rather the sound of the tree trunk snapping off near its base. We went outside to see what the noise was to find that the top of the tree had hit the car roof. By eucalyptus standards, the tree was not very large; perhaps just under ten metres tall. It put two large dents in the car which, fortunately, did not cost as much to repair as I had expected. All in all, it could have been worse.

My friend said I should see if the local council would pay for the damages. I had a vague recollection that damages were not normally paid for this kind of thing but I decided to have a look on their website. It turns out the council does allow applications for damages but the internet discussions I could find on the issue said it was not worth pursuing. A tree falling on a car is considered an act of nature and the council is not legally responsible, so I didn’t bother with an application.

Some people apparently think this rule is unfair. The tree was on council land and council are paid to maintain the trees. So, it should be their responsibility, they argue. However, this loses sight of the bigger picture. If the council is forced to pay every time a car is damaged by a tree on their land, they are very likely to conclude that it’s simply not financially viable to have trees at all. They might decide it’s cheaper in the long run to cut them all down. Imagine a suburb devoid of trees. Not only would it be incredibly ugly, it would get extremely hot in summer. The birds, insects and other creatures that depend on the trees would disappear. The whole point of the suburbs, the whole reason people moved there in the first place, was to enjoy ‘nature’. To remove the trees would defeat the entire point of the place but that would be the logical outcome of making council, a group of human beings, responsible for what are essentially acts of nature.

An objection could be made to this line of reasoning that council doesn’t need to chop the trees down, it could just spend more money on them. They could go out and hire an army of arborists to take care of the trees and we’d have the best of both worlds. There’s two problems with that. Firstly, it would cost a fortune. How many residents would be willing to accept a massive increase in their council rates to pay for such a scheme? The second problem is practical and relates to what can actually be done by the experts.

I once did a short course on horticulture at Melbourne University and one of our lecturers was Melbourne’s foremost tree expert. He told one of his war stories about a situation at one of Melbourne’s richest private schools. He had been called in to provide advice about the issue of whether some eucalyptus trees should be removed from the school playground. Some of the parents were insisting the trees were an unacceptable risk to the students. The school did not want to fell the trees partly because it’s very expensive to have a twenty metre high tree taken down (we’re talking tens of thousands of dollars) and partly because one of the trees had substantial heritage value. During the discussion, the parents demanded a guarantee that the tree would not fall or shed its branches. The horticulture expert said it was possible to be very sure that a tree would not fall as a tree must first get very sick or even die before falling and that would be quite obvious from looking at it. In relation to the risk of branches falling, there was less certainty as shedding branches is part of the lifecycle of a tree and can happen even though a tree is otherwise healthy. No guarantee could be given but with proper care and attention the risk was very minimal. This was unacceptable to the parents and the school caved in and had the trees removed, something which annoyed the horticulture lecturer. Surely the beauty of the tree, the shade it provides and the intrinsic connection between man and nature which is implied by our appreciation of trees in the first place made the risk worthwhile. What was the alternative? A school play area made entirely of concrete? Well, that’s more or less what the students at that school got.

The point of the story is that, even if you had an army of arborists, even if you have an arborist for each tree, you could not guarantee that a branch will not fall or even that the tree won’t fall. It is simply not within the power of man to know such things with certainty. It you were to hire such an army of arborists, you won’t entirely remove the risk and, in fact, you reduce the risk only a miniscule amount from where it already is. In any rational cost-benefit analysis, the plan simply doesn’t get done.

The concept of an act of nature thus has two parts. Firstly, it represents an understanding of the limitations of human knowledge. Secondly, it mitigates against outcomes like chopping down all the trees because, by acknowledging the limits of human knowledge it also acknowledges the limits of responsibility that may be borne by humans. It protects people from blame and therefore removes the risk of excessive intervention in order to avoid said blame. In this way it acts to protect the commons from intolerant minorities who use the threat of blaming those in power to gain concessions at the expense of the common good.

We can now use this concept of an act of nature and what happens when you forego it to see what has happened with the corona event.

Viral disease, and disease in general was, for most of human history seen as an act of nature. Nobody other than quacks tried to intervene for the simple reason that nobody knew what the cause was and intervention almost always made things worse. The breakthroughs made in the last hundred and fifty odd years have given us incredible new powers to fight disease. In relation to viral disease, the number of people dying, in particular among the young, has nosedived. But all the gains had already been made by the 1970s. In the last fifty years, deaths from viral disease have remained steady and almost all the deaths are now among the elderly for the very simple and obvious reason that as you get old your immune system, and your body in general, becomes weakened and can’t stave off disease so well. There has been no medical breakthrough to stop the aging process. We accept dying of old age as an act of nature. To do otherwise is delusional. But that’s exactly the delusion we got into at the start of the corona event. Remember how if you didn’t agree with the measures you wanted old people to die? That was the sign that we had thrown away the concept of an act of nature entirely.

As of March 2020, the public, or at least a very passionate section of it, was no longer prepared to accept any risk in relation to respiratory viral disease. The government, after a brief push back, decided to pretend that it had the answer to the problem in the form of lockdowns, hand washing, social distancing and masking to name just a few. Many public health bureaucrats are on record from before March 2020 saying that such measures are ineffective but that hasn’t stopped them getting on board and now pretending that they are. It was as if my horticulture lecturer had told the parents at the school that he could, in fact, guarantee that a branch would not fall on their children if such and such measures were done. He would have to know that the measures were useless but, given enough political pressure, he might play along. It’s not just governments now pretending that they have the answers. Employers have a corona policy detailing how they will keep their employees safe and shops and other public venues have their own measures.

All this behaviour is driven by the small but passionate minority who demand that others protect them from viral disease. Such people are just like the parents in my lecturer’s story who demand that the trees be cut down. In such cases, it is up to governments and those in power to stand up for the greater good but in our modern democracies, intolerant minorities have seemingly gained disproportionate power. Partly this is because vested interests have realised that they can co-opt the power of intolerant minorities to bend governments to their will. Partly it’s because the internet has allowed such groups to easily share information. The parents at a school are already networked and able to get results. The internet has allowed geographically separate intolerant minorities to network and get results too.

In any case, there are two problems with our corona response that are directly analogous to the problems with local councils and trees falling over and that follow directly from throwing out the concept of an act of nature. The first is financial. This issue is self-evident. Governments have loaded up on trillions of dollars of debt. Imagine how different corona would have played out if government had required citizens to pay for the whole thing upfront. Instead, our politicians tell us the testing and the vaccines are ‘free’. This kind of self-deception has become very common in modern democratic societies. Corona is different merely in the sheer magnitude of the deception.

The second problem is practical. Just like my lecturer said, there can be no guarantee that a branch will not fall off a tree. Similarly, there can be no guarantee that any person will not come down with viral respiratory disease. Governments were initially happy to allow the possibility of such a guarantee in the form of a vaccine but this was always a fantasy. It’s only now that the holes in this fantasy are starting to appear as we hear about yearly ‘booster’ shots and the fact that the ‘vaccine’ will not protect against infection in the first place. It was as if some group of arborists came into town and offered a treatment for the trees which would guarantee that the branches would never fall again. And we believed them. Only the branches continued to fall and the arborists changed their tune telling us we have to buy another treatment and we’ll have to buy a new treatment each year. The branches will keep falling but they will fall less frequently, whatever that means.

Of course, there’s no way to stop branches falling off trees and there’s no way to stop respiratory viral diseases from circulating. We already knew that. We’ll have to once again accept these basic facts of life as acts of nature and get on with it. We could do it tomorrow if the political will was there. Texas, Florida and others have already shown that. For the rest of us, we will just have to wait until our government feels able to allow reality to once again intervene in public affairs.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona