The Archetypal Calculus Part 7: A Quadrant Analysis of Corona

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had realised that my analysis of the corona event, collated in my book, The Plague Story, fitted quite nicely onto Wilber’s quadrant template. In my book, I had attempted to survey what was going on during corona from a holistic or integral point of view by incorporating a number of different perspectives. In this post, we’ll map those perspectives onto the quadrants with the aim of showing how the quadrants can be used to analyse real-world issues and not just abstract conceptions around wholeness and evolution.

With that in mind, let’s draw up a map of the “pandemic”. To refresh our memories, here are Wilber’s quadrants:-

We’ll now take each quadrant one at a time starting with the upper-right.

The upper-right quadrant: exterior perspective of the individual

Recall that the upper-right quadrant is concerned with holons (Wholes) in their exterior and individual perspective. From a scientific point of view, this equates to the categorisation and classification of objects for study. A classic example from biology is the grouping of various plants and animals into taxonomies based, for the most part, on external characteristics. Since we are talking about pandemics in this post, we are concerned with the field of microbiology and how it identifies its objects of study – microorganisms.

It took another two hundred years for other scientists to find the connection between bacteria and disease. Thus, a new category of pathogenic bacteria was created and the germ theory of disease was born. After decades of locating all kinds of pathogenic bacteria, scientists realised that there seemed to be diseases caused by things that could not be seen under a regular microscope. Since the name virus was already being used to mean something like “cause of disease”, this presumed category was called viruses. (The word virus comes originally from the Latin meaning “poison”).

Given that viruses were too small to see under a microscope, we had no real ability to identify them from an exterior perspective and thus their existence from a UR quadrant perspective was still speculative. That all changed with the advent of the x-ray and then the electron microscope. These allowed the creation of images and therefore the identification of viruses from an exterior, objective perspective.

Because we use the same word (microscope) for all of these technologies, the layperson may think that the identification of viruses was a simple extension of the method used to identify bacteria. There are a number of reasons why this is not the case.

Firstly, to paraphrase the meme, one does not simply do electron microscopy. You or I may purchase a cheap microscope, take a sample of something, stick it under the microscope and look at live bacteria with our own eyes. The same is not true for electron microscopes. Not only are electron microscopes seriously expensive, any sample needs extensive preparation before it is ready to be “seen” under such a microscope. Sample preparation requires a large amount of training as do the skills to calibrate the microscope itself. What’s more, the processing of the sample kills off anything that might have been alive in the sample. Electron microscopy can only show us things that are not alive.

A second big difference is that normal microscopes work off our everyday visual faculties including the rules of gestalt psychology which determine how we identify objects and patterns in the world. The same is not true for electron microscopes where the “image” must is constructed based on rules for how electrons bounce off the things they are fired at. A translation must be made back into the “language” of our everyday visual faculties.

There is one word which sums up these differences: abstraction.

Electron microscopy is far more abstract than regular microscopy. This abstraction manifests in much greater time for the preparation of samples, specialised skills in how to calibrate the microscope and different types of microscope. All of this creates more room for error to creep in. Furthermore, the technology itself requires specialists with significant experience in interpreting what they are seeing. Electron microscopy has become a full-time job in its own right. This is a far cry from the days when a tailor like Antonie van Leeuwenhoek could dabble in microbiology in his spare time.

In recent decades, virologists have begun using even more abstract technologies in their work. These take the problem of abstraction to a new level since they no longer even revolve around identifying objects from an exterior perspective but use genetic analysis instead.

The PCR is a classic example. Virologists attempt to identify a virus by finding genetic code in a sample. This is not the full genetic code of the virus but only a segment. How do we know this segment can uniquely identify the virus? Well, virologists need to figure it out. They do so according to agreed rules. Those rules have been changed three times in the last several decades, hardly a sign of stable and settled science.

Just like electron microscopes, the PCR is a complex piece of technology that requires extensive sample preparation and instrument calibration in order to produce reliable results. All of this introduces new layers of abstraction and more steps in the process where errors can be introduced.

There are two key points to make about all this. Unlike bacteria, which was originally discovered by a lay person (van Leeuwenhoek), viruses can only be “seen” by a select group of insiders – the experts. Unless you have millions of dollars lying around to buy the equipment and the time and money to learn how to use it, you will never be able to verify the results for yourself. That is true for us as laypeople and it is also true for scientists in related disciplines outside of virology including epidemiologists and doctors, both of whom must simply take whatever virologists say at face value.

The second point relates to the virologists themselves. Modern virology relies on the concatenation of evidence from numerous already abstract sources. Electron microscopy, PCR, cell culture experiments and other techniques are all abstractions in themselves, each prone to error and each requiring an understanding of rules of the abstraction in order to weigh up the evidence.

What inevitably happens in such circumstances, and I see this in my own line of work, is that the basics of the discipline get forgotten as the abstractions becomes ends in themselves. It is very easy for the basic method of science – formulating a hypothesis and devising ways to test it – to get forgotten.

When you combine this with the fact that virology is a closed shop that never gets criticised from outside, it’s a recipe for groupthink and delusion. As mentioned in last week’s post, this delusion is actually a form of dissociation and that is why intellectuals can often manifest symptoms that are indistinguishable from mental illness. The reason the average person doesn’t see it is because intellectuals talk in their usual calm and authoritative voice rather than rambling incoherently like your average mental patient. G.K. Chesterton summarised the dynamic with his usual incisive wit: the point of education is to learn not to take educated people seriously.

Should we take virology seriously? It is trapped in the fogs of abstraction like so much of other science these days. It doesn’t see any objects directly but only through its hyper-complex technologies. The basic object of study in virology is an abstraction. Take away the technology and the object disappears with it.

Abstractions are not inherently a problem, as long as they make accurate predictions about the world. But the record on virology is almost embarrassing in this respect. From the swine flu false alarm of 1976, to the AIDS hysteria, to SARS-1 and then covid, modern virology has an almost perfect record of being wrong and that is a strong sign that its abstractions aren’t real. It seems probable that there’s no there there.

For these reasons, we’ll list the technologies that lead us to believe there is such a thing as a virus in the UR quadrant as follows:-

Let’s move on to what might appear to be another categorisation problem relevant to a “pandemic” and that is the identification of disease. Disease, however, is actually a relationship between two objects. It belongs to what Smuts called a Field and what Wilber calls the “collective”. Therefore, it belongs in the lower-right quadrant and that’s where we now turn to carry out our analysis.

The lower-right quadrant: exterior objective perspective of the collective

The lower-right quadrant relates to systems viewed from their exterior interactions. Here we must make a very important distinction between what we’ll call sickness and disease. Sickness is the subjective feeling of illness and belongs in the upper-left quadrant. Disease refers to those aspects that are viewable from an exterior perspective. We you go to the doctor, you probably complain of symptoms and you talk about the subjective aspects of those symptoms. That’s sickness. The doctor then tries to match those up to externally visible signs of disease.

The human body is a system that aims to keep itself within an equilibrium as regards to vital functions. Disease is what happens when the equilibrium is breached and the functions no longer work as they should. Even well before the advent of modern medicine, it was obvious that the environment often played a key role in disease. As noted earlier, the word virus referred to poison in Latin and poison is source of disease i.e. it throws the body out of equilibrium. This gives us the recipe: system + poison = disease.

The germ theory of disease created a similarly simple formula: system + pathogen = disease. But even from the very beginning there was a problem with this because, for some people, adding a pathogen did not make them diseased. Nowadays, we know about the immune system and its role in the larger system of the human body. But we also know that bacteria and viruses are ever present and “infection” appears to be the normal state of affairs. Thus, the formula system + pathogen is redundant. The system itself already includes all kinds of bacteria and viruses which have been given the name microbiome and microvirome.

It turns out that “infection” is itself an equilibrium position. The question then becomes: what causes bacteria and viruses to get out of equilibrium? The emphasis shifts away from the simple presence of a pathogen and towards factors related to overall system health. These include diet, general environmental conditions and exercise.

As the germ theory of disease became the latest scientific craze, scientists attributed many diseases to the system + pathogen paradigm which turned to be caused by general system health. Scurvy, beriberi and pellagra were all originally thought to be caused by microorganisms but turned out to be caused by an absence of vitamins in the diet.

What is true at the individual level is true at the collective. History shows a very close correlation between malnutrition and pandemic. The Spanish Flu came at the end of WW2. It is a little-remembered fact that the combatant nations of Europe tried to starve each other into submission during that war. As a result, many Europeans were significantly malnourished by the end of the war, having endured years of food rationing. Years of chronic stress from war and malnutrition certainly would have caused a population-level reduction of general health, opening the way for a pandemic.

The whole-of-system view allows us to account for another problem with the naïve germ theory of disease which is that some diseases have multiple “causes”. Pneumonia is a classic example since it appears opportunistically when the immune system is supressed, which is why it often shows up in patients suffering from other maladies and also in the elderly. In a very narrow sense, we might say that pneumonia is “caused” by a microorganism. But the true determining factor is overall system health.

Taking a holistic approach allows us to see disease in a more accurate light. For most of human history, malnourishment would have been a major source of disease. In the modern world, we have swung to the other extreme where over-nourishment is a problem leading to lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure. These also work to weaken the immune system and allow microorganisms to cause trouble.

There are other lifestyle issues in the modern world that affect general health. As Peter Duesberg pointed out in relation to AIDS sufferers, the massive increase in recreational and pharmaceutical drug use in the post-war years is the equivalent of poisoning the body. Occasional usage of drugs does not lead to long term effects unless the drug is severely poisonous (thalidomide, AZT). But long-term drug use is a very different story.

The vast majority of AIDS suffers were chronic drug users who imbibed multiple legal and illegal substances on a regular basis. Meanwhile, long-term drug use of both recreational and pharmaceutical drugs has become normal for a large section of the population in the post-war years. It’s obvious that such practices reduce general health.

The irony is that, having learned the benefits of sanitation, nutrition and how to avert the worst pollutants from industry, the post war years have provided possibly some of the most beneficial environmental conditions that humans have ever lived under. That’s why life expectancy climbed relentlessly and infectious disease all but disappeared. What did humans do when faced with such beneficial conditions? We started poisoning ourselves. Given that the word virus originally meant “poison”, blaming the resulting disease on virus is true, but only in the old meaning of the word!

We can summarise these considerations on our diagram by describing two approaches to disease: the germ theory and the holistic theory.

It is clear that the public health and biomedical bureaucracies in the modern West all favour the germ theory with its focus on pathogens and pay almost no attention to holistic factors. This is the number one reason why health outcomes and life expectancy are now in decline in many nations.

The lower-left quadrant: interior perspective of the collective

The lower-left quadrant is what we generally call culture. My initial analysis of corona identified two main concepts in this quadrant. First was what I called the Plague Story which was the way in which Hollywood had taken the traditional plague story that is one of the oldest known to man and adapted it to the modern world by portraying the scientists as heroes who would save the day in the event of a pandemic.

This portrayal of scientists as heroes in mythic narrative is highly ironic since many modern scientists think of themselves as the puncturers of mythology. It turns out that scientists are quite happy to be the heroes in stories told about themselves.

Since mythic narrative has been central to most religious traditions, it is also rather coincidental that modern science has become far less like the golden age of science and far more like the cloistered religious institutions of bygone eras. The heroic narratives created for scientists have evoked the same kind of awe once reserved for religion.

Against this backdrop, the abstractions of virology then become a feature and not a bug of the system. Just as religions often created fabulously complex theories that the lay person would never understand, science has now arrived at the same place. Modern science addresses its “congregation” in exactly the same way that the Catholic Church once did i.e. in a language that nobody understands an that is meant to be not understood. In short, science has taken on many of the aspects of religion in its relation with the public.

We can add these factors to our diagram as follows:-

The upper-right quadrant: interior perspective of the individual

The UR quadrant is about the subjective view of reality felt by each of us. There are as many of these perspectives as there are people. Nevertheless, we can identify certain patterns of reaction related to the “pandemic” and most of these are the time-honoured responses that all people have felt throughout history when a public hysteria takes hold. Among these are fear, anxiety and panic. Equally natural in such times are the desire for leaders who can explain the situation and promise to have everything under control.

Since all of us lived through corona and could see the various reactions for ourselves, there’s no reason to spend much time on this quadrant. There is, however, one less obvious reaction that caught my attention and which formed a chapter in The Plague Story, which was the genuine excitement that a section of the public felt during the lockdowns. It was clear that for some people corona was a thrilling experience that gave them the sense of living through something momentous. Such people really were living through a Hero’s Journey where the scientists were saving the day.  

My speculation is that this is related to the point made earlier about how the post-war years have delivered a period of stability and prosperity that is unmatched throughout history. For a non-negligible section of the population, this stability has translated into boredom. Recreational drug use is one “solution” to that problem. Hollywood movies are another.

So, funnily enough, is politics. Demanding radical change from leaders as a solution to boredom seems to me behind many of the “big issues” of our time. Politics itself has become part of the bread-and-circuses dynamic of the US empire.

Once more on the lower-right

With this we have covered the major points in all four quadrants. There are a number of smaller issues we could explore but there’s perhaps only one more worth touching on in this post.

The lower-right quadrant includes not just our interactions with the microbial world and the environment more generally, but also with our society. Thus, it encompasses political and economic systems. When we take that perspective, we find that enormous sums of government money have been made available to the biomedical and public health establishment in the post-war years and that these sums of money go up every time there is a public health scare.

That’s what happened with the swine flu false alarm in 1976, the AIDS hysteria of the 80s and then with corona. In each case, it’s not just the direct money given by government but also the fact that many top scientists have patents on the various technologies and therapeutics that are employed. Think of how much money got spent on PCR tests during and corona and then understand that somebody was earning a commission for each test not to mention the profits of the manufacturers and all the middlemen involved in the supply chain. Medicine and “science” now accounts for a sizeable portion of GDP in developed nations.

Karl Marx noted how the ideology of a society seemed to mirror its economic system. In the case of virology and public health, given the lock tight correspondence between public health scares and the amount of money earned, all the “scientists” involved in that system have a vested interest in the falling in line behind the narrative. This is even more true when the narrative is set from the mandarins at the top (Fauci) who have total control over funding, media access, awards etc.

The case of Peter Duesberg is crucial here since his career was destroyed due to his pointing out the obvious problems with the “science” around AIDS. Institutional science now treats dissenters the way the Catholic Church used to treat heretics. Science is not just failing due to abstractions and expensive technologies, it’s failing because the real scientists are given a choice between falling into line or having their career ended.

Once again, a comparison to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is useful here. He can rightfully claim to be one of the founding fathers of microbiology. But he was a businessman in his normal life who was also heavily involved in civic activity in his home town. In fact, he never even attempted to become recognised as a scientist and only shared his discoveries with the Royal Society in London when convinced to do so by friends. Like so many of the great scientists, van Leeuwenhoek was driven not by money but by simple curiosity. Meanwhile, modern machine science is driven by money. Exactly as Marx would have predicted, that money has a significant influence on the ideology.    

Of course, for the corona hysteria, there was an extra special geopolitical dimension as the secretive, closed-shop of virology interfaced with the secretive, closed-shop of the Chinese communist party and the US deep state to create a microorganismic Frankenstein via gain-of-function research. Was this inscrutable abstraction an actual danger in the “real world”? The early data out of China suggested the answer was no, but who could trust that when the CCP had just locked down an entire province and, more to the point, who trusts the CCP?

Conclusion

We have seen in this post that the arrival of the germ theory of disease brought about a change in the meaning of the word virus from a generic cause of disease (a poison) to a specific object identified only by the abstractions. As Peter Duesberg showed in his book, Inventing The AIDS Virus, this shift of meaning saw virologists completely ignoring the obvious fact that almost all AIDS sufferers were long-term, heavy drug users, a fact which leads one to posit that AIDS was caused by poisoning. Instead of looking for that common sense answer, virologists were off in abstraction-land with their electron microscopes, their PCR tests and their computer models.

At the height of the AIDS hysteria, there were 1.25 researchers to every confirmed AIDS patient in the United States. It would have been possible to have each scientist study each patient directly. If they had done so, it would have been obvious that the disease was caused by a lifestyle centred around heavy drug use. Instead, the researchers were all tucked away in their laboratories churning out peer-reviewed papers, attending well-catered conferences at beach resorts, and receiving scientific awards. The result was the tens of billions of dollars were spent to achieve no tangible results; a failure that would be repeated during the corona debacle where perhaps trillions of dollars were flushed down the toilet for no benefit.

There’s a more general point to be made about the move away from the meaning of virus as “poison”, however. For most of human history, most people didn’t have enough in the way of food and nutrition. Read any history of Rome, for example, and count the number of times the words “famine” and “plague” appear in the same sentence. As a general rule, people at any time in history could have done with more food and not less.

This shared history seems to have blinded us to an obvious but little-known fact of biology which is that too much of something is just as bad, just as poisonous, as too little. That’s true of recreational and pharmaceutical drugs, it’s true of food and drink, it’s true of almost anything. Even water can kill you if consumed to excess. Over-consumption is just as bad as under-consumption.

Note, however, that this means that nothing is inherently poisonous, or inherently good for that matter. Something that seems inherently good, like water or food, may become poisonous. The only way you can know when something shifts from good to poisonous is to pay attention to the bigger picture. That is what holism and integral theory are about.