No one is very likely to get upset by an old woman in a small town on the prairie, so I'm free to say what I think. I would be derelict not to use the opportunity.
The most revelatory dynamic revealed by science in terms of how people think, is the proof that when the brain is formed before and for few years after birth, it physically memorializes in the brain structure whatever basic structure it organizes from the sensory world both in and outside its skin. The loops and connections made in this primal time become the operating system for the rest of life.
Any potential ideas that find no brain-home are discarded. There's literally no place for them in the database. This CAN be changed, but only with great effort and concentration because it means creating new neurons, connecting them properly, and reinforcing them with use. This is not willful nor conscious, but the result of experience. Because cautious Mother Nature doesn't erase anything if she can help it, most of the reforms and restraints will be installed ON TOP of the preexisting operating system. With stress, the reforms and restraints will disappear, inactivated.
This is why it's pretty certain that the "old white men" component of our society and particularly our positions of power in government and corporations will not change no matter the persuasion. But they will die, maybe from the virus instead of old age, and then the picture will be entirely different because the next generation will be different.
BUT that's not what we're fighting now. The prowling jackals who are diverting millions of dollars, preventing new knowledge, squatting on progress, are not that way because they are old and old-fashioned, though those terms get used. We've been invaded by the Russian mafia. I have a hunch that once the old white fossils really understand that, even they will not be complicit anymore. Until then, we're walking on knives. Trump will not punish you, he will punish what you love. Or whom. Or what. Like ending the Peace Corps. Like indicting Justice Kennedy's nephew.
On Twitter I follow two thinkers in different disciplines, though I don't always agree with them. They are quite different, one a European expert on narcissism and the other an American expert on criminal violence. The first is Sam Vaknin and the other is Bandy X Lee.
Sam Vaknin was a discovery of mine almost twenty years ago when I was writing "Bronze Inside and Out." There was no Twitter yet. As soon as he was able to make vids, I watched them. This one linked below was a surprise, though as usual to him it's a variation on the theme of narcissism. What makes it different and highly useful is not just his overview of viruses through history, though I appreciate that, but his extension of understanding the consequences once the virus dies down again. The social consequences of the terror, the separations, and the deaths will be played out in a nasty craving for authoritarianism that meets those who have been waiting their chance; a wave of relationship breakups after forced and mistaken intimacy; and a wave of babies as always follows emergencies. The good news he forecasts is renewed prosperity once the population is reduced.
Bandy X Lee speaks for herself in Tweets as she strives mightily to remove the totally unqualified and dangerous Trump from office. She says, "The data make me believe that politicians wish to suppress science because of what it reveals: political parties are no longer necessary. Science has developed to the point where we could find the best solution for almost every problem. There is no need to rely on ideology."
"By creating parties, they make the people fight for the politicians, so that they can pretend to have the solutions while wielding power. The presidency, furthermore, becomes a personality cult, while the people are fully capable of governing themselves."
"Withholding information from the public is a principal way they disempower the people and retain power. This is just my outside observation."
As soon as Dr. Lee, MD and MDiv, -- and therefore qualified in both medicine with the specialty of psychiatry and in "religious" ministry -- said the above, a white man spoke up to command her to go back to her shrinky stuff because she wasn't qualified for anything else. He had a bucket over his head.
I myself will be taking this calamity as a test case for my view on religious meaning, which is partly that the worst of Christian ideas, the ones most bound by the understandings of 2,000 years ago, have persisted because they are useful for autocrats who identify with God, trying to merge with this anthropomorphic figure of grandiose narcissism by encouraging dependence and obedience. In Trump's case, also admiration. Unaccountable since he is immoral, unattractive, and lying.
Some say that science is the new religion. It is not, in the sense they mean, which is that religions are institutions that compete with government and reward their self-defined faithful. Science, which is now morphing to include human feeling as a form of thought, is a method, a technique for finding the reliable. Meaning, the impetus for living with care and sustainability both social and individual, is something derived from that. The image of the river is useful because it moves and because it can get rough.
The new scientifically documented reality does not give primacy to humans, which is partly why it's pretty scary. Existence is far bigger and older that we can even conceive, which is part of another reason. The vision is of complex molecules, some of which are a code of life carried by cells. But we also know about unseeable bits like viruses, bacteria, microscopic worms and bugs, prions (which are technically not alive), and rickettsias. They can have major consequences when they interfere in bodies, but paradoxically there are also bad consequences if the ones the body needs are missing. We are part of a sheet of life in all degrees and forms, some of them long-ago captives of our own living cells, like mitochondria.
Science has also given us access to nearly overwhelming wonder and awe through instrumented images of existence that we never imagined. This is part of the classic phrase describing the sacred, "mysterium et tremendum." Witnessing an atomic bomb exploding, gazing out the window of the satellite space station at the planet Earth, we resort to the language of religion.
But science can also be an occasion for absolute rationality with no emotion, which we have in the past seen as supreme and determining. This is the source of the idea that Vaknin describes, that a pandemic that kills a high percentage of humans is a cleansing, an opportunity for later success. An old Christian idea. I went back to listen to him again because I'm not seeing much of this perverse resentful praise of the destruction of everyone in a holocaust. Vengeance is mine, they say. "MINE, MINE, MINE!!!"
But Vaknin is not reading the figures the same way that I am. Lack of testing means that there are many silent carriers out there, that deaths due to other causes are disguising the virus, and that present exposure won't show up as symptoms until April Fool's Day. (Who says a virus has no sense of humor?) This dust won't settle for quite a while.
Though this is clearly an opportunity for the dictators to play Daddy-Man Doctor, to squash disobedient women, and to crush democracy, there is another and opposing force in the necessity of empowering states, cities, and institutions who help people. This power is leaving the president.
Much of the struggle will be expressed as money, but money is only a convention, a social agreement. Only on TV crime shows and in Third World wars do we see baggage and bales of dollars. Otherwise, it's just bookkeeping. As is ownership. All governed by the same Rule of Law that keeps us from tearing Trump into gobbets of quivering flesh, as though he weren't doing that to himself. We can seize, we can devalue, we can trace as never before what the "money" is doing. The epidemic that seems like a coverup may rip the cover off. But there will always be a "saving remnant" and that is also Christian.
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