Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 24
Jan. 18th, 2022 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
The semi-open posts I've hosted here on the Covid-19 narrative, the inadequately tested experimental drugs for it, and the whole cascading mess surrounding them have continued to field a very high number of comments, so I'm opening yet another space for discussion. The rules are the same as before: 1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry et al. are causing injury and death. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.
2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its tame politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here.
3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue.
4. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules.
With that said, as more and more vaccinated people call in sick with the disease the vaccine was supposed to keep them from getting, and the euphemism "died suddenly" sounds like a repeated drumbeat in the media, the floor is open for discussion.
Re: The Decline of the Religion of Progress - Will We See a Modern-Day Martin Luther?
Date: 2022-01-19 05:04 am (UTC)It's a weak position, though they won't admit it to themselves. In a conventional religion when a group causes great harm in the name of their god(s), others can always say that group has lost touch with the divine and that they no longer have the mandate of heaven, so to speak, and the religion can be revitalized under new leadership.
That's what Weinstein and RFK are trying to do: to say that our attempt to manage this pandemic was derailed by greed, corruption, and incompetence. That's why it's important for them to believe that ivermectin would have worked, or that we should have employed different vaccines based on established technology, or that "focused protection" would have saved many lives, or that the right combination of protocols would have driven the virus to extinction - essentially that we could have triumphed over this virus but we failed, and we need to get our act together to stop failing. This could be a partial explanation for why the "alternative" narrative is also playing fast and loose with facts and science and thereby risking its credibility.
Ultimately, though, there is no guarantee that anything we could have done would have prevented this virus from spreading. As more and more crises accumulate that we cannot effectively manage, the narrative that "we're failing because we're doing it wrong" is going to become just as shrill and fragile as the narrative that "we're not failing and everything is under control."
So I think the religion of Progress will continue to falter, and that reformation movements seeking to rescue the religion will fail to gain traction. Should they ever manage to wrest the levers of control from the corporate-government bureaucrats, they will soon discover that their ideas for resurrecting Progress will also fall flat. But as long as they are not in power, they can live in hope. Meanwhile more and more people will walk away from Progress into a state of acceptance of the world as it is, letting go of the Progress beliefs and replacing them with a different story about the world. Given the amount of time and energy I've given to this, clearly I'm not there yet, but I'm working on it...
Mark L
Re: The Decline of the Religion of Progress - Will We See a Modern-Day Martin Luther?
Date: 2022-01-19 06:56 pm (UTC)Re: The Decline of the Religion of Progress - Will We See a Modern-Day Martin Luther?
Date: 2022-01-19 07:44 pm (UTC)Weinstein could be the Martin Luther figure that appeals to the hard science end of the faith of Progress, while RFK Jr appeals to the moral/economic progress set more.
Re: The Decline of the Religion of Progress - Will We See a Modern-Day Martin Luther?
Date: 2022-01-19 07:53 pm (UTC)-Jaundice Phlegmatic Possum
Re: The Decline of the Religion of Progress - Will We See a Modern-Day Martin Luther?
Date: 2022-01-19 09:15 pm (UTC)The first is what CJ Hopkins calls "GloboCap", the global capitalist bureaucratic elite-led system epitomized by the WEF and in some countries overlaid with a veneer of pseudo-democracy.
The second is the religion of Progress: the system of beliefs and narratives centered around the idea that human technology and ingenuity can triumph over suffering, scarcity, premature death, natural limits, and our own animal nature.
Last year I believed that vaccination was a sufficiently central sacrament to the religion of Progress that vaccine failure might lead to a collapse of belief. Now I am finding that argument much less convincing. Even if GloboCap collapses - which is a real possibility - it seems likely that the leadership which replaces it will still believe in Progress.
Progress is hard-wired into our psyches, woven into our personal and collective narratives, whether in the generation that saw washing machines and antibiotics come into use or in my generation that saw the advent of the internet and GPS. Even though I was largely raised with different values I am still finding it very difficult to fully let go of it.
All political speeches are couched in Progress, whether Make America Great Again or Build Back Better. Our national identity is based in Progress. Because we do not see it as a religion we believe we have separation of church and state, but any narrative that might replace it would appear as religious and so would be unacceptable to our political systems. Most people would find it strange: a message couched in a land ethic or in acceptance of death and decline rather than in a promise of prosperity and progress.
So, I'm afraid to say, I don't think the religion of Progress is going anywhere any time soon, nor do I think that any leaders who might arise after this crisis could possibly disavow it. It seems more likely that in the halls of power each new regime or administration will rise on the failures of the ones before it and soon fall on the failures of its own promises to maintain our restore progress, to be replaced by yet another. The flight from Progress will happen quietly, one person at a time, stepping away from the systems and promises into a world of different beliefs and different values. We're in very early days yet, and it's not even clear what those beliefs and values will be.
Mark L
Re: The Decline of the Religion of Progress - Will We See a Modern-Day Martin Luther?
Date: 2022-01-19 10:48 pm (UTC)When Progress loses its grip on society, I suspect it won't be because people are convinced otherwise by events but because it will have lost its appeal. At some point, younger generations will start to see Progress as a burden, an impediment to the lives they're seeking, and ditching it will be seen as liberating, as the hippies felt about conservative Christianity.
Or, since progress has been redefined so often in the past, it could end up being redefined again to adapt to the future. Being more efficient with energy could be redefined as Progress, and it could go out with a whimper as other belief systems become more important to people.
Back to the more immediate issue of the likely splintering of the faith of Progress and disassociation from Globocap, I'm hopeful that will leave more room for other belief systems including those separate from faith in Progress altogether. On the negative side though, sectarian conflict is likely that could be hard to avoid being caught up in.
Re: The Decline of the Religion of Progress - Will We See a Modern-Day Martin Luther?
Date: 2022-01-19 11:40 pm (UTC)To steal from JMG's other blog today, there is a sense in which experiencing progress in one's formative years, as was true for folks born up through 2000 or so, creates an abstraction of the world as a place in which progress happens. I suspect that a fair number of millennials like myself will manage to let go of belief in Progress by the end of our lives, but for those a generation younger for whom progress was never a reality, the religion of Progress won't have much appeal. So it seems likely that the ultimate transition will occur generationally rather than through the transformation of individuals.
Mark L
Re: The Decline of the Religion of Progress - Will We See a Modern-Day Martin Luther?
Date: 2022-01-22 05:44 am (UTC)hopefully, some of us will still be around to teach them how to survive in accordance with nature.
- p coyle
Re: The Decline of the Religion of Progress - Will We See a Modern-Day Martin Luther?
Date: 2022-01-20 03:27 am (UTC)Re: The Decline of the Religion of Progress - Will We See a Modern-Day Martin Luther?
Date: 2022-01-21 03:31 pm (UTC)Everyone has a worldview. You can’t not have one. It’s literally impossible. It’s like looking at the rabbit-duck on the other site and trying to see a black and white shape without seeing a rabbit or a duck.
The question is what worldview will replace Progress? What worldview do you want to replace Progress?
I have a Pagan worldview where everything follows a cycle of birth, growth, and death. It portrays a complex world of many gods and many religions, with great diversity. Time moves in cycles, not a straight line (or even a bumpy one). My worldview must also have blindspots, and I have no idea what they are.
What’s your worldview? Start telling your stories. To get rid of Progress, you have to replace it with other stories that describe the world differently. Why are we here? What makes life worth living? Reflect on these things, and then be there to describe another world when the people around you start to question their beliefs.
Re: The Decline of the Religion of Progress - Will We See a Modern-Day Martin Luther?
Date: 2022-01-21 03:15 pm (UTC)How much we were willing to sacrifice to reduce the transmission of the virus is an open question that should have been publicly debated, but citizens were never given an opportunity to consider or express what they really wanted.
Re: The Decline of the Religion of Progress - Will We See a Modern-Day Martin Luther?
Date: 2022-01-21 05:29 pm (UTC)We're tantalizingly close to getting rid of the guinea worm, though.
Re: The Decline of the Religion of Progress - Will We See a Modern-Day Martin Luther?
Date: 2022-01-21 06:55 pm (UTC)One of the great triumphs of modern science, and medicine in particular, and vaccines specifically, was the eradication (or at least confinement to laboratory freezers) of the dread disease smallpox (with the words "dread disease" used in this case without my usual sarcasm).
Vaccines were literally created for smallpox. That's why a vaccination-based approach worked so well on the disease. Nail, meet the hammer that we invented for you.
And to a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail.
The Elimination of Smallpox With Vaccines is one of the great touchstones of the Religion of Progress. The medical establishment is deeply invested in this religion, and by extension this approach, and so it keeps going around determinedly trying to whack every infectious-disease nail with the vaccine-hammer. When it doesn't work, the answer is obvious - hammer harder!
Re: The Decline of the Religion of Progress - Will We See a Modern-Day Martin Luther?
Date: 2022-01-21 08:37 pm (UTC)We only eradicated smallpox by enforcing vaccination at gunpoint anywhere there was an outbreak. Which means we have precedence for that, and frankly given how many people in the Zero Covid crowd are explicitly modelling their plans off of the elimination of smallpox, it doesn't surprise me that so many of them want to repeat that.