Filters
Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision making is to change them into objects.
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
It would be laughable to suggest that we aren’t fractured along political lines, or that this fracture doesn’t play a predominating role in our handling of the Covid pandemic. Along with this fracture, I note a widespread feeling that to avoid propaganda and misinformation one must stick with only those news sources clearly allied with one’s preselected side. Clearly, there is some circular reasoning here!--yet, for many in the US at least, only those sources could possibly contain anything deserving of reflection (or, frankly, absorption). Indeed, it would seem that we trust our favored news media more than we trust our own minds.
In the case of Covid, reinforcing this partisan bulwark hasn’t brought us a workable solution, in spite of astronomically huge cultural and monetary investments. Surely, to see our way beyond the pandemic as well as other considerable problems we face, a shift is necessary. But given corrupted leadership and (arguably) regulatory capture, where would that shift come from?
The Brazilian education theorist Paulo Freire wrote of “the individual’s ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human.” With respect to Covid, I am touched to notice many people working to engage in this sort of humanizing activity, however costly for them personally. Like many of those people, I myself feel that participating in such a vocation isn’t possible without thinking outside of the filters of the divisive and dehumanizing partisan bulwark. Along with Freire, I say there is so much more an individual, creative, reflective human being can offer a society struggling to overcome a seemingly insurmountable problem, than such a bulwark allows.
Unfortunately, it is challenging these days to entertain views that conflict with generally accepted conceptual frameworks, ones that declare what is ridiculous to even think or feel. When people are desperate for balance—and haven’t we been that for the past twenty months?--it seems safest to reach toward something one feels sure is there. Therefore, though I will not be representing myself in terms of the destructive political dichotomy that is getting us nowhere (right?) it seems I might dare offer some fruit of my own process in lieu of the gummed up fare that is keeping us stuck. Maybe the world will be healed as a result of more of us reaching more deeply toward the creative wellsprings within, ignoring the virtual mandates against thinking and feeling for ourselves.
A Thread in a Weaving
Everyone holds metaphysical assumptions, sometimes processed and sometimes not, sometimes conscious and sometimes not. Everyone has core beliefs held just because. Were you to question yourself closely about “the way things work” or “the way things are,” you would arrive at a rock-bottom “because that’s just how it is.” And to that you might add, “and I don’t want to talk about it anymore!”
If your experience differs from this I would love to hear about it. In the meantime, I will propose along with various philosophers and historians of science that no one has the whole truth or big picture, including scientists we seem to believe can provide such a thing. This means that you have as much right to contribute toward the creation of a better world, one that’s as you feel it should be, as anyone else. The challenge is to find your own bearings amidst so much noise.
I started my own life in the home of immigrants who as children endured some of the worst traumas the twentieth century dished out. I have great love and respect for both, but there is no way around the fact that they were tremendously damaged by their terrible experiences. As they didn’t know what else to do with their shame, hurt, and anger, they passed it along in various ways, even as they expressed physical caring and remarkably good intentions. On my way to processing this psychic inheritance out of my system, I learned how to shake my fist at God with the best of them, for what they went through. I sometimes wondered how it was that I was never struck by lightning.
Against that backdrop of feeling that God had callously abandoned my mother, my father, our people to unbearable suffering, I devoted myself to spiritual pursuit, fist shaking and all. I used various religions the way some people use drugs or alcohol, devotedly engaging in their practices to dull my pain. In spite of my best efforts the pain didn’t go away, and I never found a permanent home for myself in any religion. Rather, I learned to honor my own feelings as a means to process all teachings to which I am exposed, religious and secular. My parents had taught me that feelings are at best frivolous and quite likely dangerous to boot, but I learned to value and use mine, all of them. They are the only way I can process my interactions with the mirror of life, and I find meaning, satisfaction, purpose, and increasing amounts of joy in that.
In spite of that good long soaking in the despair and negativity my parents understandably conveyed, I have been enjoying a refreshing new perception of late. I have felt the touch of a loving, utterly nonjudgmental Intelligence. Could it be that It is the intelligence that interpenetrates all of reality, the one that mystics have experienced and physicists have postulated? I don’t see why not. I have learned that I can shift my awareness (not unlike changing a television channel) to access and unite with this Intelligence, whereupon everything feels like it can’t help but go in a positive direction. For me, this Intelligence fulfils Anselm’s famous ontological argument from a millennium ago: that God is a being than which no greater can be conceived. Whenever I am able to shift my awareness toward that Loving Intelligence, I find fulfilment of the argument. When my awareness resists, the argument is available to encourage a different choice.
In the presence of the unconditionally loving, nonjudgmental Intelligence, I am aware of my ontological vocation to become more and more like it, in a never ending process that seems to reach beyond individual lifetimes. It seems that I participate in creating myself in Its image, with Its help and loving guidance. It is that healed self that I wish to bring to the world in its current state, not a party affiliation with a concrete boundary that walls me off from my own feelings and from the more gnarly feelings of others. Any boundary that stands in the way of my processing life on the terms that make me me, needs work.
We are a judgmental people, and the pandemic environment has made this even more painfully clear. Given this reality, I question myself often about judgment. For example, I ask myself: given a Loving Intelligence that doesn’t judge and the delicious feeling that results from time in its presence: why can’t I just be more like It and surrender my own judgments? Especially now, given that judgment and its close associate, blame, have locked the current Covid nightmare in place.
It’s hard to change the channel, but not impossible.
That’s how I would summarize the story of my ontological vocation to become more fully human, at this moment in time. How about you? Do you see yourself as having an ontological vocation, an evolutionary drive of some sort that requires conscious reflection? And might this vocation be linked in some sense to the virus situation? May the context of the virus help each person flourish in their ontological vocation.
An Adjoining Thread in the Same Weaving
I always get vaccinated. I have been fully vaccinated with the Moderna COVID vaccine. My three daughters have all been vaccinated.
- Steve Kirsch
Steve Kirsch is a point-one-percenter, a politically liberal Silicon Valley entrepreneur worth hundreds of millions. An MIT-trained engineer, he comes off as a person used to being the smartest duck in the room. In some respects, Kirsch is quite hard around the edges: he is domineering in the way some people of that smartest-duck status can be, making it hard for others to get a word in. His critics observe this, and it’s also clear from Bret Weinstein’s by-now famous interview with him and Robert Malone. (Censored from YouTube, this video is available through Apple Podcasts.)
Nonetheless, it would be hard to argue that Kirsch isn’t principled. He left a very lucrative engineering career to devote himself to researching the flood of largely ignored data pertaining to Covid and dissecting it for laypeople. He has worked hard to get this information out, risking much for little personal benefit that I can see. He has spent millions of dollars funding early treatment research. He is wealthy but his moral outrage for the quandaries the pandemic has posed for the poor is clear. He may be a bull in the china shop but he shows many signs of being a truly decent human being. It’s easy to see why he is a hero to many right now.
My read is, Kirsch got really mad when he caught wind of statistics suggesting that the vaccines had killed 25,800 people as of mid-May, 2021, and permanently disabled many more. (One gets to be skeptical that the vaccines did this, but the data are intriguing and it seems quite strange to simply dismiss them, given what is at stake?) After all, he had trusted the public health authorities implicitly with his daughters’ health. Now, it seemed that by doing so he had possibly endangered them. Unless those statistics were somehow fabricated in their entirety prior to Kirsch’s discovery of them, there is plenty of cause for outrage there.
Armed with promising but ignored research about early treatment successes, Kirsch posted an astonishing offer (May 2021) to the nonpartisan pharmaceutical industry news website TrialSiteNews.com. Kirsch proposed to award a million dollars (!) to any person able to convincingly demonstrate that particular early treatment approaches don’t work. Here is his language:
To win the $1M prize, all you have to do is to provide a convincing argument that the NIH or WHO NEUTRAL and AGAINST recommendations on fluvoxamine or ivermectin (existing on May 21, 2021 when I am making this offer) are:
1. more likely to fit the evidence than recommendations FOR these drugs, or
2. more likely to save more lives than recommending FOR these drugs.
Either method of proof is fine: fit the facts or superior cost-benefit. You have two completely independent ways to win each prize. What could be easier?
To date, there have been no takers. No one has come forward to dispute Kirsch’s evidence that the drugs work—but at the same time no powerful person seems to be backpedaling from the negative assessment of the drugs either. Kirsch has been similarly rebuffed in his requests to publicly debate CDC and FDA officials about early treatment. What a very strange, unnatural situation, given that as a society we put data front and center.
Or, do we?
If the data support that these early treatments provide at best a neutral benefit, and at worst are harmful, why on earth hasn’t at least one person come by to spar a bit with Kirsch, potentially pocketing a cool million through the stating of a allegedly obvious, data-supported truth? And assuaging rampant vaccine hesitancy in the process? This would have been a public service, no?
Unfortunately, no enlightening debate took place, and I propose that this is more than a little troubling.
Kirsch’s exasperation and disbelief that his offer has drawn no reaction practically wafts from his writings. Clearly, he is passionate about his interpretation of the information he has collected. He seems beside himself that a problem he was able to observe (namely, that vaccines appear to be problematical in many respects, so that the Covid dilemma remains unsolved) had a powerful solution (that there appear to be vitamin/drug cocktails shown to reliably reverse Covid in its early stages). An engineer, he gambled that the people best situated to give reasoned consideration to the information he assembled, would do so, so that the machine of public health would work in the best possible way. Instead, his work came up against the filters that the powerful have: filters that we all have, for who-knows-how-many reasons.
That we occupy a media environment where propaganda is the order of the day, is perfectly obvious. Consider the choice that our media have consistently not been making during this pandemic. The media are not presenting civilly moderated debate among medical scientists, doctors, and people with other kinds of relevant expertise. We do not hear multiple sides to the topics that concern Kirsch and many others such as, Are the vaccines really safe? What collateral damage is there to our approach and is it worth it? What shall we make of national and international data on this topic, and why or why not? Is it truly helpful (or ethical) that everyone should get vaccinated, including young children? Do early treatment protocols work? Are the doctors who claim extraordinary success rates with them somehow lying?
Rather, we have been entreated to instantly form a very specific, inflexible perspective about a previously unknown virus, to look neither to the right nor to the left for qualifying information. For example, consider how many of even the most prestigious outlets have provided a steady and limited diet of words like “safe and effective” for the vaccines with scant justification, alongside claims that the many dissenting scientists and doctors are spreading “misinformation.” Rather than issuing categorical pronouncements, they could quite easily have given the alleged stooges enough rope to hang themselves with, in public, through debate with those claimed to hold “the truth about the situation.” If “the truth” is so obvious, what could have been easier, not to mention edifying for the public? But by sidelining the dissent and peppering the public with inflammatory language, the media clearly engaged in propaganda, and that leaves the public with a lot of thinking to do.
As far as Kirsch goes, he asked numerous parties to publicly debate him. Each of these parties might have said, “I’m not going to debate you, Steve Kirsch, you’re too much of a hothead, plus you’re not a doctor or medical scientist and therefore irrelevant.” But there are plenty of other dissenters who are respected medical scientists, epidemiologists, highly credentialed doctors, professors at top universities. Non-propagandistic outlets could have then said, “let’s get Fauci (for example) to debate some medically respected, well credentialed, dissenting expert, like Peter McCullough, Robert Malone, Geert Vanden Bossche, Luc Montagnier, Jay Bhattacharya. Then the information we are presenting will more likely be of the highest quality currently possible.”
Alas, this is not the media we have, and there’s no use hiding our heads in the sand about that. In the absence of a media that behaves in a way that truly supports your exercise of democratic citizenship, how will you deal with information that comes your way?
I have a few more concluding questions. First, are the filters of the powerful—the ones that focus their attention on mere fragments—held in place through the actions, inactions, and unexamined beliefs of many? If so, each of us has more power than we know.
On the other hand, if the powerful can maintain these informational filters without our cooperation, we might consider that we are hopelessly screwed!
I personally don’t believe that we are. By truly confronting such a terrifying realization in all its ugliness, in its utter negation of that “ontological vocation” of which Freire wrote: just maybe we would find the motivation to get off the couch and “switch the channel,” literally, figuratively, or both. Given a new channel that doesn’t broadcast mythologies of bad and good, right and wrong, stupid and smart, worthy and unworthy, maybe we would be surprised by a new set of actually helpful possibilities.
Last question. A million dollar reward is on offer. What is your opinion about off-label treatments using repurposed drugs like ivermectin and fluvoxamine? If you think such treatments are bogus, would you be willing to make a case for your opinion to Kirsch and potentially become a million dollars richer?
Covid Snapshot
Recently Stanford Professor of Health Policy Jay Bhattacharya interviewed Lord Sumption, medieval historian, author, and retired justice of the Supreme Court in the UK. The topic was democracy and the legal, ethical, and political implications of governments’ responses to Covid. At the foundation of Sumption’s thoughts about the pandemic is his sense that “what we need is a culture of cooperation, a culture which is dedicated to something which laws are not strong enough to create in themselves.”