I have spent a good deal of time reviewing literature, facts, podcasts and opinions regarding COVID-19, the vaccines, the actually factual POLICY vs SCIENCE issues involved, and various other features of this ongoing fiasco. I have made a few videos (see my youtube channel) where I discuss some of the (to me) more personally salient issues of this incredibly complex clusterfuck of both courageous science and catastrophic ignorance, as well as partisan politics, groupthink, and abject medical idiocy masquerading as ‘responsible medical opinion/behavior’.

Let me be clear: we, that meaning the common people and modern societies around the world, are in the stranglehold of a complex storm of interrelated phenomenon that are combining to create a situation that is impossible to make adequate sense of. Many brilliant minds, such as those of Daniel Schmachtenberger, Eric Wienstein, and others (as well as myself, over the past 15 years) have remarked intelligently and intelligibly on this situation, a situation viciously exacerbated by the »diseases and panopticons we call social media (facebook, instagram, twitter, pinterest, and so on). I have a model of a powerful solution to some of these problems, but it’s unlikely I will be able to pursue it alone.

In any case, we are not being merely told the truth or lied to. The science is not merely correct or wrong. There’s no simple path from here to sensemaking. This is a truly modern catastrophe in which there are too many actors and factors, behaviors, agendas, and cohorts with disparate goals (some overt, some covert, and some that intend altruistic or intelligent activity but are incapable of it) to tease the threads apart and make sense of them. In my next few posts (after this one), I will post a few things that I have found interesting, provocative or useful. None of them are truly authoritative for a simple reason: our authorities are and have long been compromised. And nearly all of us are in the same situation. It’s reasonable to be suspicious. It’s reasonable to be cautious. It’s reasonable to be pro-active. The problem, however, is that reason doesn’t work well in a context where all of the vectors and factors are confused and confusing, and some are being purposefully obfuscated for reasons of policy, profit, war, manipulation or control.

Much of the discussion has devolved into matters that are tribalistic; meaning that what one says or doesn’t say is often more related to tribal in-group/out-group signalling than it is to anything resembling authoritative knowledge or explanation. This is the face of the future, and it’s a very strange effigy indeed, familiar to no one, belonging to the madness of swarms of infotagions, and one that is neither human nor mechanical… but does partake of algorithmic behaviors in the human cogniscium and the disparate sociums presently at play.