“We are not used to thinking about vectors of viral virulence. In short, our nation… our people… have no experience whatsoever dealing with incipient contagion. In fact, one might say we celebrate it… embody it… and exhibit the unconsciously apt hubris that inclines us to refer to various ‘popular’ media as ‘viral’. To ‘go viral’ in modern jargon means ‘to become wildly successful’.

Well, something else is about to become wildly successful because, while our societies and corporations have been busy obliterating the remaining environmental nurseries and gorging themselves on representations, images and trillions of unnecessary objects and ‘pastimes’… nature was responding with her own brand of ‘media’. RNA. In a little fatty shell that rides on the exhalations of the infected. So we’re about to get a real taste of ‘popularity’ in a form many expected, and more than a few directly predicted. But this isn’t going to be a celebration. Quite the opposite.

We’re not equipped for this. And it’s not going to go away because we acquire a vaccine or ‘immunity’. People can get the flu several (more than 5) times in a single season, and most vaccines for this type of illness are only partly effective. But that’s not the point. What we are experiencing now is the ‘pilot wave’ (to steal a term from a branch of quantum physics theory) of what will most likely be an ongoing array of profoundly staggering consequences for human beings and that stuff we erroneously refer to as ‘civilization’.

I have heard many people opine that this will be ‘the great wake-up call’, and I desperately hope they might be correct — however, again, our species has a catastrophically poor track-record when it comes to dealing intelligently — or even survivably — with crises. Particularly those that are the direct result of our own greed, hubris, ignorance and habit.

World War II didn’t teach us to stop building weapons of mass destruction. In fact, one might argue that the resulting technological ‘advancements’ that followed that war turned our species into something resembling a weapon of unimaginable scope and effect — a weapon capable not only of obliterating the future, but casting the entire history of life on Earth (and our species) as a terrifying and tragic failure. For what we do now »changes the meaning of all of history. So if we raise the bar now, history is, at least in part, justified. But if we burn the ladder to ashes… then we transform the meaning of the sacrifices of our ancestors into shame.

So many of my friends have sung the praises of science and technology… but for a long time those branches of endeavor have been arming aspects of our culture that are omnicidal (everything-killing). If we wipe out life on Earth, or fail to become humane or intelligent, then science and technology will have proven to be lethal, not heroic. And, so far, that’s the basic outline of the situation. For hundreds of years our species has been waging war on the origins of life on Earth (and our own real or possible intelligence) in waves whose ferocity and effect have been continually amplified without cessation. In the past 15 years, the major Western societies have gutted environmental protections and embarked on terrifying pogroms of devastation whose effects will be felt for centuries, if not forever.

What we must do, what we should have been doing… what we failed to do… was establish societies intelligent enough to merit their own continuance. We should have been investing the momentum we dumped into corporations, products and machines into establishing something actually resembling human intelligence… and groups of people both worthy and capable of enacting it together. This is the actual frontier, and the future of our species depends upon this specific pivot.

Our recent generations may well come to be known as those who burned down history for the sake of a brief period of luxury. But it is within our capability to send a message to both the past and the future. That there were some of us who understood the terrible gravity of our collective hubris and were determined to make another choice: the choice to recover the humanity and intelligence our species long ago departed for the marketplace. The choice to ennoble the unimaginable sacrifices it took to raise us from our relatively humble origins to one of the most powerful forces in the history of life on Earth.

That power is a curse… unless and until we ensure it is a blessing. That is the task that stands before us now, and those of us capable of enacting it must pursue it with all the urgency and efficacy that our present situations… and their unpredictable future consequences… stridently demand.”

— an intelligence agent