In this article, I depart, for a moment, from the strategy of citing evidence in my coverage of the "China epidemic."
Instead, I want to make a few brief notes on the subject of power.
For many or most people, there is a kind of programming in the mind
which urges the acceptance of viruses as powerful. This programming
results in visceral emotional reactions toward microbes.
The collection of sensations would be something like: riding on a train
heading toward a possible break in the tracks. Each person on board has
been warned. No one is sure whether the tracks, a few miles in the
distance, have actually been ripped apart.
The train's engineer in the cab isn't stopping.
There is fear, of course. But there is also something else. An almost
wild feeling. Where does it comes from? It comes from the realization
that power is SOMEWHERE. Where? In the potential break in the tracks.
People don't often experience a sensation of power. For that reason,
they don't want to minimize the importance of the tracks up ahead. They
don't want to throw away that feeling. At some level, they believe
that, if they do throw it away, there will be
no power anywhere. And THAT would provoke panic.
The idea that they might be coddling an ILLUSION---and the whole warning
they received was a monstrous fabrication to begin with---well, this
prospect is entirely out of the question. That couldn't be, under any
circumstances. That would be too, too much.
If you were so foolish as to approach such a person and suggest he
could, first and foremost, look to his OWN power, he would stare at you
as if you were speaking a language from another planet. To say that
your advice, under the circumstances---the speeding
train, the tracks, the warning---was inappropriate...this would be a
vast understatement.
If a person, for whatever reason, believes he has no significant power,
he searches for it elsewhere. If he can find a train, a warning, and
danger, he'll climb onboard. It's far, far better than nothing.
In our society and present culture, of course, the thought that the
individual has a great deal of inherent power, and a right to it, is on
the wane. That ship, to go to another metaphor, is taking on lots and
lots of water.
Typical sociopaths in high places, and their bootlickers, apply basic
psychology they don't teach in fifty-thousand-dollars-a-year colleges:
People must be able to imagine power is SOMEWHERE. They don't believe
they have it themselves. So why not invoke
images of power in a venue which results in a strange allegiance:
"I'll see and feel power in a fearful threat to me. I'll sign on
and remain loyal, no matter what. I'll cling to my threat, and I'll
feel rising fear and strange rising joy together."
That's the speeding train, the warning, the tracks.
That's the virus.
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