how to save the world

chemical refinery in Cancer Alley, Louisiana; image from Jim Bowen, flickr, CC BY 2.0

In his book Moral Politics, George Lakoff attempted to articulate the different compasses and worldviews of progressives vs conservatives. At the time, I thought his analysis, which stressed the emphasis of progressives on fairness and empathy, and the emphasis of conservatives on strict morality, self-discipline and self-reliance, was brilliant.

A few years later, after spending some time with Joe Bageant, author of Deer Hunting With Jesus, I began to appreciate the role fear plays in the beliefs and emotions of conservatives, and also how largely-implicit issues of class (what class you feel you are in and how it colours your perception of your own situation, and your attitudes towards what you perceive as other classes) play into the conservative worldview. Joe saw much of politics as being an endless class war unvoiced as such, and deliberately obscured by other (more divisive and emotionally charged) issues. Joe also told me that most of his rural Virginia family and neighbours had never met a Democratic Party candidate.

A few years later I read Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste, which positioned this class war in a larger and more global and historical context.

At my friend John Whiting’s suggestion, I have just read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Its revelations are consistent with those of the other three books, but the very detailed stories Arlie relates about Louisianans in the poorest, most incarcerated, and most polluted corner of the US, allow the reader to draw conclusions that are strikingly different from those of the other three books, and even, in my case, different from Arlie’s own assessments.

What was most remarkable to me while reading it, was how startlingly similar the feelings of the conservatives she interviewed are to the feelings of progressives, only seen through a very different historical, cultural, and perceptual lens. The negative feelings in both cases are an amalgam of fear, anger over ‘unfairness’, and often-suppressed shame, guilt, and grief. The positive feelings in both cases are a mix of hope, faith, and a passion to create a better world for future generations.

But while many progressives fear violence from, for example, gun-obsessed, reactionary, resentful, anti-democratic, “neofascist” conservatives, conservatives fear violence from anarchic, crime-ridden big cities and from ‘strange’ and dangerous immigrants who, they believe, don’t share their values.

And while progressives are angry at racism, misogyny, and loss of cherished freedoms like the right to abortion and the right to a ‘fair’ vote, conservatives are angry, after generations of poverty, neglect, and suffering, that their opaque, progressive-sensibility federal government is using ‘their’ tax dollars to pay subsidies that let women, immigrants, refugees and ‘minorities’ (the historically ‘lower castes’) “cut in line” ahead of them in their generations-long pursuit of the American Dream. Even “endangered species” are seen to be cutting in line, thanks to the hated EPA.

On the issue of caste, Arlie writes:

In the undeclared class war, expressed through the weary, aggravating, and ultimately enraging wait for the American Dream, those I came to know developed a visceral hate for the ally of the “enemy” cutters in line — the federal government. They hated other people for needing it. They rejected their own need of it—even to help clean up the pollution in their backyard.

Interestingly, it appears both ‘sides’ believe in the myth of progress (and in the virtue of hard work), while believing the other ‘side’ seemingly does not.

A key point in the book is that most conservatives (and I think the same could be said of many progressives) have managed to simply dismiss, and not talk about, problems and issues they see as largely unsolvable. This can be either through outright denial of the problem, or just a tacit blocking of ideas and concerns that simply don’t fit with their way of seeing the world. So in Louisiana, they talk about immigration (which they think can be ‘fixed’ by eg building a wall), but not about racism or climate change (which they don’t see a fix for).

The Louisianans interviewed have had their gorgeous natural environment despoiled, poisoned and destroyed, mostly by oil and chemical corporations that have been explicitly abetted by lax and corrupt local and state governments and by agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers, in the interest of attracting “jobs”. Thanks to thousands of spills, explosions (like the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster), fracking accidents and earthquakes, deliberate “legal” and illegal emissions of toxic wastes into waterways, and mis-regulated underground storage of wastes and dangerous chemicals, the state has lost many times more permanent jobs (largely fishers’, farmers’, tourism and recreation jobs) than the toxic industries produced. Still, the locals see the corporations as fall guys rather than mega-polluters — they believe these organizations don’t want these disruptive and reputation-damaging events to happen, and isn’t that what regulators are supposed to be preventing?

So, they are inclined to blame the ‘bloated’ federal government for their ills, rather than corporations that are just doing what they can to make a profit, and at least bringing in some jobs while government regulators like the EPA are perceived to kill jobs and suck money out of the local economy to pay for Washington civil servants, welfare, and immigration. The fact these impressions are incorrect is beside the point — the ubiquitous belief they are true predates Fox News by decades. On average, they believe about 40% of the US workforce is employed by the federal government (the actual percentage is 1.9%).

The book suggests that, while the church, and right-wing media, play a disproportionally-large role in these people’s lives, the morality that underlies their fierce and unchallenged beliefs is mostly peer/community/historically-based, and shared by those who do not attend church or pay attention to any media. Most believe, for example, that the EPA, health and social services, education, energy, ‘interior’ and other departments are huge, incompetent and corrupt and should simply be abolished. Most believe that local, community-based self-help social service organizations (many of them operated by the church) are more effective than “public” ones run by state or federal government “bureaucrats”. I know a lot of progressives who believe the same thing.

The churches and media are reflecting the beliefs of their communities, in other words, more than influencing them. Arlie found that the most hyperbolic “talking points” of the right-wing media were rarely parroted by the local citizens. They didn’t need Fox News to tell them what to believe, though they found it reassuring that, compared to all the “liberal media”, the right-wing media at least sympathized with what they felt and believed. They have always (for a century at least) believed that accepting welfare is kinda shameful, and that abortion and homosexuality are simply wrong. If the polls suggest a tilt one way or another, that’s probably because those who felt their beliefs were out of touch with what the pollsters expected or believed, simply declined to participate in the poll.

And an astonishing 41% of all Americans believe the Rapture will come by 2050. So if God is soon going to magically fix everything that humans could not, why worry about climate change?

This lens of community-based and community-embedded morality, in the words of the reviewer of the book linked below, “provides a necessary way of navigating prosaic everyday dilemmas, hardships and injuries. It makes sense of the world for them.” We progressives talk a lot about the importance of community and community-building, but for many conservatives, especially those outside the cities, they are already living in dynamic, valuable communities — communities that, they think and feel, used to work well, but have ceased to do so since the “liberals” took over the country.

I think it is their/our isolation from each other that largely precludes both sides from understanding each other. It is hard to hate someone who walks in your shoes every day, but it is really hard to care about someone you’ve never met and have no context for understanding.

After reading the book, I’m going to try to be more cautious about labelling those who believe morality is more important than democracy as being “Republican Christian Fascists”, as I now appreciate that the group that believes this is much more nuanced than that label recognizes. The idea that corporations are “honest scoundrels” who deliver some good, while governments are well-intentioned but dishonest (even to themselves) scoundrels who deliver much less good, is a fascinating one.

Perhaps the Trumpists (and the Brexiters) are able to see the growing dysfunction of government as an economic actor at every level, and are ready to contemplate living without it, while we naive and idealistic progressives still believe that it’s the best answer. (Of course, the Trumpists are naive about corporate rule of the economy, and about limiting government regulation to moral issues, being in any way more functional.)

My main take-away from the book is that each human community’s particular morality is an emergent phenomenon, not something that is readily taught or easy to inculcate in anyone not readily disposed to accept it. And we make our decisions more on the basis of what we feel than what we rationally think is true — so our morality easily trumps our belief in democracy when the two seem to be inexorably at odds. Conservatives don’t care that much about whether their political system is democratic, as long as it’s moral and fair, by their way of thinking.

As more and more anglophone and European nations skew harder and harder right, buoyed by delighted conservatives exploiting non-democratic flaws in our political systems, and feeling their time in power has finally come, how are progressives going to respond? Will we start to reject our dysfunctional so-called democracies as well? And if so, will we use our slight ‘majority’ to replace them with something that is moral and fair, to us? Or will we see a global bifurcation and/or balkanization, where conservative and progressive governments and communities will co-exist autonomously, uneasily, and side-by-side?

If you’re interested in learning more about the book, here’s a link to a detailed review (which draws parallels to what’s happened in the UK with Brexit) and to the book’s final chapter.

Notes from a reformed sense-maker.

For much of my life, I was paid, and rewarded, to make sense of complex situations. I was told I was pretty good at it, especially for my ability to “imagine possibilities” that drew on a broad (if somewhat shallow) understanding of many diverse subjects.

Now I think that what I did, and what most of us do, when we try to make sense of things, is to oversimplify, often dangerously and misleadingly. I’m no longer sure we understand anything, beyond simple mechanical things. Our proudly held beliefs are little more than opinions, and we all know how useful they are.

I once thought that the secret of understanding lay in listening, really listening, to stories that provided a deep context, and appreciation for what is supposedly known but also what is clearly felt. Much has been written about the importance of ‘communities’ having a shared story about their culture — about what they collectively believe and do. But increasingly I see stories used to manipulate, to misinform, and, for those who don’t buy into the story, to exclude.

I think we may have arrived at a place and time where we have a multiplicity of stories that co-exist, some well, some poorly, in the same physical spaces. Many of us are oblivious to most of these stories, and if we were honest we’d have to admit that we ‘hear’ and respond only to the ones to which we can personally relate. It takes far more time and energy than most people have to really listen to the whole spectrum of stories, and to appreciate that it’s impossible to ‘make sense’ of them as all being part of some coherent whole. In our astonishingly mobile and transient world, almost all local cultures, and their stories, are now, I think, incoherent.

This is far more evident here where I live now, in Coquitlam, where there is a pandemonium of radically different stories, strongly shaped by the enormous ethnic and cultural diversity of its people, the majority of whose families migrated here from Asian, not European nations, and mostly relatively recently. As a New Yorker article this month explained about the Taiwanese-American ‘culture’, even that cultural microcosm is an amalgam, not a melting pot, of vastly different stories, most of them divergent, unfamiliar and unappreciated even among members of that micro-culture.

So how do we now collect, Dave Snowden style, enough stories to be able to do anything more than oversimplify, generalize and reflect our own cognitive and cultural biases in what stories we really ‘hear’ and how we understand them? Is there a danger that, in our eagerness to find patterns and meaning in our dizzying array of stories, we will see patterns that don’t really exist, see patterns because we want to see them or believe them to be real when they are actually not? That we will tell people, including ourselves, what we and they want to believe is true rather than what is really true?

That in our determination to paint a portrait of the vast forest we will overlook most of the beautiful, distinctive, essential nuances of each individual tree?

Perhaps today’s community doesn’t have a shared story, a voice or a soul, but rather a multiplicity of stories, voices and souls with more gaps and inexplicable inconsistencies between them than synergies and overlaps. Perhaps our real goal, then, is not to arrive at coherence about all these stories, but just to become better at listening to them, and appreciating their incoherence? And rather than trying to parse meaning out of the cacophony, perhaps we would be wiser to just appreciate, and even revel, in the dissonance, the unknowingness, the sheer impossibility of making sense of it?

My sense is that in extremely complex and rapidly-changing situations, humility might dictate that we simply cannot make sense of the situation in any appropriately thorough, actionable way. Instead, we might find it more fruitful to just listen (in the Bohm Dialogue sense), without judging, evaluating, reacting, filtering, and consciously ‘making sense’ and meaning of what we hear. That would entail listening ‘with our whole bodies’, and ‘hearing’ the feelings as well as the thoughts — feelings that probably make no ‘logical’ sense but are just as important as the thoughts that seemingly do. Perhaps that’s sufficient. Perhaps that’s the best that we can do.

In other words, maybe it’s time to:

1. Acknowledge that we cannot “know” enough to suggest that any patterns are clear, or that any particular action/response is appropriate.
2. Accept that the value of listening to stories is simply learning something new, opening ourselves up to new understandings, not in synthesizing what we hear into some pattern or product that is certainly an oversimplification and possibly dangerously wrong.
3. Give up on the very human proclivity to try to make sense of everything, and accept that nothing has to make sense.
4. Dispense with the idea that ‘effective’ learning about a situation necessarily entails (i) a groan zone (where we struggle to synthesize or make sense) and (ii) convergence (where we force everyone to agree on what makes sense from a wildly disparate collection of knowledge and possibilities). What’s left isn’t chaotic “divergence”; it’s opening ourselves to new information, ideas, perspectives and possibilities. Just sitting with them, and allowing insight and understanding to emerge, or not, may be enough. That seems to me to be what quite a few First Nations approaches do.

Of course, if we were to do that honestly, many of us would find ourselves out of a job, including a lot of ‘pundits’, op-ed writers, bad journalists, bloggers, ‘experts’, and consultants.

When the only tool at your disposal is sense-making, there is perhaps a danger that every situation starts to look like a problem that has to be made sense of.

If we were able to put that fraught tool aside, would we be able to see the world with more equanimity, less distress, and better focus? Do our bodies, with their instincts and subconscious skills at dealing with the world — skills and capacities that have evolved over millions of years — ‘know’ better how we can best ‘fit’ in this unfathomable world, than our furiously sense-making brains could ever hope to?

My favourite Michael Leunig cartoon, and one of his darkest.

Just about all living species, it seems, feel fear, rage, and grief. These biologically and culturally conditioned emotional responses serve important evolutionary purposes. They are all emotions of the moment — they don’t endure, and pass quickly when the cause of the distress has past.

Studies on rats and other creatures have indicated that when the cause of the distress is chronic, the creature, and often its entire group, tribe, or flock, become dysfunctional — they are no longer a ‘fit’ for where they are, and it is time to flee, shut down, and stop procreating. The alphas will hoard, so that at least a few will survive the crisis, and the others will cease eating, or, if things get bad enough, eat their own young. And if the problem is excess numbers or lack of diversity, opportunistic diseases will come in to cull the herd. Nature imposes these extreme solutions only as a last resort, when other more gentle, autonomic, moderating instincts have failed to rebalance the ecosystem.

We are at this stage in human civilization, and nature, who always bats last, is now pulling out all the stops.

But there is something unique going on with our uniquely intelligent and fierce species. A few millennia of chronic stress has led to the evolution of new conditioned emotions in humans that, I believe, creatures of the the more-than-human world do not feel. Endless fear has produced in us chronic anxiety. Endless grief has produced chronic shame, guilt, longing, despair and depression. And endless rage has produced chronic envy, jealousy, and hatred.

These are not natural emotions. They require an environment of abnormal and continuous stress, and they require cultivating, sustained conditioning, modelling, encouraging, and reinforcing. We have to learn to hate. Wild creatures will explode with rage and anger, but they will not hate. That takes a capacity for abstraction and judgement they don’t have.

But when others of our species tell us, through stories and ‘news’ reports and TV dramas and movies, from an early age, how certain identified ‘others’ are deliberately and wilfully cruel, evil, and/or dangerously insane, then we’ll be conditioned to hate these ‘others’, even if we’ve never met them.

And we have to hate in order to kill, threaten, injure, harm, or incarcerate another creature other than in the immediate passion of a rage-filled moment. We have to hate in order to prepare and plan and organize to do these things. And yet hate is completely unnatural, and it has to be carefully and steadfastly sustained or it dissipates.

I’m not preaching here — I’ve done my share of hating and hate-mongering, even in recent years when I’ve started to learn the pointlessness of it. Even my blog posts in the earlier years of writing it were tinged with hate: Hatred of climate-deniers and oil executives, of violent and self-righteous right-wingers, and of mega-polluters and producers of junk, just for a start. Some of my rants have been almost legendary.

Like others, I was also guilty of hating completely abstract things, like nations, corporations, governments and organizations, and still often fall into that trap. Hatred of abstractions can never heal the way hatred of an individual can, by addressing that animosity head-on with the object of one’s animosity and mutually discharging it. In that sense abstract hatred is more dangerous than personal hatred. It’s deranged. It’s unhealthy. It’s useless. That’s true even if, as is often the case, that hatred is mutual among members of the ‘other’ group towards you and your group or community.

That’s where it starts — when those in self-identifying communities identify and foster hatred of identified, labelled outsiders for something real or imagined that one or more of the ‘other’ group has done to one or more of ‘ours’. It can lead to life-long and irrational resentment and loathing, and to vendettas and other violence that is self-perpetuating and inculcated in future generations.

My sense is that we are capable of this hatred solely because we have accepted the ubiquitous, conditioned illusion that we are separate individuals, apart from the rest of life on earth and its environment, and that we are in charge of, in control over, and responsible for these bodies we presume to inhabit. I think the reason that even other large-brained creatures exhibit rage and fear but not hate, is that they lack this illusory sense of self and separation. But that’s a conversation for another day.

Rhyd Wildermuth just wrote a remarkable essay called Human Shields and Imagined Communities, which explores two aspects of this unique and, I think, distressing human proclivity.

The first part of his essay is about the strategy of haters (in war, in protest, and in other contexts) to deliberately provoke a violent, terrifying and excessive response from ‘the other’ in order to stir up further hatred and blood-fury among their ‘own’ community.

He talks about how the despicable military tactic of using civilians as human shields (as the US-advised Ukrainian army have been doing against the Russians, and as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Taliban have also done extensively). This tactic has also been used, Rhyd says (and he was there), by the Black Bloc against the cops during the Black Lives Matter protests.

“Especially in countries occupied by a more powerful foreign military, resistance usually requires operating from non-military buildings.” And likewise, in areas controlled by more heavily armed enemy combatants, like the new US paramilitary police forces, resistance requires hiding among other opponents and drawing them into the line of fire through violent actions, to be able to say “See — told you they were crazy violent”.

This is not of course to condone the behaviour of occupying military forces and racist, xenophobic police, security forces, and incarceration authorities. But it’s a staggeringly effective way to amplify existing fear, rage and distrust and harden it into hatred. As Rhyd puts it:

There’s a psychological strategy in this use of human shields and civilian buildings. When a school or a hospital gets blown up, the aggressor looks really, really bad. When images and videos of children with missing limbs or old women with charred skin start circulating throughout the world, it gets harder for the military who caused those acts to claim to be reasonable or have a justified grievance.

The propaganda coup won by such events isn’t just external, however. Civilian casualties tend to work very well in the favor of the defending military as well. Every time Israel sends a retaliatory rocket into Palestinian territory and kills innocents, more Palestinians are radicalized to fight Israel. The US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq followed this same pattern, turning the local populace even more against the US each time an innocent kid was killed in an attempt against a resistance leader.

That’s why Ukraine is doing this, though they deny completely the details of the Amnesty report.

The use of human shields isn’t the only such tactic; “scorched earth” is another.

The second part of Rhyd’s essay refers to the stirring up of the “false collective consciousness” of “imagined communities”.

Once you’ve been persuaded, perhaps drawing on your very human proclivity to hate when persuaded by a blood-curdling (true or false) story, to identify yourself with a particular partisan community in opposition to another, your collective imagined community can become what’s called an egregore, a conjured-up idea (often an antipathy) that “becomes an autonomous entity with the power to influence. A group with a common purpose like a family, a club, a political party, a church, or a country can create an egregore, for better or worse depending upon the type of thought that created it”. Perhaps “boogeyman” is a more familiar term for this.

Much of our identity politics, he argues, is about creating these false us/them distinctions and then using them, through falsely-created “communities” (‘you’re with us, or you’re with them, which is it?’) as hate-fuelled weapons to attack the “other” side.

Before you know it, you’ve put a yellow and blue flag on your lawn. Before you know it, you’re suddenly terrified of China and softening to the idea of military action against its people. Before you know it, your pacifism has evaporated and you’re ready to take up arms against some imagined community that doesn’t even exist, to defend or revenge your imagined community that doesn’t even exist. Rhyd writes:

To fight for an actual community that is being threatened—your family, your friends, your neighbors—seems to be a very human thing. I’d fight to the last breath for my husband, my sisters, my nephews, and my friends, and I think most of you would all say the same thing. But I’ll be honest: I cannot think of a single abstract concept or imagined community worth risking anything for.

That is why putting civilians in harm’s way, why using residences, hospitals, and schools as military bases is a brilliant and horrible tactic. It’s how you might be able to turn a pacifist like me into a raging nationalist hell bent on sacrificing myself and strangers to avenge someone I love.

That is why the military of Ukraine is doing it.

And to take this all out of Ukraine for a moment, it seems to me that this was exactly the point of Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. Just like the spoiled little middle class American brat throwing a bottle at the police is meant to trigger a hoped-for aggressive reaction that will turn the crowd against the police, her visit there feels calculated to have turned public opinion against China. I highly expect anti-Asian sentiment in the US to increase, and maybe we’ll soon hear beating of war drums.

We are now discovering just how effective propaganda, censorship, mis- and disinformation is at creating imagined communities and false collective consciousness. And hatred is the bedrock on which it is built.

Eastern Europe and Russia have a deep-seated hatred of each other that dates back to the atrocities of the Stalinist era and the ghastly years of the Great Depression. It was child’s play stirring it up, and in so doing bringing us to the precipice, again, of nuclear war.

Hatred, I think, is our species’ Achilles’ heel. What a hellish world it would be if it were common among other species. Fortunately, the more-than-human world seems ill-disposed to hate. Rhyd asks:

I think the forest asks a different question that humans don’t know how to ask any longer: at what point do you just live? At what point do all the ideas humans have about what is just and righteous stop and life itself takes over? And when do we finally choose to nurture, shelter, and grow the life around us rather than destroy everything at hand for someone else’s imagining?

Rhyd concludes he doesn’t know how to answer that question.

And neither do I.

Yeah, I know, we all need to learn to listen better. And I promise, this isn’t a patronizing homily-filled preachy post. It’s actually about two aha! moments that happened to me today. They may not be news to you, but to me, an incurably slow learner, they hit me like a ton of bricks.

The first of these came when I watched YouTube vlogbrother Hank Green’s regular weekly four-minute (Friday) post ostensibly directed to his brother John, who lives across the country from him.

The message was straightforward: We think we listen well, but often our presuppositions, biases, judgements, beliefs/worldviews, predispositions, and expectations get in the way of really listening. And especially if we’re in the role of key decision-maker (eg politician or organizational ‘leader’), there’s a temptation to rush to judgement, or not to really listen to people we know we don’t agree with us, and instead surround ourselves with like-minded people (especially rich and powerful ones, for those who are politicians) who will make our decisions fast and easy.

Hank talks about a recently-deceased local mayor with whom he often disagreed, but always respected because of his willingness to invite people with radically different perspectives and beliefs to talk with him, and his capacity to truly listen, even though he knew that would make his decision harder. I have known lots of people in municipal leadership roles, and their jobs are awful and usually thankless. The ones I most respect, across the political spectrum, are the good listeners. And the good listeners, almost without exception, are the ones who are consciously aware of their own biases, and who don’t take the (often emotional) arguments they listen to personally — instead they listen to understand and appreciate where the speaker is coming from, both intellectually and emotionally.

I realized that, being both conflict-averse and reasonably informed on most issues (and also easily stirred up into an anxious state), my propensity is to listen principally to coherent voices that confirm my beliefs, and only check out one or two sources that conflict with them. My argument is that if I spent enough time to really understand the often incoherent and vexatious arguments that run contrary to my worldview, I would have no time for anything else, including critical thinking. But that argument is not true: When I do allow time to understand arguments I initially find outrageous or ludicrous (and sometimes deliberately provocative, overstated and unhelpful), I almost invariably learn something valuable about why they believe what they do (and it’s not because they’re dumb, evil, or cluelessly taken in by propaganda and misinformation).

Despite the fact that ‘pay attention and listen’ is part of the mantra that sits just below my laptop keyboard, I am still, too often, prone to do neither. When I do actually slow down and really listen, I am always reminded that We’re all doing our best, that We’re conditioned to do what we do (and hence it’s useful to understand how and where that conditioning arose), and that No one is to blame for the atrocities and blunders that define much of what is going on in the world, and especially in the news. And often, it’s the emotion behind what is said (often fear, anxiety, or grief) that is most important to ‘listen’ to and understand, than the argument itself.

Hank’s video also reminded me of the importance of really listening to ourselves. As a conditioned creature, I don’t believe I have any choice in what I believe or what I do. But he made me realize that I’m often not even aware that what I am doing is entirely inconsistent with what I believe. It takes a certain innate curiosity and effort to become self-aware enough to recognize and think about the cognitive dissonance that that inconsistency between belief and action brings up.

So this morning I had been lamenting the fact that there are three groups that I am a pivotal member of, which, despite my deep appreciation of most of their members and the work they do, simply are no longer enjoyable to me. So why was I still doing them?

I should have gotten a clue from the colour coding I use in my Google Calendar. I use one colour for events and activities that I love, and a different colour for those that I consider “important duties” (mostly volunteer work). When I thought about it, I discovered that the work I do for these three groups, events that used to be labelled as “activities I love”, have gradually become labelled instead as “important duties”. Yet still, I was investing a lot of time doing them. Why?

I realized that at one point, I really cared about the work these organizations were doing, and got great joy co-organizing activities with their members. But now I was doing this out of duty. I had no idea why what they were now doing was uninteresting to me, because I had simply stopped listening to their members. And I was still doing this because I had stopped listening to my own inner voice saying Why are you still doing this when you don’t enjoy it?

So today I made what for me is a momentous decision, one I should have made long ago: I am withdrawing from two of these groups entirely, and ratcheting back what I am doing for a third group to just the routine activities I actually enjoy. When I decided this, I felt an enormous sense of relief and liberation. And I reflected about why this had been so hard, which really comes back to my conditioning and my lack of listening and self-attentiveness. And the realization that my ‘belonging’ to these groups had become part of my identity. What will fill the vacuum? I have no idea.

That was my first aha! of the day.

Then a couple of hours later I was reading the latest New Yorker magazine, specifically a gruelling article about how religious-right Republicans have used gerrymandering in Ohio to achieve a permanent, guaranteed veto-proof 60% super-majority in the state legislature despite having only about 35-40% of the popular vote. They have introduced the most extreme anti-abortion (allowing no exceptions whatsoever) and extreme pro-gun (no restrictions on open carry even of automatic weapons, even without a permit, even in schools) in the US and perhaps in the world, and they’re gleefully saying that they always win no matter what the majority wants (which is, overwhelmingly, less restrictions on abortion and much stricter gun control).

My initial reaction was, of course, outrage. But as I read, I ‘listened’ to the quotes the author provided from the Ohio Republicans. And their essential message was: Fuck democracy — the will of God (as they understand it) completely outweighs the will of the voters. Might makes right. The end justifies the means. The reason the majority doesn’t agree with us is because they’re immoral foolish sinners, and their opinions don’t count. Disenfranchising them just makes sense.

Well, duh! How was it I only just figured this out? My worldview could not accept the fact that those currently engineering a Christian Fascist takeover of the nation don’t care whether what they’re doing is democratic, fair, or popular. To them, it’s moral, and that’s all that counts.

And I realized that this is the thinking and feeling (mostly the latter) that underlies just about every brutal totalitarian regime that gets into power, whether that be the Nazis, the Stalinists, the McCarthyists, the Maoists, the Taliban, the Wall Street Corporatists, or the current Republican Christian Fascists. The only difference between any of them is the particular brand of moral absolutism they adhere to. They don’t want to do ‘evil’, they want to do what they believe passionately is right, even if the majority are opposed to it.

How, as a reasonably intelligent, informed, well-read, critical thinking individual, could I have lived this long and not realized that? How could I not have understood that pointing out the unfairness or anti-democratic nature of their regimes and plans was, to them, entirely beside the point? How could I not have understood that they have used weaknesses in “the system” to get what they want, and feel no remorse, only joy, for having successfully done so? And that, having irreparably broken the system, they have left us, the majority, with no recourse but to smash the system, no recourse but revolution, which few of us have the stomach for, at least until the brutality becomes too unbearable?

My instincts have long told me that “the system” cannot be reformed, but I thought that was because of inertia, the sheer clunky enormity of it. Now I see that the reason it cannot be reformed is because it’s been deliberately exploited (broken) to be dysfunctional and then to be unchangeable. That’s true of our political system, our economic system, our educational system, our health care system, and all the rest. The people who benefit from its dysfunction don’t want it fixed, and have rigged it to be permanently broken. Because they think that’s the right, moral, end-justifies-the-means thing to do.

The only way out now is to blow it up or wait for it to collapse. Until then it will not serve the vast majority of us, if it was ever intended to. Just thinking about what would be needed to “blow it up” — to scrap the existing systems entirely and create fair, democratic and just ones from scratch, against the wishes of those who have deliberately broken them, makes my head hurt. But that’s what it’s going to take.

That was my second aha! Like the first, it was about listening, impersonally, and in a self-aware manner — but not in order to necessarily appreciate or agree with the arguments of people with whom I disagree, but rather to appreciate and understand why they believe, and act, as they do. Those reasons are usually emotional, not rational, and stem from fear (and its mask, anger), anxiety, shame and grief. We are all damaged by civilization culture, and are all healing, the best ways we can.

Aha!

image above from Group Works
Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for talking this through with me.

Cumulative CoVid-19 deaths for BC, three sources: BC CDC (blue), BC CoVid-19 Modelling Group (green), U of Washington IHME (grey)

Early in the pandemic, there was some statistical evidence that BC had been slow on the uptake in capturing and reporting CoVid-19 deaths in the province, and had missed 300-400 deaths in the first months of the pandemic. The health officers shrugged it off, and there is of course always some debate about whether the “cause” of a death was CoVid-19, just because the patient happened to have the disease when they died.

Since the provincial health officer, Dr Bonnie Henry, seemed to be providing candid and complete disclosures about the pandemic (she has won several awards, and commendations bordering on adulation from her peers and fans) I was inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt.

I was one of the earliest advocates of using “excess deaths” as a more reliable way of computing the pandemic’s true toll. It can be dicey of course: In the case of BC, the skyrocketing increase of deaths from toxic street drugs has outpaced the reported CoVid-19 death rate, and severely skewed the “excess deaths” number, as did the 2021 “heat dome” that took a minimum of 600 and perhaps double that number of lives, largely among the same demographic dying of CoVid-19.

And there are people who would have died if there’d been no pandemic (auto accident and industrial accident victims in 2020 and 2021 for example were down sharply). And there were people who died because they delayed surgery and other health interventions because they were afraid of getting the disease or because the hospitals were full.

There has been a fair bit of evidence that, on balance, the excess deaths number is probably a much better surrogate for actual CoVid-19 deaths than the reported deaths number, especially in jurisdictions with poor health reporting or which deliberately suppressed CoVid-19 numbers for political reasons. Over a large enough population, any significant deviation from past year’s average total death tolls almost certainly has a reason, and CoVid-19 is the obvious one.

Sure enough, when you look at global excess deaths data, the patterns and numbers, based on each country’s political, economic, and health care system, start to look not only consistent but predictable. These excess death numbers also align much better with seroprevalence and other data on the actual proportion of the country that’s been infected and inoculated.

It’s when you get down to the sub-national level that these data start to get a bit mind-boggling. In Canada, for instance, excess deaths in the three westernmost provinces have been on average twice the number of reported CoVid-19 deaths, while in Québec and some Atlantic provinces excess deaths have been less than reported CoVid-19 numbers. Québec has a very different reporting system, but the other provinces purport to follow consistent reporting standards.

So are the three westernmost provinces radically underreporting actual CoVid-19 deaths, or not, and if they are, how and why? Alberta has an extreme right-wing CoVid-19-denying and -minimizing government, while BC appeared to be letting Dr Henry lay it all out there and call the shots on what to mandate, at least in the early part of the pandemic. Yet the two provinces have very similar discrepancies between excess deaths (even adjusting for the toxic street drug epidemic and the ‘heat dome’) and reported CoVid-19 deaths. So what’s going on here?

Dr Henry continues to say that, while she doesn’t deny the Statistics Canada excess deaths data, she believes the reported numbers are quite accurate, and that there may be other, perfectly valid reasons for the discrepancy.

But a few months ago, BC changed both the frequency (to once a week, with a 10-day lag) and method of computing deaths, and pretty much stopped reporting case data entirely, using ‘surrogates’ in lieu of precise tabulations. They stressed that data before the change was not comparable to data after the changes, so they should not be combined. In other words, if you want to know how many people have actually died of CoVid-19 in BC, you’re pretty much out of luck.

Unless you use “excess deaths”, that is. At the same time the politicians have shrugged off the use of excess deaths as a most likely estimate of CoVid-19 deaths, and basically taken the podium away from health officers, they have failed to provide any useful data to use instead.

The chart for cumulative reported CoVid-19 deaths versus cumulative excess deaths since the pandemic began is shown above.

It suggests 10,000 British Columbians, not 4,000, have perished from CoVid-19 so far, rising at an annual rate of 3,000, unless you assume, as IHME does, that we’ve seen the last wave. That’s 1 in 7 British Columbians over age 80.

So sorry, Dr Henry, but until you actually present some data to show otherwise, I have to think that your estimate of the province’s CoVid-19 deaths is wildly wrong. Eight people per day, not four, are dying of CoVid-19 in BC this month, and this level of understatement has been going on since the pandemic began. How, and why? I think we need some answers from you.

Turning from deaths to cases: Here’s the chart of seroprevalence data showing how the percentage of British Columbians catching the disease is skyrocketing since Omicron emerged:

data from BC COVID-19 Modelling Group and CoVid-29 Immunity Task Force

As of August 13, total reported cases in BC equate to 7% of the population, while seroprevalence studies suggest 56% of the population, 8 times this number, has actually contracted the disease at some point during the pandemic. Current reported daily new cases in the province average about 125, while the seroprevalence data suggests actual new cases in BC are currently running about 13,500 per day.

As this data shows, the BC CDC only catches and reports a tiny percentage of new cases (about 1%, according to most recent estimates). They are now forcing us to use seroprevalence data (mostly from regular blood donors, demographically adjusted) or sewer water prevalence, to figure out how many people are now getting the disease. This data suggests that about 8% of the population, or 400,000 British Columbians are catching the disease or being reinfected each month, and about 2% of the population, or 100,000 British Columbians, are actively infectious today.

In other words, if you are a British Columbian, it is likely that one out of every 50 people you work with, or share a restaurant or bus or train ride with, each day, is actively infectious, and that number is not declining. And more than one out of every 12 of us will be infected, or reinfected, this month. That means your chances of getting it, or getting it again, this month, are, unless you take unusual precautions, one in 12 this month. And probably next month. And the month after that.

““`

The good news, if there is any, is that estimates of the proportion of the infected population (which will soon be just about everyone) getting significant ‘Long CoVid’ symptoms have come down from as high as 1-in-3 to about 1-in-8-or-10, and for those previously fully vaccinated and boostered, the risk is significantly lower again (as is the risk of hospitalization or death when you do get the disease).

That’s still a staggering number of Long Covid patients, one that threatens to wreak long-term havoc on our already-teetering health care system, and on participation in our labour force.

The data for most other provinces and states in North America are comparable to the above BC data — it’s just that, until we took a closer look, we thought we in BC had been doing so much better than everyone else.

So, of course, with that high risk of infection, we should be N95 masking in all indoor locations outside the home, and whenever we’re in a crowded location. And testing and isolating and letting people know when learn we’ve been exposed to someone with the disease until we again test negative or have no fever or symptoms remaining. We’re still only at half-time in this pandemic.

And with the still-unacceptably-high risk of death (at least for those over 60, or obese, or immunocompromised) and of Long Covid, we should be taking extra precautions, avoiding crowds and risky environments (like restaurants and parties) where there is no testing and low mask use. And, of course, getting all our vaccinations and boosters.

As a recent report in the Tyee put it, quoting the above new research: “If the public knew just how much BA5 we have at the moment, we’d see a lot more masking than we currently have.”

So why doesn’t the public know this? And why is our province apparently understating its CoVid-19 death toll by more than half? And what are we going to do when we get yet another surge this coming winter?

I don’t have any answers. And I can’t seem to find anyone that has.