how to save the world

Aerial photo of anti-Netanyahu protestors April 19, 2020 in Tel Aviv; photo by Tomer Appelbaum for Haaretz

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

WB Yeats — The Second Coming

Yeats wrote this famous poem on the heels of the first World War, presenting an alternative vision of Christianity’s joyous “second coming”, describing instead a dreadful “beast” seemingly about to be born. He laments the lack of conviction of those deadened and paralyzed by recent events — those who might be able to shift the world from such a course. And he laments the passionate intensity that seemingly remains, then as now, only in the ignorant.

In some recent correspondence, my friend Paul Heft reminded me of this poem. We’ve been talking about what our collective reactions to the current pandemic forebodes for our response to the immensely greater challenges of economic, climate and ecosystem collapse as the sixth great extinction gathers steam.

I thought I’d share some of these thoughts, which Paul prompted with his characteristic skill and thoughtful questions (thanks Paul!), in case my musings are of use to others contemplating the nature of the beast now slouching towards Bethlehem, waiting to be born:

I.   What the Photos Said

I was struck by the utter dissimilarity of two much-publicized protest demonstrations in the past week.

The first, a week ago, featured an angry mob of old white men in Michigan, many of them brandishing massive assault weapons, crowded together on the capitol steps, carrying “end the lockdown” and “Trump|Pence” signs.

The second, two days ago, featured thousands of anti-Netanyahu protestors in Tel Aviv (see image above), carefully observing social distancing rules and mostly wearing masks bearing the words “Crime Minister”.

To me these contrasting images say so much about our different worldviews, and about how we are all struggling in the face of a seeming decline in democracy, tolerance and critical thinking everywhere.

It is easy to mock the Michigan protestors, and to be outraged at the overt white privilege on display on the state capitol steps. (Imagine if these had been people of colour!) It is harder to try to understand what desperation drove them to do what they did, or how powerful the ‘disinformation’ media controlled by vested interests have become that they can goad thousands to do this — and make so many feel so helpless and terrified. And to try to understand how a massive political party (the US Republican Party) has been so cowed that they make excuses for this dangerous behaviour instead of condemning it.

Why do these photos strike such a viscerally different response in us? How could anyone look at these photos and take a diametrically opposite view from ‘ours’, of which protest was justified and necessary, and which was not? And how is it that both photos, each in their own way, ultimately evoke feelings of hopelessness in us?

I’m a joyful pessimist about our future — I think our industrial civilization will slowly collapse over the coming decades, but that that will ultimately be a good thing as it will usher in, of necessity, more sustainable, relocalized and connected ways of living on our fragile blue planet. But now I wonder: What spirit will we see arising from the collective struggle in the meantime — the kind of courage and collaboration that has been so much on display everywhere in the face of the pandemic, or a response that is angrier, more antagonistic and less caring of others, ultimately giving rise to totalitarian states that most of us have never had to experience but which our grandparents warned us about?

II.  Don’t Tell Me — I Don’t Want to Know

Before despairing about the mindless anger, and the lurch to populism, I want to try to understand it. I don’t think it’s because people are stupid (Joe Rogan just said he’d vote for Trump over Biden). I think it’s because people are scared. I think it’s because they think no leader is listening to them or understands them, by which I mean a leader who understands and addresses (or panders) to their fears. As hopeless a president as he was, Obama was a good listener.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I think the media are just giving people what they want, which is to be distracted and entertained. They don’t want to be informed (just look at “What’s Trending” on Twitter). They want things to be simple. They want the same thing from Faux News that they want from Reality TV. The media have no interest in promoting particular ideologies or candidates. They want ratings, subscribers. They don’t do investigative journalism, not because they don’t want crooks uncovered, but because it has no ROI. There’s no money in it.

I think (I’m about to go out on a really thin limb here) the best candidate for the Democrats right now (and for 2024) is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She could transcend political ideologies for the same reason Trump has to some extent done so — because she’s beholden to no special interest and doesn’t bullshit. I think she could win by a landslide in 2024. (I also think Michelle Obama would make a hugely popular VP, so pay no attention to what I say.)

I don’t think the Republicans lack principles. Running for office is a lousy way to make money, and most politicians I’ve met, even the ones I’ve loathed, are doing what they’re doing because they think it’s right for their country. I think Trump makes them squirm, but they’re kowtowing because they’re scared that if he goes off on them they’ll lose their jobs and their power to do anything. And they’re right to be scared. They’ll be delighted when he’s gone, but rightfully worried they’ll never get elected again without a populist leader they can’t control.

What spirit will we see rising? A combination of those who are fatalists, realists, pragmatists and plodders (but not slouchers) — but who to stay level headed will appear to be “without conviction”; and those of “passionate intensity”, idealists across the political spectrum fervent in their desire to implant their ultimate solutions in the bloodied soil. Fortunately for us all, in the end, the idealists always lose.

III. We Can’t Change It, But We Can Walk Away

I’ve come to appreciate that systems, including economic systems, don’t really exist — they’re just concepts that people have made up to try to explain (imprecisely, and often badly and simplistically) what is happening, but as David Graeber has explained the whole idea of an “economy” is new, and kind of preposterous, in that it goes against the grain of actual human behaviour. So I can say “the system is the problem”, and in a way it is (it’s not the evil conspiracy of some diabolical powerful elite). But there is actually no system — what happens in our society (or “economy”) is the collective result of 7.8 billion humans’ behaviour, and there is no shared ideology driving that and no one “in charge”. So when I read from career environmental “activists” that “we need to quickly do X”, my eyes glaze over. “We” have never done anything.

I think this is now pervading my thinking about systems and how to change them (or if we even can). Systems are just the brain’s patterning, generalizations and models of what seems to apply, which actually has nothing to do with any of the moving parts, which are partly mechanical, partly random, and partly conditioned. ‘We’ can’t change them because we’re just moving parts within them, and in any case the perception there’s a cohesive ‘system’ at work is just a mental construct. Volition and agency are illusory; we’re all doing the only things we can do in the moment, which includes affecting the conditioning of others who are likewise doing the only things they can do, and which also includes perceiving, incorrectly, that there is a cohesive and coherent ‘system’ at work and that it can be changed through volition.

So I stumble at the idea that we must get rid of capitalism, not because ‘we’ can’t do that but because there is no such thing as capitalism; that’s just a description of what happens when people get conditioned to do things with the expectation that ‘that way of doing things’ will be best for them and mostly everyone else. To say we must all change X, suggests that 7.8B humans have a shared coherent sense of what they’re doing and why, (and can therefore shift to doing otherwise) which they absolutely don’t, and can’t. The Indonesian trader who buys bats from a cave harvester and sells them as a delicacy (or a source of pharmaceuticals) in his daily market isn’t conscious of whether he’s a capitalist or a socialist.

The writings of Ronald Wright and Jared Diamond have persuaded me that apparent ‘systems’ (civilizations, social/political/economic ‘systems’ etc) end when enough people walk away that they lose the appearance of coherence; when almost no one still acts as if they are functioning, they cease to function. Hence apparent systems collapse rather than being reformed, not because people are stupid or ignorant or arrogant, but because you can’t reform an appearance. You can just ‘walk away’ (to use Daniel Quinn’s expression) and when enough do that, it will collapse.

But there is no planning or designing or substituting another economic system — that’s just an idealist’s dream. What appears to be the new ‘system’ will be a localized relatively simple subsistence life (probably better than civilized life as we know it for most, and probably not so terribly different, so not too hard). Over time, complexity may re-emerge to the point there appears to be a ‘system’ at work, but it’s just our imagination. We’re all doing our best, and what you see is what you get when that happens.

No one is to blame. Not even for Trump. He will probably be re-elected, and no one will be to blame. The best we can do is roll with it, and hope that the sense of helpless fear of collapse doesn’t (as it did before all the biggest wars) enable people who have no choice but to be psychotic autocrats to make the situation even (for most) unimaginably worse. That may well happen, especially when the autocrats have all the money and most of the military power.

But it may also happen that collapse will be a relatively timid and stretched-out affair, with most of us trying to help each other out, the autocrats and their friends suddenly discovering that their paper wealth is now worthless and hence they can no longer buy or maintain power, and society dissolving, like a million plague-afflicted communities realizing we’ve been completely left to our own devices, discovering we’re better at self-management than we thought — and that no economic system is actually necessary.

Walking away is neither an act of conviction nor an act of passionate intensity, to return to Mr Yeats. And that is probably a good thing. For those who have lost the conviction that we can control our future or our trajectory, and who lack the passionate intensity to proffer and work for a renewed, reformed, or other ‘new and improved’ society, our job now is to watch, to pay attention, and to know when and how to walk away, and to show others the path. Not a path forward, not a path back, just the only path left, the difficult path away from what no longer works. There is no purpose trying to follow, or to kill, the beast slouching towards Bethlehem.

There will be no second coming. Nothing is coming. Instead, sooner or later, as everything falls apart, we are all leaving.

image from Wikipedia, public domain from Mikael Häggström (2014). New and missing: Ebola virus and Marburg virus (hemorrhagic fever), the new SARS CoV-2 (CoVid-19) virus, New Flaviviruses (yellow fever, dengue fever, West Nile, Zika virus), Human Monkeypox, and BSE/Mad Cow, caused by a viral relative called a prion.

Sorry for the inconvenience, folks. It was all an accident, really. We were just happily going on with our lives, here inside the bats and the pangolins and some of the other creatures who have these amazing immune systems that allow us to coexist joyfully with them, and then suddenly we found ourselves inside a human, and all hell broke loose. We have no idea how that happened. Maybe you can figure it out.

You probably know that there are over 100,000,000 different types of virus on the planet, including over a million that live in mammals, birds and fish that you humans, and your pets, at least occasionally eat. We’ve been around for billions of years, but only in the last half-billion did we first appear in animals, which is lucky for you humans, as we kill almost all mosquitos before they can create massive swarms and totally upset ecosystems. You needn’t thank us, though. It’s just what we do.

In fact, it’s really not in our interest to kill any of our hosts. After all, we depend on them — including you — to live and reproduce. It’s notoriously difficult for us to get from one creature to another, so best for us to hang around where we are until our host dies of more natural causes, and then we hitch a ride with whatever eats its body, and hope for the best.

But your species is rather a challenge. In the first place, you humans eat almost anything, which is not especially healthy for you, you travel all over the planet and gather in huge numbers, which can move us to places we’re not particularly well suited to, or spread us to hosts who have no natural immunity to us, in which case we end up — accidentally I assure you — killing our hosts, sometimes in short order and in large numbers. Really unpleasant when that happens, and no good for us at all.

Back in 1918 when you were moving armies of people all over the place crammed tightly together, some of us mutated into a new human-specific form that inadvertently killed so many humans we ran out of hosts and ended up killing ourselves. Though we’re pretty flexible — we managed to mutate into yet another form that didn’t kill humans, just let us hang around in them and cause discomfort to our hosts. Hope you’ve learned that lesson!

Most of all there’s just so damned many of you, which is great for us, especially when you tend to gather and stay in huge unnatural concentrations, and confine your food in similar huge unnatural concentrations. That helps us spread easily and experiment with a whole slew of different mutations. But surely you know that is unhealthy for you, and for your confined creatures? Everything needs space and freedom. Part of what we’ve evolved to do is to restore that balance in every creature on the planet, by exploding along with overpopulated species until enough have died that each has enough space and freedom and healthy food to thrive again. You do understand that, right?

We have no wish to kill you. We’re just doing our job here, and we thought with your big brains you’d have figured it out by now, and used the technologies you obviously have, to limit your numbers to what balances with all the other creatures we both have to coexist with, spread out so you have enough space, food and freedom to be healthy, and give the rest of the species on the planet a break.

But you know, we’ve been around a thousand times longer than you and your kind, and we’re pretty patient. We’ve seen lots of creatures that couldn’t get the knack of fitting in with the rest of the planet’s life, come and go. Your species won’t be any different.

It’s just really unpleasant to go this way, when you didn’t have to. It’s created and is creating a lot of suffering for many, many species.

So please. Get a clue. Don’t make us have to ask you again. We just want to get along. And with you or without you, we will.

image from MaxPixel, public domain, CC0

“We Make Zero”. When I saw that headline on a recent CBC article about the economic impact of CoVid-19, I thought it might actually be a recognition of how very little of western economic activity is actually involved in producing anything useful.

I was disappointed. It was just a quote from a guy in the tourist industry saying how much his company was expected to earn this year. Tourism is one of the industries hardest hit by the disease, so it’s hard not to sympathize.

But I keep dreaming that at some point we’re going to wake up and realize that a very large percent of so-called economic activity on this planet — activity that is substantially destroying the air, water, land and soils and rendering the planet unable to support life for all species — is of absolutely no value to anyone. This activity is measured by GDP, which really measures nothing more than the despoilment of our planet, and certain not the welfare of any species including ours. Despite its calculation, it is substantially just a surrogate for resource use — a chart over any time period tracking GDP against the amount of resources we extract from the planet, the vast majority of them non-renewable, shows a perfect correlation. GDP has nothing to do with economic or social wellbeing; it is simply a measure of the rate at which we are plundering the earth.

As the first wave of this pandemic flattens, there is much discussion about how severe the economic impact of our curtailment of “Work” activity in the interest of social distancing will be. There is essentially no discussion about whether all this “Work” activity was or is necessary in the first place, and whether it really produces much of value. When it comes to producing things of enduring and essential value to the planet or even to members of our own species, the CBC headline pretty much says it — We Make Zero.

But surely, you are probably saying, we couldn’t just stop doing all this economic activity without a disastrous impact on human welfare. Remember the Great Depression? It was ghastly. People would starve. Institutions would crumble.

Such is the compelling Story of Work, which is essentially the Story of Progress, that we tell ourselves. Indeed, this myth is so powerful that many retirees’ lives — rid of the sense of tremendous importance of their Work — are filled with depression and feelings of worthlessness and boredom. It is so powerful that some would be prepared to let 1% of the planet — 80 million people — die horrible deaths, rather than drastically reducing economic activity through social distancing to prevent it.

It is so powerful that those who are unable to find, or convince themselves that they have, Meaningful Work, are actually getting sick, getting addicted, and, as Atul Gawande movingly explains, dying of despair, in the millions.

Because the myth is so powerful, and almost universally believed, it is very likely that we will have one, or a whole series of, severe economic recessions in the coming months and years. This is because things are worth exactly what we think they are worth, and when people think stocks are worth a multiple of current annual profits, and that real estate values will plunge because there will be less money to spend on it because less Work is being done, stock prices and real estate prices will plummet, and those whose net worth is completely dependent on their investments, pensions, and the value of their homes — notably the Working poor — will find themselves suddenly with a negative net worth, no money to repay their mortgages and other huge debts, no job, and quite conceivably no home, and no food. Meanwhile the rich will mostly keep their jobs, and suffer huge short-term paper losses on their investments, but not really suffer at all.

All because of a myth that has been relentlessly hammered into all of us our entire lives. One that is simply untrue. There is more than enough food in this world, though the vast majority of it is factory-produced, unhealthy, massively ecologically destructive, horrifically cruel, and the cause of most of the debilitating, awful chronic diseases that kill 90% of us and are increasingly shortening our healthy life-spans and bankrupting our health care systems. There is more than enough of everything. And, even more incredibly, to those who buy the myth of Progress, there is no need for anyone who doesn’t want to, to have to Work.

So let’s take a look at this myth.

Suppose you want to set up and run a bank. You get a charter, which prevents too many competitors also setting up banks in your area, and indemnifies you from personal liability for just about any consequences of your bank’s activities. You also discover that if you really screw up, provided you get big enough that people and companies depend on you, you will be fully bailed out by government.

Now, you get to take people’s deposits, and pay them 0.5% interest on them. With your charter, you get to loan out many times your deposits (the government has your back) to people and corporations. You’ll probably only get ten times your interest cost with your corporate loans (the government has their back too). But you’ll earn an average of 16%, that is a 3200% profit multiple, on what you’re paying your depositors — on personal loans ie mortgages, consumer loans, care loans, lines of credit, and credit cards. This is entirely legal, and thanks to new laws that make declaring bankruptcy almost impossible (you can go after the families and will beneficiaries of anyone who doesn’t pay promptly), it is essentially risk-free.

You would have to be a complete moron, or a delirious psychopath, not to make scads of money as a banker. So the cash is piling up. Maybe you’re feeling a bit guilty, with your 7 or 8-figure income, dividends, bonuses and stock options. You expand of course, and your new bank towers in the most expensive locations in major cities do eat a bit into your cash flow, but they’re pretty solid investments as long as the economy keeps growing endlessly. You diversify into trust, securities and insurance businesses, which similarly are substantially guaranteed by the government as long as you are big enough. You really do have a licence to print money. You start to hire prestigious people with salaries close to your own because it looks good (especially to your shareholders) to have investment bankers, hedge fund managers, vulture capital experts, currency and commodity traders and other wheeler-dealers on your payroll. Not to mention armies of lawyers, accountants, auditors, advisors and consultants, with huge staffs of menial workers supporting them.

All of this counts as GDP in the myth of Progress. What does it actually produce of value to people? Zero. These are all what David Graeber calls Bullshit Jobs, which he lists, somewhat sarcastically, in five categories:

• Flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, drivers
• Goons, who act aggressively on behalf of their employers, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists
• Duct tapers, who ameliorate preventable problems, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags don’t arrive, online and telephone “help” desks
• Box tickers, who use paperwork or gestures as a proxy for action, e.g., performance managers, in-house magazine journalists, leisure coordinators
• Taskmasters, who manage—or create extra work for—those who don’t need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals

My experience in the corporate and government world suggests that these five categories are just the tip of the iceberg, and that most “senior executive” jobs are also Bullshit Jobs created by the self-serving rich to justify their mostly arbitrary, misinformed and utterly unproductive “executive decision-making” activity. A huge proportion of menial low-paying jobs have not been eliminated solely because employers and governments intuitively understand the need to keep the Working class — the Precariat-become-Unnecessariat — distracted and in thrall to the economic system. The bloated and utterly dysfunctional health care and education “industries”, which are among the largest providers of Work in our society, are hence needed to support the physical and mental malaise the entire system creates, and to baby-sit the children whose struggling nuclear parent(s) can’t look after and teach them because they have to Work. And don’t even get me started on the even more useless security and incarceration “industries”.

It would be nice to believe that this pandemic would give us the chance to rethink our myths, once we start to discover that most of the Work we’ve had to stop doing to socially distance ourselves really wasn’t economically or socially necessary in the first place. But we won’t, of course, rethink any of this. We’re too busy planning how to get everyone back to Work before the “economy falls apart” and another Great Depression sets in.

But we can dream. What if we could take this not-so-golden opportunity to eliminate all the Bullshit Jobs? Here’s what I think would have to happen:

1. First, of course, we’d have to have a guaranteed annual income for everyone, at a level that would allow anyone to live comfortably without having to Work. We would have to jettison the Puritan Work ethic that suggests (without evidence) that no one would Work if they weren’t “forced to” and that large financial incentives are necessary to “encourage” people who aren’t Working to Work.
2. Then, there would have to be a great reckoning on wealth. Incomes and levels of wealth of more than, say, ten times the guaranteed annual income are probably not affordable under this new system. That means pay cuts of 90-99% for the 1%, or else taxes to achieve the same end result (90% tax rates are not at all unprecedented and historically have not “discouraged” people from Working). Still, the 1% would be far from hardship.
3. There would likely have to be a huge and recurrent debt amnesty to reset the majority of citizens’ balance sheets to where the guaranteed annual income would suffice thereafter (and likewise reset the majority of nations’ balance sheets via the IMF). This would probably be the most contentious adjustment, though in David Graeber’s book Debt he outlines several historical precedents, sometimes called “Jubilees”, for it. It would of course be seen as “unfair” to those who had stayed free of debts, and to “creditors” whose careful investments would suddenly be worthless (though their might be tax credits or other adjustments to compensate those for whom this “balance sheet rebalancing” caused particular hardship).
4. So then, only those who wanted to Work would do so, for which they could be compensated to a maximum of perhaps 10 times the guaranteed annual income. Who would do so? I think you’d be surprised. I think there’d be an absolute explosion in the volume of small entrepreneurial and volunteer activities. Completely non-hierarchical, and necessarily small-scale and local. Because the end of Bullshit Jobs would free up an astonishing amount of people’s time, and because people like to do things for themselves and each other. I imagine much of this time would be contributed free and much of what was produced would be given away or sold at cost (driving down the prices of comparable high-markup “brand name” goods and services). I imagine the role of money, credit, and investment in our day-to-day lives would become marginal, because there would be relatively little need for it. There would be less “innovation”, but to the extent that’s about hugely expensive cures for exotic diseases, or self-driving cars, I think that’s a reasonable sacrifice.
5. I’d bet that energy use, for doing Bullshit Jobs and driving to, from and for Work, would plummet. I’d bet that the skies would get much clearer and that carbon emissions would drop substantially. I’d bet that with time freed up to learn (eg how to garden, how to cook, how to make things yourself), and time freed up to think, we might well see the end of factory farming, and a sharp decline in chronic illnesses caused by our dysfunctional food system.

This is, of course, just a dream. Human systems, and human beliefs, don’t and won’t change just because there’s almost certainly a much better way of doing things. But in these crazy times it’s sometimes useful to imagine how things might be, just to keep everything in perspective.

My thoughts are with all those struggling especially hard in this extraordinary time. We’re all doing our best (even the bankers, lawyers and politicians); the only thing we can do.

Stay safe, everyone.

poster by Spanish cartoonist Miguel Brieva, reproduced in the Tyee

Last week I summarized what I thought were the likely short-term developments with the virus, and thus far the models that have been developed have proved to be surprisingly accurate. They basically say that by the beginning of June, with continued social distancing, death rates will have plunged and most of the danger, at least for this wave of the pandemic, will be over.

There are of course a whole bunch of “ifs” and unknowns in these forecasts. There are likely to be additional waves of the virus. To the extent they result from loosening social distancing rules too soon, they will likely (but not certainly) be isolated and short-lived, with many fewer deaths. If some major government (eg US, UK, Brasil, Indonesia), or some large or concentrated religious group decides to recklessly abandon social distancing, then additional waves could be comparable to the first wave, killing another (rough estimate) 100,000 Americans, and two million more worldwide. Or even more. Some of the models, unlike the UW/IHME one I’ve been following, actually assume this will happen and that it will take two years and multiple waves before this is behind us. Their estimates of total deaths are 3-10x higher than the UW model, from what I can gather from public information about them.

So, for example, interpolating from the UW model in the US, we might expect about 1,000-1,500 deaths in Ontario, Canada from the first wave of the virus, peaking in late April and almost all occurring by the end of May (there have been 146 deaths there so far to April 5th). But the three models just released by the Ontario government forecast 3,000-15,000 deaths there in multiple waves over two years. They may be right. I think with continued diligence and good luck they will prove unduly pessimistic. But no harm erring on the side of caution.

The other great unknown, which I referred to in the previous article, is the risk of a radical mutation of the virus. Most of the deaths of the 1918 flu virus were in the second wave, which happened not so much because distancing and other restrictions were eased too soon, but rather because the new mutation was much more virulent and attacked a completely different demographic (young people with strong immune systems). We can’t prevent this. Viruses mutate easily and quickly, and our modern crowded mobile civilization is hugely vulnerable. The microbes will have the last word. If not this year, it will happen when the next novel virus crosses the species boundary. It will not be that long.

But if we learn our lesson now, we can be prepared, even for that. Specifically we have to equip ourselves now to follow the model that Taiwan has set:

1. We have to manufacture test kits, masks, gloves and plastic shields, enough for everyone on the planet to have all they will need, free of charge. This sounds like a huge deal, but its cost would be absolutely minuscule compared to the economic costs we have already suffered from not having them. Organizations capable of manufacturing these should be under ongoing national emergency orders to produce them as needed instead of whatever they normally manufacture.
2. When an outbreak occurs, everyone in an exposed or infected area needs to be tested at least every two weeks until the danger has passed, and those infected must self-isolate until the disease has run its course.
3. Everyone in an exposed or infected area needs to wear a mask and use a plastic shield when eating in a public place, until the danger has passed.
4. When a new novel virus arises, everyone needs to be vaccinated for it as soon as a vaccine is available.

We can do this, annoying as it may be. We have gotten used to annoyances in airport security as a result of novel threats, and we can get used to this. We can even solve the massive privacy and personal liberties issues this way of handling pandemics brings up.

There has been much debate about masks. There is no debate that they are advisable whenever either (i) you think you might have a serious virus, or (ii) you are in close physical contact with someone who might have a serious virus. The catch-22 is that because we were (and are still) not equipped to test everyone often, we have absolutely no idea who might have the virus, and we don’t have anywhere near the number of masks that would therefore be needed for essentially everyone to wear until we knew (and recommending them to everyone would put health care workers at risk of running out of the short supply of them). Once they’re freely available, we’d better get used to them. The good news is that if we follow this protocol the length of time we’ll have to continue it will be greatly shortened, and we can get back to business as usual, or at least to the ‘new normal’.

The other immediate preventative action we need to take now was what I identified in my previous post: completely ending the three sources of the recent (last 30 years’) upsurge in viral epidemics — (1) disturbance of the last wild places on the planet that harbour viruses for which there is no natural human immunity, (2) the bushmeat trade including domestication of “exotic” species for food, and (3) factory farming. Ending factory farming (which breeds exotic viruses which result in the miserable death of tens of billions of farmed animals from disease, as well as viruses that then are eaten by humans or mutate to cross the species barrier), will require an enormous shift in our entire food system. But doing so will not only radically reduce pandemic risks, it will also powerfully reduce some of the main drivers of climate change and biodiversity loss, which are also existential threats to all of us. (Not to mention reducing our grotesque inhumanity to other creatures.)

There’s a lot we can learn from what’s happened already. It’s evident that the regime in China completely botched the containment of the SARS CoV-2 (CoVid-19) virus when it crossed the species barrier there from bats or pangolins, and then only barely contained it through cruel and draconian measures. But we’re not going to reform the Chinese regime (or the WHO, which has proved to be completely, perhaps criminally, inept in their handling of this outbreak).

There has been some suggestion that our economy cannot possibly recover until everyone has been exposed to the virus and either died or developed immunity, so we should just expose everyone to it and get it over with. This was clearly the philosophy of some of the advisors to the so-called leaders of the US, UK, Brasil and some other jurisdictions. It was also touted in the early days of some other pandemics in history. Just to put this mad idea into perspective: Best guess is that 1% of those who contract the disease will die from it (varying from 0.1% of young children to 15% or more of those over 70 and those with compromised immune or respiratory systems). Social distancing strives to ensure that, for this pandemic, at most 3% of the population contracts the disease (though many more will be exposed to it). A death rate of 1% of the 3% of the population contracting the disease is 2,200,000 people worldwide. For the US it’s 100,000 people (the number of deaths the UW model currently projects there for the first wave). Those numbers are awful, and these deaths, mostly from suffocation, are ghastly, but they’re only about twice the number that ‘normally’ die from ‘regular’ influenza (which targets the same demographic).

If we exposed everyone to the virus and deliberately allowed everyone to contract the disease, then the global death rate would most probably be 33.3x higher, ie 75 million people, and the US deaths would be 3.3 million people. Ghastly, suffocating deaths, leading to an inevitable collapse of overloaded health care systems’ hospitals and health care workers. And likely riots and murders over access to hospital care and equipment. While there are risks of recurrent waves with any social distancing program, they are obviously worth taking to avoid such an outcome.

There is no question that this disease is going to wreak havoc (it’s already begun) on both global and national economies. We are going to see, first, a large number of business failures, including many household names in vulnerable industry sectors (energy, transportation, hospitality, insurance, real estate & construction, and of course banks). Governments will not be able to bail out all of them, so we’ll see some consolidation, and in most countries some inevitable nationalization. The problem is that, with stocks so ridiculously overpriced, and interest rates so low, corporations have been encouraged to borrow money (called “leveraging”) and use it to buy back their own shares, increasing their vulnerability to profit swings. With the market collapse, many people’s and companies’ investments have lost much of their value, meaning there is less to spend on new activities, and a need to ‘cover’ losses from savings or through new borrowings, which only exacerbates the problem. Like dominoes, we are likely to see business collapses, collapses in energy/minerals exploration and development, employment collapses, price and wage collapses, collapses in credit availability, and then governments going bankrupt (as tax revenues dive) and currency collapses. And with them, there will be a collapse in international trade.

The economy is built on trust, and the whole Ponzi scheme of stock values and real estate values was already teetering before the current crisis. The question will be, after so many of the pillars of our economy have been cracked or weakened, when and even whether people will ever again trust their money to the public markets. This crisis could just be the straw that breaks the back of the fraudulent bubble economy.

For a more detailed discussion of the fragility of our economic system in the current context, check out this excellent interview with Nate Hagens. And this article by Evan Fraser (thanks to Jay Sage for the link) explains the fragility of our food system, all in the interest of “efficiency” and maximizing profits. (The average city has a three-day supply of fresh food for its residents.)

While it may be political gold for a government to be seen to be writing cheques to each one of its citizens to get them over the hump, it is in many countries political suicide to acknowledge the need for a permanent ‘handout’ to every citizen every year. It suggests (quite correctly) that capitalism simply hasn’t worked. It suggests that governments and public services and institutions, which the mainstream media puppets of powerful private interests have been badmouthing and undermining for decades, are not only worth sustaining but absolutely essential to the economic and social health of the country and its people.

I’ve been writing about collapse for about 16 years now — specifically about the unsustainability of, and interconnection between, (affordable) energy, our growth-dependent industrial economy, and our stable climate and viable ecosystems. My research has convinced me that they will all come to an end in this century, but in fits and starts, leading to the end of what we know as our modern global civilization, and a chaotic period of adaptation by all creatures on the planet facing the conclusion of the sixth great extinction. My argument is that these systems can’t be reformed to make them work; and that after they collapse what will take their place will be unimaginably different from (and, I think, in the long run, better than) human societies as we know them today.

Is this the first domino in that collapse? Is this a timely wake-up call to alert us to what is to come and what must now be done? Will nothing ever be the same again?What does this all mean for the longer-term situation for our struggling planet and its human civilization?

The poster at the top of this post summarizes some of the fervent hopes that have arisen out of this crisis. Might we finally have free universal health care for all? And perhaps even a guaranteed annual income for everyone?

My sense as a student of history is that, even if CoVid-19 turns out to be much worse than hoped, we won’t learn much from the experience, and any changes that are made will be temporary.

I’ve listened (thanks to Janaia Donaldson and others for the link) to Nafeez Ahmed talking with Asher Miller about these questions, and have read all the books on systems collapse they refer to in their introduction. I’ve read (thanks to Tree Bressen for the link) Ian Paul’s fascinating Premises for a Pandemic. I confess I don’t share their optimism. They perceive the global crisis response to CoVid-19 (as many did during the Great Depression) as a (potentially) permanent shift in culture, values, programs etc, whereas IMO it is only a short-term reaction that people will forget as soon as possible and shrug off as an unfortunate, embarrassing and temporary aberration.

We haven’t learned from previous pandemics, even the most recent ones. There’s no reason to believe we’ll learn from this one either. The kind of holistic systems thinking that they prescribe as needed to deal with these crises is simply not human nature. All of our specialist/silo-based institutional structures and systems show this. We devalue generalists and radical creatives, and distrust not-invented-here solutions. This crisis has made us more xenophobic, not less.

If we could get out of our idealistic, humanistic, ‘progressivist’ bubble I think we would see that most citizens won’t blame Trump or Johnson for the excess deaths the models indicate might have been avoided, no matter what these clowns do, just as they have not blamed politicians in power for all the needless deaths in recent and ongoing wars and bombings, haven’t blamed the industrial food and other industrial systems for the untold suffering and death that our encouraged and addictive bad eating habits and unnatural food supplies have incontrovertibly produced, and haven’t blamed capitalism for our ghastly, deadly inequality and the destruction of our planet’s life systems.

The writing on the wall has been plain to see for at least a decade now, and most people have refused to look at it, not because they’re stupid, but because they don’t like the message. Most of us are “all in” invested in the stories of hard-won progress and inevitable suffering we’ve been told all our lives, and cannot hear any other story. (Trump’s MAGA and Biden’s Restore the Soul of America are identical, reactionary messages, just seen through different worldview lenses.) We will listen to the demagogues who say this is someone else’s fault, this is temporary, an unfortunate aberration, that this was unavoidable, that this is life. And most importantly, we will listen to promises that we can get back to the way things were. Even those who can hardly remember when things were even OK.

So my sense at this stage (I hope to be proved wrong) is that nothing will change in terms of human behaviour, processes, systems and infrastructure, except temporarily. Our valiant, struggling, suffering species is and has always been concerned with the needs of the moment. We only change when we believe we have no other choice, and that point has not yet come.

Nate (in the video linked above) explains how he sees humanity/Earth/Gaia as a kind of super-organism: “Right now the super-organism has been checked into the hospital and is being treated for a virus. The question is, when it’s discharged from the hospital, which might be in a couple of months, or a couple of years, will it listen to its ‘doctors’ or will it go back to its gluttonous ways?… As individuals, we can choose to live differently, but once this is over, when the cost of energy is so low, our collective default will be to try to go back to the old system.”

Just as we have become used to removing our shoes, at airport security, and at friends’ houses, we may get used to putting on masks, and other seemingly excessive and annoying actions. But we won’t give up our dream, of how things are and should be and must be, so easily.

Nate is saying, however, that unrecoverable economic collapse is coming, probably starting over the next decade, and that, not CoVid-19, will likely be our real, way-too-late, wake-up call. That seems about right.

Stay safe, everyone.

Forecasts April 9th, 2020 (shortly after this article was first written):

[EDIT] Updated Forecasts May 4th, 2020:

Current CoVid-19 deaths for North America West Coast jurisdictions to [EDITS: updated to April 9th & May 4th] per the nCoVid2019 Dashboard, and projected most likely (95% confidence intervals: +/- 50%) total deaths to the end of this wave of the pandemic for each jurisdiction per U of Washington IHME projections as at [EDITS updated to April 7th and May 1st]. Interpolations of this data for Canadian jurisdictions in the top chart are mine. Click on images for larger versions.  Download the latest version of this Excel chart and data. (I plan to keep it current until at least June 1.)

Caveat 1: I am not an expert in this subject, and these are only my wild informed guesses, subject to drastic future change and possibly great retroactive embarrassment. But I thought I’d try to summarize how it looks to me at this pivotal point, based on my experience and research.

Caveat 2: The above IHME April 7th projections are much more optimistic than just a week ago (1/3 fewer projected total deaths); [EDIT] the updated May 1st projections are nearly twice what was projected just a week earlier. These projections assume no further waves and no slackening of social distancing until either (1) resources exist to do exhaustive ongoing testing, or (2) an effective vaccine is fully implemented. The top chart early predictions have already been exceeded, and in my opinion death totals 40-60% higher than even the upward-revised (lower chart) projections are likely once unexplained excess deaths have been factored in.

The most important things to keep in mind right now IMO:

LEARNING FROM PAST PANDEMICS

When I worked 12 years ago with the Ministry of Health with a special group hired to learn the lessons of SARS so there would be no repetition of the mistakes made then, we studied the epidemiology not only of SARS (CoV-1) but of various bird flus (H5N1, H7N9), swine flus (H1N1), and the 1918 pandemic (“Spanish flu”, also an H1N1). 

What was so remarkable about this work is that most of what we would ideally like to know/learn about these diseases we could not learn, for a number of reasons — mostly about how incredibly little we really understand viruses and how they proliferate, but also because the history is still unclear. You would think, for example, that by now we would know where the 1918 pandemic arose, but we remain utterly clueless, with at least 3 major theories, all of them somewhat suspect.        

We also can’t yet agree on how many died from the 1918 virus, with estimates varying by more than an order of magnitude. 

Nevertheless, there is much to learn from that pandemic, and I’d commend this New Yorker video to you — an interview with John Barry, a writer who’s spent much of his life studying it.

 Some things that we did learn, that now seem to have become lost in the shuffle:

1. Flu pandemics come in waves. The severest wave in 1918 was the second, not the first. And it wasn’t (so much) because people got complacent and eased restrictions when the first wave abated; it was because viruses can mutate incredibly quickly, and the second wave arose from a much, much more virulent strain.
2. Unlike most flu viruses, including the first 1918 wave virus, the second wave 1918 mutation struck almost entirely young people. It did this by inciting what is called a cytokine storm in the bodies of its victims. It wasn’t the virus or any side effects of the virus (like pneumonia) that killed the second wave victims, it was the victims’ own immune systems. So those with autoimmune disorders (hyperactive immune systems) were devastated, while those with suppressed immune systems were almost entirely spared (fewer than 1% of second wave victims were over 65). 
3. There were several waves of the 1918 virus after the second one, but a peculiar paradox made them much milder: The second mutation essentially ran short of available hosts, and had to mutate to survive. The second mutation was simply too potent for its own good, and essentially eradicated itself by mutating into a much milder form. 

MODELS OF WHAT TO DO NEXT TIME

The economic impact of this virus, due to our unpreparedness for it, will be staggering. There is a significant risk of a long and deep economic depression (more on that in a future article). But this didn’t have to be.

Some jurisdictions have been largely spared both the health and economic costs of this virus, notably Taiwan. Lessons from their experience and preparedness:

1. A process must be in place to enable rapid and repeat testing of every citizen, to quickly isolate the disease. The cost of being ready with swabs, masks, sanitizers, protective shields and test equipment pales in comparison with nationwide economic shutdowns, and such shutdowns are needed only because we have no idea who has the virus now. It is very likely that actual positive cases (if we had the tools to test for them) would be about an order of magnitude (10x) the current “official” figures, which have resulted from testing only those who already exhibit strong symptoms.
2. In Taiwan, spreading fake news, hoarding, price-gouging and other actions that exploit and inflame the situation are indictable offences and considered shameful, not shrewd, behaviours. There, businesses and schools and restaurants are re-opened and life is nearly normal, and there’s been very little effect on the national economy.
3. The town of Vo, in Italy, had the luxury of having the equipment and political will to test and retest every one of its 3,300 residents and isolate those who tested positive, even if asymptomatic. Their experience is a model for every community in the world to follow, if we’re willing to learn from it.

PREVENTING PANDEMICS IN THE FIRST PLACE

While the above models can dramatically mitigate the impact of pandemics when they first occur, it would be even better if we were to prevent them happening in the first place. When Dr Michael Gregor was working in epidemiology a decade ago, he published his findings on the history of human pandemics and their causes. He revealed that virus transmission to humans only became possible with the domestication of animals 10,000 years ago, and all known human viral infections (poxes etc) have their origin in domesticated animals or the consumption of bushmeat — without it there is no way for viruses to move from their endemic animal hosts to humans who have no immunity to them (hence leading to pandemics).

Two centuries ago pandemics became more prevalent again, commensurate with the intensification of “industrial” agriculture. Then with the development of vaccines, infectious diseases were almost eradicated from the planet by the 1970s, causing some health leaders to predict that such diseases would never again cause pandemics. 

But then suddenly there was a third huge upswing in novel infectious diseases, starting just 30 years ago.  This corresponded with the order-of-magnitude increase in CAFEs (factory farming) of both domesticated and “exotic” birds and mammals for human food. Pangolins may the source of SARS CoV-2 (the current coronavirus that is expressed as CoVid-19). 

There is nervous laughter around the room when Michael says, at the end of the 2009 presentation linked above, that “we could well face a situation in the near future where every American might have to shelter in place for as much as three months to prevent spread of a global lethal pandemic”. 

It is to be hoped that, along with all the other learnings from this current horrible outbreak, we take to heart that only by completely ending the three sources of the recent upsurge in pandemic risks — (1) disturbance of the last wild places on the planet that harbour viruses for which there is no natural human immunity, (2) the bushmeat trade including domestication of “exotic” species for food, and (3) factory farming — will there be any chance that situations like that we are currently facing will not become increasingly frequent and dangerous.

But I would be surprised if there’s even an acknowledgement of this cause, outside an increasingly censored and silenced scientific and medical community.

MORE INFO

• The charts at the top of this post came from IHME projections, and the underlying data is available here if you want to make your own or track the accuracy of them. They’re especially useful if you’re in a state that will likely face severe hospital bed, ICU or ventilator shortages and hence excess preventable deaths: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Michigan, Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, Vermont and Massachusetts.
• The IHME used in its modelling information on other countries’ death rates after the number of deaths and infections reached a certain base level (“trajectories”). Our World in Data is maintaining excellent charts on trajectories. So is John Burn-Murdoch for the UK Financial Times.
• The data suggest that the mortality rate, on average, is converging on a rate of 1% of those infected [EDIT: Update May 4th: mortality rate now looks to be closer to 0.2-0.5%]. But the number of people testing positive (due to drastically limited testing stemming from unavailability of test kits and testing resources) is wildly underestimated (the actual number of those who would be testing positive if everyone had been tested is likely 8-20x the reported numbers). That means, if the projections pan out, that only 1.5-2.5% of North Americans would actually test positive at some point during the current wave, if the test were available. Without social distancing, it was estimated that 25-50% of the population would eventually contract the disease. This is the power of social distancing: It is almost certainly saving tens of millions of lives worldwide. It is these tens of millions of lives saved that we must weigh against the horrific economic cost of this pandemic, which is only beginning to emerge.

WHAT TO DO NOW

• Depends on your situation, of course. If you’re needed in the food, health care and other essential fields, thank you for continuing to do what you do. If you have things you can give away safely to people who would benefit from them, of course please do so. If you’re in financial peril as a result of the economic shutdown, the resources available to help differ in each jurisdiction.
• [Edit: Added Mar 30] If you can, please get involved in the various “mutual aid networks” that have sprung up since the pandemic started. Here’s a summary of how they work. Here’s a US directory. Here’s a global directory. Most communities have something like this going for peer-to-peer support, as governments are often overwhelmed, too distant, underprepared or in some cases in denial. [Thanks to Kevin Jones for reminding me about this.]
• If you’re like most of us, the next few weeks especially will bring a lot of anxiety, and feelings of anger, being trapped, feeling shameful etc. These are all manifestations of grief (thanks to Maureen Nicholson for the link). There are many online resources on coping psychologically with this. Here’s one (thanks to John Graham for the link) that I find useful.
• Keep up the pressure to sustain social distancing on your government, if it’s dragging its heels or proposing to relax the rules. Here are the worst offenders globally. Likewise if your peers are flaunting the rules (the link above also has a tab on citizen behaviours, which largely parallels their governments’). Millions of lives are at stake.
• Limit your time on useless social media and other media that are mostly or entirely unsupported opinion, useless information and misinformation. If it’s not actionable, and doesn’t give you any sense of comfort that you’re doing the right things by being overcautious, and that it’s going to be OK, then there’s really no benefit in reading it.

And for the vast majority of us, it is going to be OK.

Next articles here will be on the economic fallout, which is likely to be longer and deeper than the health impact, but was overdue to happen anyway, and on why this horrible event may be a useful wake-up call that might get us started addressing some of the more profound and permanent challenges ahead.

Stay safe, everyone.