First posted, 7th April 2021
Plato was probably a fool. The reason this is a fair assertion is because, unlike his mentor, he failed to understand that it is not the role of the philosopher to proselytise but to question. But that Plato was a fool is easier to accept if we are able to appreciate that all of us are fools. Those who know not that they know not are, indeed, fools and deserve to be shunned as Confucius (or whoever it was) suggested.
History shows that we are an animal far better at creating problems than solving them. Our brain complexity and size is, in many ways, an evolutionary flaw, not an advantage, and other animal species and our history, show this to be true. Interestingly, we unwittingly record our problem-creating propensities through the cathartic processes that generate narratives in things like novels, films, comics and cartoons. Our tales are inspired by the seemingly endless problems created for ourselves by ourselves. If humans didn’t get out of bed in the morning, there’d be no EastEnders.
Or, if I may quote from one of my novels without looking like a prick:
“It is true to say that a man’s will is best exercised, and most likely to succeed in the achievement of his aspirations, at such times where there are no other men’s wills involved, and is it not true to say that the greatest mountain range is but nothing compared to a little adversarial determination: battles are fought upon hillsides, not against them.”
Symposion Chapter 37
The DSM-V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – fifth edition) of North America is less a manual for diagnoses of mental illness than a catch-all anatomy of the mind. Like the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the DSM should be made available in all school and public libraries or, like the Gideon Bible, should be squirrelled away in every cheap hotel bedside locker. It should be alongside the Complete Works of Shakespeare and the Bible to be read whilst listening to one’s favourite desert island disks. Well, it isn’t. It’s only found in mental hospitals and clinics, as if to suggest that we aren’t all on one spectrum or another when it comes to the final analysis.
The dystopian catastrophe (some might say tragedy) of the Covid era is man made, not the effect of some invisible pathogen. Like a kid with ODD, our species is inclined to blame all but itself for its trials and tribulations. These self induced crises, whether domestic or global,, comprise the human drama, our narrative journeys from cradle to grave, Genesis to Revelations.
I am, of course, not referring to the ‘Covid era’ as being the result of some delusional conspiracy theory. I’m referring to collateral damage. Unlike the AIDS ‘Epidemic’ (that has killed some 38 million people) the COVID-19 ‘Pandemic’ (that has killed under 3 million people) has resulted in a global crisis far greater than could have been caused by the pathogen alone. (Interestingly, the WHO has chosen to call the AIDS ‘thing’ a global epidemic, not a pandemic. Why this should be is a little peculiar, given the relative sizes of each pathogenic crisis in terms of deaths).
I’m going to call this human ability to cause more problems than are solved by intervention as the ‘Team America Effect’. The link here should explain or illustrate what this means: https://youtu.be/HIPljGWGNt4.
As a euphemism, the phrase ‘collateral damage’ used to refer to the idea that you couldn’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. However, in the current crisis, the ‘Team America Effect’ means more than this. It refers to the idea that human intervention to resolve a problem results in far greater problems elsewhere and later.
If human history, the narrative of our species, is driven by what happens when humans get out of bed and start doing stuff, why is it that we keep screwing things up?
Santayana’s famous warning (or is it a prediction?): ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it,’ is a little problematic for two reasons: Firstly, human action is not based on some kind of memory game. It’s strange to think that the hard-wired human need to commit acts of genocide, for example, simply comes down to amnesia. Secondly, it is more salient to understand and appreciate that those who don’t remember the past are condemned to lose it. To illustrate this point, every ‘successful’ technological innovation comes with a loss. Consumer technologies are, for example, causing the decline in literacy. The horror show of Der Zauberlehrling fallout of the Zuckerberg crowd is only just beginning to be understood by a few of the dying generations able to distinguish between egomania and narcissism, fact from opinion, appearance from reality. Talk to anyone under twenty and witness for yourself the richness of their bloated ignorance and reflect upon the apocalypse just around the corner. Talk to a teenager today, listen and be filled with wonder at the TikTok-Instagram-delusional-psychotic madness that will spew forth. Those who don’t consider the present are condemned in the future.
Actually, the use of computer models by the WHO (and, in the U.K., philosopher king technocratic think tanks like SAGE and COBR) is part and parcel of the digitalisation of stupidity presently exacerbating the ‘Team America Effect’ over the COVID-19 ‘epidemic’ or ‘pandemic’ or ‘thing’. Influencers like Dominic Cummings, Marc Warner and others in well dodgy morphing commercial outfits such as Cambridge Analytica, ASI Data Science (now called Faculty) should be made accountable not just for the catastrophic economic fallout, but the illness and deaths that are themselves the consequences of endless lockdowns and travel bans (and Vote Leave, coming to think of it).
The list of collateral damage is potentially endless and includes rising fatalities from: domestic abuse, poverty, alcoholism, depression, suicide, terminal cancer, stress, anxiety disorders and so on and so forth. Globally, these deaths will far outnumber the deaths from Covid-19 even if, like the AIDS ‘thing’, it was left to run its natural course unhindered. Yes indeed, the medical ‘experts’ and computer modellers driving and hiding behind the current government lock-up policies should be made accountable. Every life saved comes at a dreadful price and that the opportunity costs are being so wilfully ignored is a grave culpability issue for the future.
But we don’t learn. We keep on doing this sort of thing. We don’t learn from our disastrous experiments (and we learn by noting carefully all the fallout and unintended consequences) because our predictions and our reflections are blind to fallout effects. Our predatory brains have evolved to be way too single-goal orientated. This means that as long as a particular aim is achieved, any resulting damage is ‘collateral’ – in the sense that it is relatively unimportant.
But this is just crazy. All victories are, in a sense, Pyrrhic. And though the ultimate test of our foresight lies in hindsight, which testifies to this very fact, we seem to be wilfully blind and we blunder on. In some ways this is sort of what Santayana was getting at, I suppose.
Our philosopher kings, our technocrats, are not evil. These people really believe they are doing the right thing, regardless of the social, economic and ethical mayhem and destruction they are leaving behind (along with the health consequences to follow for generations to come). Humans aren’t destructively evil, they’re destructively stupid and the mistake of conspiracy theorists is to think that we are smarter and better able to calculate than we are.