They say the lockdown will end soon
the war against the virus will be won
the economy will rocket to the moon
and we'll be back to all the normal fun

They say we need to quickly forget
all we have endured suffered and lost
to be out again and buy with no regret
spend and spend with no regard for cost

They say there is nothing to learn
from an unseen little bug not even alive
while it waits in the dark for another turn
and when it comes again, we will not thrive

We. Will. Not. Thrive.

As I hunker down and shelter in place, I am set to reflecting on this crisis caused by a new Corona Virus and producing the disease known as COVID-19. The virus will kill hundreds of thousands or more before it is done and before, according to the latest research, it comes again, perhaps annually. In my reflecting I take in the economic devastation that has followed in the path of this virus and the suffering it is bringing to the lives of so many. Whether it infects or not, it is touching most everyone to some degree.

            I hear the idea that we humans are at war with the virus. I hear clamoring that we will win! We always do! Politicians love the war metaphor. It is meant to mobilize resources against the common enemy and to recruit the winning spirit. Hope is energized.

But the metaphor of war, like war itself, enables consolidation of power, further extraction of wealth from the many to the few, while deepening the reach of scrutiny, security, and secrecy.  War is beneficial to the powerful whether as metaphor or as combat.

I don’t resonate with the war metaphor. For me, nature, even at its most difficult from a human perspective, is always a teacher.  If we don’t see this, then we miss the lesson. Simple as that.  Corona Virus is nature doing its thing. What lesson might we learn if we see the virus as teacher? As I write this, I see the Pope say that the pandemic is one of nature’s responses to humans ignoring the climate crisis. This is a good example of a different perspective than “war.”

At the same time, President Trump tweets, “Once we OPEN UP OUR GREAT COUNTRY, and it will be sooner rather than later, the horror of the Invisible Enemy, except for those that sadly lost a family member or friend, must be quickly forgotten. Our Economy will BOOM, perhaps like never before!!!”

As you can see, the hegemony of human exceptionalism turns a deaf ear to nature except to exert human power and engage in unlimited extraction of resources. This is the operation of unbounded greed that has created the conditions leading to the climate crisis, decimating environments, extinguishing untold number of species, diminishing biodiversity, melting the glaciers, raising the oceans, and all such devastation. The unforeseen consequences created are what we are beginning to experience: unpredictable catastrophes, exponential changes that will lead to uninhabitable conditions and likely, very likely, the extinction of the human species.

The Pope says the pandemic gives us time to pause, to lower production, to lessen greed and to find ways to return to being part of nature. Good words. Falling on deaf ears.

The powers that be call for a rapid return to “normal.” This normal is precisely the problem that has so damaged our own nest that humanity’s collective suicide is all but assured. All for the short-term benefit of the few and long-term disaster for the many.

The Corona Virus Crisis is at present saturating attention as the collective event takes over in ever greater degree the center and periphery of most everyone’s attention. This is a natural process and the more so if the “event” is threatening. You probably feel the preoccupation verging on obsession. This too is natural. It is obvious that this crisis is foregrounded forcing other crises into the background—even those that are more threatening.

While the Corona Virus crisis is front and center in most everyone’s conscious experience, the crises we refer to as “climate change,” continue and deepen and become more severe and more threatening. But at present the climate change crises receive scant collective attention.

In addition to the Corona Virus crisis itself, there is of course the “fall out” from the crisis in the form of economic losses, extreme unemployment and collapse in many markets. Governments everywhere are taking unprecedented measures to shore up economies, to rescue collapsing markets, and in doing so generating degrees of debt beyond comprehension. The magnitude of this debt is such that it cannot be repaid and will be causing its own crises further down the road.

Trump councils forgetting about the horror of the invisible enemy even before we discern the full impact of the virus. This head-in-the-sand, feel good idea is wrong headed and dangerous.

What I am seeing in dreams is that the virus is a call to attention, to deep observation and reflection on what we humans have done to ourselves, and to begin preparing not for the next big boom, but for even greater horror.

The response to the first phase of any collapse (whether in markets or anything else) is always an attempt to do whatever it takes to return to "normalcy." For the powers that be in capitalism's corporatocracy, this is essential. Hence, we see the drums being beaten by the Secretary of the treasury: Mnuchin predicted the economy will roar back with a"gigantic" fourth quarter, saying "we are going to kill this virus" and return to a "normal world." All these efforts (bailing out businesses, checks to consumers, Fed's expansion of multiple credit facilities and pouring trillions into the markets) are likely to fail. The markets will indeed rise on these "hopes," but hopes are for the headlines, not for the factors that drive the markets. All these efforts are counter to the"corrective spirit “of genuinely free markets. The markets are not free under the conditions we see at present. Genuine corrective factors are not allowed to work. If they were, such as was the case in the Great Depression, then would follow, not a return to "normal,” but to a deeply different way of doing things. Hence the many new programs of the "New Deal" introduced by President Roosevelt. Only a few of his proposed programs were enacted and survived legal challenges. Social Security was one. The corporatocracy is relentless and never let’s equitable conditions become normal. Hence, the increasing degree of inequality. This hubris invites correction. We will likely be seeing more and more of Nemesis and her retributions for hubris.

The Mind Parasites

I’ve never embraced Colin Wilson’s philosophy of “existential optimism,” but I have devoured his work and feasted on his provocative and insightful ideas for many years. His work is a veritable garden of delights even if that delight comes in the form of horror. I’ve been re-reading his novel, The Mind Parasites (1967), a Lovecraftian-inspired work that embodies his aim of trying to create a “new type of novel.” What has become punctum[1] for me in this reading, is a feeling that the image of mind parasites is so apt as an image for thinking about our current political and cultural climate. Before I go into this directly, it will help to lay out some orienting observations.

We are aware of “virus” both in its biological and cyberlogical meanings and how both spread collectively. The word “virus” is Latin for “poison.” Virus is the most abundant life form, though its “living” status is more an “in-between” life form. Virus infection kills the host cell and can be quite lethal to the whole organism. The small pox virus brought to the Americas by Europeans killed more than 70% of the indigenous population. The Spanish Flu killed upward of 100 million people world-wide. Often there is little or no treatment for viral infections—particularly new ones. Security agencies are constantly looking for signs of virus, both biological and cyberlogical, that could be used as terrorist weapons.

A parasite works differently. The parasite takes up residence in a host and uses the host’s resources to satisfy the parasite’s survival needs. It does not work to kill the host, but to increase consumption of the host’s resources as well as changing the host’s behavior to secure the parasite’s ultimate aim—its propagation. The parasite conceals itself so that the host has little or no awareness of the parasite itself. The parasite is immune to efforts to treat it by treating the “symptoms” alone. The host can suffer in many ways: mental, emotional, and physiological. In a sense, the parasite “takes over” control of the host. While we know about parasites as living organisms, most are not aware of cyberlogical parasites. The best known example is the “bot,” which is a robotic script that takes up residence in one computer after another and begins its “feeding” off the host in various ways, often without any knowledge on the part of the computer user, as well as changing the behavior of the host systems.

Everyone who uses a computer connected to the internet is as risk. And like a parasite, the limits to which the parasite can grow in enabling is own ends to the detriment of the host (our computers and by extension almost every aspect of our life) are at present unbounded. The more everything becomes “smart” and “connected” the more we are at risk. To cite just one example from a recent report: “Bots are feasting on the economic bloodstream of the digital age.”[2] I believe it is useful to think of parasites in various forms: as biological, cyberlogical, and psychological entities.[3]

Using biological entities in cyberlogical and psychological space is a form of analogical research and a productive way of thinking (reasoning) “outside the box.”[4] We do this naturally in forming language metaphors. For example, we use the word “parasite” to speak of someone who “exploits others and gives nothing in return.” We might think of such behavior as the result of parasitic invasion. A parasitic invasion “takes over” and controls the behavior of the host. If we imagine that parasites can be spread in many ways (as are actual parasites), then we can imagine the spread of cultural, political and psychological mind parasites as an unsuspected form of control of human behavior.

With the ever increasing interaction of climate change processes in or entering in exponential phases, it is quite likely that biological parasites will become an evermore virulent phenomenon. With the increasing interaction of cyberlogical systems (the internet), which are also likely entering into exponential phases of penetration, it is quite likely that our interaction with cyber systems will become pervasive, ubiquitous and unpredictable. This would naturally include robotic systems of all types. And with the ever increasing exposure to psychological parasites of all kinds, we can expect increasing degrees of instability of traditional ways of functioning at all levels at both an individual and collective level.

The following questions, among others, I’ll take up in future posts on this topic are:

1.How do mind parasites spread? What purposes do they serve?

2. In addition to natural mind parasites, how are they engineered, and by whom (people,

            computers, robots, etc.)

3. Is everyone infected? Are there natural immunities? Is there any treatment for brain

            processes destroyed by mind parasites?

4. What characteristics “invite” or encourage mind parasite takeover?
5. What cognitive biases are a result of mind parasites?
6. When mind parasites take over, they likely destroy what we think of as the best human qualities and replace these qualities with parasitic qualities. This is how humans become parasites.
7. An insidious form of mind parasite is “money.” The danger of this is unreognized.

[1] Punctum is Roland Barthes’ term for the element in a photograph that attracts his psyche autonomously and makes the photograph “exist” for him. It is contrasted with stadium, which embodies the photographer’s intentionality. The value of this distinction has wide relevance. See Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981.

[2] Kellerman, Tom. “BOTS: Cyber-Parasites.” World Bank Security Team, July 2004.

[3] I use the term “entities” deliberately to emphasize the sense of “foreign” life (of whatever form) along the lines that Jung intended when he wrote, “We would do well, therefore, to think of the creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche.” Jung, C. G. “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry.” CW: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. Vol. 15, Para. 115. The question arises as to whether this sense of “implant” is different than parasite. This topic will be the subject of a future blog post.

[4] For emphasizing the value of analogical research, I am indebted to Dr. Mils Hills, of the Northampton Business School in the UK. His paper, “A New Perspective on the Achievement of Psychological Effects from Cyber Warfare Payloads: The Analogy of Parasitic Manipulation of Host Behavior” (Journal of Law & Cyber Warfare, Vol. 1, Winter 2012, Issue 1, p. 209-217) has proven invaluable to me.

A Note. My work on the "Trump" pieces has followed from an overflow of inchoate intimations concerning the present state of the world and its future. At all levels I see the regressive pull of the past, from wanting to return to some prior glory to trying to understand the present situation through the vehicles of past understanding. We cannot go back and we cannot understand the future while looking backward. We can only open ourselves to witnessing the full horror that is happening in and to the world, in and to human beings, in and to the rest of creation. There is an enormous fear of and loathing for the strange, for otherness, for difference, for incongruity, for disparity, for doubt—all those qualities that Keats pointed to as characterizing "negative capability." If we don't welcome these things, as Baucis and Philemon welcomed the "strangers who were gods," then will we experience the fate of the villagers who locked the doors, who sent the strangers away, who did not welcome the divine visitors? Their fate was to die in a great flood, leaving only the generous-hearted Baucis and Philemon alive. And, yes, I am aware of the irony of referring "back" to Baucis and Philemon. It's like the "hope" left in Pandora's box. My deeper intuition, however, is that hope is gone as well. "Something else" is in store. Of this, I am convinced.

I've been brooding. When I brood, I write, I doodle. Brooding provides room for negative intuitions, dark intuitions. Making such stuff public, even in a small way is risky, risky because of the possibility that what seems so obvious in the brooded world is, in reality, only a mirror reflecting one's own world. Still, even the strongest projections cannot obscure what is present, what is looming, what is coming.

On a lighter note, my grandson Ben Lockhart, and one of the best non-Asian Go players in the world, was just interviewed by the New Yorker on the current match between Lee Se-dol and Google's Deep Mind Alpha-Go computer. The computer has won the best of five match, but all five games will be played. Lee won the fourth game. For the first time, Alpha-Go made a mistake and recognized its error too late. Here's the link:

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/in-the-age-of-google-deepmind-do-the-young-go-prodigies-of-asia-have-a-future

The Meaning of Not-Human

One of the major conclusions in my book (in progress) The Commodification of Desire, is that the value of humans is being replaced by the value of money. For example, climate change denial is driven by valuing short-term profit over long-term human existence. This process is ubiquitous and is continuing to escalate its profound consequences at all levels of human function. Unintended consequences—coupled with ignored consequences—are quickening the ascendancy of the not-human replacement of the human.

The not-human takes varied forms. A catastrophic hurricane is not-human, though humans now play a role in increasing the likelihood of catastrophic forces never seen before. For the first time, the global life-extinction process currently underway is aided and abetted by humans. At present, humans—at least those in control—seem incapable of changing course. Such extremity is necessary to bring about the conditions of "something else," conditions that might form the generative eros for welcoming what Jung called the "Coming Guest." I think it safe to say the Coming Guest will be shocking and will inaugurate a new age for humans, unlike anything humans have experienced before. But not yet. The old dominant is breaking down, but not fully so. The new dominant is emerging and not fully recognizable. It takes time.

As the old dominant breaks down there is a tendency to escalate holding onto old patterns. This grasping often appears as a renewed "vitality of the familiar" as well as extreme attempts to "bring back" patterns of previous times. This is misleading, but can be very compelling in the short-term. As the new dominant emerges, it comes with elements that threaten complete destruction of what has gone before. Such destruction is not inevitable, but it is as if there needs to be a "clearing away of the rubble” of prior structures and dynamics before the "new" emerges in forms that are experienced as new. Some areas of human activity will be witness to and carriers of the new before others will. Look to non-mainstream art to reveal the first signs.

The not-human has both absolute and relative aspects. An asteroid smashing into earth, a binary black hole entering the solar system, an enormous electromagnetic emission from the sun—all these would have life-destructive consequences for humans. Of course, these have always been possible and so are not exactly "new" possibilities—though they would be new to humans. These are examples of absolute not-human forces. There are many such forces on the earth as well. It is here where humans may be engaging in behavior that escalates the negative potential for these factors to replace the human with the not-human. Climate change, ecological poisoning, and biosphere destruction are prime examples. Other examples are organisms such as viruses and bacteria that may be escalating in their not-human potential to eliminate humans as a result of what humans are doing. In any event, all these types of absolute not-human forces, are increasing in potential for destructive impacts on humans. Humans seem unable or unwilling to deal with such realities.

What do I mean by not-human in a relative sense?

We know that conscious integration of the shadow is essential for individuation— never-ending process. We know that the extent of shadow integration is quite small and that the population of those humans engaged in individuation is smaller yet. In Commodification of Desire, I propose that it is largely the human shadow elements that will be most rapidly and readily "computerized" by artificial intelligence. Psychopathic greed is already computerized via computer algorithms that played such a part on the financial collapse of 2008, and this process has accelerated since and points to a new collapse not far off. With the advent of immersion in virtual worlds coupled with “somesthetic” computerization, it is now possible to satisfy "lust" in high degree. The addictive potential of this bodes poorly for enhancing real-world relational dimensions of love. The more "positive" human qualities will not readily nor rapidly fall victim to this accelerating process of computer replacement of humans. It is this potential of human characteristics to be computerized that, in a relative sense, can be described as becoming "not-human." In addition, the more humans are tethered to their computer devices, the more insensitive to and unaware of they will become to this process of replacement.

We know that humans are capable of great atrocities and when this happens we call such humans brutes, animals, sub-human creatures, monsters, and all manner of evil incarnate. It is all of these qualities which together are going to be readily and most easily computerized and in this sense this becomes as example of the human replacement process.

So what has this to do with Mr. Trump?

Robert Paxton, the pre-eminent historian of fascism, has warned against using this analogy in relation to Mr. Trump because historical analogies distort the understanding of the present. Comparing Mt. Trump to Hitler or Mussolini is an example of "read made" analysis I described earlier. If, in Mr. Trump's campaign, you sense an absence of higher level values and a strong presence of identifiable shadow elements, as I do, then what we are witnessing is a powerful replacement process. It is perhaps more important than we realize what the synchrony of Mr. Trump's ascendency and the defeat of the best human by the Alpha-Go computer is pointing to. It is perhaps more important than we realize that a salesman may become president, an iconic personification of the overwhelming success of what Bernays unleashed: that the purpose of humans is to consume according to the dictates and to the benefit of those controlling the wires. This process can only be enhanced by the extremity of artificial intelligence particularly as the resources of the puppet masters will be in position to make early and full use of it. Whether we know it or not, we are tethered herd-like to this process. It is the commodification of desire made visible.

How this will develop is anyone's guess, but develop it will, and to great extent before we will see the Coming Guest.