In late 2019 I was doing research my book about a futuristic doctor using nanomedicine and bio-electronic sensors to create a cure for cancer.
Most of my story is based on guesswork about where current technology can take us. We can’t cure cancers like glioblastomas yet, but we can guess how that could change based on hopeful possibilities like CAR T-cell therapies. CAR T-cell therapy uses T-lymphocytes that are taken from a patient's blood and are then modified by adding a gene that helps them attack a specific cancer cell. After modification, the T-cells are then returned to the patient’s blood, where they do their job, attacking cancerous tumors.
This new, recently FDA approved treatment involves the use of mRNA and lipid nanoparticle technology. It’s based on decades of extensive studies of the immune system, its strengths and weaknesses.
I did so much reading on the subject I got Facebook ads for CRISPR solutions and turn-key PCR testing labs.
Since Facebook’s algorithm seemed to think I was a virologist, it started feeding me lots of info about a new and frightening virus called 2019-nCoV. In January 2020, I was more concerned about this ‘novel virus’ than most people. Some might have said — obsessed.
On a business trip, my husband shook hands with a guy from Wuhan. Partly joking, he called to ask if he should isolate for 14 days. I said ‘No’. If people from Wuhan were traveling worldwide, COVID was probably everywhere already. Acknowledging that made me worry less. Not much could be done about it. There were a million ways to die, this was just one more.
Then China locked Wuhan down. 11 million people were placed under a Medical Martial Law called ‘ZeroCOVID.’ I watched the awful videos. People were welded into their apartments under the delusional belief that this would ‘eliminate’ COVID. What a horrific waste of time. Anyone who paid attention in ninth grade health class knew this wouldn’t stop or even slow a fast-spreading respiratory virus. By the time we the virus existed, it would already have spread.
Add to that the fact that it was zoonotic, infecting to humans and animals. Even if every human on the planet was encased in Carbonite, flies, cats, bats, hippos, mink would still serve as disease reservoirs. The idea that lockdowns would slow the spread was dumb, but the idea that ZeroCOVID could eliminate it was insane.
By then we also knew that the majority of people survived encounters with this ‘novel’ virus. Obviously exposure to other similar colds and flus provided protection. Hadn’t the Chinese ever heard of cross-reactive t cell immunity? Mucosal cross immunity?
I guessed the education system in China wasn’t up to our standards.
Then came the Italian lockdown. Neil Ferguson used his garbage-in garbage out mathematical models to spread the myth that lockdowns could work. When this caused hysteria worldwide, he proudly said “We couldn’t get away with it in Europe … and then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”
Xi, the world’s governments and our media managed to convince well-educated Westerners that Martial Law could stop a virus. There was no science behind this, no researchers or facts. It went against all common sense, it went against everything we’d learned in school. Were they convinced by blind panic, or was it something else?
“Society is in its late decadent phase. The ruling hierarchy consists of the senile and the adolescent.” - Camille Paglia
By mid-March, lockdowns were in place. Our media and government propaganda machine worked overtime to sell fear, uncertainty and distress. Natural immunity became a conspiracy theory and T-cells became a mystery. Experts who had been publishing articles about identifying and genetically altering T-cells were now (apparently) baffled by their very existence.
At that point, I began to realize that the CDC was either lying, stupid or both. I started ignoring everything the CDC said. I was already ignoring Trump and most of the media. I still read the New York Times for recipes, but when they said China’s lockdown was a great success, I wrote them off too
Formerly reliable science journals like the NIH Natural Library of Medicine and Science were flooded with peer-reviewed papers using crap mathematical models to ‘prove’ that lockdowns and social distancing could work. Epidemiologists babbled about cases, reproduction values. Like Ferguson’s unverifiable garbage data, these papers were used to support extensions of mandates and ‘emergency’ Martial Law.
Fearing COVID’s spread, the Danes decided to cull millions of mink. This led to a dank disaster of rotting corpses, poisoned water and oozing filth.
First, Danish officials culled the animals illegally .. Then, millions of minks were hastily buried in mass graves that were not actually deep enough. Overtime, the gases released from the decaying bodies meant that some deceased mink resurfaced, in what daily national newspaper Berlingske described as “zombie mink rising from the grave.”
Fearing COVID, Spanish health workers abandoned nursing home residents, leaving them to die of slowly of starvation.
In Argentina and Canada, people were killed for not paying proper attention to their health.
Our instinct to protect children was turned on its head – masking toddlers to protect their elders became the norm. Teachers claimed being around germy children would kill them. People who tried to defend kids were condemned as conspiracy theorists and even fired for their efforts.
People blamed Trump, the CDC, and a general enthusiasm for totalitarianism for the COVID disaster, but that didn’t explain how the sophisticated, intelligent Danes forgot the basic burial practices that mankind has practiced for thousands of years. It didn’t explain how millions greedily abandoned the instinct to protect children and the elderly, how they enthusiastically shredded the social structures that allowed all civilizations to thrive.
It didn’t explain why the most educated and influential among us forgot everything they’d ever learned about viruses, the economy, basic healthcare, mental health and modern epidemiology.
In April 2020, the empty streets of midtown in New York City reminded me of Miranda, the fictional planet from Joss Whedon’s movie Serenity. Miranda’s population of 30 million was wiped out by a medical experiment that pacified them to such a degree, they just let themselves die.
I’ve lived in the tri-state area nearly all my life, and I’ve never seen New Yorkers in such a state of meek compliance. And it was entirely voluntary.
Whedon based Miranda on biologist John Calhoun’s Universe 25 experiment, in which a colony of mice were raised in a peaceful Utopia where all their needs were met. Despite suffering from no hunger or need, at a certain population level some mice who could not find their place in paradise became extremely aggressive and violent. This was followed by an irreversible downfall, a period of extreme apathy toward joy, life, reproduction mixed with the few psychotically violent ones. The mice forgot how to be mice. This led to a complete societal collapse. Calhoun called it ‘Behavioral Sink’, the collapse (or sinking) of "good" behavior with a corresponding increase in destructive behaviors that led to a societal downward spiral.
Given that most of the planet outside of Sweden seemed to be living a large-scale version of Universe 25, I figured the only hope was to plan an escape. It was Mars or Bust.
So I set my story on a newly terraformed Mars and read about something hopeful for a while. This helped me shrug off the daily tsunami of fear porn playing on social media, on grocery store PA systems, in the mall, on highways signs – mask up, stay six feet apart, stand on the dot, use a clean pen, walk in this direction, get vaccinated even if you had COVID, you can never have enough boosters, fear the variants!
Don’t listen to those Great Barrington doctors, they’re part of an evil plot. (Like, what was their evil plan, sending kids to school, having a thriving economy?)
On the bright side, I had plenty of fresh material for a futuristic dystopia.
The Heartbreak of Elite Overproduction
Most people, even ones in the future-predicting business didn’t see this catastrophe coming. But one person did. In 2010, Peter Turchin predicted that economic, social, and political instability in the United States would “peak” in or around 2020.
In this interview with Bari Weiss, Turchin noted that ‘elite overproduction’ is one of the best predictors of a crisis to come, even in successful civilizations. Too much success leads to too many people expecting a certain place in society.
The more people are vying for these positions, the more people are going to be frustrated. They’re going to be losers. the dark side of competition: if it’s too extreme, it creates conditions for people to start to break rules…
..these enzymes can end up in revolutions of civil wars that kill hundreds, or sometimes tens of millions of people, like what happened in China in the nineteenth century.
Turchin’s ‘elite overproduction’ turning point sounds a lot like John Calhoun’s rodent-Utopia ‘plateau’. In ‘Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?’ Calhoun describes the predicament of status seekers who can’t find their place.
“In the normal course of events [when] more young survive to maturity than are necessary to replace their dying or senescent established associates, the excess emigrate.” But when there’s nowhere else to go the ones who find themself with no social role to fill become isolated – or violent.”
‘Plateau’ is the tipping point that leads to behavioral sink, just as ‘elite overproduction’ leads to the Turchin’s ‘bust’ - revolution, civilizational destruction.
Many blamed rodent overpopulation for Calhoun’s apocalyptic ‘bust’ cycles. But overpopulation wasn’t the problem. The utopias failed before they reached carrying capacity.
And they forgot the control group — the wild rodents who inspired this study, who continued to thrive in the hard-knock streets of Baltimore. Comparing the wild ones with the pampered, civilized ones showed the problem was not overpopulation. It was the Utopia, the zero-sum cage they couldn’t leave.
From the best to the worst
In 2019 life was better for the majority of humans on the planet, but the elites were being squeezed. Like Calhoun’s status-seeking mice, they couldn’t find their place in the world. Moving on meant risking their status, their comfortable life and their unusually large slice of the collective pie.
This may explain why the people who should have known better, our best and our brightest, were the most enthusiastic followers and enforcers of lockdowns and mandates. Aside from a few outspoken, rational rich people, the majority of journalists, comedians, artists, scientists and pundits jumped onto the COVID crazy train. They uniformly boasted about how they learned to bake bread and appreciate the little things in life. Yes, they were going stir crazy but they knew, at some level, this would pacify the masses and keep the unpredictable at bay.
When men and mice follow the same behavior pattern, it’s clear there’s some basic mis-wiring in our animal brain. Maybe this is evolution’s way of clearing the field for healthier civilizations. Or maybe it’s God/Gaia’s way of saying ‘Nope, these guys aren’t going to make it’, and tossing us out of the nest.
Maybe these cycles are inevitable. The qualities that create a successful civilization - innovation, problem solving, always striving for better – will usually lead to Utopian dreams. But when perfection seems to be close the people who have it within their grasp begin to fear they’ll lose it. Any sign of change or loss of control becomes a threat – children, immigration, or innovation. They clutch harder. Like other doomed elites, the more they tighten their grip, the more slips through their fingers. And the tipping point is reached.
We appear to have survived this bust cycle. People are resisting the media’s calls to panic about something, anything. But everything our best and brightest have done shows that they have no intention of stopping this downward spiral. They sincerely believe that they did no wrong.
Shelter in place, (ie. Martial Law), is still the government’s solution to every problem — crime, terrorism, viruses, bad weather, murder hornets. They pretend to be rebuilding after the fire they created, but they’re just rearranging furniture to hide the scorch marks, duct-taping a tarp over the gaping hole in the roof. Come the storms, there will be more Martial Law, another attempt to Nudge the world’s population into a self-destructive frenzy for reasons even the Nudgers don’t understand.
Is there any way to stop the cycle?
We’ve been close to this tipping point for a while. There was a similar anomie during the 1970’s, but Silicon Valley found a way of making overproduced elites useful.
We might be able do the same now, with new technologies like AI and Space exploration. We also need to adapt the changing landscape created by climate change instead of devolving in a misguided and pointless effort to ‘fight’ it.
2020 proved that our elites and technocrats can NOT prevent unfortunate events. In many cases, they put us on a fast highway to disaster. We can’t control a virus or the climate, we can’t prevent accidents, and most of all, we can’t create a sustainable Utopia that will always be at equilibrium. We should not even try. The drive to explore, to take risks and move beyond limitations is an essential part of our being. It’s how we adapt and survive.
But above all, we need to acknowledge that our reconstruction efforts will get no help from our elites and their utopian followers. They will fight it every step of the way.