The Other Pandemic, Hiding in Plain Sight
“Everything your government has told you about this virus, everything you need to do to stay safe, is a lie.” —Dr. Michael Yeadon, former vice-president and chief scientist of allergy and respiratory research at Pfizer
A lie is to the mind as a virus is to the body. Both populate their respective atmospheres in which we live and breath. Both are essentially invisible and mostly known by their effects. Neither should be much of a concern with robust immune systems.
The immune system for the mind consists of various component systems. These not only include what we normally think of as mental functions—critical thinking and the like—and not only various adjunct functions and requirements, such as attention, memory and reliable information inputs, but also other types of intelligence, such as “artistic” capacities to recognize patterns, or the ability to make analogical connections from disparate experiences. Interestingly, Dr. Yeadon was distinguished in his field for an extraordinary ability to quickly detect the patterns couched within data.
Covid, like any assault, gains its easiest foothold through dysfunctional defenses. Just as a virus thrives in an already-compromised environment, one of comorbidities and weakened immune systems, so too does a pandemic of lies find its ready host in a weakened mental immunity. Beyond such initial breaches, bodies and minds can only withstand so much toxic load before they lose integrity. Some would argue that toxicity is the real disease in the first place, in which case the sources for undermining body and mind are plentiful.
Unfit bodies and weakened immunities are the “product” of the same general system now threatening our liberties and our very lives with their “solution”; we can say the same thing about the plethora of unfit minds. Humanity has been hoodwinked into its debilitated state—and its vulnerability to these two interlocking “pandemics”—through the sustained marketing of various “junk foods” for body and mind.
What are called “culture” and “education” are increasingly the scrambling and deactivating of the well-honed discernment needed for mental immunity. “Only a fool would let his enemy teach his children,” said Malcolm X. We all should take heed; we’re all children in the sense of requiring proper mental rearing, and being susceptible to the implanting of lie-viruses by those intent on taking over our minds. The enemy takeover of a mind culminates with the programming of the victim to accept that takeover. Everything after that for the infected mind is simply some variation of arguing for its own enslavement. Look around. How many are now doing just that? That’s the other pandemic, hiding in plain sight.
Which one is really the greater danger? The mere existence of an immune system bespeaks of a potentially threatening environment. But so do the hard-won mental faculties mankind has struggled to uncover and practice. The former is mostly a given of biology; the latter is part of the struggle to rise above the level of the human animal. There is a conscious “something” within each of us whose fullest realization is not achieved by mere physical survival, even when sublimated as affluence, luxury or status. But the two domains redound upon each other. Being derelict in mind will have its physical consequences, particularly in today’s world. The most likely chance of a perfectly operating immune system, without mindful, conscious tending, would be in a relatively unspoiled world left more to operate as designed; but we’ve already veered off of that path and are far down another, one cluttered with various lie-ideas whose imbalances manifest in the toxic spillover polluting our physical and mental worlds, and where each “solution” only seems to divert us further on down that path.
No number of masks and no amount of physical social distancing are going to remove us from ourselves or the world we’ve created. And no number of masks and no amount of physical social distancing are going to bolster one’s mental immunity to lies. If anything, the passive compliance to those irrational and ever-changing “pandemic” dictates bespeaks where the real problem is, in the mental atmosphere; it also hints at the rightful hierarchy: thinking leads… or is supposed to. “We have the right to be intelligent” said Dr. Didier Raoult, the esteemed French microbiologist and infectious disease specialist. But it goes even further than that: We have the duty to be intelligent. That includes the active, mindful struggle to maintain one’s mental immunity and consciously tend the inner garden under its protection. And that begins with the sentinels you place at the entrance checkpoints to screen what is allowed into that sacred space of your own mind.
David Arzouman