A Cure for 21st Century Madness

... the new paradigm is already here, but mostly unrecognised

Consciousness evolves. Does that sound blindingly obvious or, to the contrary, simply wrong?

I ask because the fact (as I see it) that it does evolve, offers real hope – it offers the only hope there is of overcoming the cycle of madness and confusion into which the world has been pitched.

And because, on the other hand, most of the thinking and discourse in the world today seems not to recognise the fact at all. People and events and cultures of the past are discussed as if their consciousness were the same as ours. Futures are discussed as if the contents of our consciousness will change – new things human beings will know and changed external realities they will cognise – but the nature of the internal space in which those new things live, apparently, will be the same.

‘Paradigms’

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn made popular the expression ‘paradigm shift’. Kuhn however was not referring to new ways of doing things or to new concepts emerging within some given field or discipline. He was referring to the totality of the set of assumptions, recognised precedents and approaches to interpretation which form the basis of knowledge at a given time. And we could add to that mix ‘human cognitive capacities as they stand at a certain point of evolution’.

In short, a ‘paradigm’ is a mode of cognition, widely shared, which forms the basis of a civilisation or a cultural epoch. And importantly, it is a mode of cognition which, gradually and then all at once, can change.

In practice, such profound change happens extremely infrequently. The last time it happened was ‘The Enlightenment’ of the 17^th and 18^th centuries. At that time, a ‘paradigm shift’ occurred in which the capacity for objectivity and rational analysis, which had previously been well-developed only in the few, became more or less the norm. That led to tremendous progress, but as part of the same shift, Descartes led us in seeing the world as a big machine, and mind and matter as utterly separate. Then, close behind him, Kant led us in seeing the now-separated mind as constrained only to knowing its own theories about reality, and never reality itself. The resulting outlook, which has reigned until very recently, was one in which the newly-rational human intellect stood forever separate from the world it surveyed. And in which the self-perceived destiny of that mind was to control all that it surveyed.

Whenever a new paradigm emerges however, it is already on an evolutionary path which will at some time lead to its successor. If we trace briefly (drawing heavily, but not exclusively, on the breath-takingly lucid work of Richard Tarnas¹) what has happened in the past couple of centuries, it will lead us to very good news: Another new paradigm, enfolding but transcending all that was in the old one, and able to get beyond the failures and breakdowns which are everywhere taking place, has already happened. It has just not yet found its way to widespread recognition, nor into policy-making or the operation of social institutions.

This Thing Called ‘Mind’

On one side Kant’s proposition that we cannot know reality, but only our theories about reality, was taken as a foundation to the thinking on which our civilisation has been built. But on the other, a secondary and unavoidable implication of that – namely that there is more to the world than our theories about it - has mostly been submerged and forgotten. For over two hundred years the prevailing paradigm has involved an alienated mind wandering in a soulless, impersonal world.

Things began to shift most noticeably² with Freud and Jung. Freud showed that the rational mind was frequently not even in charge of the theorising and interpretation of reality that was going on – frequently the unconscious mind was. But while that further destabilised the basis of knowledge, it also took a step in the direction of whatever it is about the world that is ‘more than our theories about it’. Next, Jung’s work on the way that ‘archetypes’ form the substrate of both a personal and a shared level of consciousness, and also manifest their influence in both psyche and matter, decisively undermined the perception of a separation between mind and world – at around the same time as quantum theory did the same.

Truly massive shifts of understanding however, generally take a long time to gain widespread recognition. (Witness that fact that the scientific community in particular resisted the idea of a round world for 200 years after Copernicus proposed it). But the reality is that these first steps in revisioning the relationship between 'mind process' and 'world process' at the opeing of the twentieth century have been continuously extended and deepened ever since, by great scientists such as Bateson,³ Keller,⁴ Bohm,⁵ Hillman,⁶ Bortoft,⁷ Prigogine,⁸ Pert⁹ and Sheldrake.¹⁰ Today they unequivocally indicate an aspect of ‘mind’ which:

• Extends both beneath and above the rational, and beyond the individual.

• Involves faculties of knowing other than those of the intellectual/analytical mode, and complimentary to it.

• Reaches its highest potential when its rational, theorising element works in partnership both with its own deeper origins, and the fields of intelligence that are shared between it and the rest of the natural world - rather than believing, as it still so often (and always wrongly) does, that it is capable of dominating both those things.

• Is ultimately (subject to development, and because of the above three points) capable of direct knowledge of reality and not merely theories about reality.

Complexity

But this paradigm shift, this change which has already happened but not been widely realised, is not only about the mind’s empowering reunion with the world it observes: Running just behind that development has been another, which has cut the ground from under the modern mind’s self-perceived destiny to control all that it sees.

As a result, while the (recognised) power of the mind has greatly increased, the way that it uses its power is really now obliged to change.

Here’s how that part happened: From the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, the new science of complexity theory has shown – really quite unequivocally – that complex systems are subject to unforeseeable change, and are essentially immune to being externally directed. Tiny inputs to complex systems can have huge and entirely unpredictable effects. Attempts to impose control on such systems invariably destabilise them.

To understand that this need not be a regressive step into anarchy, we must first look at the actual evidence of what ‘control-freakery’ has been doing to complex systems. And then we must consider what the realistic alternative is – by which I mean an alternative other than the rightly feared and rejected one of ‘just letting everything go into free-fall’.

Historical evidence first. I’ll limit myself here to just five brief examples, out of a great many which could be cited:

• Statistician, options trader and philosopher Nassim Taleb’s recent arguments that life constantly develops outside of our comprehensions of cause and effect and, in that order to avoid discomfort, we post-rationalise unexpected events and convince ourselves that we have explanations for them. (Freud’s unconscious at work again).

• Taleb's message in fact echoes what Tolstoy sought to demonstrate in ‘War and Peace’ a century and a half ago: That it is ultimately not the plans and policies and strategies, the presidents and kings and generals who determine the direction of the world, but the swarming minds and hearts and countless small actions of the millions on the ground, beyond the plans and the policies.

• Milton Friedman's realisation, by the middle of the 20th century, that economies became less stable after central banks arrived to 'stabilise them', not more.

• A 'chess game' as a metaphor for international relations is ridiculously inadequate, declared former UK diplomat and UN negotiator Carne Ross in 2011. A Jackson Pollock painting, he suggested, is a better metaphor, but also in the end inadequate. ‘Control’ in complex matters, Ross concluded from experience, does not and cannot exist, and we need different strategies.¹¹

• In the 1950's, China was suffering a famine. In response, Mao sought to increase crop production by killing the birds which ate part of the yield. He offered a small sum of money for every dead bird brought in, and young boys everywhere found ways to kill them in tens of thousands. The result was an explosion of the locusts (which had formed another part of the birds´ diet), destroying far more crops and massively intensifying the famine. This example is perhaps the most important: While we may laugh at the primitive strategy of a dictator and the come-uppance that it delivered, the simplistic principles of his thinking are terrifyingly similar to those of the arch-strategists seeking to impose their will on us today.

To be exact, what it is that has been 'well-established but not yet widely recognised' is that complex systems tend in the direction of instability when imposed external interventions fail to fully comprehend the great web of dependencies and dynamics involved – and also, critically, that such interventions are always doomed to that failure.¹² Furthermore, the degree of volatility and unpredictability in response to such interventions depends also on the internals of the systems itself: The greater the number of rules that are operating, and the greater numbers and types of inter-connection between system elements, the greater the inherent inclination to instability.

From that follows the converse, and thus the seed of the more realistic alternative to ‘just letting everything go into free-fall’: More coherent and stable forms of complexity tend to arise when there are smaller numbers of simple rules - and more distributed actors, with shared objectives.¹³ With such system-characteristics, deeper forms of intelligence, formerly repressed, come into play. Stable and sophisticated configurations emerge beyond any which could be predicted in advance.

All this, combined with the new understanding of the ‘extended and embedded mind’ leads to a shocking realisation. It is this: The current trend to ever more centralised power, and the imposition of ‘simplistic and massively-funded schemes imposed from the top’ not only is making things worse, but can never do anything else.

New Forms of Participation

From here on, the mind is no longer alienated, no longer stands outside the world, confused by an apparent schism between itself and what it surveys. The mind is part of the world it is looking at. Furthermore, it is in some sense distributed, and progress is necessarily participatory .

If the emerging phase of world evolution calls upon us to leave behind control-freakery though, I believe it also calls upon us to leave behind ideas of anarchy.¹⁴ We must come to genuinely new ways of doing things, beyond all the old categories. Such new ways might for instance still involve institutions and laws and positions of responsibility, but arrive at them differently and operate them differently. (Most essentially I believe, that will require the gradual emergence of a third set of institutions in addition to the existing ones of the state and corporations, separate from them and able to form a mutually regulating triangle with them).¹⁵

Irrespective what new forms of society evolve from it however, the new paradigm itself is scientifically, philosophically, psychologically and developmentally¹⁶ a done deal. Supported by a good deal of cross-disciplinary confirmation, as well as the lived experience of a great many people of the front lines of exploration, it awaits only a fuller permeation and diffusion into individuals and society, into institutions and policy making.

Here is the ‘small print’ however: Most of the population remain unaware not only that a new paradigm has emerged, but also of the extent of the horrors currently constellating under the old paradigm. That is in part because the new perspectives – initially – are a little tricky to grasp precisely because they represent a new paradigm. Yet that for sure is not the whole reason. It is also in part because as ‘The New’ emerges, ‘The Old’, in time-honoured fashion, rises up, intensifies itself, and seeks to present itself as a new paradigm. Bound up as ever with power structures, terrified of being deposed, it makes an intensified push for dominion. Specifically, that includes shutting down free speech, and taking control, on every front, of what people may be allowed to know about and what they may not. One very interesting case of that (among others numerous enough to write a book about) is complexity theory itself. It is without doubt one of the most significant scientific developments of recent decades, and its principles are easily imparted – yet not a single college-age student I’ve spoken to over the past dozen years or so has ever heard of it.¹⁷ Perahps we should be wondering why?

Growing Pains

Genuine paradigm shifts are rarely accomplished without turbulence. The last one after all, was accompanied not only by the Industrial Revolution, but the profound and ultimately global changes which flowed from the French Revolution, the grotesqueness of the ‘Great Terror’ which accompanied it, and the eight years of bloodshed which was the American War of Independence. As well as the burning of quite a lot of ‘witches’.

Today, a battle is again gathering pace between an outmoded world-view and an emerging one. On one side the mechanistic view of the world has now gone so far that even human beings are now seen as ‘biological machines’, programmed by circumstance, and which can now be ‘re-programmed’ at will - and the biggest, most mechanistic and best-funded egos in history are hard at work preparing the biggest and most catastrophic external interventions in history. On the other, initiatives consistent with the new world-view everywhere struggle to break through. Crowd-funding, a mushrooming of small independent media, home-schooling, open-source non-proprietary software, 'permaculture',¹⁸ open means of exchange such as Bitcoin, and even new medical networks¹⁹ are just the tip of the iceberg.

Now let us add one more dimension to the challenge – and it is an inevitable one: Much of the ‘radical avant-garde’ which sees itself as a challenge to the ‘old guard’ is in fact falling into the same error. Which is to say that for them too, the ‘conscious personal mind’ is still seen as constituting the whole of human cognitive capacity, and theoretical constructs it produces are still seen as the ultimate form of knowledge – more real even than the world outside of the intellect, which they describe. Here though there is some felt sense of a new reality in which the mind must be more participative - but the problem is that it is not seen, as it should be, to imply a mutually transformative, ongoing engagement between mind and world, and between free-thinking individual minds and other free-thinking individual minds. It is not seen as a radically creative, open-ended process capable of producing wholly unanticipated solutions and ways forward, which evolve ‘in flight’, and which transform and grow and synergise in response to external challenge. Rather it is seen as implying a process of first creating an ideological vision, perceiving it as absolute, and then obliging the world – both ecosystems and other people – to conform with it. 'Participation' is cheapened into the belief that the world can be transformed at will into whatever 'vision' the narrow intellect is possessed by. That means that for the old-guard and the apparent ‘torch-bearers of the new’ equally, there is a closed, desperate and fear-driven need to set up as quickly as possible a vision for ‘fixing everything’, and to then shut down all ideas which might compete with such vision, and it’s supposed capacity to ‘urgently save the world’.

Crisis after crisis piles up and much of the public, rather than recognising that the old orientation to ‘absolute control’ is what is causing them, gravitate to a half-conscious belief that the crises are somehow natural phenomena. Governments are in a semi-panic state, as they perceive themselves to be losing control – which they are. They react with renewed hunger for even more centralised and top-down control - and many people support them in that, having been terrified into believing that the world is full of bogey-men, from which only the government can save them.

Finally, to return to the sense of hope I began with: The real message of the new paradigm is that the plans of the megalomaniacs seeking to impose absolute control on the world and everyone in it must ultimately fail. It is only a question of how long that will take and how much suffering will occur first. Both could be extensive. Notwithstanding, we are assured that the new world is already growing behind it, and we have the option to accelerate that.

The good news is that the recently intensified evidence of madness, breakdown and dysfunction is already leading to unprecedented numbers of people realising that governments, ideologues and ‘philanthropists’ are not fixing the problems, but causing them. The phenomenon of ‘distributed intelligence’ and the free participation it implies, it is gradually becoming clearer, are not only a feasible component of a healthy society, but a necessary one. Societies, like individuals, become healthier when they get beyond the obsession with control.

The better news is that the underlying bedrock of this new paradigm is now so firmly established that it is ultimately unstoppable. That is truly a great source of hope. Indeed, on a practical level, it may be the only hope there is - because, as Einstein noted, “problems cannot be solved at the same level of thinking which created them”.

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• Please leave a comment, public discourse has never been more important! Others may be interested in your views - and I certainly will!

1. The trajectory of western thinking and ideas, from classical Greece through the medieval, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and into the beginnings of the now-emerging new paradigm, each enfolding and transcending the other, is traced in exquisite, scholarly detail in Richard Tarnas’ 1991 book, ‘The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our Worldview’. The book presents that evolution specifically as an unfolding of the collective mind or psyche, and despite its tremendous depth and comprehensiveness pulls off the near-miracle of reading like a novel. It seems not unreasonable to call it one of the most important books of the later part of the twentieth century.

‘The Passion of the Western Mind’, Richard Tarnas, 1991.

2. In fact, the shift was underway earlier than that, in the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Nietzsche, James and others - and in fact already emerging even at the time of the ‘Enlightenment’ itself through thinkers such as Hegel and Goethe. It became however, more pronounced and ‘mainstream’ with the advent of Freud and Jung.

3. Anthropologist, biologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson developed influential views in direct opposition to Descartes’ separation of mind and matter. He seemed (to this author) only to half leave materialism behind, but certainly believed ‘mind’ to be distributed, and not localised. He studied deeply of William Blake, who in the 18th century was already aware that the philosophy of Locke and Newton could generate only ‘dark satanic mills’, and he undoubtedly sought to go beyond the mechanistic worldview, to understanding of systems which are ‘alive’. The modernist failure in this respect, he said, had led to a 20th century which was ‘a history of malfunctioning relationships’ and left us all trying to choose between ‘two monstrous ideologies’ in the form of capitalism and communism. Ultimately, Bateson’s work was a warning that if the paradigm were not changed it would lead us into a systemic crisis of our own making - which forty years later seems to have come to pass. At a conference on education in 1978 he also declared the occidental educational system to be entirely out of date - which makes it by now a further 40 years out of date.

‘Mind and Nature - a Necessary Unity’, Gregory Bateson, 1979.

4. Physicist and feminist Evelyn Fox-Keller’s proposal that scientists must be capable of ‘empathetic identification’ with the object of their study reflects a similar shift in regard to the nature and extent of ‘mind’.

‘Reflections on Gender and Science’, Evelyn Fox-Keller, 1985.

5. Physicist David Bohm proposed that the history of physics is a series of discoveries of new levels of reality. His central thesis (on which he worked for several decades with collaborator Basil Hiley) was an implicate, or ‘enfolded’, order from which the explicate order unfolds. Space and Time themselves, he declared, might be derived from an even deeper level of objective reality. He further proposed that the ‘unobserved forms’ in that deeper reality are the reason for apparent weirdness of quantum physics, and that at that level matter and consciousness form an indivisible whole.

The broad outlook of Bohm’s ‘implicate order’ is one in which thought itself is distributed and ‘non-local’, and the totality of everything is “unbroken wholeness in flowing motion” - the implication of which is that we go badly wrong when our strategies and concepts continually seek to fragment it.

‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order’, David Bohm, 1980.

6. Psychologist James Hillman was a former head of the Jungian Institute in Zurich, who later went beyond the Jungian perspective and became critical of some parts of it. In keeping with Jung, he declared it an error “to locate the psyche inside of the skin”. But he noted that a consequence of that error is that we try to fix the interior psyche while the exterior world very visibly goes into decline. Psychotherapy cannot help much he said because a) it is making people passive, and b) our buildings are sick, and so are our institutions, our banking system, our streets and our schools. Very relevant to the context of this article, he proposed that to become effective psychotherapy would need to include an element of activism.

‘We’ve Had A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse’, James Hillman and Michael Ventura, 1993.

7. Physicist Henri Bortoft (who studied under Bohm) worked extensively on a ‘new science of nature’, able to perceive the world in wholeness. Drawing extensively on the work of Goethe 200 years before him, he proposed that this would require human faculties beyond the analytical mind, and direct and participative forms of knowing, in which “the phenomena themselves become the theory”. Such knowing, in the Goethean approach, requires entering perceptively into the morphological processes at work, allowing them to play themselves out as archetypes in observer´s consciousness, so as to reveal underlying truths. Bortoft also proposed that such a change in cognition is necessary since many of the problems of the contemporary world are a direct result of the ‘divorce from nature’ which results from the detached, intellectual and analytical form of modernist science. (In which he himself was well trained).

‘The Wholeness of Nature’, Henri Bortoft, 1996.

8. Physical Chemist Ilya Prigogine extensively studied complex systems, operating far from equilibrium, and the strangely unexpected phenomenon of ‘self-organisation’ which they display. His work led him to assert that belief in determinism is no longer viable.

‘Order out of Chaos: Man's new dialogue with nature’, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, 1984.

9. Neuroscientist Candace Pert showed that intelligence within a single human organism is distributed throughout the organism. White blood cells, macro-molecules in the gut, and other minutiae of the body´s more distributed processes are all fundamentally involved in mind, memory and ´emotional intelligence´. Her work was revolutionary enough to initially draw huge criticism and rebuttal from the scientific establishment, but later went on to be well verified and accepted. Pert’s work shows intelligence to be distributed throughout the whole organism, not limited to the brain. That is a little different to the work of the other scientists listed here whose work shows intelligence and ‘mind’ to be distributed even beyond the body - but nonetheless an interesting compliment to it.

‘Molecules of Emotion’, Candace Pert, 1997

10. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake´s work on the hypothesis of formative causation is centred on the concept of shared ´morphic fields´, which govern the development of biological organisms and also allow the non-physical transmission of information between them. Such transmission of information and knowledge is related to folk-lore of the so-called ´hundredth monkey syndrome´ in which it is said that when colonies of monkeys, even distributed across multiple islands, learn a new trick or technique, there is a kind of ´flash-point´ in which the ´nth´ monkey learns the trick and suddenly all monkeys know it. Sheldrake rebuffs that and says the process is a gradual one and not a flashpoint from ´n´ to ´total´ - but nonetheless there is in his view a shared field of information and the implications are extensive. Communication, co-ordination and transmission of knowledge between members of a species is not limited to the rational, to the codified, or to physical mechanisms. This is highly complimentary with the view that open-ended public participation is a better and truer motor of social progress than supposed genius in top-down policy-making. (Sheldrake also described his work as “quite compatible” with Bohm’s ‘implicate order’).

‘The Presence of the Past’, Rupert Sheldrake, 1988.

11. Carne Ross is a former British diplomat and senior UN negotiator, who was involved in the attempts to manage situations ranging from war in Kosovo to global warming. In 2004 he resigned over the lies told by the British Government in relation to the Iraq war, and the realisation that the state is 'fundamentally amoral'. In his 2011 book 'The Leaderless Revolution', he explicitly cited complexity theory as a new principle for dealing with the problems of the twenty-first century. Regarding society in general, he asserts that centralised and pyramidal structures are inherently vulnerable to corruption, that conversely the only structures which are resistant to anti-democratising forces are those with power evenly distributed among the base, and that normative values of society are often more effective than laws.

‘The Leaderless Revolution’, Carne Ross, 2011.

12. You can successfully plan a military operation with a good possibility of success. But you cannot predict what the downstream consequences of it will be for the societies in which that operation took place. You can theorise about economic interventions and some of the time you might in the short-term get the result you hoped for. But if the theories were really 'fit for purpose', the world's economies would long ago have attained stability, and they have not. You can psychologically manipulate populations and get a pretty fair degree of the reactions you intended – at least in the short term. But you´ll always get ones you didn´t anticipate too. The further out you go in time and the more complex the domain that your operation impinges upon, the more unpredictable become the consequences. Thus predictive control strategies are most effective in controlling narrow parameters or outcomes, especially when one is not concerned about collateral effects outside of that narrow range. Which means they´re good when the goals are short-term power and profit. But when the aspiration is to bring many complex variables, dependencies and interests into dynamic and evolving balance, and furthermore with multiple bottom lines, attempts to impose from top and centre bring disaster.

13. Finding ‘shared objectives’ is not nearly so impossible a goal as it seems. First, the objectives must be formulated as ‘whats’, not ‘hows’. Let’s note that when ordinary people of ‘the right’ and ‘the left’ debate each other, much of what they want for society is the same (a better education system, less environmental damage, a more functional democracy, equal justice, meaningful work, less lies, unadulterated food, some kind of means for participating in society beyond more or less meaningless voting (maybe even ‘some constraints on AI, and better rights to know about, and modify, add, delete, data that others - especially corporations and governments - have about you).

Substantially, what obstructs ‘shared progress’ is the chaos created by government power and corporate power in an ongoing process of corrupting each other. That can gradually be changed by introducing new forms of civic institution able to form a mutually regulating triangle with those two.

The quest for ‘shared objectives’ is also eased when they are expressed as, or supported by, broad principles. An example is here:

michaelwarden.substack.com/p/the-failed-mantra-of-the-french-revolution

another is here:

drtesslawrie.substack.com/p/the-taming-power-of-the-small

14. Some parts of my audience will likely be uncomfortable at the implications of devolving certain powers away from government . Likely others will feel that I should go further, and join them in embracing anarchy. I ask both groups, if they exist, to keep an eye out for a pending article entitled ‘THE VERB TO GOVERN: Why There is a Problem With it and Why I am Nonetheless Not an Anarchist’.

15. Both state and corporations should be functioning in service of society. How can that principle not go astray when society HAS NO institutions other than the state and corporations? Furthermore, with no third set of institutions to mediate between those two, and hold them properly to account, they begin to corrupt each other. Who would not agree that government interferes too much in commerce and commerce interferes too much in government? This third group, call them 'cultural institutions', existed in embryonic form in the late 19^th and early 20^th century as 'civic society', before they were crushed out of existence by the already unbalanced power of government and (especially) corporations. It is now time for them to re-emerge on a much greater scale. I introduced this principle in 'WHY CULTURE MUST LEAD' (michaelwarden.substack.com/p/good-government) and touched upon how cultural institutions might be funded in 'THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY'. (michaelwarden.substack.com/p/the-circular-economy).

16. What I mean by ‘developmentally’ is that the new paradigm has developed naturally and gradually out of all that went before it. It transcencds all those elements which led to so much progress and human social evolution before it, but still contains them within, in transformed state. It is just now reaching that developmental maturit and that transformation which becomes a new level.

17. That is, beyond brief references to ‘the beating of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil’, made famous by the movie ‘Jurassic Park’.

18. Permaculture is an ‘interdisciplinary earth science’ which gives rise to truly ecological food production. Existing natural systems are observed and aspects of them accelerated or mitigated without the pretence of enforcing / creating anything. Plant and animal species develop side by side based on their interaction and the compatibility of their inputs and outputs. Soils are enriched rather than depleted, nutritional quality of food is increased, environmental degradation is greatly reduced, wild-life chains are supported and animals are treated humanely. It is a systemic and collaborative approach based on understanding the natural order of things and the deeper intelligence inherent in the world - of which our individual minds are a fragment - rather than seeking to impose ego. A great many examples could be given, but a simple story of the humble dandelion will suffice:

When soil has become hard and compacted, nature sends dandelions. And with their incredibly long and strong root systems, the dandelions break up the compaction. When soil is deficient in calcium, dandelions again appear. They are one of the most calcium-rich plants in existence, and when their dead leaves later drop on the soil and rot, balance is again restored. Naturally, the worst thing to do in either case is to misunderstand why dandelions appeared, and keep trying to physically destroy them. Result: nature redoubles her effort to send more. Beyond agriculture, this is also a great metaphor for understanding the emergence and management of viruses, as well as various socio-political processes.

Permaculture is the true path to sustainability (‘permanent’ = perennial, or sustainable) in food production, but is discouraged because it is an approach which interferes with the profits of big interests.

19. In response to the political campaigns to marginalise and discredit some of the best virologists, epidemiologists and critical care doctors in the world, 2021 and 2022 saw the formation of several new independent medical networks. The Canadian Covid Alliance, The World Doctor’s Alliance, America’s Front Line Doctors, The World Council for Health are only some examples. Their approach is summarised by a former head of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (Richard Amerling) who said: “The current system is so corrupt that we have to start from scratch and build something alongside, as an alternative”.

In light of that extensive corruption, it might be no surprise that you will find all of the above organisations widely attacked and smeared by those who control ‘the regular media’ despite the world-class credentials of their members.