COVID: THE FEARFUL SYMMETRIES
By Professor Gilbert Morris
IMAGINE: a new brutal variant that exceeds the protection of vaccines…
The Samurai is the finest master of self-discipline the world has ever known; more Stoic than the Stoics of ancient lore, more vicious than the Cossacks of Russia or the Gurkhas of Sri Lanka (the most fearsome worries of modern times).
One core element of Samurai culture is he must contemplate his death dozens of times in a day: he must cultivate commerce and comfort with the varieties of death’s multitudinous propensities.
As a strategist, one’s brief is to show clients the varieties of means, methods, incidences, architectures and emerging possibilities of the death of their enterprises; whether they be companies or countries.
There is a childish notion in modern culture by which disease of the mind, the Samurai imperative is avoided. People say things like: “couldn’t you put a positive spin on that”? As if strategy is their favourite ice cream or pizza, upon which they can heap their desired delights!
Others plead, “let’s look at the bright side”, as if one is the marketing and promotions department.
The strategist is a scavenger of risk: his job is to induce discomfort based on the most realistic analysis, not by prediction or even forecast, but by immediate extrapolation from the factual circumstances.
Where the lazy analyst says “well, thing A could likely impact thing B. The competent strategist demonstrates A and B are extremes of a single continuum.
Or where the fawning ‘yes man’ says: ‘things go in phases, there are always ups and downs’, the master strategist shows the phase-guide lacks structural depth or systemic coordinates.
Where the fool treats “success” as organic. The strategist framed it as a “success window”, that is already closing at the moment of its most obvious prowess (Ask Nokia or IBM).
The role of the strategist is to game the situation, enterprise or national prospects in such a manner, at such a scale and with such dimensional scope as to force the client out of complacency into innovation…before the risk metastasises or is realised; to drive the client into the Samurai imperative.
Let’s take the current pandemic: In 2020, I gave four 90 minute lectures on the history, logistics and economic consequences of pandemics from the 4th Century AD to the present. In interviews leading up to the lectures I extrapologised the following:
1. Covid is forever
2. Covid will change the world more in 3 years than the last 300
3. Countries will optimise to save lives but will cost more lives by the measure they impose
4. Democracy under the pandemic will transition to a power vertical with the public’s safety as an excuse
5. Variants will outrun vaccines
6. Vaccine visas will emerge
7. You have to check into countries the way you check into hotels
8. Health records will become the new identity
9. No country will arrive at “herd immunity”, because of the lack of global coordination
10. A variant will emerge and generate so much fear that citizens and governments would turn on each other
I am satisfied that all of these have proven true…yet, it does not have to be this way: the strategy for which I argued was/is:
1. Universal free testing, with 48 billion free tests in an 8 week period
2. Upload tests to a database to gain pattern and flow of the virus
3. Deploy Blue tooth contact tracing and digital diagnostic surveys to overlay the Fibonacci patterns as the emerge
4. Make decisions from data/extrapolations and not events, because humans react arithmetically but pandemics have exponential velocities.
5. Hold global summit to streamline boarder entry protocols
6. Embark $4.5 trillion for global stimulus (using SDRs) rather than raising interest rates
Across the world, only 8 nations gain a measure of these protocols.
Now, today, during this holiday season, in more than 9 European nations, citizens will suffer lockdowns again because of the result of poor, reactionary Covid management by their governments.
In the US, governors of more than 7 states are openly defying basic public health management measures for purely political reasons.
In much of the rest of the world, useless national dashboards, fascistic attacks on unvaccinated persons, desperate copycatting and inflexible, convoluted procedures rule the day: the result will be VARIANTS!
I seem to see (to quote the ancient Seer) that this is all metastasising toward an eschatological global health crisis orders of magnitude beyond what we’ve witnessed or suffered so far. This level of global leadership vacuum and incompetence cannot continue without consequences.
IMAGINE: a new brutal variant that exceeds the protection of vaccines…countries would slam their doors shut, the global economy would collapse, within countries, their oligarchical structures would undermine public trust, billions of children would go uneducated, those with non-Covid medical complaints would die in equal numbers to Covid sufferers. That is to say…our social worlds are poised to retreat by fear, ignorance and hysterical speculation into the worlds imagined in Zombie apocalypses.
Terrifying?
This is what a Samurai would imagine, given what we are witnessing…then he would act to prevent it.
