To say that viruses aren't alive is an insult to these creatures. They are alive, but just live in a different way. The first organisms came to life on our planet about 3.8 billion years ago and for another 1.4 billion years our ancestors were just single cells. It is believed that viruses started showing up about 1.5 billion years ago, so they've traveled on the evolutionary highway a long time with us.
An argument can be made that the virus is beating us in the evolutionary race. They don't even need a reproduction system, and instead they hijack host cells and make them create their babies. They focus on simplicity and are super efficient. As I mentioned recently, viruses are not bad and, in fact, we mammals have incorporated some of their coding into our own coding. For example, a viral infection that infected primitive mammals a 100 million years ago now helps females to transport nutrients to her fetus.
The virus that is currently devastating our population was likely evolving in other lifeforms for millions of years before it made the jump to us humans. Now, we are appealing to whatever god we believe in for help, but like the victims of the Great Flood, there is to be no mercy.
My Life Change
The one book that completely changed my life is "Ishmael," by Daniel Quinn. One of the key tenets of the book is that instead of always viewing life through the last 10,000 years, when the agricultural revolution began, we should look at life from our hunter-gatherer or "caveman" days. For instance, I was recently astounded to learn that if our ancestors who lived on the African savanna could get past infancy they would then live, on average, into their early 70s. This is completely mind blowing since healthcare is a $6 trillion industry in the U.S. and nearly 18 percent of our GDP, yet we've only succeeded in increasing average life expectancy a few more years. Despite the wonderfulness of capitalism and finding the one true, correct god, something is horribly, terribly wrong in our society.
The author of "Ishmael" divides people into two groups — the Leavers and the Takers. Before I dive into this topic I'd like to say that humans are obsessed with control, and I'm not sure why. We are even arrogant and cocky enough to think we can control nature, and the coronavirus has given us a huge slap in the face and is waking us up to the fact that we are NOT little gods, but rather just one of 8.7 million animal species here on Earth.
So, along those same lines, the author defines Takers as the dominant culture that drives into our heads "the one right way." The vast majority of people I know are so covered with and embedded into this facade that they don't know anything different, and they are only able to see life from their Taker culture viewpoint. But look what we're doing, folks! The Taker mentality is destroying everything, including ourselves. We are no better than the little virus, who doesn't even care if it kills its own host.
The Leavers, on the other hand, are typically the native, indigenous peoples, or individuals who have gone off the grid. They lead simple lives and don't have to worry about unemployment or the value of their stock investments. They don't have to be strung out on alcohol or antidepressants to get through life. Yet, we call them savages just because they don't live like the Kardashians.
You can make fun of their bad hairdos or whatever, but the fact is that the Leavers have lived in harmony with the Earth for thousands of years. There are still a few Leavers left in the Amazon Rainforest and a few other remote areas of the world. But the ranchers in Brazil are trying to run them off their land and take what little they have. Why? Because a Taker has no limits and has no boundaries. They simply consume until everything is gone, just like the virus multiplies until there's no more cells left to hijack.
A second key tenet of Quinn's book is that there is no "one right way" to live. I've always had trouble grasping this concept because the Taker culture is definitely not a right way to live. But, the Takers have given us technology, which I sort of like. The Amish, Luddites, and Unabomber have all shown their disdain for technology but without it I couldn't stream Gilligan's Island reruns on my iPad. I guess our lives are more comfortable now, as contrasted to 200,000 years ago. I'm sure the capitalists will say that it is because they want to make money on all the crap they sell me, which is supposed to make my life better.
What I can say is that we have a corrupted form of group-think in our mainstream culture, and maybe if this was fixed we Takers wouldn't be so harmful. For instance, it was the Republican governors and president who wanted to keep the economy going as the coronavirus was spreading like wildfire. The religion of capitalism is drilled into their brains so deeply that they don't want to change, yet by delaying action they only exacerbated the problem.
Diet
One sure way to fight virus pandemics is to get rid of the nasty, filthy industrialized meat industry. Now, I'm not talking about family farms, but rather the large corporate meat facilities. Certainly, with diet there is no "one right way" of eating. The diets I've seen and have been on are usually in contradiction with one another and to further complicate things, it seems that people respond differently to various diets. It appears that everyone needs a custom designed diet to optimize their gut flora.
There is no "correct" diet but the one I like mimics what our ancestors ate on the African plains. It's a myth that our ancestors were big meat eaters, although they did enjoy some fish or lean meat a few times a week. What they mainly ate were lots of whole grains, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, and legumes. Milk and milk-based products should be eliminated. If you can live off the foods on this Happy List you are less likely to give your dollars to the multi-trillion dollar healthcare industry scam.
Population Density
Population density is another factor that is making the coronavirus race around the world like lightening. Every time we TAKE from the world we are leaving other animals with LESS. One way that we take is by exploding our human population. To do so is senseless and irresponsible. In 1798, Thomas Malthus said that we were going to simply breed to the limits of our food supply, and our improved agriculture methods are only accelerating this process. To produce more food to feed starving people is a dark comedy because more food only creates more human reproduction and more starvation. So, what we need to do is limit our family size to either zero or one child, and two maximum.
Final Thoughts
The other thing we all should do is adopt a simple lifestyle. I don't expect us all to switch from Takers to Leavers, but we can adopt some aspects of the Leaver culture. The Takers are obsessed with accumulating crap, and some people even suffer from a mental illness called Hoarding Disorder. What we need is a life that is built around human connections instead of inanimate things. We need to find our peace and happiness from within, instead of from buying junk.
Better yet, instead of Takers and Leavers, we also need Givers. We've done enough taking and now we need to give back to wildlife, the Earth, and each other.
I hope that during this virus crises we all take some time to think about what we really want in life, what makes us happy, and the direction we should be going.
One thing I've learned is that there are rarely absolutes in life. Agriculture did not really begin 10,000 years ago. People were planting things they liked around their homes for hundreds of years prior. But what changed is the introduction of totalitarian agriculture, where the farm workers and other life forms become subordinate to the endless, ruthless creation of food for people. It is the Taker belief that all the land in the world is for farming and grazing, and fences are put up to enforce this idea.
There is also the fallacy that humans are flawed, but I believe that Leaver humans, at least, are not. Our entire Christian religion is built around the idea that we are born as bad, or "sinful" people. No, we are all born innocent and then immediately get sucked into our culture, and only a few of us ever question the lies that are programmed into us at an early age. It is our CULTURE that is flawed, not us.
I find the Adam and Eve myth intriguing because eating from the Tree of Knowledge is what got us into our current predicament. Sure, the first human couple on the Earth screwed up by breaking the rules, but as God-fearing people shouldn't we try to rectify that by denying knowledge? When scientists started showing up in the 1400s and 1500s the Catholic church executed only a few, most notably Giordano Bruno. For the most part these scientists were allowed to give us knowledge and we ate more and more apples from the forbidden tree. Maybe God was right and we should have listened to Him. If so, we wouldn't be in the predicament that we are in now. For the knowledge has corrupted us and created the all-consuming Taker culture that we have today.
Oh, and why the picture of the gorilla above? The main character in Ishmael was a gorilla who could communicate telepathically. Yeah, I know, it's a little crazy.
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| A must-read for every human. |
Sources:
- What Came First, Cells or Viruses?, by Viviane Richter, Cosmos Magazine, October 2015
- Ishmael By Daniel Quinn, and the Movement It Inspired, by Pete Reinwald, Chicago Tribune, July 2013.
- Ishmael.org
- Experiencing Globalization: Religion in Contemporary Contexts, edited by Derrick M. Nault, Bei Dawei, Evangelos Voulgarakis, Rab Paterson, and Cesar Andres-Miguel Suva.
- The Guerrilla Diet & Lifestyle Progra
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Photo: Carlos Cram
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