Heute möchte ich den amerikanischen Schreiberling Charles Eisenstein zur Lektüre und Wahrnehmung empfehlen, jemanden, den ich ob seiner ausgeglichenen und reflektierten Art der Schreibe und Darstellung sehr schätze.
„Modernisierte Menschen, die in eine kartesianische Weltanschauung versunken sind, gehen typischerweise davon aus, dass es zwar viele mögliche Zukünfte, aber nur eine Vergangenheit gibt. Die Vergangenheit kann sich nicht ändern. Unsere Informationen darüber können sich ändern, aber was passiert ist, ist passiert. Aber könnte es sein, dass sich die Vergangenheit selbst (nicht nur unsere Interpretation davon) ändert, wenn wir uns ändern? Könnte es sein, dass Existenz – Vergangenheit, Gegenwart oder Zukunft – Beziehung ist und keine absolute, beobachterunabhängige Tatsache? “
I just watched a video, New Discoveries that Completely Alter Human History, on the After Skool YouTube channel. The thesis is that conventional archaeology has given us a false history of civilization, erasing a mighty global culture that flourished before the Younger Dryas impact event some 12,850 years ago.
I am well familiar with this theory (or family of theories). Their main evidence is as follows:
Bronze Age megaliths that could not possibly have been produced with Bronze Age technology.
An archaeological record of declining building technology from archaic up through Roman times.
Striking stylistic commonalities among megaliths around the word dating from the same time period.
Dating of certain megaliths such as the Sphinx to many thousands of years before conventional dates.
Accounts in myth and legend of civilization-ending floods, fires, and other cataclysms.
There is, however, good reason to doubt the existence of a highly advanced technological society prior to the current interglacial period. For instance, although rising post-ice age sea levels may have submerged most of that society’s urban centers, we would still expect to find metal artifacts in, around, or under ancient megalithic sites. But no, the archaeological record plots a clear and continuous progression of technology from hundreds of thousands of years ago straight through the period in question, and it does not include metals until much later. Evidence of agriculture too is missing from before ten thousand years ago, and it is hard to conceive of large-scale civilizations developing technology without agricultural food surpluses to support specialization and division of labor. We can safely rule out the earlier emergence of technology as we know it (more on this caveat later).
It is as if two historical timelines present themselves for our consideration. The observer chooses which reality to occupy, and cannot occupy both. Each is inconsistent with the other.
Impossible Objects
I have known about alternative archaeological narratives for many years, but it took a direct encounter with their physical evidence to shift me into they reality they represent. Just before the pandemic, a series of small synchronicities landed me on a sacred sites tour of Egypt, where I saw with my own eyes and felt with my own hands objects that should not exist in the conventional historical reality-narrative.
The megaliths of Egypt come from several distinct periods. Those from the Greco-Roman era are made of limestone blocks weighing several tons. Quarrying, transporting, and building with them was an impressive feat, but not a mysterious one. Limestone is relatively soft, amenable to Iron Age technology. Researchers have built boats from ancient diagrams and (with difficulty) used them to float five ton blocks across the Nile. The massive population of Egypt could easily provide the labor to erect Roman-era buildings.
The megalithic relics of the Old Kingdom, which was deep in the Bronze Age, are baffling from the conventional view of history and technology. Here is a photo of some of our group seated before a structure from that period.
The pillars and lintel you see are made of granite—a stone much harder than steel. Each is a single block weighing as much as 70 tons. These are by no means the largest of this kind. We also visited a granite obelisk weighing 300 tons, again carved from a single block. I also saw precise carvings and inscriptions on granite, basalt, and other hard minerals, also from a time when the hardest metal available was bronze. Neither were the huge granite blocks rough-hewn—they fitted together with absolute precision.
I didn’t have the chance to see them, but some monoliths from ancient Egypt are even bigger, such as the Colossi of Memnon, which weigh on the order of 700 tons (probably 1000 uncarved). The granite was quarried at a site 400 miles away—an impressive feat considering that evidence of the first pulleys appears hundreds of years later (by conventional dating). For context, today’s largest mobile cranes can lift about 1000 tons.
I mention these numbers because you were not there. In person, I was overwhelmed by the sheer mass and presence of these objects. I can feel them right now, anchoring me as if by gravitational pull in a different reality.
Although conventional archaeology holds that the Great Pyramid was constructed in 20 years during the reign of Pharaoh Khufu, there is no mention of its construction in any ancient document, nor of the other two main pyramids. Mind you, to build the Great Pyramid that quickly would require quarrying, sculpting, transporting, and installing one multi-ton block of limestone every five minutes, continuously, night and day.1 Why is there no record among the many of ancient Egypt referring to those logistics? It is as if the pyramids were already there. Nor is there any indication that the Giza pyramids were used as tombs. Other, smaller structures, yes, but not these.
Doubtless mainstream and alternative Egyptologists could debate these points ad nauseum. Far be it from me to “prove” that conventional Egyptology is wrong. But what it looks like to me is that the pyramids and other megalithic structures around the world are outcroppings of a parallel earth history intruding into the standard one.
The Stream of Time
Modernized humans, immersed in a Cartesian worldview, typically assume that while there may be many possible futures, there is only one past. The past cannot change. Our information about it may change, but what has happened has happened. But could it be that the past itself (not only our interpretation of it) changes as we change? Could it be that existence—past, present, or future—is relationship and not an absolute, observer-independent fact?
On the quantum level, the answer is quite possibly yes. Retrocausality is a topic seriously considered by physicists and philosophers in interpreting phenomena like the quantum delayed choice experiment. If we add the proposition that consciousness or intention can alter the probabilities of otherwise random quantum events, and a further assumption that these events can be amplified into the macro realm, then it is conceivable that the past changes in accord with human consciousness. Yeah that’s a huge leap. My inner scientist is rolling his eyes. Nonetheless, we cannot say that reality absolutely doesn’t work that way.
Maybe the past is right now toggling between two different streams of time, or more than two, corresponding to the fracturing of our present social and political reality.
Perhaps we are moving toward a reality in which history is no longer what the standard narrative has described. If so, we will uncover more and more evidence for the existence of ancient antediluvian civilizations. Is it that that evidence was there all along? Or are we producing it as a function of our own shift into a different world-story?
This would seem to be an academic question, but it has consequences right now. As the past shifts, so does the present and the future as we slip into a different stream of time.
The real issue is not whether ancient civilizations had what we today recognize as high technology. The ancient Egyptian builders did not have diamond-edged power tools (or the industrial infrastructure that must accompany them). The “high technology” of the parahistorical ancient world was of a different sort altogether. Therefore the emergence of this parahistory into the main stream of reality (or rather, the shift of mainstream reality into a new channel) corresponds to the emergence of new kinds of technology today. Well, not exactly new. They would be new in the timeline we are leaving behind. In the timeline in which they exist they are very old; we are merely rediscovering them.
Yes, I know the above paragraph is rife with paradox. It is unavoidable in the English language, which contains words like “exists” that already carry the assumptions of objective reality. When I speak of moving from one to another timeline, it seems like there must be some higher-order timeline that contains the shift. When did it happen? Rather than delve further into these metaphysical complexities, I would like to say more about the new-and-ancient technology of these high civilizations that once did not formerly exist and now are starting to have formerly existed.
Miracle Tech
Consider the following hypothesis: the way the ancients moved and carved enormous blocks of granite was by changing their density. They had a way, perhaps using sound, to reduce the stones to the density of Styrofoam and the hardness of moist clay. Then they quarried, shaped, engraved, and changed it back again. It would still have been an impressive feat to transport and shape these huge blocks, but it wouldn’t require industrial machinery nor the population density of agricultural civilization. If my conjecture is true, it shifts the challenge to conventional paradigs from the realm of archaeology to the realm of physics and materials science. We are still stepping into a different reality, but one which alters not only what has happened, but what is possible.
Even conventional archaeology is now accepting that pre-agricultural society allowed quite large concentrations of people, at least seasonally. Extensive construction projects like Gobekli Tepe and Boncuklu Tarla bear this out. These sites are at least 10-12,000 years old. In the alternative timeline, they would have been built by remnants of the pre-cataclysm civilization. Imagine what it could have built at its height with technologies that do not today “exist” in consensus reality.
Not only do these technologies exist in a different reality, they join reality’s flickering dance from one pose to another. They operate not so much by making something change, but by entering a reality in which it is different. Current, conventional technology comprises various ways of controlling reality by force, and it draws from a mechanistic view of the universe. Therefore we naturally see “machinery” as the hallmark of technological progress. With no evidence of machinery in the ancient world, of course we assume its people were incapable of feats that would require machinery today. That is why some posit extraterrestrial assistance for the building of the pyramids. But that assistance is necessary only if we assume that advanced technologies of control like ours are required to build them.
If conventional technology is about forcing nature to do our bidding, what might the principle of new-and-ancient technology be? If not forcing, dominating, and controlling, then what? How about asking? How about inviting? How about persuading?
The existence of alternate realms of technological possibility has consequences far beyond construction of big buildings. If the ancient builders could change the density of stone, what else could they do with those tools of sound, attention, ritual, word, or who knows what? Well, we don’t have to exercise our imaginations too hard to answer that question, because these technologies of reunion are emerging all over today.
I’ll give examples from my wife’s healing practice, which employs what she calls resonant attention. Sometimes tumors, blood clots, or skeletal dislocations disappear without a trace. Normally one would think that the disappearing tumor or blood clot must go somewhere. But it is as if Stella and the client shift into a new reality in which the offender does not exist. She does heavy metal cleanup too. Where do the metals go? Recently she treated a child who had a small divot in his skull from an accident years before with a car door. The divot disappeared. When the father saw the child later that day his jaw dropped and tears sprang to his eyes, it was that obvious. Well, where did the divot go? Or where did the new flesh and bone come from? Is there a physiological process that could operate that quickly to generate new flesh?
None of this is quite as dramatic as moving a 100-ton block of granite, but it is on the same spectrum of possibility.
Many years ago I held a part-time teaching position at Penn State. My job title was “Temporary Employee Type 2”—in terms of prestige, I think somewhere between full professor and department head. Somehow I became acquainted with the renowned materials scientist Rustum Roy, a giant of the field. Under his leadership, the materials science lab would sometimes test the ability of shamans, psychics, and qi gong masters to affect the properties of various materials—changing the index of refraction of crystals and so forth. But some were more dramatic. I heard one story in which the psychic was able to cause a peanut held in her hand to sprout a seedling. A roasted peanut. To make sure it wasn’t a sleight-of-hand trick, the lab laser-engraved a tiny code onto the peanut, which was still visible on the petioles after it had sprouted.
I have not experienced anything quite that dramatic first hand, but I suspect some of my readers have. If you’d like, share your story in the comments.
Those who are in despair over the state of the planet, ask yourselves: Does your despair take into account the powers and possibilities that these stories imply? Could it be that despair shunts miracles out of reality, making it so they do not happen, never have, and never will? Don’t worry. Despair is a normal transition zone born of the realization of the futility of control. You needn’t lift yourself out of it. It will lift, and as it does the light of a larger reality will shine through the cracks of the one that is crumbling.
If we are indeed moving into a time stream in which technologies of reunion operate, we should expect to encounter them more and more frequently. As we accept them, integrate them, and live as if they are true, we bring them further into reality. The question “Are they real or not?” does not have a fully objective answer that is independent of ourselves, our beliefs, and our state of being. I have learned that living as if they are real requires more than intellectual acceptance. The self-sovereignty and trust they entail brings me quickly up against core wounds, unresolved traumas, and legacy programming. I am being asked to accept things I cannot explain or control, to step into a deeper level of trust.
You cannot make the stone soft, you have to ask it with song, and all that you are comes into the notes. Stella cannot make a body heal; she holds attention in a reality in which healing can happen. Miracle technologies are available only through recognizing we are not the sole intelligence in the world. Because, if we don’t force things to happen, then how do they happen in a non-random way? Through the cooperation of other intelligences. Therefore, what I’m calling miracle technologies fundamentally depend on an attitude of cooperation and trust. That is why I also call them technologies of reunion. The oppositional posture of force-based technology shuts them out of possibility.
More and more miracle technologies are breaking through into the consensus reality that made them impossible (which is why they seem like miracles). As they do so, the consensus unravels and we start to accept them as normal. As our individual and collective conscious shifts away from the Cartesian aspiration to become the “lords and possessors of nature,” the portal widens and yet more miracle technologies break through from the other timeline. I’ve been experiencing this acceleration, have you? Is it just that I’ve become more open to things that were already happening? Or is my growing openness, our growing openness, bringing them into existence? I think it is both. The more we accept them, the more real they become. The more real they become, the more we accept them. That is the co-creative process of world-story transition.
Scott CatamasMar 7Thank you Charles for this well thought out exploration. When I was 21 years old, I „woke up“ in my bedroom…..but it was a different reality. There was a different girlfriend in my bed, and the posters on the wall were different. There were NO drugs, alcohol or substances involved in any way, and I was wide awake….vividly. It was early dawn, and I was scared that the „other girlfriend“ would wake up and I would be stuck in that alternate reality.Mind you, this was long before I had read anything about parallel universes or even quantum physics. I willed myself back to sleep and back to this present reality.After that experience, I had a series of Lucid dreams about what was going on for me in „that reality“. This lead me to a lifelong study of these things.Later in life, I worked as a Supervising Producer for the Television series „STRANGE UNIVERSE“ and other similar shows that ran nationally. I had the opportunity to interview 8 former astronauts, 30 military people and an eyewitness to the Roswell event. After producing over 100 segments, I came to the conclusion that this is a „dream world“ and that from one POV all of it is real, and from another POV, none of is „real“. We are dreaming individually and collectively in ways that our human brains cannot fully comprehend.68ReplyGive gift
E HiteshewMar 7·edited Mar 7Liked by Charles EisensteinWhat a wonderful exploratory piece… I would highly recommend to anyone interested in the subjects you touch here, to read and study the body of work by Jane Roberts, who channelled Seth. Yes the past is as malleable as the future. Yes there have been „previous“ great civilizations on earth with high technology we are currently unaware of. Yes there are infinite timelines. the universe(s) is infinite as are dimensions, and every probability ad infinitum exists „somewhere“. Time is an illusion, space is an illusion. The known universe is full of paradoxes and unknowns. The Edgar Cayce body of work is also worth studying… As are the so-called mythologies and legends of the East. (Yes Vimanas are real.) All first peoples, native, indigenous lore are worthy of open-minded study. Instantaneous healing is possible. Jumping timelines is possible. The „history“ of Earth is much more than what we’ve been told. There are blocks weighing well over 1000 tons in places that we could not even move today with our machines. There’s laser holes in quartz so fine and perfect and we do not have the capacity to make them. How do they exist? Yet they do! Everything we can imagine, and everything we cannot (yet) is possible.34ReplyGive gift
“ A member of an online community I co-host described a Match.com exchange in which her prospective date, upon finding she was only partially vaccinated, wished her death—the sooner the better. It was one of many similar, she said.
Now it is probably a good idea to eliminate from the dating pool people who disagree with you on basic issues like religion, health care, child-rearing, or politics. But to wish them death? Wow.
Given that at least 30% of Americans are unvaccinated (and many more unboosted), it does not bode well for this country if this kind of vitriol spreads. The media and social media are profuse with hateful sentiments about how the unvaccinated deserve to die, should be denied medical care, are immoral, ignorant, narcissistic, sociopathic, and so on.
I am sorry to observe hate on the other side of the vaccine divide too. Sometimes I see in health freedom communities half-hopeful, gloating posts about how the vaccinated will someday wail and gnash their teeth in abject regret when mass vaccine-induced death shows them the error of their ways. Monikers like “sheeple,” “normies,” and “vaxtards” play into the most dangerous controller agenda of all—to divide and conquer by fostering internecine hatred.
If we who oppose vaccine mandates wish to live in a world based on dignity, we should do everything we can to affirm the dignity of all human beings. By dehumanizing those with opposing views, we reinforce the same pattern that dehumanizes ourselves, the dissidents.
In my writing I have tried to avoid language that dehumanizes anyone, even as I have voiced strong opinions about Covid policy and especially mandates. Nonetheless, the prevailing pattern is so strong that some people took my last essay, A Path Will Rise to Meet Us, as an indictment of the vaccinated. No. As I’ve written in other essays, people including my own family members get vaccinated for reasons that seem good to them. It is not that some are smart and others are stupid, that some are ethical and others wicked. It is that each, by dint of chance and biography, occupies a different vantage point on the information landscape. Each is subject to different influences.
I actually dislike arguing about vaccines. Yes, I have my opinions, but neither the passion nor interest to research the topic deeply enough to competently argue them. I think Covid vaccines are overall harmful, but not compared to rain forest destruction, militarism, or neoliberal capitalism. Or world hunger, which killed ten million people in 2021, half of them children, and stunted the growth of tens of millions more—numbers that dwarf casualties from Covid or its vaccines. I also prefer to avoid the debate because its very terms take for granted a system of industrial medicine that has something like vaccination built into it.
So why do I engage this issue at all? My entree has been not vaccines per se, but vaccine mandates. It is only in small part personal—I resent attempts to coerce me into overriding my strong instinct in a matter of body sovereignty. But so what. Worse things can happen to a human being—and are happening. However, these “worse things” are expressions of the same ideology and system of domination and the war on the Other. The mandates are Trojan horses for an apparatus of control that will also crush resistance to other violations of Life, human and otherwise.
The mandates and coercion policies have another, even more sinister, effect: they divide the public and pit us against each other.
I sense that most people, vaccinated or unvaccinated, like I have little desire to argue about medical procedures. However, the institutions pushing mandates have maneuvered the public into fighting over them anyway. They have woven a narrative in which the unvaccinated are a threat to society: spreading germs, filling up hospitals, breeding new variants. The science confirming these ideas is shaky at best, especially given how subject it is to financial and political influence. So, reluctantly, I step into the minutia of case rates in vaccinated populations, viral loads in the vaccinated, vaccine adverse events, and so forth. Not because I want you to think you’ve made a mistake by getting vaccinated, but rather to undermine the rationale for hating, coercing, and punishing those who have not.
Basically, whether deliberately or not, a situation has been engineered to dispose the public toward division. It is an old formula: Enemies are among us! The unclean put us all at risk! The heretics will bring the wrath of God upon us all!
Let us recognize that ancient formula and how closely the dominant Covid narrative conforms to it. Is that conformity just coincidence? Were past incitements mere propaganda and hysteria-mongering, but this time the heretics really do put us all at risk? At the very least, we should recognize with grave suspicion any incitement to hatred. We the human family have fallen for that trick so many many times before.
The trick depends on a lie, the mother of all lies: that some of us are less valid, less human, and less sacred than others.
Tyrannical institutions hold dominion only through social agreement—their leaders don’t have personal superpowers like some movie villain. Real power is with the people. Therefore, tyrants can have their way only by setting the people against one another.
From appearances, they have been successful, but appearances can be deceiving. The most hateful tend also to be the loudest. A quiet majority wants peace.
Sometimes it happens in the midst of conflict that both sides awaken to its absurdity. Often, laughter accompanies the breaking of tension as each party steps out of the role of enemy. They recognize that the whole drama is something of a joke. It’s not that there is no valid matter of contention; it’s that the drama has overshadowed the original issue. Shedding their roles and their self-righteous identification with them, the warring parties can often come to a quick solution. Or maybe they realize that the conflict has become obsolete.
Something like that may be possible with Covid—the decreasing virulence of variants, the development of effective treatments, and the spread of natural resistance could render many Covid debates, including those around vaccines, obsolete. Many people are sick of the whole thing and are ready to move on. However, powerful vested interests prolong the drama by stoking further fear and rage, drawing from the long-festering resentments of our fevered society.
The antidote is for the hitherto quiet majority to speak out; to amplify the voices of tolerance, the voices of humor, the voices of compassion. This is a form of resistance even more important than resistance to medical tyranny. It is resistance to division. It is resistance to hatred. It is resistance to dehumanization. Overturn these, the root of all other evils, and we will forge a solidarity that will accomplish miracles of transformation within our lifetimes. „
A couple years ago after a speech about ecological healing a man came up to me to ask a question. With a warm, friendly smile he drew me close and put a hand on my shoulder. “You mentioned in your speech that you have four children. What makes you think you have the right to bring four humans onto the planet to consume resources for the next 90 years, you arrogant, entitled, white male asshole? How do you justify that?”
I took a deep breath. “Look, the Q&A session starts in ten minutes. Ask me again then.”
Ten minutes later he took the mic and repeated his question (substituting “hypocrite” for“asshole”). Then he added, “You owe an apology to everyone who has struggled with the decision not to have children and sacrificed parenthood for the good of the planet.”
I responded with something like this: “If I tried, I could probably concoct some kind of justification for my choice to have children. Maybe I could say that the good they will do in the world outweighs the damage from the resources they’ll consume. Maybe I could make a case for an upcoming population crash. But if I said that’s why I decided to have children, I’d be lying to you. It wasn’t some carefully calculated ethical decision. I had children because I wanted to. And when I think of those precious beings, I cannot imagine apologizing to anyone for bringing them into the world.”
The man was disgusted. “You’re just like Donald Trump,” he said, “doing whatever the hell you want oblivious to its consequences for the world, and then refusing to apologize.”
Have you ever been in one of those conversations where you cannot meet the other person’s logic, yet you know you are right? This wasn’t quite the situation. I am well able to debate the premises and logic of his position.1 However, I did not and do not want to go there, because I’d rather invoke something other than quantitative calculations in making intimate decisions such as whether to have children.
So rather than debate, I will say some things I know are true. Either you will recognize them as true too, in which case no persuasion is needed; or you will not, in which case no persuasion will work. Why say them at all? Because it is important sometimes to hear inner truths from the outside, especially when they may be lonely truths.
First I want to say, in this time when everything seems to encode praise and blame, that I do not intend to elevate parents above those who choose another path. My intent is to celebrate that which often passes beneath notice.
Sometimes people tell me my writing and speaking has had a positive impact on themselves or the world. That may be. Usually I believe so as well; otherwise I would not continue doing it. But sometimes I visit a dark place where it seems all these years of labor have been for naught, or even had a negative impact. From there my life looks a waste—except for one thing, one indubitable truth. My children are a love-gift to the world. When I think of them in those dark times when every parenting mistake I’ve ever made flashes before my eyes, still I know that I have made a great gift to the future.
We pour endless hours into our children, changing diapers, giving them horsey rides, reading them Dr. Seuss, feeding them, protecting them, making them laugh; we were young when we started and when they finally leave the house as adults, our own youth has gone as well. We take a big part of our own lives and give it to them. Somehow, this love-gift must register on the scales of creation. I can’t prove it to you with numbers. I just want to nourish the part of you that knows it is true. I think of some of the heroic parents I know. Some may be reading this now. Yes, you Tracey. You, Rebekah. And you, and you, and yes, you too. Society may not notice or reward the love you pour into your children, or appreciate the sacrifices you have made. It may not look like a great deed, but it will surface eventually as great deeds done by your children, or their children, or maybe someone five hundred years hence when the seed you have tossed into the future lands on fertile ground.
Painting “We Are Made of Stardust,” by Natasza Zurek
Seldom do people include on their CV birthing or raising children. Compared to founding organizations, winning offices, creating new technology, or conceiving great ideas, society does not view raising children as an accomplishment. Perhaps that is because it is such a common thing, and our competition-oriented society tends to celebrate those who excel over others. Economic rewards flow accordingly. The work of raising children receives scant economic support. Parents receive no money from society for being parents, and professional caretakers of children like babysitters, day care workers and schoolteachers are among society’s lowest in pay and prestige.
To the other parents out there, and to all who pour labor and love into children, and especially to the mothers who sacrificed career opportunities to raise children: you have done some of the most important work there is to do. Society may not celebrate you today, but the future will. There is a reason that most cultures revere the ancestors. They recognize what I am saying here: that to give your life and youth to another being, so that they may become human, is a profound gift.
If we as a society really embraced that truth, we would offer more than token celebrations of parenthood in the form of Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day. We would reorganize all of our systems, starting with the economic. We would organize society in the spirit of, “How can we support your love-gift to the future?”
Yes, I’m sure some of my readers could offer calculations showing the damage per capita human beings are causing. And I’ve added four more capita. Ultimately though, the practice of navigating choices by the numbers is what has to a large degree gotten us into this mess. The reduction of the world to number and morality to a series of calculations leaves out everything that we cannot quantify. Can you quantify beauty? Can you quantify joy? Can you quantify love? No wonder our society, so enamored of rational cost-benefit decisions, has become in so many ways ugly, joyless, and unloving. That is what happens when decisions are guided by maximizing or minimizing a quantity, whether it is money, carbon, cases of an illness, square meters per dollar, or bushels per acre.
Maximizing money, we devalue everything that money cannot buy.
Minimizing carbon emissions, we commit to ecologically disastrous megadams, biofuels, and batteries, even cutting down forests to make room for solar farms and wind turbines.
Minimizing Covid numbers, or attempting to do so, we lock down and isolate and mask at the cost of what isn’t measured, like human connection, civil liberties, and, ironically, the health that comes from connection.
Maximizing square meters, we produce cheap, soulless buildings and generic dwellings that assault the aesthetic senses.
Maximizing bushels per acre, we deplete food of unmeasured nutrients and flavors, and rob land of its biodiversity, soil ecology, and resilience.
Do you see the pattern here? The point is not to ignore quantity. It is to understand what it leaves out. It is also to understand that the choice of what to measure and how to measure it determines what we see.
The idea that we can navigate life by the numbers is obviously ridiculous on a personal level. On the level of public policy it seems more plausible; after all, that’s what they call scientific policy-making. Either way, the ease with which the numbers can be manipulated to rationalize choices that come from elsewhere should caution against this approach. The world cannot (contrary to the metaphysical assumptions of science and the ideology of economics) be reduced to number. The harder we try to control life accordingly, the more out-of-control it becomes. That’s because all that the numbers, the plans, the fences, and the data leave still operates beyond our ken.
The choices we rationalize with the numbers come from elsewhere. The man who accosted me may not know the real reasons why he is childless. Whatever they were, I can honor them. Perhaps his love-gift to the future takes another form.
We will all be better off when we drop the rationalizations that install a falsely virtuous pretender onto the inner throne. These rationalizations cloak one’s real motives and prevent us from knowing ourselves; thus they rob us of true choice. It can be scary to rip off the cloak. Background myths of our civilization tell us that the naked self that will be revealed is ugly, that some despicable truth lies behind our pretenses, that to be naked is to be humiliated. It can indeed seem thus, when vain and selfish motives are revealed. But what lies beneath them? What is the nature of the life force that pulses through us and takes shape through our desires? It is love. Even when it is contorted into the knot called hate, still it is love. Love wants to bring more life to the world. „
