The Perfect Storm

Posted By Mahabodhi on Mar 15, 2024 | 0 comments

Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book…

© Mahabodhi Burton

5 minute read

This excerpt is from the chapter ‘Safetyism,’ and explores an unfortunate combination of factors prevailant today.

The Perfect Storm 

Most of the symptoms of mass formation that surfaced around the time of the pandemic have largely abated, but the seeds are still present for further chaos and dystopia. We could yet face a truly perfect storm.

A perfect storm is created out of frighteningly few interacting conditions: in my calculation just three. When two people are playing pool, it is theoretically possible to predict — and therefore control — where the object ball will go from the angle it is struck. However, suppose we are dealing with a collision between three pool balls. There is no way that we can predict what will happen. This is known in physics as the ‘three-body problem,’ and it is mathematically insoluble.

In the pandemic we experienced the collision of three irreconcilable forces, in other words, a Perfect Storm:

Condition 1 – Neo-liberal economics, resulting in mass free-floating anxiety (Pressure from ‘the Right.’)

What we saw during the pandemic were insecure and fragile employment scenarios playing into the problem of attempts to solve the pandemic. Neo-liberal economic pressures led to the prevalence of conformist narratives and individual risk aversion, with few risking losing their jobs by speaking out when harms were being perpetrated. For instance it became dangerous — career-wise — for a doctor to promote any Covid-19 treatment regime that was not within the mainstream narrative. Even to resist the pressure to conform within one’s workplace and refuse vaccination could mean losing your livelihood: against their better judgment, many people bowed to the pressure to be vaccinated. But all that got in the way of the real science and so meant the problem was never effectively solved.

Mass formation stoked fear, which stoked self-protection among those who had a responsibility to protect the public; which stoked the public’s unresponsiveness to the real issues in the pandemic leading to ineffective solutions, which further stoked the cycle of fear.

This ‘neo-liberal anxiety’ extended to the Internet, where insecure and fragile social scenarios led to a pressure to conform with one’s peer group or lose one’s social standing.

Condition 2 – Cultural imposition of political correctness, excessive safeguarding and Woke culture, resulting in mass free-floating resentment (Pressure from ‘the Left.’)

In its reaction to the real and imagined excesses of the Trump era, the Left went to the only place it knew well: protest. But once in power, protest became uberprotest: as if nothing in traditional society had — or ever had had — any value. Unrealistic pressure was placed on ordinary people to reject life-long social habits and bend to extreme norms promoted by university academics and left-wing intelligentsia. Miss Jo tweeted:

Miss Jo (@therealmissjo)

(16 Apr 2023)

 

I didn’t mind if you were gay. Until you paraded in the streets in chaps and with dildos in front of families.

 

I didn’t care if you were trans. Until you wanted access to my kids in school and wanted them to question their own sexuality and gender.

 

I didn’t care if you were black or white or brown. Until you wanted to pull down statues, destroy our history, re-write our novels and pay you reparations.

 

I didn’t care if you wanted to cross borders. Until you decided to do so illegally and then started criminal enterprises in the country you entered or lived off the welfare system.

 

I even didn’t mind if you wanted an abortion, until you started celebrating them and calling the fœtus a “clump of cells”.

 

I am not the only one. There are millions of people just like me. And we are angry now and will fight back.

 

The line must be drawn here.

Woke pressures have cowed many voices with genuine concerns about the state of the Union — and the world — into hesitancy. Mainstream and social media guidance on ‘hate speech’ and ‘misinformation’—both ad hominem arguments implying a lack of compassion in the author — have led to debate being censored and freedom of expression restricted. This has led to a catastrophic drop in the quality of the information pool on which judgments need to be made, again compounding any ability to deal with real problems when they arise.

Skilled individuals find their focus and motivation to help undermined by distracting minutiae, in having to be politically correct; to address everyone by their preferred pronouns; and to conform to excessive ‘personal safety’ demands.

Condition 3 – A Very Large Problem (VLP) to solve (whilst being hindered by the above pressures,) e.g. Pandemic

The final condition in the equation is the presence of a very large problem requiring a clear, effective and collective response. We saw such a problem arise with the pandemic, and we saw how its solution was hindered by the above pressures. Other very large problems include Climate Change; meeting the needs of both the Left and the Right in a sustainable way; and the problem of America versus China.

I was expecting that, in the 2022 midterms, there would be movement by both sides back towards the centre, and a subsequent alleviation of these pressures, but instead what happened was a doubling down on their political commitments by Democrats and Republicans: with Blue states become more Blue and Red states becoming more Red, thus resulting in what Dr. Steve Turley called a Balkanisation of the United States.

The Western Gulag

In his novel The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn catalogued the history of the network of forced labour camps which Stalin had established in the Soviet Union, comparing them to islands in an archipelago; while those islands existed for decades, they and the prison system were hidden in the midst of ordinary life: a secret parallel world within Soviet society.

I wonder if we might not be seeing a similar situation arising in the West, but with uniquely Western parameters.  Today the ocean the archipelago sits in is a ‘sea of capitalist make-believe.’ An ocean where individualism reigns supreme, where people are too timid to risk giving offence; where gender-reassignment surgery is freely offered to ten-year-olds (who may kill themselves at a later date;) where the established pandemic science of focused protection is ignored; where experimental drugs are ’insufficiently tested, while historically safe ones are questioned; where the needs of the snowflake generation are pandered to, whilst the resources the world needs to ensure their futures are squandered. It is as if the world consists only of one great big horn of plenty, whose only requirement is to be divided up.

And the islands are populated by isolated voices of sanity retreating from censorship, division and mistrust.

To ensure that we do not get caught up in another Perfect Storm, we need to reverse the conditions that led to mass formation: we need to create connection; discover real meaning; reduce free-floating anxiety; and neutralize free-flowing aggression. In Tibetan Buddhism we might find the model that does this. As we saw earlier, Tibetan Buddhism has an archetypal concept called the Five Jnanas (pronounced n-yanas) or Five Wisdoms. Each Wisdom counteracts a specific ‘poison.’ We can adapt the model to address the poisons of the current milieu: ‘Safetyism,’ ‘Postmodernism,’ ‘Transhumanism’ and ‘Woke.’

By pushing back against these poisons parading as religious dogma we move towards an expansive view of human existence: from Dystopia to Utopia.

• Abandoning postmodern moral relativism, we come to see things as they really are, including the ethical structure to the Universe that is the law of karma.
• Abandoning the woke DEI agenda, we come — through the wisdom of equality — to see the true preciousness of all living beings: that all have equal value, that ALL LIVES MATTER.
• Abandoning our isolating, alienated life in the Transhumanist Metaverse, we come to clearly discriminate what and who we really are: living breathing human beings in need of kindness, care and attention.
• Abandoning an obsessive need to stay safe, we come to fearlessly share our views and opinions and strive to manifest our ethical values in the world in the face of all obstacles.

In other words, we connect with TRUTH; ABUNDANCE; LOVE; and FEARLESSNESS. This is how we take care of our planet: realizing that nobody is going to do any of this for us, we take up responsibility for it ourselves.