 There's a lot of unconscious, like deep unconscious psychosocial forces at work here. It's totally irrational. But people do irrational things all the time. And then if you don't conform to the irrationality, to the hysteria, then you become the enemy. Anytime that you invoke an external enemy to unify you, it always is mirrored with an internal enemy, which is the traitors, the heretics, the nonconformists, the taboo breakers. So there always is some kind of purge or some kind of authoritarianism, police state environment in these times of existential crisis. And it doesn't even have to be a real crisis. As you probably know, like historically speaking, COVID-19 was a pretty weak pandemic, but that didn't matter. It was enough to spark this pattern of hysteria, mob violence, which is very ancient. You could say the same thing about the witch hunts. It was a troubled and divided society. But in going around burning witches, that didn't solve anything, except it kind of did because this is the pattern of unifying violence. When everybody turns on a sacrificial subclass of victims, of scapegoats, then that desire to do something about it, to do something about the crisis is satisfied. And this is the historical pattern that René Girard, the philosopher described called sacrificial violence. René Girard described this as the original social crisis. It starts with cycles of vengeance. Say we are all together in a tribe and I'm in one clan and you're in another clan and we're getting along fine and then one day there's an accident. I shoot you with an arrow by mistake and you're not killed but you get revenge. And then maybe I get killed and then my brothers get revenge on you and then your brothers get revenge on them and there's an escalating cycle of violence that ends up dividing the entire society and creates an impossible crisis that can tear society apart. Blood feuds, tit for tat violence. The solution historically, according to Girard, was that everybody would turn on a scapegoat and murder them in an act of unifying violence that discharged all of the bloodlust, all of the desire for vengeance and unified the society once again. Therefore, the crisis which was caused by the division itself would go away because we're all unified now. So then human psychology being what it is, if killing the victim solved the problem, then the victim must have been responsible for the problem. So myths and legends grow up around these events, casting them as these arch villains, casting them as possessed by demons, casting them as unclean. And in a sense they are unclean, they are agents of contagion because if you associate with them, then you're tainted and we see this dynamic even today. I noticed it in grade school where there was the weird kid in the class. Did you have a weird kid in your class? Always, yeah. In our class he was named Kent and Kent had cuties. Who decided he had cuties? Who knows? It was just kind of one of the class bullies maybe just said, hey Kent has cuties. And as soon as he said that, nobody wanted to associate with Kent because if you associated with him then you'd get cuties too. You'd be the weird kid too. So we had a couple loud mouths who gleefully accused Kent of being weird and then there were the enthusiastic joiners who joined in with the name calling and the ostracism. And then there was the silent majority. People who, they're like, well, gosh, I don't necessarily think Kent is weird but if everyone says so, I guess they must be right. So, ew, Kent. And then there were the doubters who were also silent because even though they maybe even felt sorry for Kent, this was me, I didn't want to risk being friends with him because then I'd get called weird too. I didn't want to speak up for him because then I would be ostracized as well. So I kept silent. So my silence and the silence of that other group who just kind of shrug and say, I guess everybody can't be wrong, that creates an illusion of unanimity. So each person who doubts, you look around and you're like, well, nobody else seems to think that Kent is okay. How can I be right? I'm the only one. So we see that today in, say, the medical community where you might be a physician seeing a lot of vaccine damage but is this just an anomaly? Is this really happening? Maybe it was always like this. I don't know, how can I be sure? Well, let me look around. Are my colleagues saying anything? Are the medical journals saying anything? No, no? Okay, I guess I better not speak out. Human beings are exquisitely attuned to reading the mood of the mob. It's a survival mechanism. And in order to fit in, we instinctively adopt the correct opinions and profess those opinions. We signal the appropriate virtues. We respect the appropriate taboos that mark us as part of the in-group and not part of the sacrificial subclass. That mark of belonging could be a mask, could be a vaccine, a vaccine card. And it doesn't matter if the mask actually works or if the vaccine actually works. Doesn't matter if the kid actually has cooties or not. This is an ancient powerful psychological disposition that fascists and totalitarians exploit in order to control society. This mania for safety, this obsession with risk minimization and this worship of control actually never succeeds. It always brings the opposite of what it intends. It brings less security. It brings less safety. It brings less health. So if you isolate yourself, like you think that if I could only isolate myself from all germs, then I would never get sick. But the more you isolate yourself from germs, the more vulnerable you become you become to whatever germs can get through your bubble because your immune system gets weaker and weaker. Not to mention your body ecology deteriorates because your microbiome requires constant interchange with the outside world in order to thrive. So this is an example of the paradox of control, that the greater the level of control, the more need you create for even more control. Same pattern with agricultural chemicals. You spray roundup and you get roundup resistant weeds and you spray for those and now you've destroyed the mycelia and the ability of plants to uptake minerals. So you add more minerals to the soil and that kills the earthworms. And then so you substitute one technology after another after another, each one addressing the consequences of previous technology. So this is a universal pattern. The world is not this reductive linear mechanism that we can control by controlling all of the parts. It's nonlinear and subject to emergent phenomenon. What would happen if we fully take in the truth of the fundamental dysfunction and illness of society and enter the space of, and we don't know what to do about it, the space of unknowing.