The Pandemic of Narcissism

• Tragic Deaths from COVID-19: 575,000
• Tragic Deaths from Poverty & Social Insecurity: 17,480,000¹
• Tragic Deaths from Suicide 2018-2021: 350,308²

Updated 25 May 2021 10:11:11 HST

• Tragic Suffering from Substance Use Disorder due to Hyper-Individualist Narcissistic Bootstraps Culture, in 2020 alone: 20,000,000

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Why do we, as a society, react so dramatically differently to each of these pandemics and epidemics? What’s happening here? What role might narcissism play in skewing our priorities? The desire to believe we live in “the Greatest Nation in the History of the World,” above all else, sounds just a wee bit grandiose, don’t you think? To believe that no one can possibly be better than us at anything, and if other nations show signs that they might be doing better, we must either find reasons to tear them down or bomb them into oblivion for daring raise their voices or heads to see us as equals? That seems more like a CULT-ure of Narcissism than one of self-aware patriotism. That seems more like a CULT-ure of denial, gaslighting, scapegoating, and ostracizing of truth-tellers. Victim-blaming and shaming, at micro and macro scale.

However, let there appear an urgent opportunity to appear caring, and the narcissist or narcissistic CULT-ure will be all over it with a week’s worth of “aid,” a one-time pandemic penny, and then gone; leaving the years and decades of real recovery work to all others, while completely denying all of the long-term, self-inflicted underlying factors that actually set the stage for the crisis, in the first place. All of the tragedies at the top of this article are long-term and long-standing problems, killing equal or greater numbers of people than the pandemic, and yet the response is almost nowhere to be seen. Where is the emergency to end suicides, substance use deaths, and deaths from plain, stark poverty, right here in America?

Watch Narcissism Virus Vaccine NOW: It Evades Your Immunity! Real Pandemic Is Here! if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Is the Pandemic of Narcissism Reflected in COVID-19 Pandemic?

I’m far from being an anti-vaxxer. Got all my vaccinations as a kid, which has been a blessing, had my own children vaccinated, get my flu shot every year for 30 years. And from my own direct experience, there’s a lot about the COVID vaccine that justifies the highest level of scrutiny and analysis.

That said, as of late May, 2021 “The pandemic is over,” according to top physicians at Stanford and Johns Hopkins University. Put local narcissistic control freaks in small town, city, and county government don’t want it to be over, because they love the shared narcissistic power and control that they have been able to exercise.

We can believe in science and be skeptical of scientific motivations at the same time, especially where profit motive serves to skew the priorities of the scientific enterprise, especially where side-effects are downplayed and compliance for compliance’s sake is emphasized, under threat of “not opening the economy.” Wherever there is a carrot and a stick, there is someone driving a cart, attempting to get a horse to do something that a healthy ordinary horse would never just spontaneously do, of her own free will.

Case and Point: this eight minute read My Experience with Pfizer Vaccine #1: Side Effects of This Vaccine are Real by Kristina H. Kristina’s experience is similar to my own. We are not “anti-science” or “anti-vaxxers.” In fact, we are scientists who are not keen on making poorly-informed decisions, particularly in the context of a moral-hazard-riddled mine field of profit-and-power seeking motives that may or may not be interested in human well-being as a prime directive. After three weeks of extremely unpleasant side-effects of the vaccine, Kristina writes:

So, what [my doctor] is telling me, is that this particular vaccine is causing my immune system to make me miserable. Awesome. I asked about what will happen with the second dose, and he said, “Most likely, you won’t feel any side effects from the next dose.” Most likely?!?! I don’t think I am ready to go through all of this again, on a “most likely” basis.

Many people surely share this view. “Most likely,” isn’t what we want to hear when mRNA is hacking our DNA, for whatever laudable reason.

Moreover, clarifications and debunking of myths about mRNA changing DNA (the biological “software” process is actually the reverse of that), don’t exactly provide much comfort for the analytically minded.

“Now, imagine that instead of giving the protein, we would give the instructions on how to make the protein, how the body can make its own vaccine. That’s an mRNA vaccine” (Moderna chief medical officer Tal Zaks. Reuter’s Fact Check).

Okay, so the conspiracy theorists have the vector of causality reversed. Not too surprising. Nevertheless, mRNA interventions do absolutely engineer the DNA -> mRNA -> protein creation process, mid-stream. Could this be amazing? Absolutely. Do we have anywhere near enough understanding of how each and every individual body interprets these instruction sets? Maybe. Statistically, will we likely “get away with giving it a shot?” (Pun intended). Yes, we’ll “get away with it,” because a small enough number of people will be adversely affected that corporations can do what corporations always do in America with the least of these: pathologize, marginalize, minimize, and dismiss. Statistically, by definition, individuals just don’t matter. However, when that individual is you or someone you love, well, then statistics tend to suddenly fade in significance. There’s just something about having to “get away with it,” that makes many people take pause. Is that really an irrational response? To pause and await more data about how having “the body make its own vaccine,” works out? That’s a question only you can answer.

When nurses who are seeing the adverse reactions firsthand also say they’re willing to lose their jobs over this, that might be something worth paying attention to, as well.

Our contention is this: individuals should not be shamed, berated, criticized, or implicitly and explicitly punished with social restrictions for taking a pause to consider. This experiment is not like the polio vaccination I received as a child, it is not like the annual flu shots that I have received every year for decades. This is something completely new, and as such, the balance between our collective health and individual autonomy must include the option to keep wearing masks to protect others, without being shamed. Lack of vaccination poses no risk to others it only affects the individual’s response to the virus. From this perspective, it follows that people ought to be free to act in ways that respect and protect others, while also choosing their own individual level of risk to their own individual bodies. Does it make sense? If not, I’d very much like to hear the case against this middle way proposition of encouraging public health, collective awareness and interdependence, and individual direct experience. Philosophers have debated these principles from the dawn of human reasoning; the choice to be vaccinated or not is simply one of the most recent and most universal exercises in applied faith and philosophy, to date, due to the current era of immediate global communications.

Next, let us also explore the case that many are making that the root motivation for moving so quickly to create vaccines and then to force acceptance of vaccines developed on a rush basis is not because any of the corporations involved care about human beings, but primarily, if not exclusively, to protect industry bottom lines. This isn’t “evil,” or “nefarious,” or a “conspiracy.” This is seeing how incentives are structured to favor certain kinds of decision making; in particular, maximize shareholder returns above all else, under threat of breaching fiduciary duty. We’ve written about the toxic influence of the current definition of fiduciary duty and will, no doubt, invest more time in describing potential advantages to re-defining this concept in the context of the Post-Automation Era, moving forward. In the meantime, let’s continue with the matter at hand.

From a purely pragmatic financial perspective, the primary reason for the urgency in responding to COVID-19 is that so many sick people were overwhelming the system, causing cost overruns, which powerfully and negatively impacted profits. The argument is that decision-makers responded to the impact on profits, they did not respond to any concern for human health. Is there any merit to such a claim?

“Financial toxicity is a medical complication.” — Dr. Marty Makary, Johns Hopkins University.

Some skeptics suggest that the pandemic presented a convenient opportunity to deploy mRNA technology that can then be followed by minor tweaked viruses, potentially to experiment with how those new viruses interact with the vaccine platform. The CDC’s own history of human experimentation is as important as racial history in America, and the two overlap. There is zero institutional concern for the individuals involved.

“We are running this epidemiological experiment of linking the entire world together and also democratizing the tech that will make it possible to engineer pandemics. More and more people will be able to engineer synthetic viruses that will be – by the sheer fact that they will have been engineered with malicious intent – worse than COVID. And we have a country here, where we can’t even agree that this is a thing. We can’t even converge on what is ground truth.” — Sam Harris

Related: this just in, paraphrased from Corey Doctorow: The fact that Facebook conducted an experiment on 60 million people without their consent kind of indicates that they shouldn’t be running a lemonade stand let alone the public digital commons.

the purpose of citing these realities is the fact that these are not conspiracy theories these are conspiracies that have been methodically carried

Dr. Makary of Johns Hopkins also explains in the video below that many of us have natural immunity. So, if we went through the whole pandemic and never got sick – which is effectively over as of May / June 2021 – odds are non-zero that we are naturally immune and we don’t need a vaccine. But where are the tests to determine natural immunity?

Watch Being LEAST Wrong About COVID (w/Dr. Marty Makary) if the embed below does not behave nicely.

Do individual human doctors care about patients? Of course they do! People are not making an argument to believe any of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding the entire pandemic storyline. We are not suggesting that you accept any of these words as definitive, we are sharing a line of skeptical inquiry. For example, Dr. Monica Gandhi does clearly say, “some people will still get sick,” but not hospital sick. Which was “the whole point of the vaccine,” says PBS’s Hari Sreenivasan. Does it get any more obvious that the goal was not to protect humans so much as it was to protect hospital profits? People may still get sick, but hospital costs are not impacted. Raise the Mission Accomplished banner. Shareholders protected.

The fact that such a line of reasoning can be forwarded at all is additional evidence of how shareholder-driven healthcare opens the door to this kind of skepticism.

We’re simply noting that there are legitimate reasons why some argue that the pandemic created a handy crisis – which policy makers know should never be wasted – to accelerate global human experimentation on an unprecedented scale, and experiment with global and social engineering that will only accelerate and expand from here, due to a highly narcissistic form of so-called scientific investigation and medical obligation. Like all narcissists and narcissistic systems, the high maka-maka (arrogant, false altruistic) labels are like blaring neon signs to anyone who sees the potential for charade for what it is.

The edict to conform or be cast out has become more prevalent than ever, in too many cases. This is what new organizations like the People’s Party are about. When every point of public policy becomes a political battle-line formation, there’s something deeply, deeply wrong in a nation.

Don’t listen to, or believe, any of this. Look into the links. Listen to other perspectives. Make up your own mind. Listen to legendary investigative reporter – now 88 years old, the OG of Authenticity long before authenticity was a thing – Hedrick Smith with Committee for the Republic for a deeper dive into associated systemic issues that support the cause for healthy skepticism about health care in America, including pandemic responses.

I suspect I’ll take heat on this one. That’s okay. When a nation’s heart is stone-cold frozen, we need some sincere heat and light to begin the thawing. All this is simply to say that we don’t have to put on a tinfoil hat or join any kind of resistance movement to simply LISTEN to people with a different perspective and not immediately dismiss them as crazy.

Another reason we can know that COVID-19 vaccines have absolutely nothing to do with concern for human life is the fact that not a finger has ever been lifted toward alleviating the much more prevalent causes of tragic human suffering and death described at the top of this article.

Poverty, Economic Precarity, Suicide, Substance Use, are all forms of far more prevalent, persistent, long-term suffering in America, and globally. Suffering and death that we know are attributable to obvious and addressable causes, and yet, we ignore all that, to keep the private health care industry insanely profitable.

For ten years research and bibliographic details about these and other factors of intentionally engineered economic precarity, read the book Where We Go From Here: Chaos To Community. .

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Footnotes

[1] 874,000 EVERY SINGLE YEAR since 2000 (Columbia University).

[2] Derived from 87,577 in 2018 alone; which hasn’t improved.

Have you discovered or learned something interesting or valuable here? Something that piqued your imagination, creativity, research, discovery, or other academic, philosophical, or spiritual interest? Let us know with ETH 0x1eb2d6E3f26fBBF31B485bbe3e316D6dAd806632, Cashtag $metavalent, or Patreon. Every action we take in this multiverse, however small, matters and makes a difference. So, thank you and blessings, in this very moment!