key: cord-1029379-eyq9zr1z
authors: Schwartz, Stephan A.
title: Consciousness, Covid, and The Rise of an American Death Cult
date: 2022-03-21
journal: Explore (NY)
DOI: 10.1016/j.explore.2022.03.008
sha: 141a09438f9d83dbfdc7ea7e8d2b651551d1e536
doc_id: 1029379
cord_uid: eyq9zr1z

nan

It is worth noting that while the case rate has been going down, the death rate has actually been going up. By the time you read this it is very probable that as many as one million Americans will have died. This despite the fact that the U.S. -…spends $10,586 per person, per year on healthcare. Norway spends $6,187 and ranks 3 rd , and Netherlands spends $5,288 and ranks 8 th .‖ ii This discrepancy between money spent and results achieved doesn't seem to be comprehended by most Americans because it is not the prominent issue one would expect it to be.

Partly I think this is because Americans don't travel out of the country as much as many seem to think. It is very hard to comprehend, let alone experience, another healthcare system unless one spends a lot of time in other countries or is unlucky while traveling. As Pew Research Center discovered, -…the degree to which Americans have traveled around the globe varies widely: 19% have been to only one foreign country, 12% to two countries, 15% to three or four countries, and 14% to five to nine countries. Only 11% of Americans have been to 10 or more countries.‖ iii That doesn't mean Americans are not concerned about healthcare. They may not know what other systems are like, but they definitely know that what we are doing in the United States is not working for them financially. 1n 2019, before the Covid Pandemic struck, Pew Research Center surveyed this issue and reported 69% of Americans polled felt reducing healthcare costs was their second highest priority. iv And this sense of urgency is now even greater.

The hard facts are no nation spends more on healthcare than America. Yet what does it get us? The United States ranks 30 th in the World in the quality of its healthcare. v I have written about this at length in these pages and elsewhere, vi,vii,viii so here I will just say it is my view that with the Covid pandemic the inadequacy of the illness profit system of healthcare in the United States, the profit first structure of the entire system, has been made glaringly obvious. I do not mean the frontline doctors, nurses, orderlies, house keepers, janitors, and cooks who, in my opinion, should be seen as the heroes and heroines their daily service shows them to be.

Covid has proven to anyone who can see past their ideology to the actual facts that universal birthright publicly funded healthcare is the way to go. Because it is not a profit making system, and is national, it would be more efficient, more effective, nicer to live under, more productive, and much much cheaper. The evidence for that is unimpeachable.

Second, this death rate is directly correlated to the politicization and weaponization of anti-science throughout the MAGA world created by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. And I say this not on partisan terms, but simply based on the facts now so well documented as to be irrefutable. anti-vaxxers, and anti-maskers, usually the same people, have made fidelity to a fact-free but emotionally satisfying reality, more important than life itself, and created the first American death cult.

What strikes me about this particularly, what stands out when one studies the data, is the cynicism it represents. There was a deliberate plan from the very outbreak of the Covid pandemic to take what should have been a fringe movement --there were anti-vaxxers in the Middle Ages with the Plague; there were anti-vaxxers with the 1918 Spanish Flu --and transform it into a mainstream political movement. What had been fringe became a death culture involving millions. Believers willingly subject themselves to a vastly higher risk of contracting and dying of Covid. And they do this in the face of million dead, and 2,000 people, or more, dying each day.

What makes a person make such a choice? what are the facts? The glaringly obvious one is that Covid in February 2022, and for most of 2021, became increasingly a disease of the unvaccinated. Millions remain unvaccinated; not because they can't get vaccinated, but because they have chosen not to get vaccinated, and they are dying in wildly disproportionate numbers. Ninety five percent of the people in hospitals are unvaccinated, and they are 93% more likely to die than those who may contract the disease but have had the two jabs and the booster.

What would make a person knowing at least the general sense of those numbers, and unless one has been a hermit in the mountains for the past three years everyone knows those numbers, to increase their chance of dying by 93%? This is where the consciousness aspect of what is happening comes into play. But before going there it should also be noted that this death cult has both health and economic consequences for the entire society.

According to Health System Tracker, "Despite the availability of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines, vaccination rates have lagged, particularly in some states and among younger people. As of early December 2021, 17% of adults over the age of 18 in the U.S. remain unvaccinated for COVID-19. These COVID-19 hospitalizations are devastating for patients, their families, and health care providers. The hospitalizations are also costing taxpayer-funded public insurance programs and the workers and businesses paying health insurance premiums. Our recent analysis found that insurers are beginning to reinstate cost-sharing for COVID-19 treatment, though patients still only pay a small share of the total costs.‖ ix As Anthony DiMaggio observed in Salon, "The reality is that the U.S. has a widespread anti-vax problem, and lags well behind most wealthy countries in the percentage of adults who are fully vaccinated. If roughly one in four adult Americans under age 60 is unvaccinated, that comes to more than 60 million people, without even counting children younger than 18 who remain unvaccinated for various reasons.‖ x One of the most obvious lessons to emerge from the Covid Pandemic, as President Biden observed, is that as time has gone on it is clear what is going on is "a pandemic of the unvaccinated.‖ xi Is that an exaggeration to make a political point? It is not. It is an explicit statement of fact. During the spring and summer of 2021, although both vaccinated and unvaccinated people contracted Covid and were hospitalized a large disparity between the two communities became became obvious, and was astounding. According to the CDC unvaccinated people were 10 times more likely to be hospitalized with the coronavirus and 11 times more likely to die. xii In contrast, a person who is vaccinated and boosted has about a one in a million chance of dying from Covid, a lower probability of death than dying in a fatal automobile accident.

What brought this death cult into being? This is not going to be the last pandemic in the world or the United States. Climate changes are causing viruses and bacteria to mutate to survive, and such mutations, as we can see with the Covid-19 variants, can mean great death and suffering, with all the social impact of such losses. Cults of any kind in a culture arise from shared consciousness by a self-defined collective of people. Common sense tells us we need to understand how the anti-vaxxer, anti-masker Covid Death Cult arose in America and became weaponized as a political tool because its success, if talking people into putting their lives at risk of death can be considered success, assures it will happen again.

When I look at the death cult I see four major factors that created it, and it is a deliberate creation.

The And look how it is distributed. Start with 34.13% are between 100 and 84, and another 13.59% are between 84 and 68, which is considered retarded. (See Figure 2) 

I.Q. is not education. But both have a correlation with the rise of the American death cult. The Pew Research Center, which has been tracking education level and political ideology for some years, has reported that "the ideological gap between more and less educated adults,‖ is greater than it has been in the previous two decades and is a growing factor. They found:

"More than half of those with postgraduate experience (54%) have either consistently liberal political values (31%) or mostly liberal values (23%), based on an analysis of their opinions about the role and performance of government, social issues, the environment and other topics. Fewer than half as many postgradsroughly 12% of the public in 2015-have either consistently conservative (10%) or mostly conservative (14%) values. About one-in-five (22%) express a mix of liberal and conservative opinions.

"By contrast, among the majority of adults who do not have a college degree (72% of the public in 2015), far fewer express liberal opinions. About a third of those who have some college experience but do not have a bachelor's degree (36%) have consistently liberal or mostly liberal political values, as do just 26% of those with no more than a high school degree. Roughly a quarter in each of these groups (28% of those with some college experience, 26% of those with no more than a high school education) have consistently conservative or mostly conservative values.‖

The data are clear: the more education an individual has the more progressive an individual's worldview is likely to be. Or, translated into what I think is really relevant, the more you learn to think and assess facts the more likely you are to support programs that foster wellbeing. (See Figure 3) In terms of Covid that conservatism has translated into an anti-science, antivaxxer, anti-mask movement that is the core of the American death cult. NPR tracked political affiliation with whether a person was vaccinated or not. They reported in December 2021 that there was dramatic difference between conservatives/Republicans and liberals/Democrats. (See Figure 4) This was true even factoring in age, which is a primary factor in Covid deaths. xiv The ACASignups.net at that time, from its own research, reported the same thing, noting, -…new cases are now running 2.71x higher per capita in the reddest tenth of the country than the bluest tenth.‖ xv Not surprisingly, the death of unvaccinated Republicans is much higher than the death rate of vaccinated Democrats.

A confluence of the social and neuro-science research has presented us with findings that describe a politics driven more by psychophysiology than rational thought. This research shows that we are driven by hormones, group dynamics, and the way we respond to negative stimuli. After doing research on this for several years Roy Baumeister, Francis Eppes Professor of Psychology at Florida State University, reported, "The greater power of bad events over good ones is found in everyday events, major life events (e.g., trauma), close relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interpersonal interactions, and learning processes. Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones. Various explanations such as diagnosticity and salience help explain some findings, but the greater power of bad events is still found when such variables are controlled. Hardly any exceptions (indicating greater power of good) can be found. Taken together, these findings suggest that bad is stronger than good, as a general principle across a broad range of psychological phenomena.‖ xvi Political psychologist John Hibbing, Foundation Regents University Professor at the University of Nebraska -Lincoln, along with Kevin Smith and John Alford also in the Political Science Department, set out to explore this issue in depth, and discovered, "Difference in negativity bias underlie variation in political ideology…we argue that one organizing element of the many differences between liberals and conservatives is the nature of their physiological and psychological responses to features of the environment that are negative. Compared with liberals, conservatives tend to register greater physiological responses to such stimuli and also to devote more psychological resources to them…. Politics might not be in our souls, but it probably is in our DNA.‖ xvii But it isn't just psychological. I have written earlier about the amygdola, "an almond shaped ancient brain structure deep within the temporal lobe…. It is activated during periods of fear, stress, or a threat, and with sufficient stress it takes over. It is an heroic response, an attempt to save your life from a perceived threat. This activation overrides rational thought." xviii , xix (emphasis added) What matters socially is that this response turns out to be highly political. Researchers at University College London show "greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala‖ xx .

The researchers also found that "greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex‖ --a region in the brain that is believed to help people manage complexity. The study also reported that conservatives 'brains had smaller anterior cingulates --the part of the brain responsible for courage and optimism. xxi

There have been other earlier modern pandemics, Ebola, H1N1, HIV, SARs, H5N1, but they never provoked a death cult such as we see today. And this when you would have to be a hermit in a cave not to know how lethal Covid in its variants is. Projections are there will be over a million dead by mid-summer of 2022. Why would conservative people behave differently under the stress of this disease than they did previously? How did this pandemic become so politicized, weaponized?

The answer has two interlinked components. First, is the rise of social media, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, etc. There is nothing comparable in human history. Never before could an ignorant but charismatic individual develop the ability to spew forth their prejudices to a million people or more.

The second factor is the decline of local paper news operations. The Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) puts it this way:

"Technological and economic assaults have destroyed the for-profit business model that sustained local journalism in this country for two centuries. While the advertising-based model for local news has been under threat for many years, the COVID-19 pandemic and recession have created what some describe as an 'extinction level 'threat for local newspapers and other struggling news outlets. More than one-fourth of the country's newspapers have disappeared, leaving residents in thousands of communities living in vast news deserts.

"In the U.S., 200 counties do not have a local newspaper, nearly 50% of counties only have one newspaper, usually a weekly, and more than 6% of counties have no dedicated news coverage at all. Other media sources have been unable so far to fill the gap. Digital startups are focused on population-dense communities rather than the rural areas most often abandoned by local newspapers, while many subsidized public media outlets rely primarily on non-original content.‖ xxii Over the last 20 years American culture has undergone a dramatic but far too little remarked cultural transformation. It is a major anthropological event. The rise of social media and commercial digital media, coupled with the decline and often demise of local newspaper coverage, has allowed for the weaponization of disinformation and fantasies in the service of political aims. And it has been targeted principally at those portions of the American population with less education and greater fear, people who define themselves by their actions as conservatives. The American culture has become one of manipulated ignorance. Whole industries have developed specifically to spew out dis-and mis-information in order to accomplish political purposes. Fox, NewsMax, Infowars are leading examples of this.

This trend is far enough along that it now encompasses children as well as adults, and it is radically reshaping American society literally from childhood to the elderly.

In 2015 and 2016 a research team at Stanford University administered 56 tasks to students across 12 states, at every level of education from elementary school to university. In total they collected and analyzed 7,804 student responses across a spectrum of schools, from under-resourced, inner-city schools in Los Angeles to well-resourced schools in suburbs outside of Minneapolis. At the university level they surveyed six different universities that ranged from Stanford, an institution that rejects 94% of its applicants, to large state universities that admit the majority of students who apply. xxiii They found that more than 80% of middle schoolers believed that an advertisement labeled as sponsored content was actually a news story, and that less than 20 percent of high schoolers seriously questioned spurious claims in social media.

Howard Schneider, executive director of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University who has been studying this utilization of dis-and mis-information for years says, "What we're facing are transformational changes in the way we receive, process and share information. We're in the middle of the most profound revolution in 500 years.‖ xxiv Culture is the manifestation of collective attitude and intention. The Covid pandemic has confronted us with the reality that large numbers of us from children to the elderly are easily manipulated by playing on our fears to a point where we are willing to sacrifice our lives. I suggest that the challenge to America is whether democracy can survive in these circumstances?

Scientist, futurist, and award-winning author and novelist Stephan A. Schwartz, is a Distinguished Consulting Faculty of Saybrook University, and a BIAL Fellow. He is an award winning author of both fiction and non-fiction, columnist for the journal EXPLORE, and editor of the daily web publication Schwartzreport.net in both of which he covers trends that are affecting the future. For over 40 years, as an experimentalist, he has been studying the nature of consciousness, particularly that aspect independent of space and time. Schwartz is part of the small group that founded modern Remote Viewing research, and is the principal researcher studying the use of Remote Viewing in archaeology. In addition to his own non-fiction works and novels, he is the author of more than 200 

ii Healthcare Costs by Country 2022

Most Americans have traveled abroad, although differences among demographic groups are large

Priorities: Economy, Health Care, Education and Security All Near Top of List

Covid-19 and the documented failure of the American illness profit system -We have to stop treating our doctors, nurses, healthcare workers, and ourselves this way

Climate Change Covid-19, Preparedness, and Consciousness

Climate change, migration, and preparedness. In City Preparedness for the Climate Crisis -A Multidisciplinary Approach

health-systembillions-of-dollars/ x DiMaggio A. Who are the vaccine holdouts? America's real COVID divide might not be what you think. Salon

xiii Countries by IQ -Average IQ by Country 2022

Bad is stronger than good

Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology

Politics, consciousness, psychology, psychiatry, and brain behavior

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Addressing the decline of local news, rise of platforms, and spread of mis-and disinformation online

Schoolkids Are .Falling Victim to Disinformation and Conspiracy Fantasies