Consciousness, Covid, and the rise of an American death cult

ARTICLE IN PRESS Explore 000 (2022) 1 5 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Explore journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jsch Columns Consciousness, Covid, and the rise of an American death cult Stephan A. Schwartz The American death rate from Covid is appalling, particularly when compared with other developed nations. As I write this in early February 2022 there have been more than 900,000 deaths attributed to Covid-19 in all its variants, and for the past two weeks there have been more than 2000 new Covid deaths reported each day in the US, according to Johns Hopkins, and that is after we enter the third year of this pandemic with vaccines available1 (See Fig. 1). 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 3rd, and Netherlands spends $5288 and ranks 8th.”2 This discrepancy between money spent and results achieved does not seem to be comprehended by most Americans because it is not the prominent issue one would expect it to be. Partly I suspect this is because Americans do not 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.”3 That does not 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.4 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 30th in the World in the quality of its healthcare.5 I have written about this at length in these pages and elsewhere,6 8 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. What I mean is the structure of the American healthcare system under which all these people work. E-mail address: [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2022.03.008 1550-8307/© 2022 Published by Elsevier Inc. 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 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 the equivalent of 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 2000 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 cannot 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 ARTICLE IN PRESS 2 S.A. Schwartz / Explore 00 (2022) 1 5 Fig. 1. Consciousness, Covid, and the rise of an American death cult ¢ Schwartz. 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.”9 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.”10 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.”11 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 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.12 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, became weaponized as a political tool, and achieved such success, because such success, assures it will happen again. When I look at the death cult I see it is a deliberate creation and that four major factors created it. I.Q.: The average I.Q. in the United States is 97.43. We are not in the top 10 Highest I.Q. nations. In fact we are 29th.13 Top 10 countries with the highest average IQ - Ulster Institute 2019 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Japan - 106.49 Taiwan - 106.47 Singapore - 105.89 Hong Kong (China) - 105.37 China - 104.10 South Korea - 102.35 Belarus - 101.60 Finland - 101.20 Liechtenstein - 101.07 Netherlands & Germany (tie) - 100.74 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 Fig. 2). Education and political affiliation 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 ARTICLE IN PRESS S.A. Schwartz / Explore 00 (2022) 1 5 3 Fig. 2. Consciousness, Covid, and the rise of an American death cult ¢ Schwartz adults,” is greater than it has been in the previous two decades, is growing and correlates with political orientation. 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 postgrads roughly 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 Fig. 3). In terms of Covid that conservatism has translated into an antiscience, anti-vaxxer, 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 Fig. 4). This was true even factoring in age, which is a primary issue in Covid deaths.14 Fig. 4. Not surprisingly, the death of unvaccinated Republicans is much higher than the death rate of vaccinated Democrats. Concurrently, ACASignups.net, 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.”15 The psychophysiology of fear A confluence of the social and neuroscience 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.”16 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.”17 Fig. 3. Consciousness, Covid, and the rise of an American death cult ¢ Schwartz But it is not 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 ARTICLE IN PRESS 4 S.A. Schwartz / Explore 00 (2022) 1 5 overrides rational thought”18,19 (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”20. 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.21 The rise of social media and the weaponization of a disease There have been other earlier modern pandemics, Ebola, H1N1, HIV, SARs, H5N1, but they never provoked a death cult such as we see today. Projections are there will be over a million dead by midsummer 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 previously 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 forprofit 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 this 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.”22 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 augmented 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 7804 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.23 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% 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.”24 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, and how? References 1. McPhillips D. US reports more than 900,000 total Covid-19 deaths. https://www. cnn.com/2022/02/04/health/covid-deaths-jhu/index.html. 5:07 PM ET. Accessed 7 February 2022. 2. Healthcare Costs by Country 2022. World population review. https://worldpopula tionreview.com/country-rankings/health-care-costs-by-country. Accessed 7 February 2022. 3. Silver L. Most Americans have traveled abroad, although differences among demographic groups are large. Pew Research Center. 12 August 2021. https://www.pewre search.org/fact-tank/2021/08/12/most-americans-have-traveled-abroad-although-differ ences-among-demographic-groups-are-large/. Accessed 7 February 2022. 4. Public’s 2019 priorities: economy, health care, education and security all near top of list. January 24, 2019. Pew Research Center. 24 January 2019. https://www. pewresearch.org/politics/2019/01/24/publics-2019-priorities-economy-healthcare-education-and-security-all-near-top-of-list/. Accessed 8 February 2022. 5. Best Healthcare in the World 2022. World population review. https://worldpopula tionreview.com/country-rankings/best-healthcare-in-the-world. Accessed 8 February 2022. 6. Schwartz S. 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. Explore.. 2020;16(4):210–213. July AugustPages. 7. Schwartz S. Climate change Covid-19, preparedness, and consciousness. Explore.. 2020;16(3):141–144. VolumeIssueMay JunePages. 8. Schwartz S. Climate change, migration, and preparedness. City Preparedness for the Climate Crisis A Multidisciplinary Approach. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar; 2021:244–255. Ed. By Francisco Janier Carillo and Cathy Garner. 9. Amin K. and Cox C. Unvaccinated COVID-19 hospitalizations cost billions of dollars. Health System Tracker; 2022. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/unvacci nated-covid-patients-cost-the-u-s-health-system-billions-of-dollars/. 10. DiMaggio A. Who are the vaccine holdouts? America's real COVID divide might not be what you think. Salon. December 22, 2021 | 5:45AM (EST) https://www.salon. com/2021/12/22/are-the-vaccine-holdouts-americas-real-divide-might-not-bewhat-you-think/. Accessed 8 February 2022. 11. The overwrought pushback on the ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ the washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/11/overwrought-pushback-pandemic-unvaccinated. Accessed 8 February 2022. 12. Monitoring incidence of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, by vaccination status — 13 U.S. jurisdictions, April 4 July 17, 2021. Centers for Disease Control. 10 September 2021. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037e1.htm. Accessed 8 February 2022. 13. Countries by IQ - average IQ by country 2022. World Population Review. https:// worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country. Accessed 8 February 2022. 14. Wood D. and Brumfiel G. Pro-Trump counties now have far higher COVID death rates. Misinformation is to blame.npr. December 5, 202110:27 AM ET. https:// www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828993/data-vaccine-misin formation-trump-counties-covid-death-rate. Accessed 10 February 2022. 15. Weekly update: #COVID19 case/death rates by county, partisan lean & vaccination rate. ACASignups.net. https://acasignups.net/21/12/02/weekly-update-covid19-casedeathrates-county-partisan-lean-vaccination-rate. Accessed 10 February 2022. 16. Baumeister RF, Bratslavsky E, Finkenauer C, Vohs KD. Bad is stronger than good. Rev Gen Psychol. 2001;5(4):323–370. 17. Hibbing J, Smith K, Alford J. Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology. Behav Brain Sci. 2014;37:297–350. 18. Schwartz S. The psychophysiology of politics. Explore. 2014;10(6):354–357. VolumeIssueNovember DecemberPages. ARTICLE IN PRESS S.A. Schwartz / Explore 00 (2022) 1 5 19. Schwartz S. Politics, consciousness, psychology, psychiatry, and brain behavior. Explore. 2021;17(2):106–108. VolumeIssueMarch AprilPages. 20. Holland J. Why is the conservative brain more fearful? The alternate reality right wingers inhabit is terrifying. AlterNet (U.S.). May 2, 2012. http://www.alternet.org/story/155210/ why_is_the_conservative_brain_more_fearful_the_alternate_reality_right-wingers_inha bit_is_terrifying?page=entire. Accessed 10 February 2014. 21. Kanai R, Feilden T, Firth C, Rees G. Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults. Curr Biol. 2011;21(8):677–680. https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.cub.2011.03.017. 22. Ardia D., Ringel, E.V., and Fox A.. Addressing the decline of local news, rise of platforms, and spread of mis- and disinformation online. UNC Center for Media Law and Policy, University of North Carolina and Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. https://citap.unc.edu/local-news-platforms-mis-disinformation/. Accessed 10 February 2022. 23. Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning. Stanford University History Education Group. https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:fv751yt5934/ SHEG%20Evaluating%20Information%20Online.pdf. Accessed 11 February 2022. 24. Moyer M. School kids are falling victim to disinformation and conspiracy fantasies. Scientific American. 1 February 2022. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ 5 schoolkids-are-falling-victim-to-disinformation-and-conspiracy-fantasies/. Accessed 11 February 2022. Scientist, futurist, and award-winning author and novelist Stephan A. Schwartz, is a Distinguished Consulting Faculty of Say brook University, and a BIAL Foundation 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 technical reports, papers, and academic book chapters. In addition to his experimental studies he has written numerous magazine articles for Smithsonian, OMNI, American History, American Heritage, The Washington Post, The New York Times, as well as other magazines and newspapers. He is the recipient of the Parapsychological Association Outstanding Contribution Award, OOOM Magazine (Germany) 100 Most Inspiring People in the World award, and the 2018 Albert Nelson Marquis Award for Outstanding Contributions.