The Coronation

Charles Eisenstein is one of the most thoughtful, penetrating and nuanced social commentators and a visionary for a holistic rather than technocratic new normal. Readers can subscribe to his posts and follow them on Substack. We have all been engaged in an exercise of sense-making during the Covid crisis, and Charles goes more deeply into the crisis in our humanity, what kind of being we are and therefore what kind of future is most humanly congenial. He also widens the lens to consider the overall context and paradigm within which the drama is being played out. Recently he has been writing a series of essays on what he calls ‘pandemania’, a social malaise that ‘includes the hysteria, the persecution of dissent, the censorship, the mandates, the propaganda, the corrupt practices of pharma and its regulators, the radical rearrangement of society, the suspension of civil liberties, and the tendency toward medical fascism.’ He adds that ‘none of the ground conditions for those have substantially changed’, which leaves us open to the same patterns of behaviour and response. Tellingly, he notes that we have not yet evolved in consciousness beyond ancient scapegoating patterns dependent on our limbic system rather than the cerebral cortex.

In an age of such deep social polarisation and division, it is uncomfortable to hold the centre, as Charles has discovered when some of his measured and qualified opinions have been savagely attacked from both sides. He repudiates the process of dehumanisation and othering while at the same time not pulling his punches in exposing the lies and deceit surrounding public health messaging. Those who chose to be vaccinated have the comfort of in-group inclusion, while those who chose not to be vaccinated have been sacrificially scapegoated along the lines explained in the work of Rene Girard. All kinds of pejorative labels have been attached to the nonvaccinated, and many families have been riven by taking different positions. We have been subjected to the process of ‘mass formation’ that has unleashed the anger and hatred of a mob morality. Many commentators have been reminded of the 1930s, when CG Jung was among the small number of people who understood the psychological dynamics at play.

The pandemic has demonstrated how close we are to fascism, totalitarianism and authoritarianism, willingly exchanging the promise of safety for social restrictions. Charles notes that ‘it took so little for its full machinery to spring into motion: surveillance, censorship, propaganda, restriction of movement, suspension of civil liberties.’ Ancient patterns of good vs evil and the denial of death resurfaced, along with a comprehensive programme for control, which Charles relates to the mechanistic mindset, reductionism and the cult of quantity. His analysis leads him to conclude that we need ‘nothing less than a total transformation of consciousness and culture, a profound shift in our basic mythology.’ It is here that we are collectively faced with a choice: the default trajectory of the existing financial and economic system as articulated by the WEF is towards transhumanism and technocracy based on centralised digital control systems that have been piloted and widely accepted during Covid. If we want a different and more humane future, then we have to claim it, which means speaking up and speaking out rather than going along with the flow – this is the challenge for each one of us. Interestingly, Charles’s first essay on Zika and the mentality of control dates from March 2016 and uncannily prefigures the events we have recently experienced.

The title essay was read by 2 million people, and drills down into the cultural reflex of control and the associated war on death/ bacteria/ viruses that pervades our entire medical system. It explains various elements of what he calls the conspiracy narrative representing claims that can theoretically be examined in relation to the evidence. The waters, though, have been muddied by so-called ‘fact-checkers’ who are effectively policing the mainstream narrative and deplatforming dissenting voices. I agree that the problem is deeper than the overthrow of an elite coterie with evil intent, although historically such groups and have been working on a centralised world government for over 100 years. These powerful groups represent a certain ideology, so the roots are more deeply ideological than personal.

Charles points out that war on germs thinking is akin to the war on terror, the war on crime, the war on weeds, and the war on cancer, not to mention wars between states. As Thomas Merton remarked, the only winner in war is war itself, and Charles makes the key observation that this focus on war ‘diverts attention from the ground conditions that breed illness, terrorism, crime, weeds, and the rest.’ (p. 31) He analyses the assumptions behind this view in the essay ‘Beyond Industrial Medicine’. He begins by drawing parallels with glyphosate as a feature of the system of industrial agricultural monoculture. Normal, he notes, ‘has been a society where autoimmunity, diabetes, obesity, and other chronic conditions are at epidemic levels.’ Similarly, industrial medicine is all about ‘standardisation, control, quantification and scale’ – this is where the funding is funnelled, leaving herbal, nutritional, naturopathic and other alternative/complementary approaches at the margins where their individual approach arguably makes them unsuitable for standard clinical trials. Then we are told that there is no evidence for such modalities. In this context, Charles sees vaccines as a way to keep society functioning as normal in technological dependency, when a much more radical and regenerative system transformation is required.

The last two chapters remind readers that the rehearsal is over and that we must ask ourselves the questions: ‘Who am I to be? What is the world to be?’ We will then become as we choose; bravery, Charles asserts, ‘means acting when you know it is time to act. It isn’t a convenient time. It is simply the time.’ (p. 151) We are at such a crossroads where further acquiescence and submissiveness cannot deliver. Gandhi reminds us that ‘the first principle of nonviolent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating.’ The pattern of Covid tyranny and pandemania will only end when a sufficient number us no longer stand for it and repudiate the powerlessness of submission and victimhood, awaken into our inherent sovereignty that sees through and refuses the technologies of manipulation and control, implementing what Charles calls ‘Technologies of Reunion’ based on ‘trust in the tendency of all things towards wholeness, trust in the deep connection among all beings, trust in an intelligence perfusing all life.’ (p. 172) Charles’s work represents a bold prophetic voice and rallying point that holds the centre and reaffirms genuine humanity and humaneness. As such, these eloquent essays should be widely read and discussed.