COVID’s busting myths
By: Josef Carey
Tags: Covid 19, Farming, Systems Thinking, Health, Covid Diaries

In this era, it takes a massive dose of toxic positivism accompanied with the well-versed practice of head burying just to get to the end of each day. Glimpses of photons at the end of tunnels we can only dream of right now. This s*** storm (you know the one I’m talking about, and Covid is just the tip of the pile) is apparently here to stay. And so, as our microscopic adversary might testify, our tenure of exploitative habituation on planet earth has exposed human-sized holes in the basket we call convention. COVID it seems has a true talent for busting human myths.

Dogma vs objective reality

Human culture is a bit of a paradox. On the surface, we’re all geared up for the “bread and circus feel-good factor” whilst the undertone of our monotheistic culture drags us all further into the murky undertones of sin and guilt. A bit more bread and circus should do the trick! Embedded in this meta myth is the notion we can somehow extract our lives from the landscape (most of us pay dollar for this well-earned right, far removed from the true-crime scenes). In our ceaseless search for “happiness”, and in some fingers crossed fashion, we all aspire to thrive in the midst of this murky anecdote we’ve baked into our culture. Much like the sister you grew up with dropping truth bombs that you’re a “fat knacker” (having convinced yourself you’re just big-boned), the truth stings. COVID rips the plaster off quicker than you can say fat knacker, waking us up to the notion of what true value is and most importantly what it’s not. If we are to thrive as a species, we need systems that can support the thriving of the landscape. The bottleneck to human health lies here. You can never exceed the health of the food you’re consuming, or the landscape your immersed in. That’s a fact and Maslow would definitely agree with me. As I hope you’ll agree, me-generation, only leads to degeneration and so we’re going about our business in a kind of upside-down, inside out fashion. Narcisism it appears, will only get us so far…..

There are no solutions only tradeoffs

Clearly, something massive has gone awry in our systems since the good old days (small caveat, there never was such a thing. Life is by definition a series of complex problems but it helps to romanticize the past). Not to lose the thread….. COVID is a symptom of the greater disease stitched into our systems from which we the majority live our lives. Whilst in search of the silver bullet, we continue to sleepwalk further into the COVID apocalypse. The reality is, we have not solved the problem of plant cultivation. Oil has allowed us to kick the can further down the road. From a human well-being perspective (and I argue this is what we should be aiming for) we still don’t know how to best use oil, apply relevant and meaningful information that would facilitate a movement and development of much-needed technology to meet our physiological needs. To that end, oil lends itself as a convenient anesthetic numbing the root of the issue. A screwed-up value system that allows for a screwed-up agricultural system based on bad science and anecdotal storytelling. The commodification of food and the exploitative means in which it is produced from seed to table makes disease not only possible, it make it inevitabile.

Choose your hard

I’m convinced (and I put my theory in harm’s way by writing a blog about it), that if we get clear on our context, and start asking better questions, we realize the majority of collective human behavior is simply for behaviors sakes. Filling the void for the sake of it may feel like an accomplishment but in reality, it is still just filling the void, no matter how fancy we sophisticate it up. I’m not gonna drop the meaning of life in here (I’ll leave that pearl for another blog) but we do need to organize ourselves in a way that builds health into the wider systems we are part of, along with it a pinch of joy and a splash of benevolence for good measure. This will not magically appear and no amount of bread or circus will make catalyze the necessary shifts (I like bread and circus but they’re not good societal foundations). These virtues need to be cultivated consciously and intentionally as individuals. We must inspire one another to bring the very best of our humanity to each day. Sounds hard no? It is hard, but if we don’t choose option A, we by default get option B (aka COVID). Choose your hard and choose wisely.