Not Selves, but Not Nothing

We're living at a time when the glorification of independence and individualism is harming the world and others in it, as well as leading to an epidemic of loneliness. According to Jay Garfield, the root of suffering is in our self-alienation, and one symptom of our alienation is clinging to the notion that we are selves. "We are wired to misunderstand our own mode of existence," he writes in his brief yet substantial 2022 book, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self. 

Garfield traces arguments against the existence of a self primarily through 7th century Indian Buddhist scholar Candrakīrti and 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, and explores where many other philosophers hit or miss the mark along the way. The book is a surprisingly accessible read about a complex topic with perhaps the exception of a couple more in-depth chapters that develop arguments to further his conclusion: you don't have a self, and that's a good thing.

Garfield starts with the idea of self from ancient India: the ātman is at the core of being. A distinct self feels necessary to understand our continuity of consciousness over time (diachronic identity) and our sense of identity at a single time (synchronic identity). A self gives us a way to explain our memory and allows for a sense of just retribution when we're wronged. We feel a unity of self to the extent that it's hard to imagine it's not so.

However, Garfield argues that feeling of having some manner of core self is an illusory cognitive construction. Hume claimed the idea isn't merely false but gibberish, and Garfield calls it a "pernicious and incoherent delusion." We cannot infer from a sense of self that there is a reality of self. Garfield asserts that, "We are nothing more than bundles of psychophysical processes--changing from moment to moment--who imagine ourselves to be more than that." We are similar to the person we were yesterday and a decade ago because we're causally related yet distinct. We share enough properties and social roles with ourselves to feel as if we're the same over the years. That causal connectedness enables the memory of the past and anticipation of the future.

It's unnerving to think that our sense of self isn't real if that just leaves us as nothing more than a collection of perceptions. Garfield calls this complex bundle of subjective processes a person. It's not just a substitution of terminology, though. Personhood, in contrast to selfhood, is a legal and narrative term. From persona, we are a collection of roles we play that don't make sense outside of our social context. A person is like a character in a book without a set dialogue, doing improv as an ensemble player. Our identity includes how our role fits in with the people around us. Garfield uses an analogy of money to explain that our physical body and mind aren't enough to make up who we are since we only exist within a social context. A one hundred dollar bill is just worth a few cents for the ink and paper without the social context that permeates it with meaning.

I wrote a while back about the importance of having some sense of a core self in order to take responsibility for our own development of character. We need to be able to look through our past actions and decide to do things differently in order to improve our behaviour in future. However Garfield's notion of being a person fulfills this function as well. The problem comes that we still want to assume we're a concrete agent behind a persona. The term brings to mind the Jungian understanding of self as the very center with the persona just a small part of our ego out in front and our shadow elements in the dark recesses behind this self. This view makes sense to us or at least it's become familiar to us. We know we act differently with different people, but still feel like there's some real self in there somewhere that's informed by some subconscious feelings that we can't quite put a finger on. Garfield wants us to eliminate our attachment to a self and embrace ourselves as just persons. 

For Garfield, the concern with this common self-illusion isn't just about living a lie, but that it brings about disastrous moral effects. He argues that our belief in a distinct self is from an egocentricity that has each of us at the center of our own moral universe. It provokes us to feel proud of ourselves as if we're the sole author of our own actions and to be vindictive when others offend us, both of which destroys true caring if we can't take as much joy in others' achievements as we do our own. The self stands against the world instead of being embedded in it. When there's an inner and outer world -- a subject surrounded by objects -- we end up reifying the self. A self allows us to act from self-interest and the interests of close friends and family.

As a self, we feel like our decisions are not caused, as if we exist beyond the parameters of cause and effect. Garfield explains that when we recognize we're part of the causal order, the fact that our thoughts and actions are caused seems obvious. This is something Zen Buddhist and founder of Dialectic Behaviour Therapy, Marsha Linehan also discusses: once we can radically accept the chain of events that caused this moment, it's easier to accept the situation we're in. We tend to believe that we can make predictions about the world because everything runs by cause and effect except our own mind (possibly unless we have a brain tumour or are inebriated.) Garfield says it's bizarre to want our behaviour to be uncaused and random as if it means freedom, when it actually leaves us no control over any aspect of our lives. If actions are accepted as caused, then we withdraw responsibility for the action, and there's less likelihood of blame and vengeance. We're more likely to respond with care. He puts the west's glorification of free will at the feet of Augustine's argument to explain how an all-powerful and all-benevolent God allows so much harm to come to people.

I'm open to the idea of a no-self and accepting a more interdependent understanding of our world; however, I don't think it's necessarily the case that we generally think our decisions are freely made without cause. Decisions are definitely caused: by ideas, by a line of reasoning, by information and experiences we take in, as well as by social influences. Sometimes we're better able to act on our decisions than others. We recognize that we get better at this with maturity and that we regress when sucked in by social media algorithms, and then we struggle to regain control over ourselves. Decisions are caused but still our own agency. It's not that everything's random, but that it's possible to make an uncaused decision. We don't have maximal autonomy in that we don't choose what we desire, but that's not to say we never make decisions from among choices presented to us. If someone plans to cause harm to others, we might care about them enough to try to change their mind without being punitive, but we will also want to make an effort to influence their decision. Maybe we're just one more cause creating that final effect, but without the actor's belief in the agency of their choice, they might lose the influence of being perceived as acting rightly.

I'm not convinced that removing all praise and blame will necessarily lead to more moral interactions. I agree that we've gone off the rails in terms of glorification of the self and an all-by-myself type of egocentricity. Many of us are often loath to acknowledge all the help we've gotten along our journey. And we could definitely benefit from softening all the guilt and shame so many carry from minor lapses in judgment or from harmless behaviours that meet with social disapproval. Neuroscience professor Hermes Solenzol explains: 

"When our natural drives towards food or sex conflict with shame and guilt derived from body image (social disapproval from being fat) or sexual repression from religion, this increases dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens. It is this conflict, and not the pleasure of eating or masturbating, that leads to compulsive behaviors. The greater the conflict between natural drives and repression, the more we feel that we cannot control our behavior. This explains why ‘porn addiction’ is often found in people with a religious upbringing." 

 However, shame and independent agency have their place when it comes to actual harm caused to another person or entire groups of people.

Garfield explains that we aren't spectators in the world, but part of it, co-constructing the world and ourselves all the time. Thinking of ourselves as people calls on us to abandon egocentricity and rethink our interdependence, which provokes a deeper appreciation of and responsibility for all others. A selfless morality includes impartiality, friendliness, sympathetic joy, and caring. It wishes all others well and is fully able to take pleasure in their successes, acting to alleviate pain and suffering in general, not just our own. It's a disinterested caring to avoid being impaired by a "contagion of suffering." It lets go of pride and revenge. I love this idea of the world, yet there exists a handful of people in the world right now to whom I would struggle to wish well. I don't hope for revenge, but justice, and that involves a belief in their free will to make the heinous decisions they have made.

Outside of the worst actors, I do see the benefit of at least loosening our attachment to our sense of self. Some Buddhists argue that it's only possible to eliminate our illusion of self with long-term meditation, but Garfield is more optimistic that it's possible by focusing on the times that this illusion weakens or disappears, which happens regularly. He describes moments of flow, when we're so immersed in activity that we lose track of our very being. It's an indication of expertise when we're able to spontaneously interact with the world, and Garfield calls it "our most effective mode of being." Shedding the self illusion means becoming more attuned to the world we inhabit. When we're in a state of self-conscious awareness of our actions, it's typically when we're training or learning. Self-consciousness is a special feature of our cognition; it's not always at play because it has a limited utility.

Garfield's arguments are thorough, yet they still don't entirely hold water. Others have criticized his notion of dualism, his unity argument, his treatment of Buddhist ideas, and his conflation of groups with individuals. He provides some arguments to have us reduce how much we cling to a reified inner self, which can be beneficial to ourselves as well as the world as a whole. It could do us a world of good to get beyond that childish longing to be special and work towards a greater sense of interdependence and connectedness. We hate when we fall short in any comparison, but we hold fast to this artificial sorting when we're ahead of the game to the point that we cling to the entire hierarchical system. I completely agree it's the cause of our suffering, and we'd be so much further ahead if we could abandon that game altogether.

However, Garfield's expectations of the moral utopia we'd achieve as persons seems overblown. Without a sense of agency as a distinct entity, at least in the meantime before we reach some kind of spiritual enlightenment, the argument that all is cause and effect leaves a door wide open to renouncing any sense of personal responsibility. I don't think we're ready for that. More importantly, as an ethical treatise, I'm not convinced that people living in such an individualist culture will be provoked into selfless thinking by understanding the nature of self as egocentric. If all is cause and effect, and we believe we have no true agency, are we more likely to develop a morality of impartial friendliness or dive into potentially harmful hedonism?

I think it's possible to be less egocentric if we can just stop looking inward, desperate to prove we belong or that we deserve some care. Garfield wants to start with a sense of interdependence from a dissolved self in order to build connection, but it may suffice to start by looking outward to the world which then helps us to feel that necessary sense of belonging. We can see ourselves as subjects without necessarily seeing others as objects.

Safe Schools and Hospitals

We're starting the school year with high levels of Covid in Ontario, and kids are still getting sick from a disease that, unlike the flu or a cold, has potential long-term consequences, leaving behind micro-clots that can lead to strokes, as well as increase chances of diabetes, brain damage, and more as it runs through the bloodstream and can affect every organ. 

Vaccinations don't entirely prevent illness and spread, but they CAN keep most people out of the hospital from the acute illness. Unfortunately they wane after several months and most of us are only allowed to get one once/year. If you're going to do it, now is the time. Also unfortunately, they're not ready yet. The government keeps putting them out with the flu shot despite that Covid is not seasonal; it spreads when people congregate. The best time to get the shot might be one in mid-August in time for school, and then early December in time for all the celebrations in late December and winter travel. Then open the windows in the spring and summer! But the powers that be will likely not release this one until next month.

Facing the Backdraft

Climate analyst Barry Saxifrage explains how the CO2 from fires is adding significantly to greenhouse gas accumulation. His charts show the dramatic increase in Canadian wildfires:

"Wildfire is now incinerating four times more forest carbon than during the 1990s. In addition to the surging immediate threats of choking smoke, wanton destruction and disrupted lives, rising wildfire is also pumping billions of tonnes of forest carbon into our atmosphere, intensifying long-term climate breakdown. ... It is piling up in an ever-thickening blanket in our atmosphere that will overheat generations to come. The extra heat being trapped by humanity's CO2 now equals the explosions of 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs every day. And rising. ...

Wildfire emissions totalled 30 million tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) [in 1990]. The much taller bar on teh far right shows that this year's wildfires have already burned massive amounts of forest. Emissions are around 500 MtCO2 so far, with many weeks of fire season still ahead. ... It is tempting to think that this current level of wildfire is our 'new normal.' But it's going to keep getting worse until we take our foot off the wildfire accelerator. ... Levels will keep rising until we stop the primary source of them, fossil fuel burning. ... 'It ain't rocket science -- when it's hotter and drier fires burn more easily and more explosively.' ... Burning fossil fuels burns Canada's forests."

Not Strategy but Symptoms

 So, things are a mess. But here's an interesting take on Trump from Andrew Wortman: 

"Trump's 2 a.m. meltdowns and dictator cosplay aren't part of a predetermined strategy--they're collapse. A malignant narcissist, weak and unhealthy, colliding with the one thing he can't escape: DEATH. And his team knows it, which is why they're going full-fascist now. As a psychologist, I can tell you: when malignant narcissists lose control, they don't fade quietly. They escalate exponentially--rage, smear campaigns, humiliation, projection, even violence. Every move is about punishing those who expose their weakness to claw back control. This isn't 'toughness.' It's disintegration. In my field we call it narcissistic mortification: the sheer terror, shame, and dread of being forced to confront one's own fragility. To them, it feels like annihilation--as the false self they've lived behind for decades shatters. 

Mortification hits with both physical and psychological shock--chest pain, burning, panic, humiliation, obsessive thoughts. They feel exposed, worthless desperate. That desperation is what fuels the meltdowns you're watching play out in real time like an SNL skit or horror film. For Trump, the trigger is being faced with his own mortality. He can't sue death. He can't cheat it, bribe it, or con his way out of it. It's inescapable. And for the first time in his life, he's powerless--and the panic shows in every crazed rant and wild attempt to project control. That's why you see him suddenly fixated on things like getting into heaven, legacy, and being remembered. Humiliation is the narcissist's deepest wound--and nothing humiliates more than colliding with the truth that you can't escape the end.

The Epstein files serve to make this terror far worse. Not only do they expose what he's spent 30+ years concealing, but if they surface after he's gone, he can't spin them. The thought of being defined by that humiliation--with no power to control the narrative--is devastating. When narcissists face both mortality AND exposure, collapse deepens. They don't reflect or accept responsibility. They deflect, rage, lie, smear, and escalate authoritarian grabs. Anything to keep the mask intact just a little bit longer--no matter who gets hurt in the process. 

Blending Psychotherapy and Spirituality

In my last post on meditation, I suggested that there's not a lot of harm that comes from meditation and mindfulness training, so maybe it doesn't need the kind of scientific scrutiny that we might expect from a clinical drug trial. However, in Toward a Psychology of Awakening (2000), Buddhist psychotherapist John Welwood documents three traps: spiritual bypass, narcissism, and desensitising, that arise in part because we've leant too far to either psychology or spirituality instead of using both. He also discusses them in brief in a paper, "Principles of inner work: Psychological and spiritual" (1984).

Both psychotherapy and spirituality are about "developing a new kind of loving relationship with one's experience," and both help us break free from our conditioned reactions. But spirituality doesn't address our early mishaps that affect our perceptions, and psychotherapy doesn't address the need to transcend our personal feelings.

When he first trained as a therapist, Welwood was concerned that psychotherapy has a narrow view of human nature, but then realized how much it can help once we no longer demand answers from it. It can help free people from negative childhood conditioning, particularly from dismissive or engulfing parenting, by working with our needs, scripts (now narratives), fears, self-respect, etc. A lot of us don't learn how to exist in the world well. Welwood claims that part of the problem is the "breakdown of extended families and tight-knit communities" so that children just get influenced by parents or just one parent instead of many people providing a variety of ideas that can help a child figure out where they fit in the group. As far as I understand this point, with only one or two major influences, children might accept lessons without question, then have to "spend a good part of their lives freeing themselves" from this singular impact in order to find their own sense of self. It's somewhat unintuitive, but a larger group influence helps a child find their individual self by differentiating from others more clearly at a younger age. But whether we find it at 5 or 50, it's necessary to have this "stable self-structure" before trying to go further.

But without a spiritual element, we have "too literal-minded and serious … too small a vision of what a human being is." Psychotherapy can focus too much on content and not enough on the human being. It's changing more recently, focusing less on content and more on how we are with our experience. Welwood wants to stop trying to overcome emotional content and instead open up to it. If we can't open up to anger, for example, we end up trying to be nicer (people pleasing) or overmonitoring our behaviour to avoid triggers, which can create more stress. Yet there's even more ground to cover than just this.

Yup, Still Writing About It

Covid is still here and still killing more people than car crashes. The highest vehicle fatality rate in Canada in the past decade was in 2023, with 1,964 deaths with over 8,000 serious injuries. For Covid, counting less than the last year (about 11 months) and only from participating provinces, we've had 2,248 deaths and over 33,000 serious illnesses that required hospitalization. So, more. 

In some places, it's way more right now!

California is experiencing a surge, and Honduras is experiencing such a spike in illnesses that they're mandating face masks again in hospitals, airports, shopping centres, schools, public transport, and other enclosed or crowded paces. A recent study suggests that LongCovid may be far more common than currently estimated at about one in ten people, with non-human primates studied reaching 90% of the population with bio-markers: 

"Even if you started off lean and healthy, this study shows it won't protect you from some of the worst consequences of Covid."

I compare Covid rates to car crashes because we still, pretty much all of us, take precautions whenever we get in our car, and most of it don't even think about it any more. Some precautions are imposed on us, like I had to ditch my car because apparently the MTO would take it off the road for rust that could enable exhaust to get inside the vehicle. Air bags and driving laws are imposed on us. But we willingly strap ourselves in our cars, for most of us, even when no cops are around. I do it automatically before I start the car. It became second nature.

On that Sexual Assault Case

I listened to a CBC call-in show about the London sexual assault trial of five former Hockey Canada players. All the callers were either on one side or another. I think there's a middle path. 

The gist of the case: Back in June 2018, a woman known as "E.M." was drinking at a bar where the hockey team was celebrating a big win. She consented to go back to a hotel room with one of the team members. A little later, he texted others to come up for a three-some, and up to ten guys were in the room at one point. Allegedly, five of the guys, all between 18 and 20, either had sex with her or had sexually assaulted her. Afterwards she called a friend, crying, saying she was upset at herself for what had happened. All men were acquitted because E.M.'s testimony wasn't seen as credible. A possible reason for this is that she filed a civil suit in 2020, and, if any of her testimony was different between then and now, that brings her credibility into question. Typically a criminal case is filed before a civil case, and she had started a criminal case soon after the event, but that was put on pause, at which time she moved to a civil case. That civil case was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. 

First of all, how many of us describe an event exactly the same way after five years? Our brain changes our memories slightly whenever we re-remember an event. It's a very high bar to meet to have explain every detail exactly the same way. 

Mentalizing, Mindfulness, and the Drive for Evidence

 In reading about attachment theory, David Wallin's description of Peter Fonagy's work was intriguing, so I went down that rabbit hole. 

Fonagy developed Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT) to improve emotional regulation, as distinct from Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). Fonagy sees our mental development as relational, but in order to have empathy for others, we need awareness of our own feelings, which can be helped with mindfulness work. However, in looking at the evidence of efficacy of these separate modalities, I question the attempt, since Freud, to make psychology into a natural science. Each of the various ways to help are useful, but there's an element of the unknowable in the way when we treat them scientifically.

According to Wallin, Fonagy's focus was on developing the understanding of the mental states of others, which he calls mentalizing, to let us understand the depths of ourselves and others. For instance, it can help heal old wounds if we understand that dad's rejection of us might be due to his depression and not our behaviour as a child. Other people's reactions to us aren't just caused by us, but there are always multiple factors at play affecting how people behave. It seems very similar to Theory of Mind. He met Bowby in the 1980s, and studied adults' behaviour relative to their own descriptions of childhood attachment, and found, when comparing severely deprived to well-connected adults, that a weak attachment was correlated with a weak "reflective functioning" (the ability to understand behaviours in terms of their thoughts, feelings, and mental states). From this, he says psychotherapy should be the "effort to restore or kindle patients' capacity to mentalize," to simultaneously feel our feelings and reflect on their meaning. To help people develop mentalizing requires a relationship that mirrors and guides emotional responses.

Vaccinate Against Variant Soup

Some weird new federal SARS-CoV-2 vaccine guidance - in layman's terms.

Variant soup ingredients from April 2025

But first, remember that, when it comes to vaccinations, Covid is like the flu, not like measles or polio. It's not one and done because the virus mutates so easily and quickly. Every few months we permit new variants to add to the mix by letting them spread and mutate, and only sometimes does anyone important mention the variety of variants out there. (By contrast, for rates of illness and death, Covid is a lot like measles and polio in the unvaccinated death and disability rate. It's a serious disease!) 

Like the flu, we need regular access to vaccinations. If people ask how many Covid shots you've had, ask them how many flu shots they've had. It's the same silly question.

If you've never been vaccinated for it, get two shots this year.

If you have been getting shots, the guidelines say you should get one a year if you're pregnant, over 65, in congregated living, a health care worker, part of a listed racialized group, or have an underlying medical condition that's associated with more severe infection, which includes diabetes and cancer and other medical conditions, but also obesity, and disabilities like ADHD, and mental health disorders like depression (but not anxiety).

Luckily, you don't have to prove you have an underlying condition because anyone may (is allowed to) get one shot. They'll come out with a new shot this fall, but who knows when that will be!

The vaccination is protective for less than six months, so you might want two shots a year. But good luck with that! 

According to their collective wisdom, you should get two shots if you're over 80, in congregated living, or moderately to severely immunocompromised due to an underlying condition. I don't think claiming severe ADHD will work, but no harm trying! You may get two shots if you're 65 to 79. 

So despite that most infections come from schools, all those kids spending their days in a school building, from junior kindergarten to university, can get a shot in September, but then are just sitting ducks come February. Make it make sense!

A good N95 is still your best bet to avoid this preventable disease!

The Necessity of Feeling Seen

Attachment theory is part of the vernacular now. Even the Norwegian show Porni mentions it, and the dramatic eldest daughter blames her mom for her “relational damage”! We’ve largely accepted the questionable idea that mom’s attentiveness in childhood creates our attachment patterns for life — the gist of the theory as it’s largely understood, but what’s usefully generalizable from the actual studies? There are many criticisms of the theory, yet some university psych courses applaud it without reservation. I’m dubious about it, but I also don’t want to entirely throw this baby out with the bathwater.

 This is a huge topic, and I’ll hardly do it justice here. There are a few excellent books on it, but part of the problem with how we understand the studies might be that the most nuanced books seem to be the most academically written, and likely the least read. As it morphed into popular consumption it may have strayed further from the original intention. On top of the reading, I went to a couple workshops on attachment to find the magic solution to all our relationship ills, and my big takeaway is this (for free!): if you’re a bit distant, consider being open to getting closer, and if you’re a bit clingy, try to step back a bit. It’s good advice to notice and change patterns that are a problem, absolutely, but I’m not sure it merits the number of workshops, courses, and self-help books that it’s provoked. At worst, some books actually counsel people to avoid any “avoidant or disordered people” as if there’s no saving them from their dastardly origins. Therapeutic discussions of childhood misconnections definitely have helped people better understand themselves, but I think this theory produces such volumes of celebration and condemnation because, in difficult relationships, it feels like the answer, but to parents, it feels like blame.

Attachment Theory Criticisms 

Heidi Keller’s The Myth of Attachment Theory (2022) is an extremely thorough takedown of the theory. If attachment notions make you feel like a crappy parent, this book is vindicating. She explores the offense of putting it all on moms both because of the narrow focus on a single person as well as on singular causation, but her best work is in exploring the creation of a norm of interaction from upper-middle class, western assumptions around what it means to be sensitive to a baby’s needs, an analysis that was made at the time as well: 

Losing Our Democracy in Ontario

For a little while, Trump's mess made me über proud to be Canadian, and even a little bit okay with Ford. But that was short lived! 

If anything, the US disaster has been a distraction for us as the provincial majority government pushed through several anti-democracy policies. They're using Trump's trade war to try to justify these policies, but we all know that's bullshit. 

Bill 33: Supporting Children and Students Act, which passed second reading yesterday. It will give Ford more control over school boards and universities and colleges. It could mandate police presence in schools and mandate university admission policies. From OPSEU President JP Hornick:

"Stripping away access-focused admissions pathways threatens the socio-economic mobility of entire communities. They want to surveil and criinalize our kids from a young age and then make it even harder to access post-secondary education later on in their academic careers. Ontario's future depends on an inclusive education system, not one that intentionally keeps people out. ... It is clearly intended to defund these services in our colleges."

Covid Causes Clots!!

 A headline in the New York Post: "Why so many people are having strokes in their 20s, 30s, and 40s: We've never had patients so young." 

They report that, "Between 2020 and 2022, there was a 14.6% increase of strokes among people aged 18 to 44." Many of whom were "by all common standards, healthy." Their theories about the increase include birth control pills, stress, long working hours, physical inactivity, caffeine especially from energy drinks, and Adderall (although they add that most studies don't show a strong association between Adderall use and strokes). None of these have been shown to have increased that dramatically since 2020, but something else has. I stupidly read the comments on the article, which are all about "the jab" killing us. IT'S NOT THE VACCINE!!

There is, of course, absolutely no mention about an unmitigated brain-invasive virus doing the very type of damage researchers and doctors warned us about years ago. We knew that Covid stays in the body and forms blood clots since at least 2021, and it became widespread in 2022, which is why some wise doctors ask for a D-dimer test after a patient has problems post-Covid infection to check for clotting issues. Here are just a few: 

Protect Your Neurons from Nimbus!

The latest Covid variant has the same name as a big looming rain cloud. The more we let Covid spread, the more it will continue to mutate, and this one is even more easily transmissible. 

It's provoking people to mask up in parts of Asia, and governments are encouraging updated vaccinations in parts of Europe, and it's definitely in the states, but they're not doing much to stop it. Will we?? My kids and I still can't get another Covid shot until it's been a year since our last, and we can't access Paxlovid if we need it. But thankfully there are no mask bans being proposed here.

In the states, the FBI is treating Covid as a crime to be investigated instead of a public health matter to be mitigated:

Still Blooming!

Another milestone to reflect on life a bit today: my 60th birthday. It sounds so old, but I biked 60k total on Monday and Tuesday (didn't have time for it in one go), and played pickleball today, and I'm regularly writing 3,000 word essays, so I appear to still be reasonably sound in body and mind.  

I was hoping my crabapple would bloom for my birthday, but everything bloomed early this year. A couple years ago I wrote about some people who randomly walk by, loudly insisting my crabapple is dead. It's still not dead yet! These are the very last of the lilac blooms from my garden. Such a weird year.

New Covid Strain Causing Razor Blade Throat

Several news venues have been reporting on Covid in the last few days. An ABC News headline says: "Why are more than 300 people in the US still dying from Covid every week?" 

The article explains,

"Public health experts told ABC News that although the U.S. is in a much better place than it was a few years ago, Covid is still a threat to high-risk groups. 'The fact that we're still seeing deaths just means it's still circulating, and people are still catching it.' ... The experts said there are a few reasons why people might still be dying from the virus, including low vaccination uptake, waning immunity, and not enough people accessing treatments."

That last sentence is infuriating because vaccines wane in effectiveness after a few months, and vaccinations here are restricted to yearly except for people over 65 and anyone moderately to severely immunocompromised, such as organ transplant recipients, anyone HIV+, and anyone taking immunosuppressants. Furthermore Paxlovid, our only treatment option here, is only available to people over 60 or at high risk of complications from Covid. Otherwise, you're on your own.

On Approaching Death

 CW: As the title suggests, there will be discussion of death and dying and some mention of suicide in this post.

I thought nothing of following up my last post on Irvin Yalom on the meaning of life with Yalom on the meaning of death, until I started writing here. The very reality of being a bit wary of broaching the subject reveals the strength of societal taboos against admitting that we’re all going to die. Until it’s staring us in the face, we delude ourselves into thinking we will get better and better, mentally and physically, despite that our brain starts to shrink in our 30s, and our joints and organs will start to give out not so long after. We work hard to keep death clean and sanitized so the reality doesn’t seep in too much, and we try to do all the right things to keep death at bay: exercise, various special diets, wearing masks to avoid viruses. We can fix some evidence of erosion with meds and surgeries, sometimes miraculously, but some people even hope to keep their brain going long after their body dies.

Dancing with Viruses

There are several measles cases in Waterloo Region. As of last week there were currently over 60 cases in nearby Wellington/Guelph, and over 1,300 in Ontario since October.

Measles is like Covid in that there's an incubation period in which people have no symptoms but are contagious. Viruses are stealthy! For measles, it's 7-12 days from exposure to symptoms like fever or cough, so it's really important to track cases and isolate if potentially exposed. For Covid, it can be 5-7 days before it's picked up by a rapid test, and you can have it and spread it without any symptoms at all. Both cause serious complications, including brain infection, and leads to death in about 1 or 2 in 1,000 people. 

Both can be prevented with an N95.

The biggest difference between these viruses is that getting vaccinated is extremely good protection for measles, but not for Covid. If you got your measles shots, you're very likely completely protected. Unfortunately, vaccination rates are plummeting. We need to have at least 94% of the population vaccinated to create herd immunity and keep measles at bay, and Ontario has been hovering in the 70s since Covid started and anti-vaxx nonsense got a platform. Vaccination against Covid does a lot to keep people out of the hospital, but it doesn't prevent getting and spreading the disease because, like the flu, Covid mutates all the flippin' time. Measles is just measles, but Covid could be delta, or alpha, or one of many omicron variants, or whatever's going on now. It changes so much I stopped keeping track. The more it spreads, the more it mutates, and we're doing nothing to stop the spread. 

Please Vote!!

Let's see if we can avoid our own Timbit Trump tomorrow!! If you're not sure of the best candidate to beat the cons in your riding, check out Smart Voting!  

Prime Minister Carney said of Poilievre yesterday, 

"It's easy to be negative when you've never fixed anything. It's easy to be negative when you've never built anything. It's easy to be negative when you're a career politician who has never accomplished anything." 

Taylor Noakes, agrees that Poilievre has accomplished nothing during his twenty years in Parliament:

"This isn't as much a political party as it is a ChatGPT-based slogan-generating algorithm speaking through the mouth of everyone's least favourite muppet. . . . The Conservatives have essentially made 'Fuck Trudeau' their ideology, and the average Conservative voter has made it their core identity. ... The Conservative Party have placed strict limits on who is allowed to ask him questions, and have further tried to prevent journalists from talking to party supporters and local candidates. ... According to a report by LaPress, Poilievre seems to have the loosest grasp on facts and the truth, as the publication found that he lied, embellished or misled far more than any of the other candidates during last week's debate. ... He has voted against the environment and climate 400 times ... against the Canadian Dental Care Plan, $10 a day daycare, the National School Food Program, the Canada Child Benefit, and raising the federal minimum wage ... against a proposed first-home savings account and a proposal to build four million new homes."

The Rise of Unreason

The Ontario Health Coalition put out a press release a couple weeks ago about the sharp increase in people infected with measles here. There were 816 cases from October 2024 to April, then 155 new cases from April 3-11. Our immunization rates are lower than most of Europe -- only 70% of kids have typical childhood vaccinations. Vaccination rates were reduced dramatically in 2020. "This is a Public Health failure that must be addressed with the utmost urgency." 

David Fisman recently wrote about it: 

Balancing Individual Rights and Community Health Requires Knowledge of History

Ontario is in the midst of a measles outbreak, and our Chief Medical Officer of Health (CMOH) is taking a “you do you” approach. No mandates. No strong guidance. Just a gentle suggestion that people make informed decisions…if they choose to. It’s a startling response given public health’s long history of collective action, and at times, authoritarianism. 

That authoritarianism wasn’t a bug of early public health. It was a feature. Modern public health emphasizes individual rights, but those rights can come into tension with the community’s right to health, especially during outbreaks of communicable diseases. Institutional public health grew out of fear. 

Yalom on Approaching Meaning

About 45 years ago, psychiatrist Irvin Yalom estimated that a good 30-50% of all cases of depression might actually be a crisis of meaninglessness, an existential sickness, and these cases require a different method of treatment. We experience this lack of purpose as boredom, apathy, or emptiness. We are "not told by instinct what one must do, or any longer by tradition what one should do. Nor does one know what one wants to do," so we feel lost and directionless. Instead of addressing meaninglessness as the problem, though, we've been merely addressing the symptoms of it: addictions, compulsions, obsessions, malaise. In today's context, it might suggest that even social media issues could be problems with a lack of meaning. 

The last sentences of his lengthy tome, Existential Psychotherapy, sum up his solution: "The question of meaning in life is, as the Buddha taught, not edifying. One must immerse oneself in the river of life and let the question drift away." How he lands here is an intriguing path through a slew of philosophers and psychiatrists. Even without symptoms of a problem, attention to meaning is necessary as it gives birth to values, which become principles to live by as we place behaviours into our own hierarchy of acceptability. 

"One creates oneself by a series of ongoing decisions. But one cannot make each and every decision de novo throughout one's life; certain superordinate decisions must be made that provide an organizing principle for subsequent decisions." 

Yalom doesn't, however, suggest coming up with a list of values that can become meaningful to us, but that we immerse ourselves in life to become more aware of which values we already have. 

WHAT'S THE POINT? IT'S FOR US TO DECIDE

According to Yalom, we've hit this crisis point in meaninglessness because we have the leisure to think and because our work is no longer clearly purposeful, both of which are relatively recent experiences for such a large proportion of civilization. It's no longer just the philosophers of the day asking, What's it all for? What's the point of it all? He takes the existential position that it's up to us to figure it out. 

Orange Monday or MAGA Monday?

Time will tell which name will go down in history books. But April 7, 2025 will be up there with Black Monday (October 19, 1987) and Black Thursday (October 18, 1929).

Trump wants everyone to just calm down, already, in his own ever-weirdly worded way. But he said this just before millions of Americans died of Covid, too. 

So, Tariffs, Amiright?

Round of tariffs for all, except Russia.

I have a friend in the states who isn't worried about any of this stuff. "Big businesses will stop it," she says. She expects 3-6 months of wavering, max, then corporations will push back enough that things will settle down. It's all just posturing. She has a lot of faith in the markets and in this administration's willingness to be pushed. But okay. Maybe.

I suggested the tariff threats have already changed everything, and she was surprised to hear about American products being taken off the shelves or indicated in some way to help us avoid purchasing them, and that travel between our countries is down 70%. We don't want American stuff anymore, and we'll avoid it as much as we can. 

One analogy that rings true: 

"Imagine one of your friends points a loaded handgun at your face, and then immediately goes, 'nah man, just joking lol'. No matter how short a time that was, you're still not gonna ever trust that motherfucker again. It will have permanently altered your relationship. Anyway, tariffs on penguins."

Public Health Needs to be Independent

 David Fisman posted a thread yesterday about problems when big money gets involved in public health.

"During Covid, I experienced firsthand how political pressure twisted science—and nearly destroyed reputations. A short thread on conflict-of-interest theatre, redacted emails, and lessons we still haven’t learned. 

In January 2021, I was publicly accused by Ontario’s Premier of having a conflict of interest due to paid consulting work I did for the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO). The suggestion was that I’d influenced school closure advice. What wasn’t shared? Internal emails—later released via FOI—show this was a manufactured controversy. The allegations didn’t reflect what officials knew privately. And that story deserves to be told. 

On Jan 26, 2021, Heather Watt (Chief of Staff to Health Minister Christine Elliott) drafted messaging about the “conflict.” She sent it to Steini Brown—my dean at the University of Toronto, and chair of the Science Advisory Table—for input. Steini replied carefully. He pushed back, noting: “There’s no direct line between David working for ETFO, us giving you advice to close schools, and you following it.” His reply was initially redacted in FOI responses. Journalist Jack Hauen appealed the redaction—and won. He sent me the full, unredacted email when requesting comment. It showed that the internal view did not support the public claims being made about me. Steini also wrote: “He is merely one of dozens of scientists working on a volunteer basis and does not speak for the group in his work for ETFO.” That’s a very different story than what was spun publicly. 

Disappearance of the Rule of Law

Charlie Angus talked about Canada-US relations on Meidas Touch: "We're thinking, if we go down the road with this regime, we're talking about the disappearance of the rule of law, and that's deeply offensive to us." 

Rule of law goes at least as far back as the Magna Carta over 800 years ago. It means that everyone is under the law, including the king. Even a president! Even in the US they overtly seek "the government of laws and not of men," and make that clear in the 5th and 14th amendments. John Adams feared the "vulgar rich": To ennoble the new regime, the most talented must be made to serve their country, rather than their selfish desires. Adams thought offering fancy titles would satiate their quest for power, taking a page from Rousseau: "the role of illustrious offices and signs of rank in countering the popular passion for material wealth." But that's not enough for this crew. They have no respect for rule of law. 

Human rights will always be pushed by those who hope to exploit a situation or group of people, and we need to be there to push back. Over and over and over again. I used this 5 minute explanation of the history of human rights in my grade 10 civics classes:

The important bit is at the end, that we have to KEEP fighting for our rights. There will always be people trying to amass power and override the law, and we have to be ready for that, en masse, to stop it. 

Monbiot on Capitalism vs Commerce

 George Monbiot wrote today, 

"One of capitalism's greatest successes is to shut down our imaginations. With the help of its favoured tools - neoliberalism and fascism - it persuades us that 'there is no alternative'. Our first task is to re-ignite our moral imaginations and name our alternatives. I cannot count the number of times I've been told, 'if you're against capitalism, you must be a communist,' or 'you must be a feudalist'. In fact, as in my case, you can be fiercely oopposed to capitalism, to communism, and to feudalism. It helps if you undertstand what capitalism is. This means recognizing that it's true nature is endlessly disguised. It's a distinct economic system which arose around 600 years ago. In The Invisible Doctrine, we give this definition:

Capitalism is not the same as commerce. The Dutch VOC and the British East India Company were not trading with the people whose land, labour and resources they seized. Nor were the slavers in the Caribbean and the Americas. Nor is investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) commerce: nations are forced to surrender resources to corporations or pay compensations. Nor is conversion of rainforests to cattle ranches or  extraction of deep-sea minerals. No one's freely trading or being properly remunerated in such cases. Yes, colonial looters might then trade the wealth they steal: capitalism can intersect with commerce, and can overrun commerce, but it is not the same. 

Bearing Witness

 Brandon Friedman wrote an important thread about what we do now. Here it is in full:

"This is a German woman being marched past the bodies of Holocaust victims. After World War II, it was common refrain among German civilians: They just didn't know. For that reason, many were forced by Allied troops to bear witness. Like this. 

I bring this up because fascism is now here, in America. 

If you're thinking, "but it doesn't feel like fascism, nothing in my life seems amiss," then congratulations, you have discovered what fascism is like. 

Avoiding the Sausage Machine

click to read

I attended an excellent masterclass on "Trans-Inclusive Philosophy" with Sophie Grace Chappell last week, put on by The Philosopher magazine. She wrote Epiphanies and Transfigured, and this paper will be coming out in a collection soon. She discussed system-building in a way that lit some lightbulbs for me. I was waiting for the video to be posted before writing about it, but, in lieu of that, here's my transcription of it. 

She starts by responding to a call to build a theory of what gender, transgender, and gender identity are, and she clarifies the problems with gate-keeping off the bat. People will demand that before anyone's allowed to claim they're trans, they first have to define male and female, and she likens this to saying before you can sit on a chair and drink some tea, you first need to establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for chair and for tea, which is just ridiculous and very dangerous.

More interesting to me is her second argument, that defining what counts as transgender butts up against bigger problems with any system building. She prioritizing experience over theory because any attempt at an overarching trans theory will inevitably leave someone out. She has her own idea of what fits her, but it won't fit everyone, and other people might have great definitions for themselves, but they don't entirely fit her, either. 

Things May Appear Bleak, And Yet...

Byung-Chul Han's The Spirit of Hope is a beautiful book, the kind you want to treat with care and won't dare dog-ear a page. Anselm Kiefer's illustrations throughout provide a place for contemplative moments between ideas. It's more immediately accessible than The Burnout Society, which took me weeks to wrap my head around, yet no less profound. 

A REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS OF HOPE

We like a secure illusion of control over the world, yet that hasn't gotten us much further along. We recognize something's missing. Han writes, "Amid problem-solving and crisis management, life withers. It becomes survival. … It is hope that opens up a meaningful horizon" (2). 

Han explains how a lack of hope furthers the current neoliberal capitalist trajectory: 

"Fear and resentment drive people into the arms of the right-wing populists. They breed hate. Solidarity, friendliness and empathy are eroded. … Democracy flourishes only in an atmosphere of reconciliation and dialogue. … Hope provides meaning and orientation. Fear, by contrast, stops us in our tracks. … Hope is eloquent. It narrates. Fear, by contrast, is incapable of speech, incapable of narration" (2-3). 

The Flies Have Conquered the Flypaper

Steinbeck's The Moon is Down was first published in 1942, before he was sent off to fight. As a journalist, he enlisted in order to be in the thick of thing to write with authenticity. This may be a book for our times, unfortunately. It's about a town invaded by enemy forces.

It's a short read, but also captured fairly well in the movie, made just the following year, with Henry Travers (Clarence in It's a Wonderful Life). Of course it's a hopeful read as the town fights back, but it's also terrifying for what they endure. 

 

And then I watched Shame, which might be a more realistic depiction of what it is to live with the beginnings of invasion as sides get confusing and people betray one another.  

Possibly I'm looking for instruction of how to be when another country threatens invasion, what it looks like to be courageous in the face of real danger, but I may well be just torturing myself! I'm also reading Byung-Chul Han's The Spirit of Hope as a healthy antidote to the gloom.