The Politics of Contagion

Goddammit! 

Such beautiful words, sentences via a lived experience. 

Read the whole thing: eschew arrogance, victimhood, ideology and bring some gratitude into your life. 

In this moronic anthropomorphic world; most morons look for incentives. 

Remember, you will die sooner or later. Gratitude is probably the only tool which could reduce pain and suffering in months, weeks, and days before you die. 

There is you go, I gave you an incentive for having gratitude. 

It was summer. We all had mosquito bites and little scratches. That's how it is when you live in the woods. But now they didn’t heal. Instead, the bacteria was fizzing away in there, eating the edge of the wound outward, making it soft.

I started to feel kind of sick one day, and looked hard at one of my scabs. It looked sort of wet and puckered, like skin after a long bath. The next day all my little wounds looked like this. A few days later, it was worse. From a scrape on my shin I could see this angry red line of inflammation crawling up my leg—my blood had started to get infected—the evil was climbing toward my heart.

We had a well-stocked “medicine room” but only a few jars of old expired antibiotics. Those went to the worst cases. The rest of us tried healing it with herbs. I remember spending three hundred-fucking-degree days just hanging in a hammock, sweating and hallucinating from massive amounts of garlic and goldenseal and top-grade California hashish.

One guy actually had to have his lymph nodes removed—they liquefied in his armpits. He survived only because we took him to a hospital in the city, and they were legally required to treat indigents with no health insurance or money.

The worst part though, was the way it infected my mind. I felt like it was turning me evil. Oozing from many wounds, shambling around in the heat, surrounded by buzzing flies. I remember standing in the dinner line and wanting to eat my fellow comrades. Thinking about gnawing on their succulent flesh. Mouth watering at the image of a sizzling human drumstick. Suddenly thinking how very far away we were from society and its taboos.

[---]

Another year we couldn’t stop shitting ourselves, and didn’t know why.

We couldn’t find the culprit for weeks. We checked the drinking water filter and the hand soap, we cleaned the building, we made the primitivists move their roadkill tanning farther from the kitchen. But it wasn't enough. We kept getting sick. We learned later it was giardia.

Giardia is like a little tiny sucker fish in your stomach—not really a fish, it's a microorganism, but it latches its mouth onto your intestinal wall and sits there absorbing all the sugars and nutrients you would otherwise eat, and outputs the results of its metabolism. That means that it’s eating your food and shitting in your guts. They produce a lot of gas too, which has to come out somewhere, so all day long you’re burping out their farts.

No matter how much we washed our hands or cleaned our dishes, everyone kept getting sick. Sometimes we would recover for a minute and make a big decadent carrot cake to celebrate. Then we would all get sick again, shitting everywhere, spreading more of these critters back into our communal body. We learned later it’s the sugar that helps them multiply. Ass to hand to mouth to guts to ass, that’s the life cycle of giardia. And they were thriving.

[---]

Staph, giardia, and scabies in less than three years. Eventually I realized that these plagues were not coincidence. They were an inevitable outcome of the conditions. An organism is only as strong as its boundary layer. A society is much the same.

Our social organism was too open in some ways: the open door policy meant that all types of people could come in. All types of animals, diseases, and ideologies too. Our governance system was by consensus of those present, so as soon as you show up you get a vote. This made the governance completely impossible, as weekend warriors squared off against the people who would actually have to enact whatever decision was made.

We were too closed off as well. So far away in the mountains, with so little connection to the world, we lost immunities to things in the default world. When I returned I was disgusted by advertising, fluorescent lights, saran-wrapped foods, and all the other tissues of our modern technoleviathan. They were repellent to me, viscerally made me sick. I still think this is the correct reaction, but I’ve grown used to it now, and can stomach the grocery store with a smirk.

An organism must have a semi-permeable membrane. The ability to kick things out if they threaten its health, and the ability to intake resources to survive. Disgust is the immune system of the greater social organism. It protects us from contagion. But in a planetary society, we are constantly exposed to new vectors of change. Foreign organisms, environments, ideas; our cultures and societies are fully inflamed around these perceived intruders.

I see this online all the time. I watch as memetic phrases and viral emotions spread through my networks. We attack each other for following the wrong person on social media, for not wearing masks, for being inoculated with RNA, because we are all in constant fear of infection. No two groups can ally without first solving every small difference between them. Even homogenous ideological blocs tear themselves apart with loyalty tests and purity spirals. We are in a great autoimmune spasm of the human species.

If we are all one planetary social organism now, that creature is in pain. Its own organs attack each other, unable to recognize their interconnectedness. We’re constantly putting up boundaries. Boundaries between nations, between computers, between people.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

I’ve learned a lot from experimenting with radical social structures, both in the woods and on the internet. At the commune, I thought we could prototype methods of living that were more egalitarian and ecologically balanced, and then export them past the barrier of our village to replicate. Those experiments were mostly failed utopias.

But I learned something important there, something I believe needs to spread and take hold: not all contagion is destructive. The flower feeds the bee and the bee pollinates the flower; neither can exist without the other. We are not separate species who must fear infection by the other. We are a system of flows.