An Impersonal Bureaucratic God

I am, admittedly, no expert in artificial intelligence, quantum entanglement, computer programming or computation.

In fact, my enemies would say I am no expert in anything, and they would be mostly right. My domain of self-proclaimed expertise resides in the world of fantasy, illusion and unfathomable mental processes, whose signature and traces I have spent a lifetime teasing out in the intense one-on-one work of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and also in the creative work of poetry and theatre.

No doubt I may be deluding myself even with this allusion to personal talent, but to sum it all up I'd say that my professional training and career, my abiding creative interests, and my own art all meet at a common interface -- that border between fantasy and reality, deception and truth, notwithstanding the inherent ambiguities.

Looking back over the Coronavirus Epoch, now in its fourth year, I am struck not only by the savage and slavish devotion of many to the pompous dictates of States, but also by the craven renunciation, by once-honored institutions of health and governance, of accepted foundational principles. Thus Medicine conveniently forgot about natural immunity, treatment and the dangers of new untested interventions, and Medical Institutions, global and national, embarked on a jihad against practitioners who remained faithful to such principles. In New Zealand, I am disheartened to say, the authorities are still harassing doctors who had the temerity to try to help patients by prescribing Ivermectin or suggesting Vitamin D, Zinc, and Vitamin C as promising protective and ameliorating agents.

Governments, empowered by the populations they purport to represent, conveniently seized upon drastic measures to control, while neglecting truly beneficent and sensible measures to mitigate fear and address a threat of illness.

Sacrosanct boundaries have been serially violated throughout, borders have been transgressed, and privacy has been desecrated -- all, ostensibly, in the name of our good common cause of safety.

Under the shadow of fear we allowed ourselves to be masked, contained, and inoculated. At times we were prevented from visiting our elderly and sick and beloved, or paying respects to our loved ones' mortal remains when they died. Coincidentally the line between genders began to be blurred, and the barriers between impulse and action taken down. All because of the putative emergency that 'necessitated' a suspension of ordinary safeguards and customs in favor of hastily adopted and inadequately debated dictates and untested procedures that engulfed most of our known world.

The monies we earned and banked, and banked upon — they too became prey to the grasping and lawlessly invasive arm of governmental entities. And those who dared to opine against the prevailing dogma on the 'commons' offered by social media found themselves disappeared.

We learned over these past years that our freedoms, our monies, our bodies and our souls were all now 'fair game' in this manufactured emergency.  It was quite the trick to convince so many to go so fully along with these sacrifices.  And the neatest part of this trick was for the Organizers and Rulers to have created a vast bureaucratic interface that not only did their bidding but also absorbed responsibility for anything that went awry — like sudden deaths and excess deaths and horrific adverse effects of the unnecessary Jabs.

And as for censorship, well, this too could be relegated to AI-mediated algorithms, as if the hand of Man had given way to this novel and peculiar Deity of impersonal computational complexity.  It is a marvel of moral sanitizing.

Many of my friends and colleagues continue to be puzzled by these developments as aberrations of rationality, while others have long concluded that these actions have been purposefully deceptive and malevolent.

I believe we have entered a new phase, a phase facilitated by astonishing advances in physics and mathematics, a phase that has given birth to a transcendent technological web that is as vast as it is impersonal, as cold as it is efficient. It is, nonetheless, a tool that has been devised and is wielded by the relatively Few in their ceaseless war against the Many.

Perhaps some of the Few believe and worship at the altar of the False Idol they have created, while others are content simply to profit from their sleight of hand. But both camps are united, I suspect, by the thought that they are cheating Death. Whether it is a transhumanist future and/or the imaginary protection of boundless wealth and power, both parties are vying for an illusionary immortality.

Which brings us back full circle to the sad Achilles heel the propagandists knew to strike so well when they launched their Operation: the universal fear of death. How many of my neighbors accepted the destruction of their rights to save their skins? How many became ogres of apartheid and accused the unjabbed of reckless endangerment?

I’m tired of repeating myself, but repeat I must because the danger — the real one, not the feigned — hasn’t gone away. And it is this: the danger that we refuse to accept our deaths and cling to the wildly absurd quest for living our physical lives forever and ever.

In Plato’s Phaedo, the philosopher and gadfly Socrates, who has been condemned to death by the Athenian democracy, confronts his fate with equanimity. The demise of the physical self becomes the portal to the greater life of the Soul.

The Soul, in our times, resides in a Machine, a gigantic faceless and bureaucratically impartial one — or so would the overlords like us to believe. Perhaps that is why they are so frantically despotic in censoring, quashing, silencing, harassing and persecuting any shreds thereof.

But the harder they try the less they will succeed. They, in their smug sadistic ignorance, don’t truly know what they are really up against.

Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D.

October 2023