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Feels like I’m missing an important angle on virus. Sense of a major blindspot. Hmm. Public health, economy, institutional response, secular behavior shifts... what angle are we missing? Working out extra degrees of impact on above angles doesn’t seem to illuminate blindspot.
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Something about this being an important historical long-arc narrative cue. Thinking centuries not decades. Something about this is setting off my longue durée instincts. More Black Death than Spanish flu.
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I think my sense of the uncanny has to do with the extent of miscalibration of the strength of the wilderness/built environment barrier. At the microbial level it barely exists. We are in relation to microbes where we were with lions and tigers a thousand years ago.
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It’s not that the civilizational stack is fragile because of bad design or perverse evolution. Our stack tech is just laughably weak in relation to our microbial environment. A century of parent progress against infectious diseases has created a false sense of security.
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It’s like hurricanes or earthquakes or forest fires vs built environment, but drastically more asymmetric. The biggest, rarest quakes we expect, like Cascadian big one, still only threaten a region. Here we have a decadal threat that can casually threaten us much more broadly.
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Old thread of the parts I think are not mysterious even if difficult
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When this is all over, the question will be how to beef up things that collapsed under the stress. There will be calls to: Nationalize things that fail Privatize things that fail Distribute manufacturing more Distribute inventory more Distribute money more Distribute time more
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Best fit to my blindspot is a version of a hypothesis I’ve entertained for a long time: the rewilding of humanity is beginning. What’s new is that we’re finding this is not even remotely fun. Especially the rewilding of cognition. We’re learning to think like wild animals again.
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Wild cognition, not cognition in the wild. The wild consciousness is not fun to inhabit, compared to the many pleasant escaped realities available to the civilized “enlightened” mind. It’s a mass of unpleasant mind states besieging a small is,and of ignorant bliss phase space.
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The apocalypse of the “civilized” mind is far more consequential than that of the built environment. The Great Weirding has been a first sniff of it so far. This is the first bite.
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What lies beyond is not barbarian mind or savage mind. Those are stages/forks of civilization, not alternatives to it. What lies beyond us wild mind. Or rather rewilded mind. Forged by the cognitive effects of civilization and it’s unwinding.
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