The Doors of Perception & the learned foolery of research

Alfred Dedreux as a Child (Géricault);

Images from Hal Ashby's, Harold and Maude (USA, 1971); 

Hupert Sheldrake: Science Set Free/ Part 1 & 2 (talk, 2013);

John C. Lilly interviewed by Jeffrey Mishlove (from Youtube); 

Documentary about John C. Lilly's Dolphin House (from Youtube); 

Brain Coordination Dynamics (Scott Kelso, Florida Atlantic University, 2010);

From Waterboarding to Rape: Abu Zubayda Depicts Torture (Democracy Now, Youtube, 2023); 

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Vestibule:

"He was delicate; he had mischievous moods; he could play. He carried his rag doll about him for company until he was eight. He was fond of grumbling."

Sybille Bedford

"Don't poke your nose into my papers. The smell of ink will poison you."

The New Saying
"Não estou aprendendo lições senão da vida."
Clarice Lispector

"... le génie est le meneur de jeu en personne... Peut-être est-il aujourd'hui même dans un endroit auquel on ne pense guère. Car c'est souvent un hérétique aux yeux du dogme. L'école ferait bien de le garder comme un secret dans une chambre close... un mage! Il faudrait donner un cours en dehors du complexe scolaire... construction du secret."

Paul Klee (traduction par Pierre-Henri Gonthier)

"Daniela, telefonando de Londres, ficou horrorizada. Achou que eu tivesse me convertido a algum novo tipo de religião."

Gerald Thomas

"... there is a critical blindspot. The more intently we look for the answer in terms of the grid, the more impossible the task becomes."

Thomas P. Kasulis

"Nietzsche critique Darwin, parce que celui-ci interprète l'évolution, et même le hasard dans l'évolution, d'une manière toute réactive. Il admire Lamarck, parce que Lamarck a pressenti l'existence d'une force plastique vraiment active..."

Gilles Deleuze

"Quand comme moi on répond par l'affirmative on est bien obligé de détester d'abord le marxisme puisque ses bases sont uniquement rationalistes."

André Masson (Lettre à Georges Bataille, 6 octobre 1935)

"Si j'insiste autant c'est pour bien affirmer que je ne peux m'intéresser à aucune activité intellectuelle qui ne dénoncera pas d'abord l'activité inconsidérée des sciences dites exactes..."

André Masson (Lettre à Georges Bataille, 8 novembre 1935)

"... cette force d'inertie dont tout le monde parle à mots couverts, et qui n'est jamais devenue si obscure que depuis que toute la terre et la vie présente se sont mêlées de l'élucider..." 

Artaud

"... la dromosphère d'accélération se substituant, in extremis, à la noosphère des élus de Dieu d'un Teilhard de Chardin, lui-même victime du grand lavage de cerveau de la propagande du Progrès..." 

Paul Virilio (Le Grand Accelerateur)

"O dr. Antônio Álvares dos Santos, médico-adjunto do exército que acompanhava a expedição, enlouqueceu."

Euclides da Cunha (Caderneta de Campo)

"Remember, the sixties counterculture was centered on the campuses. Berkeley. Kent State. Columbia. Madison. Austin. Boulder. Seattle. In the 1980s, however, the colleges, the source of our future, have seethed with rest."

"At this point it dawned on me that this clinic, supposedly set up to deal with sexual arousal, was the most antiseptic, mechanical, unerotic place I had ever encountered. I could feel my reservoir of sexual desire rapidly draining away. If I didn't have an erection problem before, I was very likely to catch one in here. This place could make Casanova take a vow of chastity."
Timothy Leary

"Why, when he himself was pointing to serious flaws related to the fundamental assumptions, did he want to teach this nonsense? His response was that there were two reasons: the first was "P.E." "P.E.?" I asked. "What is P.E.? Population explosion? Punctuated equilibrium? Physical education?" "No," he replied, "P.E. is 'physics envy,'" which is a syndrome in which scientists in other disciplines yearn for the mathematically explicit models of physics. His second reason was even more insidious: if he didn't couch his studies in the neo-Darwinist thought style (archaic and totally inappropriate language, in my opinion), he wouldn't be able to obtain grant money that was set up to support this kind of work."

Lynn Margulis (Gaia is a Tough Bitch Conversation)

"In fact, this method of treatment has been largely neglected. Apomorphine is a metabolic and psychic regulator that can be discontinued as soo as it has done its work. The world is deluged with tranquilizers and energizers but htis unique regulator has not received attention."

"'Defense is meaningless in the present state of our knowledge,' said The Defense looking up from an electron microscope."

William S. Burroughs

"Há, por pura preguiça intelectual, uma resistência confortável no mundo científico que pesquisa 'medicamentos' para curar doenças humanas torturando cobaias. Em pleno terceiro milênio, ei-los injetando xampu nos olhos de ratinhos para descobrirem a fórmula do antialérgico equivalente. Mexam a bunda, senhores doutores, há mais soluções alternativas entre o céu e a terra do que sonham vossas vãs cegueiras."

Rita Lee

"Les travaux qui me valent la bienveillante attention de l’Académie royale datent d’il y a vingt-cinq ans, d’une époque où je faisait partie du milieu scientifique et où je partageais pour l’essentiel son esprit et ses valeurs. J’ai quitté ce milieu en 1970 et, sans renoncer pour autant à ma passion pour la recherche scientifique, je me suis éloigné intérieurement de plus en plus du milieu des scientifiques."
"Or, dans les deux décennies écoulées l’éthique du métier scientifique (tout au moins parmi des mathématiciens) s’est dégradée à un degré tel que le pillage pur et simple entre confrères (et surtout aux dépens de ceux qui ne sont pas en position de pouvoir se défendre) est devenu quasiment une règle générale, et qu’il est en tout cas toléré par tous, y compris dans les cas les plus flagrants et les plus iniques."
"Dans ces conditions, accepter d’entrer dans le jeu des prix et des récompenses serait aussi donner ma caution à un esprit et à une évolution, dans le monde scientifique, que je reconnais comme profondément malsains, et d’ailleurs condamnés à disparaître à brève échéance tant ils sont suicidaires spirituellement, et même intellectuellement et matériellement."
"C’est cette troisième raison qui est pour moi, et de loin, la plus sérieuse. Si j’en fais état, ce n’est nullement dans le but de critiquer les intentions de l’Académie royale dans l’administration des fonds qui lui sont confiés. Je ne doute pas qu’avant la fin du siècle des bouleversements entièrement imprévus vont transformer de fond en comble la notion même que nous avons de la « science », ses grands objectifs et l’esprit dans lequel s’accomplit le travail scientifique. Nul doute que l’Académie royale fera alors partie des institutions et des personnages qui auront un rôle utile à jouer dans un renouveau sans précédent, après une fin de civilisation également sans précédent…"
"Je suis désolé de la contrariété que peut représenter pour vous-même et pour l’Académie royale mon refus du prix Crafoord, alors qu’il semblerait qu’une certaine publicité ait d’ores et déjà été donnée à cette attribution, sans l’assurance au préalable de l’accord des lauréats désignés. Pourtant, je n’ai pas manqué de faire mon possible pour donner à connaître dans le milieu scientifique, et tout particulièrement parmi mes anciens amis et élèves dans le monde mathématique, mes dispositions  vis-à-vis de ce milieu et de la « science officielle » d’aujourd’hui."

Alexandre Grothendieck (lettre adressé au secrétaire perpétuel de l’Académie royale des sciences de Suède, publiée en Avril 1988 dans le journal Le Monde
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Main Hall:

"There is always money for, there are always doctorates in, the learned foolery of research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced whom to say what when? ...But when it comes to finding out how you and I, our children and grandchildren, may become more perceptive, more intensely aware of inward and outward reality, more open to Spirit, less apt, by psychological malpractices, to make ourselves physically ill, and more capable of controlling our own autonomic nervous system... no really respectable university or church will do anything about it...

Besides, this matter of education in the non-verbal humanities will not fit into any of the established pigeonholes. It is not religion, not neurology, not gymnastics, not morality or civics, not even experimental psychology. This being so the subject is, for academic and ecclesiastical purposes, non-existent and may safely be ignored altogether or left, with a patronizing smile, to those whom the Pharisees of verbal orthodoxy call cranks, quacks, charlatans and unqualified amateurs," Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception.

By "non-verbal humanities," Huxley means investigations possibly related to traditional academic disciplines such as philosophy, history, the study of literature, painting etc., but not hampered by the many conceptual systems and "notions" that hinder, for the only benefit of the monopoly of academic priesthoods, direct experience of reality as a Bergsonian living field of interconnected intensities. (It is through Henri Bergson that Huxley makes sense of his experience with mescaline. Bergson comes second only to William Blake in terms of importance to Huxley's essay.)

Huxley criticism of universities and churches is fair and even more valuable now than when he wrote it. The only (but serious) problem with this essay is Huxley understanding of art mainly in terms of "symbols," as if a painting or a madrigal would have to "stand for" other things.
What Cézanne and Alban Berg do is definitely more than merely representing things. And in "Heaven and Hell," Huxley recognizes that "in nature, as in a work of art, the isolation of an object tends to invest it with absoluteness, to endow it with that more-than-symbolic meaning which is identical with being." He also tempers his criticism of Modern art: "Looking at Ny, Ny, I was amazed to see that every pictorial device invented by the old masters of non-representational art and reproduced ad nauseam by the academicians and mannerists of the school, for the last forty years or more, makes its appearance, alive, glowing, intensely significant, in the sequences of Mr. Thompson's film."

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"Heretics":

"... historians of science have suggested that... the military spirit is identifiable even in the pragmatic and instrumentalist attitude toward high-energy physics that characterized many American theorists" (Kragh, Quantum Generations); 

"... one of the effects of the new kind of big science was a marked shift of the role of the physicist, from an individual researcher to a small wheel in a collective research effort. It was a shift that many physicists of the old school deplored. One of them was Percy Bridgman, the Nobel laureate and philosopher of science, who argued that the new style of physcis was detrimental to creative ideas and intellecutal freedom... this was a critique to be repeated and reinforced by a younger generation of physicists" (Kragh, Quantum Generations);

"Ehrenfeld meanwhile went on publishing all his observations, which continued to show a far greater variability than Milikan's selected data. Ehrenfeld was disregarded while Milikan won the Nobel Prize..." (Rupert Sheldrake, Seven Experiments that Could Change the World);

"Peer review and refereeing procedures act as important quality checks, and are no doubt often effective, but they have a built-in bias. They tend to favor prestigious scientists and institutions" (Sheldrake, Seven Experiments);

"We have become a scientific society. This society has produced all sorts of discoveries and technology, but if it leads to destruction, either through war or through devastation of natural resources, then it will have been the least successful society that ever existed" (David Bohm, interviewed by David Peat);

"It seemed that physics did not have as much meaning as I thought it had. It turned out to be not so different from, let us say, business. A businessman does whatever will please his customers and get him money, get him whatever he wants. A lot of physicists seem to be in that boat. They found out what was wanted and did it and hoping thereby to gain various advantages" (David Bohm, conversation with Maurice Wilkins);
"I remember when I got back to Europe from Israel, I came in the summer of ‘56, and I met this fellow... whom I had known fairly well in America. He began to talk about my ideas and he took me aside one day and said, “You know, you better not talk so freely about your ideas, that people will steal them.” The point is that the people became more interested in using ideas to get ahead to get ahead and to gain advantages... This is the way I can get a job and get ahead and make it security and win a Nobel Prize and whatever" (David Bohm, conversation with Maurice Wilkins);

"And then I was going to say, at the university I was a little bit disappointed in the teachers there because in the first two years I wanted to ask questions about relativity and about quantum mechanics and about the foundations of these subjects, but I was kept being told not to worry about all that but to pass the exams — so, I was very disappointed until the last year as an undergraduate... at school we had a good physics master and he always was willing for me to talk about all sorts of topics in physics and so it was really that interaction that inspired me. And then when I got to university I was expecting a lot more than I got" (Basil Hiley, interviewed by Olival Freire);

"... I was brought up in an atmosphere where it was generally agreed that there was something basically wrong with the ‘52 paper of Bohm. But, there was more to it than that. There was a general atmosphere in physics, that there was something, I would almost say “evil” about it, and I never understood why there was that feeling around. It seemed that if somehow you touched it and thought about it, it would corrupt your physics forever more" (Basil Hiley, interviewed by Olival Freire);

"... everybody who’s doing physics now, ninety-nine percent of them are following the tradition that is already laid down. So, where are you going to get your new ideas from? You know, new ideas are going to come from looking at different philosophical frameworks to see if there is anything in those frameworks which is the sort of thing that you can use to develop the way you’re thinking. I found reading Fichte and Schelling..." (Basil Hiley, interviewed by Olival Freire);

"... the youngsters, you know... they’re forced into a difficult job market in academia, they are sort of tailoring their research to what is expected and I think this cannot be but bad for physics in general. Now, the great thing about the research in the ‘60s and the ‘70s was, yes there was prejudice... but because there was more freedom from the constraint, the university constraints, you know (“How many publications? Which journals do you publish your papers in?”)... all this absolute nonsense that has been going on since the ‘80s and ‘90s has now stopped the creativity that we had in the ‘60s"(Basil Hiley, interviewed by Olival Freire);

"Another piece of advice I was given was, ‘Find a very, very small area in physics and then just publish about ten or fifteen papers on it; then you’ll get a reputation. Then you can go and do this other stuff.’ In fact - another little story — when I did go and spend a sabbatical with Bohm, a very senior physicist in England asked me to come visit him for a few days. He took me out to dinner one night and, very fatherly, said he wanted to give me some advice. He said he knew I was working with Bohm and that it probably wasn’t a very good thing to be doing. It would be bad for me, and really I should try to dissociate myself from him and go back to doing small pieces of physics. ‘Do small problems,’ he said. ‘That’s the way that physics is going to progress, by people doing little bits of things.’ Another person told me that his ambition was to be just a footnote in a textbook" (David Peat, interviewed by Mike Towler);
"The saddest people on Earth are junior faculty hoping to get tenure at a university, because they are forbidden to smile in public, crack jokes, or make eye contact, and they absolutely can't be seen as being even mildly interested in tabloid stories. It's the kiss of death to put one's twenty-plus years of education and training in jeopardy by being perceived as too sympathetic about controversial issues" (Dean Radin, Real Magic, p. 13);
Brian D. Josephson's critical review of BBC's program Heretic:
"For the last six weeks, BBC2 TV has been running a series called 'Heretic', detailing the responses of the scientific community to ideas generally considered unacceptable by scientists, and the treatment given to those advocating such ideas... In every case a similar story unfolded: dismissal of the claims as being nonsense or impossible, generally without any serious attempt to look at the evidence or the arguments... The sense of self-superiority of the critics in many instances was in striking contrast to the humility, integrity and sincerity manifested by workers such as Robert Jahn (an expert in rocket engineering forced to resign his position as Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at Princeton University because of this unconventional side to his research interests and, for a time, not allowed to talk about that research). Jahn became interested in psychokinesis because an undergraduate at Princeton asked if he could choose as a project the investigation of possible effects of mind on electronic circuits. Jahn assumed that there would be no such effects, but thought setting up an experiment to look for them would be a useful exercise in itself and agreed; to his considerable surprise the results were positive. These results held up under further investigation and since that time the phenomenon has been studied by Jahn and his associates in great detail and in a variety of ways. As in a number of the cases, finding out the truth was more important for Jahn than whether others would accept his discoveries and whether work in the area would advance his career. Critics of his work have been numerous, but most have been armchair ones, who have not taken the trouble to find out what the experiment actually entailed", Brian D. Josephson (Times Higher Education Supplement, 12 Aug. 1994);

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More recent & general material:

'In the U.S., however, industry dug in, seeking not only to discredit the research but to cast pesticide companies as a solution to the problem. Lobbying documents and emails, many of which were obtained through open records requests, show a sophisticated effort over the last decade by the pesticide industry to obstruct any effort to restrict the use of neonicotinoids. Bayer and Syngenta, the largest manufacturers of neonics, and Monsanto, one of the leading producers of seeds pretreated with neonics, cultivated ties with prominent academics, including vanEngelsdorp, and other scientists who had once called for a greater focus on the threat posed by pesticides' (Many seeds in the U.S. come precoated with neonicotinoids, The Intercept);

'Undercover footage at the Laboratory of Pharmacology and Toxicology (LPT) near Hamburg, published by Cruelty Free International and Soko Tierschutz, shows technicians with metal prongs grabbing macaque monkeys by the neck. The monkeys are restrained by braces during testing. The footage also shows primates being handled “violently” by technicians: in one incident a monkey has its head smacked against a door frame...' (Barbaric tests on monkeys lead to calls for closure of German lab, The Guardian);

'I didn’t get the approval letter I needed from the professor that day. Instead I was given an “insider tip” that my research project would probably be evaluated by old-fashioned white men, who would likely be fascinated and impressed by cliches about a woman’s struggles in the Middle East... I left Iran to pursue an academic career where I could have better access to knowledge and collaborate with international scholars. Instead, I feel increasingly trapped in Germany... Projects which depict an oppressed, exotic other – for instance, through examinations of topics such as physical violence in Islamic rituals or the persecution of women in the middle east – tend to be well-received by lecturers and students...' (As an Iranian academic, I'm fed up of being asked to focus on poverty and oppression, The Guardian); 

'Lawrence Krauss, a physicist who retired from Arizona State University, even continued defending Epstein after his 2008 conviction, telling the Daily Beast in 2011: “As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people...”' (Private jets, parties and eugenics: Jeffrey Epstein's bizarre world of scientists, The Guardian); 

'Even as dogs have become beloved pets in the U.S., treated as members of the family, with harsh punishments for those who abuse them, the behavior of corporate and academic entities that subject dogs to gruesome experimentations has barely changed. It’s a strange hypocrisy: Individuals may not abuse these animals, but corporations can...' (Bred do Suffer: Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation, The Intercept);

"In the fall of 1949, the influential scientific General Advisory Committee of the AEC recommended not to proceed with the hydrogen bomb. The majority, consisting of Oppenheimer, Conant, and Lee DuBridge (a physicist and president of Caltech) argued in ethical and political terms that the bomb was unnecessary, indeed, unwanted, because its use would involve a decision to slaughter a vast number of civilians... Fermi and Rabi agreed in the rejection of what they considered to be a danger to humanity as a whole and necessarily an evil thing considered in any light... Arthur Comton had advised hat this development should not be undertaken, primarily because we should prefer defeat in war to a victory obtained at the expense of the enourmous human disaster that would be caused... There were other and louder voices, especially that of Teller, who argued passionately for a thermonuclear crash program. During the beginning of the Cold War, his voice reached the ears of many politicians and, not surprisingly, generals and admirals... President Truman authorized the development of a superbomb based on fusion... Many of America's best physicists, including some of those (Oppenheimer, Bethe and Fermi) who had argued against the superbomb, now engaged collectively in an effort to find a way of how to construct the bomb... by 1952 a thermonuclear test device, called Mike, was ready... It took one and a half years of hard work to develop Mike into a real bomb that could be dropped from an airplane. The result was Bravo... The destructive yield was awesome, corresponding to about 15 megatons of TNT or more than 1000 times as much as the 1945 Hiroshima bomb... The Soviet Union followed quickly in the new arms race..." (Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations) [also, Donald Trump confirms US withdrawal from INF nuclear treaty, The Guardian];

See also:

- the most auspicious tetrahedron;
- what is REAL space, what is REAL number?
- 5G?! Get real;
- list of charming scientists/engineers;
- Dark Consciousness; 

- L'affirmation de l'âne; 

- Structuralism, Poststructuralism; 

- Liste des figures du chaos primordial;
- Scenes Worth of God's Existence; 

And also: 

- Concretos &/ou Brazilian Inteligentsia;

- Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: Brazilian Perspectivism?!
- Augusto Meyer and Machado de Assis;  

- L'intelligence des fleurs; 

- God Save the Queen (Blake's Palace of Wisdom);

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Covid-19 (by Jean-Dominique Michel): 

'Je l’ai dit et le répète: en ces temps de mobilisation collective, nous avons tous à respecter scrupuleusement les mesures qui sont imposées. Même si on doute de celles-ci ou qu’on les trouve inadaptées, aucun d’entre nous ne peut se donner le droit de suivre sa propre idée. Cette compliance -que je n’ai cessé de prôner- m’habite inconditionnellement. Par contre, cette obéissance civile ne doit surtout pas conduire à une interdiction de penser ou de parler.'

'Un possible motif d'inquiétude en revanche est cette affirmation qu'il y aurait des personnes jeunes en quantité non négligeable atteintes de pneumonie et placées sous assistance respiratoire. Elles semblent heureusement survivre, mais évidemment que le nombre de lits en soins intensifs est le paramètre qui pose problème. C’est dans ce paradoxe compliqué entre la très grande innocuité du virus pour l'immense majorité des gens et sa dangerosité extrême dans certains cas que nous sommes trouvés coincés.'

'Raoult a relevé avec ironie qu’il n’était pas impossible que la découverte d’un nouvelle utilité thérapeutique pour un médicament tombé de longue date dans le domaine public soit décevant pour tous ceux qui espèrent un prix Nobel grâce à la découverte fracassante d’une nouvelle molécule ou d'un vaccin… sans oublier la perspective des dizaines de milliards de dollars de revenus à prendre, là où la chloroquine ne coûte littéralement rien.'

'La recherche et l’autorité médicales sont aussi souvent faites de mesquineries, de manipulations, de malhonnêtetés ou d’abus en tous genres, ainsi que de pitoyables mais violents combats d’ego. Sur BFM TV, le Dr Alain Durcadonnet cassait aussitôt du sucre sur le dos de Raoult en rappelant qu’une conclusion scientifique se publiait dans des revues scientifiques et non pas par vidéo… Ceci alors, que dans sa communication, le Pr Raoult (le chercheur français qui, rappelons-le, a le plus publié dans les revues scientifiques dans son domaine) venait évidemment de préciser que l’article décrivant son essai clinique avait été envoyé pour publication à une revue à comité de lecture.'

'La seule stratégie qui fasse sens est de dépister massivement, puis confiner les positifs et/ou les traiter, tout comme les cas à risque puisque c’est possible, comme on le voit en Chine et en Corée, qui ont intégré l’association de dépistages massifs avec la prescription de chloroquine dans leurs treatment guidelines. Ni Hong Kong ni la Corée, deux territoires qui ont connu les plus faibles taux de mortalité face au Covid-19 n’ont imposé de confinement aux personnes saines. Elle se sont simplement organisées différemment.'

'Il n’est pas dans mes habitudes d’être complaisant avec les autorités. J’ai trop souvent vu les ravages de la flatterie et de la veulerie (comme de la critique gratuite ou du procès d'intention) pour tomber dans le piège. Ici, on entend bien des critiques qui me semblent injustes. Oui, notre système de santé n’en est pas vraiment un, on a une industrie de la maladie – ce qui n’est pas pareil. Oui, nos réponses sanitaires sont incroyablement poussiéreuses et même dépassés' (Covid-19: fin de partie? Anthropo-logiques, 03/18/2020);

More on Covid-19 & the US Health System (Jeffrey Sachs):

'Our health system is focused not even first and foremost on curing disease; it’s focused first and foremost on making money. We have drugs that could stop many other epidemics now, like hepatitis C, that don’t do so, because they are priced hundreds of times more than their production costs because of the unbelievably broken system we have to give monopoly power to powerful companies, who then use their unbelievable profits, in part, to buy the Congress. So, the corruption of our political system has driven so much attention to the wrong things, away from our well-being and now even away from our survival.'

'This is a corruption of the most basic human spirit. It’s a kind of sickness that has infiltrated our public life, of now literally money before lives, money before survival. And it leads to a kind of blindness, because it’s not only cruelty that we’re seeing. We’re seeing profound ignorance. Of course, the president is the ignoramus-in-chief. He knows nothing, understands nothing. He’s a vulgar narcissist. But we have so many people in this country that know something, but where are they when Congress is spending $2 trillion? Where are the experts being listen to? Our system is broken because the greed has supplanted the basic values, and the greed has supplanted people who know what to do' (Economist Jeffrey Sachs: Trump “Understands Nothing, Listens to Nothing” as Pandemic Surges in U.S./ Democracy Now, 03/24/2020);

Covid-19 & Agriculture (Yakk Pabst & Rob Wallace):

'The increased occurrence of viruses is closely linked to food production and the profitability of multinational corporations. Anyone who aims to understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous must investigate the industrial model of agriculture and, more specifically, livestock production. At present, few governments, and few scientists, are prepared to do so. Quite the contrary.'

'When the new outbreaks spring up, governments, the media, and even most of the medical establishment are so focused on each separate emergency that they dismiss the structural causes that are driving multiple marginalized pathogens into sudden global celebrity, one after the other.'

'... Globally, and in China, wild food is becoming more formalized as an economic sector. But its relationship with industrial agriculture extends beyond merely sharing the same moneybags. As industrial production–hog, poultry, and the like–expand into primary forest, it places pressure on wild food operators to dredge further into the forest for source populations, increasing the interface with, and spillover of, new pathogens, including Covid-19.'

'The U.S. and Europe have served as ground zeros for new influenzas as well, recently H5N2 and H5Nx, and their multinationals and neocolonial proxies drove the emergence of Ebola in West Africa and Zika in Brazil. U.S. public health officials covered for agribusiness during the H1N1 (2009) and H5N2 outbreaks' (Capitalist Agriculture and Covid-19: a deadly combination/ Climate and Capitalism, 03/11/2020);

Covid-19 & le for intérieur (Julia Kristeva):

"... la mort, cette limite ultime de l’expérience humaine, se trouve occultée dans nos sociétés sécularisées... cette déferlante virale que nous venons de vivre, nous a révélé la vulnérabilité inerrante à la condition humaine, par-delà le grand âge. Je parle ici de la vulnérabilité qui est en nous, qui nous habite et que notre idéologie de la performance, et du gagnant/gagnant s’avère incapable d’assumer..."

"Cette crise sanitaire fait basculer, dit-on, le néocapitalisme libéral dans un capitalisme numérique, ce qui voudrait dire qu’il faudrait organiser le soutient budgétaire direct de l’Etat et trouver des outils numériques capables de faire du « sur mesure » pour baisser les coûts, tout en revalorisant les rémunérations de certaines professions sous-estimées, notamment dans la santé, l’éducation ou la sécurité. Etc… Mais le désastre humain qu’entraine la pandémie me semble tel, qu’il ne pourra pas se résoudre avec les seules mesures politiques, économiques et sanitaires aussi indispensables soient-elles. Nous devons de façon urgente changer de paradigme et mettre la personne au centre de notre logiciel. Aux niveaux essentiels du pacte social : éthique, éducatif, cultuel, politique."

"Alors, une brèche s’ouvre dans leur confinement. Posé sur la table ou l’oreiller du lit de l’internaute stressé et coincé, ce même objet comme oublié facilite en fait le besoin et le désir de se dénuder, de faire tomber le masque, de parler « seul à seul », « pour de vrai ». Déverrouillage de la culpabilité, du faire-semblant, des défenses mondaines s’en suivent. Chacun découvre son « d’intime/extime », « dedans /dehors » qu’il ou elle puise dans les zones fragiles de leur vie, faisant appel à la vitalité de l’analyste. En attente du vaccin, ce n’est pas un anticorps qui s’élabore ainsi, mais un véritable contrefort psychosomatique qui repousse l’effondrement fomenté par l’attaque virale et la désocialisation confinante. Une espèce d’éthique, transversale aux frontières et interdits moraux qu’elle n’ignore pas, et qu’on nomme dans notre jargon un « inter-dire » (Lacan). Pour ma part, j’appelle « reliance » cette mutualité nucléaire de la parole qui constitue l’être parlant et qu’il nous faut retrouver."

"Nous accusons les scientifiques et les politiques d’être « incertains ». Mais c’est l’abyssale incertitude des frontières entre la vie et la mort que les virus révèlent (ces parasites sont-ils des concepts, des molécules ou des êtres vivants ?) et qui nous tombe dessus. Il faut donc se préparer à vivre avec ces menaces présentes à l’intérieur de notre corps et avec lesquelles nous avons cohabité depuis des millénaires, mais qui vont se faire de plus en plus envahissantes. Si rien n’est fait pour les brider la viralité économico-politique risque de nous revenir en boomerang dans l’inévitable réchauffement climatique," ("C'est le for intérieur qu'il s'impose de sauver dans l'état de guerre en cours," L'Arche, Mai/Juin 2020);