Contagion: Living With And Through The Plague

By Richard David Hames

What an unprecedented experience the last two years has brought. A global populace has been in a state of extreme trepidation. An instinct for imposing draconian rules to maintain public order was revealed by governments of all persuasions around the world. Meanwhile the global economy shuddered almost to a standstill. Not through nuclear warfare or the climate crisis, both of which continue to present existential threats to humanity, but by a virus we have known about for at least a couple of decades. A pathogen so tiny it remains invisible to the naked eye.

Apart from the death toll, now exceeding 5.143 million people, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has caused the suicide rate to jump, mental health problems to increase as families and loved ones remain isolated from each other, disruptions and civil disobedience to be met by rubber bullets and riot police, and a spate of conspiracy theories ranging from the intriguing to the plainly absurd to fascinate the popular press. At the same time every individual has experienced the pandemic from wildly different perspectives.

Contagion is a collection of ten essays commissioned by my friends in 2021 at the height of the Convid-19 pandemic. Each essay explores one or more aspects of life and death, business and education, health and travel, as we face potentially the most grievous biomedical threat to humanity since the Spanish Flu over a century ago.
Each of the ten essays in this anthology is connected in some way to the current pandemic. Akin to Alfred Hitchcock's cameo appearances in each of his movies, the spectre of Covid-19 is ever present, though not always overtly, within the context of each of the dialogues. I want readers to take away an understanding of the impermanent nature of knowledge, and the shifting nature of truth, as shards of information spill and cascade around us, while misinterpretations that we bring to any narrative that matters, intermingle in ways that prance into our consciousness and embed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard David Hames
• Release date: Nov 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005812874

Richard David Hames

Dr Richard David Hames is an Australian citizen, born and educated in Europe, now resident in Asia.Recently described as one of this century’s most insightful philosopher-activists, and by Forbes Asia as one of the smartest people on the planet, Richard is considered to be among the world’s most influential intellectuals and strategic knowledge designers.Richard is the Executive Director of the Centre for the Future, Executive Chairman of The Hames Group, and President of the Asian Foresight Institute. Richard works internationally as an adviser to governments and with many of the world’s most innovative and entrepreneurial business corporations. Richard has been a personal mentor to heads of state, government ministers, CEOs, company directors and entrepreneurs across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and South America and is also acknowledged within the foresight community as one of the world's most accurate futurists.A celebrated speaker and writer, Richard is the author of several best-selling books including The Management Myth; Burying the 20th Century and The Five Literacies of Global Leadership. He is currently working on three new books, Contagion; Dancing with the Future; and Arcs of Intersection & Ascent. All three are concerned with the development of a post-humanitarian cosmology and societal paradigms from advanced levels of collective consciousness.

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CONTAGION

LIVING WITH & THROUGH THE PLAGUE

A Collaborative Inquiry

curated by

Richard David Hames

Executive Director – Centre for the Future

Copyright 2021 Richard David Hames

All rights reserved.

DEDICATION

This anthology of essays is dedicated to those whose lives have been interrupted by SARS-CoV-2, who struggle to find meaning or who suffer from depression, are out of work, or who feel neglected within societies that are failing to provide adequately for the physical safety and emotional wellbeing of their citizens.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My writing began in all seriousness when I stopped composing music and turned to words instead. That was in 1984 – the year in which George Orwell's prescient novel was set. As a writer I have been fairly disciplined in recording my thoughts each day. A total of eight published books helped to shape and express what I hope is becoming an original voice. The Hames Report, containing a library of over 350 essays and articles exploring differing facets of our civilization, and what it means to be human in a pluriversal world, evolved into a slightly subversive niche with which I am at ease. More recently, The Virtual Activist gave me an opportunity to compose a brief daily commentary on current affairs. There are still so many more ideas to capture in some form or other.

Contagion: Living With & Through the Plague has been a uniquely challenging project for me. Inviting friends to commission an essay whose theme was close to their passion, yet connected in some way to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and bringing these together into a coherent anthology, was a compositional act of speaking truth. It was also an attempt to express deeper, subliminal patterns existing under the surface of our awareness, as we grapple with the rare experience of a global public health emergency that struck abruptly and often tragically.

I have tried to uncover fresh insights within the intricate tapestry of my writing that most of my readers will be familiar with. And of course I sincerely hope that the sponsors of these essays will be inspired with the result.

I must record my thanks to those of my family and friends who, though remaining discretely in the background, contribute so much to my physical wellbeing and spiritual nourishment. At the start of the pandemic it became clear that Suna and Nico would be safer if they left Bangkok and stayed in our village home in the far northeast of Thailand. I have not seen them for six months now. Unselfishly they gave me the bittersweet gift of solitude, without which I could not have undertaken this enterprise, but also the pain of loneliness at a time when we most needed each other.

A special word of thanks must go to Khwanchit Armatmontri whose devoted friendship and sense of calm has quietly suffused my whole being during the writing of this book. She is the rainbow's arc in my life. To Elizabeth Winkelman who invariably provides encouragement just when I need it and is an integral part of bringing my ideas to the attention of a wider audience. To Tricia Lustig for her kindly prodding. And those of my children, especially my daughter Emilie, who kept in close touch with me during these demanding months to ensure that I remained healthy and in high spirits.

And of course I am grateful for the trust and friendship I have received from the patrons of this anthology which I appreciate in ways that can never be fully expressed in words – even given my extensive vocabulary! They are Steve and Margaret Graham from The Graham Group; Michelle Loader and Nikki May from Fisher Leadership; Larry Quick, David Platt and all the team at Resilient Futures; Alain Ruche; Richard Burnett; Stuart McGregor; Glenn Drew; Oscar Tymon; Ernest Stabek and Susanne Bransgrove. Thankyou all for your support. You urged me to push myself beyond the limits of my usual cadence, while remaining true to an innately heretical impulse. I did not deviate from that course in spite of knowing that for many readers my thoughts will still amount to secular blasphemy! There is little in these pages that the crowds at Davos or Extinction Rebellion will recognise or know how to deal with! And that is my intention.

Richard David Hames

Thana City – Bangkok

9th October 2021

CONTENTS

Dedication & Acknowledgements

Preface: Contagion 1 – Living With & Through the Plague

And the People Stayed Home

You Never Can Tell – My Mother's Wisdom & Other Sagas

The Floating World – Exploring the Ontology of Contagion

Life on a Bike & Other Cycles (As Distinct From The Six-o'clock News)

The Languishing & Flourishing of Leadership

Functional Families – Women & Leadership in Family Business

Planet Reliability – A Real & Present Danger for Business

Letting Go! – How One Man Escaped the Trap of Manufactured Normalcy

Powered by Nature – Can Tourism Have a Sustainable Future?

A Plague of Memes & Misinformation – Pandemics, Reactive Behaviour & the Erosion of Trust

Population & Related Taboos – Homo Sapiens and the Extraction-to Extinction Model of Progress

On the Psychologist's Couch – The Voice & Conscience of Industrial Economism

Lockdowns & Aftershocks – A World in Upheaval

Postscript: Contagion 2 – The Imprint & The Future

PREFACE

Contagion 1: Living With & Through the Plague

The real problem of humanity is we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and God-like technology.

Edward O. Wilson

Conflicting Concerns

What an unprecedented experience the last two years has brought. Almost all of humanity has been in a state of extreme apprehension. An instinct for imposing stringent rules so as to maintain some semblance of order was revealed by governments of all persuasions around the world. Possibly for the first time humans grasped what it means to be part of a single family – a community of mind. Meanwhile the global economy shuddered almost to a standstill. Not through nuclear warfare or climate breakdown, both of which continue to present existential threats, but by a virus whose genus we have known about for decades. A pathogen so small that it remains invisible to the naked eye.

Apart from the death toll, now officially approaching 4.8 million people, although the real figure could be closer to 16 million based on new ways of calculating mortality, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has caused suicide rates in some countries to jump, mental health problems to increase as families and loved ones remain isolated from each other, civil disobedience to be met with rubber bullets and riot police, and a spate of conspiracy theories ranging from the intriguing to the plainly absurd mesmerizing much of the popular press.

At the same time every individual has experienced the pandemic from wildly differing perspectives. I wanted to explore the outbreak through the eyes of others and from diverse perspectives, including the occasional satire and absurdity that stalk contemporary existence. The result is Contagion: Living With & Through the Plague.

Contagion is a collection of thirteen essays commissioned by my friends in 2021 at the height of the Covid-19 tragedy. Each essay explores one or more aspects of life and death, business and politics, personal relations, health and travel, as we face potentially the most grievous biomedical threat to humanity since the Spanish Flu over a century ago.

And the People Stayed Home was written on 30th March 2020, just after the WHO announced that Covid-19 was now to be considered a pandemic. It comprises the personal impressions and body of extant knowledge I expressed from the outset of this drama. This is counterbalanced by the final essay, The Imprint & The Future, in which I try to imagine the most beneficial and hopeful outcomes arising from our shared predicament.

The Floating World: Exploring the Ontology of Contagion looks at narratives of meaning inherent within human progress, and what must change in order for the human experiment on Earth to persist. Life on a Bike & Other Cycles, examines patterns and time-cycles, posing the challenge of whether we can continue to dance in the destruction we constantly create. The Languishing and Flourishing of Leadership turns the spotlight onto what literacies will be needed to lead in a world that is markedly different from the one we were living in 2019.

Functional Families scrutinizes the role of women in family business in Australia and the need for greater levels of empathy and caring in a society under stress. Planet Reliability takes the challenge of disruption, presenting it as a real and present danger to business and examining ways we can move forward together by thinking differently about 2nd-order change. Letting Go is the true-life tale of how one man managed to escape the trap of normalcy manufactured for him by precedent and the expectations of so many others.

Powered by Nature looks at the future of tourism as a regenerative catalyst for community systems in a state of decline. A Plague of Memes & Misinformation examines the erosion of public trust in officialdom – particularly as this applies to alternative medicines and treatments which are routinely disparaged by conventional science. Population & Related Taboos inquires into the issue of human numbers – their past and future impact on the 'extraction-to-extinction' model of industrial production that has become the basis of capitalism.

On the Psychologist's Couch features an interview between the industrial economy and a psychologist. As we listen to the economy arguing for its future role to be in service to human purpose, we realise that humanity must adjust its priorities in order to survive, least of all prosper. Finally Lockdowns & Aftershocks examines the likelihood of further pandemics, presenting possible paths out of the traps associated with our unrelenting addiction for more and more material goods, along with continued growth at any cost, given that we equate growth with progress.

A Shifting Context

Akin to Alfred Hitchcock's cameo appearances in each of his movies, the spectre of Covid-19 is ever present, though not always overtly, within the context of each of these essays. I hope readers take away an appreciation of the impermanent nature of knowledge, and the shifting nature of truth, as shards of information spill and cascade around us, while misinterpretations that we bring to any narrative that matters, intermingle in ways that prance into our consciousness and embed.

From the earliest days of my involvement in this topic until today, the truth surrounding the origins of the virus have morphed as new evidence became available. In February 2020 I appeared on Australian television to confirm that what we were experiencing was most probably a zoonotic transfer from bats. Recent studies have convinced me that this virus was actually fabricated in the Wuhan laboratory from gain-of-function research, from which it then accidentally escaped. Additional factors continue to trouble me however. Even now it is too complicated to settle upon an absolute truth. The ground shifts under us constantly and in ways that can be unsettling. For example...

Constant. Intense. Intentional. I am talking about government propaganda built on lies, half-truths and the corruption of science. What are these falsehoods you ask?

The first and most problematic is the proposition that it was inevitable SARS-CoV-2 would develop into a full-blown public health crisis. Certainly the manner in which most governments and public health officials reacted to the WHO's declaration of a pandemic probably made things worse, unwittingly contributing to an escalating global emergency. There can be no denying the deadliness of the disease. Nor should the bio-medical miracle of discovering a vaccine in just a few months rather than years be sneered at. But information now accruing concerning the origins of the virus indicate it could have been halted had Chinese authorities in Wuhan acted quickly and decisively to contain the spread of what now appears to be a lab leak of a fabricated coronavirus engineered using gain-of-function research. Then again, if EcoHealth Alliance had not channelled funds from the US into Wuhan in order to continue researching coronaviruses after the 2015 moratorium on gain-of-function activities, the entire problem might never have materialised.

Once the virus escaped, of course, the situation became a different proposition. If a containment strategy had been universally applied – quarantining the elderly and inform – accompanied by weekly public announcements reminding citizens to take simple precautionary measures, such as practising basic hygiene, boosting natural immunity with vitamin D, and exercising common sense, we might be witnessing a less lethal plague, greater resilience in the economy, and a less divided community to that which has transpired. Of course this remains sheer speculation.

But now several points of reckoning have been reached. We need to fathom out an exit strategy after the fear-induced muddle of quarantine, social distancing, mask-wearing, emergency lockdowns, and earnest entreaties to get vaccinated, even when vaccines were unavailable and demand outstripped supply, have failed to halt the virus – as anyone familiar with complex epidemiological systems realised they probably would. Lockdowns, for example, might not turn out to be the enduring success they were once presumed to be.

With established boundaries breaking down and the most unlikely people becoming susceptible to right-wing extremism, we now run the risk of divisions opening up in society between the vaccinated and the un-vaxxed, and between those who trust authority and those who can not. Psychologically speaking we must find ways of short-circuiting hard-wired tendencies that trap us in apathy, inaction, and a reluctance to future-proof the present. And pragmatically we must debate the wisdom of conducting gain-of-function research if an accident of this nature can do so much harm.

In terms of the pandemic itself it is also evident that the most fundamental lesson of all has not sunk in. That in order to avoid continuing uncertainty, with confusion dragging on for months, and possibly years, any managed recovery must be designed, agreed and coordinated across borders. It must accommodate the weakest links, (such as international travel, sanitary safeguards, and bilateral deals between Big Pharma and rich nations that left poorer countries largely unvaccinated) and not be applied unilaterally or indiscriminately without extensive consultation. The virus is ignorant of the borders we scrawl on maps, and it takes absolutely no notice of the Gregorian calendar, as we have discovered. Cooperation is therefore vital.

This is before we start to take a long, hard look at the aftermath. We are facing a mental health crisis that has yet to reveal its full impact; a mainstream economy reeling from the impacts of impulsive lockdowns; small to medium enterprises decimated, and even iconic brands filing for bankruptcy; and a virulent contagion of fear and mistrust that threatens our most venerable institutions. What kind of normalcy can be conjured out of all this?

Are we really open to trusting governments who habitually refuse to face reality and who distort science to fit their own versions of the truth? What about the large pharmaceutical companies and their need to post profits for shareholders in an industry captured by Vanguard and Blackrock? What are the motivations that drive the key players in this vaudeville? And to whom should we now turn for the truth when increasing numbers of GPs, as well as experienced clinicians in hospitals and ICU units are instructed what to say and do, while treatments for increasing immunity against viral infections have been mostly ignored, in what is now a contagion of fear?

Purely as an example of the underlying confusion, and the various ways in which we have reacted to these unprecedented events, I want to consider just three ambiguous outliers:

• the known history of coronaviruses relative to the patent archive

• correspondences between benchmark events and influential playmakers

• the impact of how and what we measure in terms of sense-making and shaping knowledge.

The Virus & The Vaccine

Which came first: the vaccine or the virus? As it happens Pfizer patented a spike protein coronavirus vaccine in 1999. Back then it was considered a veterinary problem. All through the 1990's Dr. Ralph Baric, an eminent virologist at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and a long-time research collaborator with Zheng-Li Shi, the so-called 'bat woman' from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had focused his world-leading research on cardiomyopathy in rabbits. We must also remember that even today almost 80 per cent of the drugs produced by pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer are targeted at animals.

In 2008, just five years after the first 2002-2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-1) epidemic, Baric published an article in which he described the creation in the laboratory of an entirely new virus capable of producing a human SARS-like infection. In that study, he demonstrated that his new synthetic virus was capable of infecting human lung cells to a similar extent as the first human SARS pandemic virus. He had genetically spliced the receptor binding domain (RBD) from the SARS virus onto his new artificial virus through what is known as gain-of-function research.

Similar to the 2008 study described above, Baric and Zheng-Li Shi jointly published a 2015 scientific article describing the insertion of the RBD from a newly isolated coronavirus (SHC014) into SARS-CoV-1, the virus responsible for the 2002-2003 SARS pandemic. Baric and Zheng-Li Shi combined the components of two coronaviruses and produced another novel virus, SHC014-MA15, which showed what they described as robust viral replication both in vitro [cell cultures] and in vivo [animals], using models adapted to test for human infectivity.

Other genetic engineering techniques, such as the insertion of a furin polybasic basic cleavage site, which is found in the Covid-19 virus, but in no other close natural relative, as well as individual artificial 'point' mutations, have been widely used in coronavirus research.

Since the initial 2002-2003 SARS pandemic, which also originated in China, there have been attempts to create a broad-spectrum vaccine that would provide long-lasting protection against a variety of coronaviruses that might emerge from nature and infect humans. One approach has been the development of live-attenuated 'viral vector' vaccines like those used for the childhood diseases measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox, in which a weakened or 'attenuated' form of the virus that causes the disease is manufactured. Because live-attenuated vaccines are so similar to the natural infection they help prevent, a strong, long-lasting, and even life-time immune response can be produced.

In a 2018 scientific article, Baric offered a strategy for the development of a broad-spectrum, live-attenuated vaccine for coronaviruses. Baric also identified the inherent danger of live-attenuated virus vaccines that have been shown to revert back to their original pathogenic structure after administration to a recipient. That risk is exponentially increased for 'self-spreading' vaccines – essentially genetically engineered live-attenuated vaccines designed to move through populations in the same way as viruses, but rather than causing disease, conferring protection. I would not be at all surprised to see Big Pharma urging the scientific community to develop the mRNA platform as the standard technology in the future given the potential global market for such vaccines.

Correspondences

In 1999, a year before SARS-1, Dr. Anthony Fauci who was already Director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US, decided to fund a contentious research program aimed at creating a recombinant infectious replication defective coronavirus. This was an attempt to find a way to make the coronavirus more capable of infecting human cells. Humanized mice were used in this study together with a number of human models for lung and cardiac tissue. In that same year Pfizer patented a spike protein coronavirus vaccine.

By 2002 Dr. Fauci had patented a mechanism of amplifying the pathogenicity of coronavirus so that it would infect humans. In other words the world did not have SARS-1 prior to scientists manipulating the coronavirus to become more capable of infecting humans. By 2013 all of the symptoms that have been identified as Covid-19 were isolated and uploaded into servers in Wuhan.

In 2015, following a moratorium on all gain-of-function research in the US, including in the most secure bio-safety level 4 laboratories, the coronavirus research shifted to China with funds provided by the US via EcoHealth Alliance, whose director was the British zoologist Peter Daszak.

Unfortunately links like this, available for anyone to see in the public record, have been ignored by a press seemingly preferring to strike dread within Western societies at least by following a particular logic and its anti-Chinese sentiment. In this way statements from various parties have been taken out of context and the gaps exploited as the basis for a range of wild conspiracy theories.

For example, Peter Daszak openly stated that the public needed to be convinced to take a pancoronavirus vaccine. This was in 2015 after SARS-1 had officially been eradicated. Daszak also stated, in the published proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of 2016, that we need the media to create the hype and we need to use the hype to our advantage. Conspiracy theorists leapt on statements like that, using them as proof that Event 201, a fairly routine pandemic simulation exercise held in late 2019, involving various players from public health agencies, the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was in fact a dress rehearsal for a deliberate attempt to infect the human population.

Although such