The Sacred Left and Right

or deliverance from the loving embrace of the Machine

I’ve recently experienced a sea change in my politics, finding the waters of belief to have drastically shifted around me. In February of 2020, I believed myself to be firmly rooted in the Left, as I had been for about 25 years. I had even considered myself a denizen of the Far Left since 2001. I had thought being on the Left was all about freedom, dignity, liberty, equality, and democracy. And that was where I belonged: in opposition to authoritarian forms of governance, action, thought, and belief, which I associated with the Right. I had thought being on the Right was something that made sense for your pocketbook if you were a millionaire or richer. Otherwise, it made no sense to be on the Right — unless your primary political motivation was a cultural issue that was unpopular on the Left, usually an expression of either religious, racial, or gender bigotry that you wished to impose on the whole of society. As alienated as I now feel from those on the Left, who still think about left and right the way I used to, I also feel liberated in the ability to see the Right differently, and in my ability to now see both the sacred and the authoritarian in each.

The covid lockdown was the activating factor that changed everything for me. I previously authored a companion article to this one: Lockdown Evoked a Political and Conceptual Earthquake in My Life. It relates my experience over the course of months as the lockdown was imposed, and then cemented into place. In time, I came to regard the lockdowns, mandatory masking, and social distancing as authoritarian measures. If you are reading this and want to understand more about why I believe those things, it’s best to direct you to this article: What to Make of Covid and the Lockdowns? rather than repeat myself here.

I understand some readers will believe that covid is much more dangerous than a regular infectious disease (I agree it is slightly more dangerous, but I disagree that it is much more dangerous). Perhaps such a reader believes that a disease this dangerous will only show up once a century, and therefore there is no danger of permanent authoritarianism. They might believe that all of the lockdowns, distancing, and masking measures are effective at curtailing the spread, not just delaying the spread, that covid would be far more deadly and devastating if these measures had not been implemented — and that if stricter measures had been implemented, the effects of covid would be less still. They likely believe that next year, or at worst, in a few years, global vaccination will eliminate the disease, and it will then be about another 100 years before the next superbug arrives. Our leaders will willingly give us our rights back, and we won’t have to insist on them. We will be allowed to shake hands, hug, uncover our faces, and gather again, without having to prove we are diseaseless. This isn’t authoritarianism, it’s just sensible science. After all, our sensible scientists in leadership positions wouldn’t recommend these measures unless they were scientifically verified to be correct.

My response begins like this:

From the inside of authoritarianism, there is actually no such thing as authoritarianism, there is only the common sense to obey the authorities and trust them in everything they say.

I understand the mainstream narrative: The authorities do not coordinate their responses, they simply allow truth to arise to the surface in the free marketplace of ideas, and by the invisible hand of the scientific method. They themselves have also risen to the status of authority through the natural selection of meritocracy. We would know if the authorities were misleading us, because that knowledge would also rise to the top, faithfully reported by the mainstream press, which has likewise been formulated by a naturally-selected meritocratic process that we can implicitly trust.

That mainstream narrative is unfalsifiable and circular in its reasoning if one accepts its premise: The policy authorities cannot be misleading us, because if they were, the media authorities would tell us they were doing so, because we can trust the authorities. Sometimes the media authorities do tell us when the policy authorities have misled us, and the problem is corrected. There are no times in which the policy and media authorities both mislead us on the same issue.

If one is to oppose authoritarianism, one must be willing to consider the possibility that the authorities may be abusing their power. Otherwise, one will never be able to detect the presence of an authoritarian regime. I’m inviting the consideration of our current human moment from that possibility, as that is the only possible way to tell the difference: Are we participating in sensible restrictions that all good, informed people would willingly agree to — even if not forced or coerced by the state? Or have we become subject to authoritarian thought and rule?

Leaving aside for the moment the question of how dangerous covid really is, or whether lockdowns and masks are effective, useful, or detrimental, I am proposing that authoritarianism would be wrong even if it were to produce net effects that could be defended as beneficial. Authoritarianism is a philosophy of boundary-violation, in which a person’s body, beliefs, speech, association, and movements are subject to nonconsensual restriction or modification by the prevailing authority, without due process, justified by that authority’s belief that this is done for the greater good (or else justified for the sake of authority alone). Democracy offers an alternative philosophy in which authorities may not violate these boundaries, other than in the mutual enforcement of the sovereign boundaries for all people, and with due process.

It might be argued that if someone is shown to actively have a contagious infection, it would be democratically permissible to quarantine them against their will — or if strong evidence existed for the efficacy of masks (with widespread agreement with that evidence), to compel that person to wear one — but only for the duration of the infectious period. This might be justified on the principle of protecting the boundaries of others. But to subject people who do not have an infection to such restrictions is a boundary-violation without due process. To require people without infections to submit to this in order to access public accommodations such as stores, restaurants, school, medical care, and travel is also a boundary-violation without due process. So is requiring them to submit to covid testing or vaccination against their will.

As I mentioned before, the argument could be made that such boundary-violations should be done anyway, because the benefits of doing so disproportionately outweigh the harms of not doing so. It is argued that we must impose these restrictions on a million people who are not infected, because we are unable to identify the thousand people who are infected, and that this is done for the greater good. I just want to be clear that this is an authoritarian argument, not a democratic one. That doesn’t mean it’s a good or bad argument, just that it is authoritarian. Since these kinds of restrictions have been imposed on the public en masse, regardless of whether we are infected, we are living under authoritarianism, in violation of our boundaries, due process, and democratic principles. If we are to become an authoritarian people, and no longer a democratic people, we ought to be aware of it.

But what if the response is not justified, even on authoritarian grounds? What if we are being misled into accepting authoritarian measures that do little to prevent harm, or cause more harm than they prevent? Who is in charge of measuring the harm prevented against the harm caused? What level of danger or risk makes it permissible to jettison democracy for authoritarianism? Who gets to make that determination? If the same logic of authoritarian necessity were applied to the seasonal flu, what would make covid different? Or would it be different? The seasonal flu kills over half a million people on Earth each year. Tuberculosis kills 1.5 million every year, about the same number of deaths attributed to covid in 2020. Perhaps we should accept authoritarian rule over our bodies at all times, permanently, forever. But if we don’t accept that, how will we know where to draw the line? And how do we know that line has not been redrawn for us this year, at the level of ordinary risk, or slightly higher than ordinary risk? If that has happened, and we accept that precedent moving forward, then we have adopted authoritarianism as the ongoing and permanent paradigm for human governance, applicable in all situations of ordinary risk.

In the US, and other democracies, our mainstream and social media systems have not permitted this debate to occur. This debate regarding the most fundamental democratic and human rights of the people, is absent from the news (except on some right-wing news outlets), and has been banned and censored by Google, Facebook, and Twitter. The authorities declare that protests and assemblies in opposition to lockdowns are illegitimate, even as other protests and assemblies addressing different issues are permitted or encouraged. If anything is a signal that authoritarianism has replaced democracy, this is it.

This is what I’d like to explore. In terms of political alignment, I have found that in the US, it is the political Left that has almost uniformly endorsed this authoritarian response. Much of the Right has done so as well, but there is a contingent on the Right that is questioning and resisting, with almost nothing of the kind found on the Left. That was the big surprise for me. Having aligned myself with the Left for decades in opposition to authoritarianism and in support of democracy, I would have expected a larger portion of the Left to be questioning and resisting this than the Right. Has something happened to the Left? Or was I simply wrong about what I thought the Left was for all these years?

People who hold my views on covid have been largely demonized by those on the Left. We are ridiculed, dismissed as right-wing, ignorant, selfish, delusional, or psychopathic. I often hear people making these kinds of comments about the “covidiots” and so forth, assuming I agree with them — they have no idea that I am one of the people they despise. After all, I seem like a reasonable, intelligent person. It’s unthinkable that I would oppose the way society has responded.

My opposition to lockdowns, social distancing, mandatory masking, and generally speaking, biomedical authoritarianism, is the most important political issue to me of my lifetime. I’ve been fortunate to live for 40 years in a largely democratic and free society (despite its flaws), and I’ve never been subject to anything approaching this kind of government intrusion on my life before, enacted at the most personal level, even when I lived in China for 7 months.

It’s not just covid. I do believe something has changed in people’s attitudes about democracy over the years. I remember when I was a kid in the ’80s and ’90s — there was this common phrase people would say: “It’s a free country.” It was the kind of thing you might say in response to someone courteously asking permission to share their opinion with you, sit down next to you, or take off their shirt in your presence. No one says “It’s a free country” anymore. I think I stopped hearing this sometime after 911 and the War on Terror. Not only does the country not feel free anymore, it no longer seems to be a popularly held opinion that it ought to be free.

I would rather live in a society where it was legal to discriminate against me for being queer than to live in a society like the one we have right now. Civil liberties and personal rights have been extinguished in favor of the collective’s right to impose preemptive biological security measures on any individual. I would rather live in a society where the rich own everything and I can’t even afford medical care, than accept a social order where people agree that from now on, we must stay six feet apart from others and wear masks everywhere — or at least that it is better to do so anytime we are commanded to by the medical/state/media authorities. And in this preference for the sacred freedoms of bodily autonomy and personal association, I am so alone on the Left that I cannot see myself as even belonging to the Left at all anymore.

This is not just about institutions, political parties and leaders, or media figures on the Left. It’s regular people. For instance, I went on a first date early in October. We met at a park and walked to a picnic table. She insisted that we sit at opposite corners of the table so we could maintain the regulation 6 feet of distance. One the first things she asked me was whether I was excited for the possibility that Trump might die of covid. I told her I didn’t have any of those kinds of feelings about it. As we talked more about covid and what is going on, I shared with her my concerns that we could have a totalitarian society on our hands if we don’t set boundaries on the exercise of authoritarian state power and protect individual rights, especially the right to bodily sovereignty. She was dismissive of my concerns — she shared with me that she saw the covid crisis as an opportunity to impose permanent structural changes on society that would produce what she believed would be beneficial results regarding disease management, climate change, race relations, and policing.

She was unmoved when I shared my belief that individual civil rights and liberties were not only important and sacred to me in my valuing of a free and dignified life as a human being, but are also necessary and important checks on tyranny, preventing the accumulation of unaccountable power. She suggested I might discover life to be improved in a society in which my individual rights had been extinguished (or in which my rights were contingent on the decree of the ruling authority) — and that I couldn’t really say it would be worse until I had lived under it (except I am living under it now, and I don’t like it at all). I reminded her that once an authoritarian and anti-democratic power structure has been installed, there is no way to remove whoever climbs to the top of the power structure other than revolution or civil war. We might change our minds about the virtues of authoritarianism later if we decide they are not actually ruling in everyone’s best interests. She kind of shrugged and conceded that I had a point, but it seemed to her to be a minor point.

In 2019, I still would have been shocked by this conversation. But now, I’ve come to expect this kind of attitude from those aligned with the Left. This was just one example, but I’ve encountered similar versions of this over and over since the pandemic and lockdowns were declared. I’ve also noticed a hostility to democracy expressed in other areas of discourse on the Left, particularly on the issues of race and BLM. I live in Portland, Oregon, the beating heart of Antifa and the BLM protests and riots in the United States. After the 2016 elections, a good friend of mine denounced electoral democracy and joined an Antifa-aligned group — and I’ve had the chance to discuss politics with him and many other friends and acquaintances involved with, or strongly supportive of, the Antifa and BLM movements on the Portland Hard Left.

One increasingly common thread on the Left is the denouncement of Liberals and Liberalism. (This became a favored punching bag of my Antifa friend.) Although I believe part of this is due to a conflation of the term Liberal with the pro-corporate, pro-finance policies of centrist Democrats (which I think could be more accurately described as Neo-liberal) — the hostility to Liberalism goes deeper than this. I’m reminded of a moment in June here in Portland, at the height of the George Floyd protests and rioting: A group of activists found a statue of George Washington in the city, toppled it, and defaced it. Many statues were being targeted at the time, but this one stood out to me.

Now, I’m not sentimental by any means about Washington or any of the other American Founders (except Thomas Paine, for whom I do have sentimental affection), but I found myself disturbed by this all the same. Setting aside all of the valid critiques one could make of Washington, more important to me is what Washington represents to the country. More than any other single person, he represents the republic itself, founded on the principles of liberal democratic governance and rights. Yes, those rights were withheld from all people except white, property-owning men at first, but the franchise gradually expanded over the years to all people as the country increasingly lived up to and embraced those principles of liberal democracy that were there from the beginning. And in every case of this successful expansion, it was achieved by appealing to those founding principles.

So what does it mean to chuck old George onto the trash heap of history, and to deface and dehumanize his image while doing so? Does it mean you’re a good anti-racist speaking out against a slave-holder? Yes, I’m sure that was the primary motivation, but it’s more than that. The prevailing view on the Left these days, as I’ve heard from many proponents, is that liberal democracy itself is actually not a good thing, but was invented as a Trojan horse for patriarchal white supremacy. We are not to be fooled by ideologies of individual rights because the liberal colonizers hide behind these notions of rights and equality in order to perpetuate continued evils through manufactured consent.

In fact, the Left now argues that we should toss equality itself on the scrap heap; it is to be replaced by equity. With equality, the state prohibits discrimination in application of the laws and access to public accommodations so that every citizen has equal access to the democracy, and people will be free to create their own lives and relationships. But this is seen as insufficient, because equality is not able to stamp out prejudice in people’s hearts and minds, nor prevent them from acting accordingly in their private lives. With equity, the authorities step in with a heavier hand, assuming that any difference in the outcomes of people’s lives must be the result of demographic identity-based oppression, and therefore, the authority is justified in any action intended to impose equal outcomes among members of disparate identity groups.

It’s not just that Washington was a slave-owner that makes his image offensive, it’s his status as an icon of liberal democracy. Liberal and democratic values are to be understood as a cloak for the true agenda of patriarchal white supremacist oppression. Distribution of equity must take precedence over individual rights. In fact, individual rights are rendered meaningless other than to the extent to which they can be justified by an appeal to equity.

I’ve noticed that this doctrine of equity has also shown up in the covid ideology. We are always implored to prioritize (or “center” in the prevailing vernacular of equity) the safety of those who are at most risk of death or harm from covid. This centering trumps all other considerations. It would be inequitable if the vulnerable quarantined themselves voluntarily while the hale and hardy were free to take their own risks (building immunity in the process and reducing the risk they pose to the vulnerable). Instead, the entire society should be forced to social distance, shut down businesses, and submit to mandatory temperature checks, travel restrictions, contact tracing, vaccines, masks, and anything else the public health authorities decree; that puts all people in the same equitable boat as the most vulnerable. Those who disagree insist that disease and variations in vulnerability to illness are a natural and unavoidable part of life. This view is then denounced as selfish, frivolous, callous, ableist, and tantamount to wishing death upon the vulnerable. Not only will equity be imposed on human society, equity will be imposed on Mother Nature herself.

Somewhere in the world, there is an 89-year-old person with a heart condition and compromised immunity. They might be able to survive for another six months as long as they can avoid infection (whether from covid or even the common cold). But if they are infected, they will die within a week or two. Although millions of people’s lives will be disrupted against their will in the most intrusive ways — when they are at little to no risk from colds, influenza, or covid, they should be denied the right to mix with other people and live their regular human lives because this might reduce the likelihood that the 89-year-old encounters a virus. The 89-year-old cannot mix with the others without significant risk, therefore, it is equitable to require all others to live as if they were similarly at risk.

Under Equity, even that very same 89-year-old will not be allowed to take their own risks, either. Maybe that 89-year-old would rather spend their final years, months, or weeks connecting with their loved ones, touching, smiling, talking, seeing each other’s faces in person, free to socialize, play games of bridge, and reminisce, even if it means increasing the chance of catching covid, or another infection, and die earlier than they otherwise would. That choice will be denied them, because somewhere else in the world is another immunocompromised person who would rather isolate themselves from viruses at whatever cost. In purest form, equity insists that the most physically vulnerable, most frightened and risk-adverse person in the world will set the baseline rules that all the rest of us will be expected to submit to.

Another recent trend on the Left is that one’s opinion is not really considered valid on anything unless it comes from a personal experience of loss or disempowerment. And so, in the interests of communicating with the Left, I will share this: My mother died from a coronavirus, or at least she died from the common cold, which is often a coronavirus. She was receiving intensive treatment for a cancer that had metastasized — it was predicted she had only one year to live, even with the treatment — and would die earlier without it. The intensive treatment killed a lot of the cancer inside her, and also suppressed her white blood cells and immune system — leaving her immunocompromised, and vulnerable to the common cold, which she was unlucky enough to catch. The cold ravaged her system, and she lost the ability to breathe without a machine. She lost the ability to open her eyes or speak. She died about 2–3 weeks later.

Now that was back in 1994 — we didn’t have social distancing or general lockdowns in those days, although immunocompromised people like my mom were still dying from viruses. There is an argument from an equity standpoint that social distancing should be made a permanent feature of human life in order to provide ongoing protection for people like her. If those restrictions had been in place in 1994, and if they were effective, maybe my mother would have never caught that coronavirus. Maybe she would have been able to live for one more year. An extra year with my mother would have been priceless to me.

Even so, I can say this: I would not wish that the rest of the world be forced to live at six feet of distance from each other, faces covered by masks, and all the rest of it, even if that would have successfully prevented her from contracting that infection. I am certain she would not have wished this fate on the world either. But even though my personal experience of loss gives me permission to speak on this issue, according to the Equity Left — my wishes and her wishes would still not prevail in that system.

Somewhere in the world there’s a kid that would wish to impose this fate on the world for one more year with her mother; or somewhere in the world, there’s a mother who would impose it on the world for herself. As long as there is at least one who would wish it, we are all compelled to comply. As Andrew Cuomo instructed us back in March, any measure is justified as long as it saves just one life. There cannot be a clearer, more concise summation of authoritarianism. If we dissent, we are heartless, callous, and selfish, even though we would also selflessly choose our own death rather than extend our own life at the expense of the world’s freedoms. Meanwhile, some members of the compassionate, soft, and selfless Left pump their fists, hoping for Trump’s death from covid, citing “karma” or “just desserts.”

I recognize the equity doctrine as having roots in Marx’s “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” It seems like a great formula on the surface — it did to me, when I first heard it as a junior high student. And it continued to seem like a great idea to me until recently, when I started to realize what it can mean when taken seriously and implemented, as illustrated above. I think there is still a good argument for it when limited to wealth redistribution and antitrust enforcement. But this year, thanks to covid and the identitarian culture wars, I have come to see that the prevailing winds of the Left, at least in the US, increasingly view individual rights and liberties of one’s body, movement, speech, association, conscience, religion, and privacy as subject to state-imposed equity principles. That is a recipe for totalitarianism.

I am now met with scorn by left-leaning people when I speak of the importance of individual rights and democracy. This is increasingly seen as a right-wing artifact of imperialist, colonial, capitalist, white supremacist, or patriarchal culture forms. On the Far Left, to insist on the value and importance of such things is to brand yourself a dreaded “Liberal.” On the Center Left, these values are just shrugged off as irrelevant. The Neoliberal Center-Left has put its faith in Meritocracy: a religion of academic/scientific/financial priesthood that sorts through its supplicants, admits the worthy into the Ivy League and equivalent prestigious institutions, indoctrinates them with truth, filters out those who are unresponsive to the truth, and then plugs the rest into positions of power in medicine, finance, government, media, law, and science. We are meant to trust in this system and its ability to produce people with more knowledge, wisdom, and intelligence than that of the public at large, and we are meant to obey their declarations of what is true, and what courses of action to take. Democracy is not only unnecessary, it’s a detriment, unless people agree to vote the way they’ve been instructed to vote.

On all sides of the Left, there seems to be an agreement that a socio-political-medical order ought to be imposed over the objections of those advocating for individual rights and democratic values. Again, I return to the question: How can this be? What am I now to understand about the Left that I did not previously understand? What is the Left?

The term “Left” has its origins in the French Revolution, referring to those on the left side of the National Assembly who opposed the authority of the monarchy, nobility, and church, in favor of vesting authority in the people (whereas those on the right side of the assembly retained loyalty to these traditional institutions of power and rule). This original definition still seems like the best and most relevant way to look at the Right and Left. Either wing could be on the side of dictatorship or democracy. It’s just a question of whether they purport to rule in the name of the people, or in the name of hereditary and religious traditions.

In France, the Left soon prevailed in the contest for power. Soon after, it produced the authoritarian Reign of Terror, led by Robespierre, characterized by mass arrests and executions of accused counter-revolutionaries and other enemies of the state. Lest one dismiss this appellation of “terror” as derogatory toward Robespierre and those who followed him, it seems he actually claimed terror with pride as a virtuous and necessary element of governance. In his own words, written while presiding over the Reign of Terror:

“If virtue is the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country…”

Robespierre administered the Reign of Terror in France with dictatorial power as head of something called the Committee of Public Safety. It was understood then, as now, that the need for Public Safety, combined with terror, can effectively justify and implement totalitarian rule, even in the name of the people, democracy, and “The Left.”

I’m not making the argument that the Left equals totalitarianism and the Right equals freedom, as many of those on the Right believe to be true. Instead, I now see how both the Right and the Left can be vehicles for totalitarian rule. If I were in Czarist Russia, my call for individual rights, democracy, and human dignity might be denounced as “Left-wing.” In Soviet Russia, my calls for the same thing might be denounced as “Right-Wing.” When I opposed the theft of the 2000 election, America’s “War on Terror” in response to 911, and the anti-democratic policies and ideas that came with that movement, such as torture, unilateral preemptive warfare, mass surveillance, censorship, and suspension of habeas corpus, my ideas were denounced as “Radical Left-Wing.” I thought that meant I was a radical left-winger. Now I’m opposing the theft of the 2020 election and the anti-democratic policies and ideas that come with the covid lockdown, such as mandatory masks, social distancing, business closures, testing, temperature checks, and vaccines, as well as contact tracing, mass surveillance, censorship, and the redefinition of the human being into a presumed vector of disease. Now my ideas are denounced as “Radical Right-Wing.”

Both the Right and Left can drift into dense expressions of boundary-violations, authoritarianism, and disregard for the divinity of others. It would help heal the United States politically if each side could see this in themselves as well as the other.

The Right can become fatalistic regarding cruelty in the way of the world, forgetting that as expressions of the divine, human beings have the option to awaken and turn away from cruelty. This tacit acceptance of cruelty — while accurately acknowledging the shadow aspects of life — can become habitual and systemic, gaining expression in police and military brutality, torture, mass imprisonment, economic oppression, and deprivation of basic needs. The Right’s preference for traditional cultural forms can also lead to the oppression of minority religious, ethnic, racial, gender, and cultural groups, and can lead to the violation of the rights and boundaries of individuals in these groups.

The Left can approach authoritarian disregard for the divinity in others in the opposite extreme, enforcing equity in the attempt to impose equal outcomes on all people (categorized as demographic categories) without regard to individual rights. A secular belief system is adopted, such as Critical Race Theory, or Mechanistic Scientific Materialism, which reduces life to bundles of energy and matter that bounce off of each other in a struggle for power. The rigid and extreme expression of the Left lacks awareness that this belief system is actually an establishment of a religion, and imposes these beliefs on all people as incontrovertible truth, oppressing those who believe otherwise. Even disagreements of fact among members of the same religion (such as dissenting scientists, doctors, or academics) are prohibited as heretical to the true faith. With increasing dogmatism and rigidity, these beliefs are imposed according to equity, without regard to individual rights. With all of life recast into a totalizing narrative of a struggle for power between the oppressed and oppressors, power becomes the only currency or objective in life. Any exercise of power becomes just if rationalized as serving the interests of equity and the oppressed.

These are the shadow forms of the Sacred Right and Sacred Left.

In contrast, the sacred expression of the Right draws from ancient traditions and ways of living that carry a certain organic wisdom about how life, nature, and human beings work. It recognizes that nature is often unjust and sometimes cruel, and that power is not apportioned equally, and it recognizes that a dignity can be found in affirming life as it is, adapting to it, facing hardship with courage, and taking solace from spiritual forms that transcend worldly power. Life is more than measurable matter and energy bouncing off each other. There is more to social life than a struggle for economic and political power, prolongation of life, or achieving increasing degrees of safety. Not only is there more to life than this, but whatever makes life meaningful is found beyond these things. The Sacred Right is better able to see the religious nature of Scientific Materialism, and is better able to recognize doctrinal disputes within the faith, and give a fair hearing to its heretics and apostates. The Sacred Right recognizes that some values are worth dying for — that some risks in life are worthwhile because they are truly risks — dying is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. It is worse to survive without truly living. There is a freedom and dignity in making one’s own mistakes and failures, and claiming them as one’s own — to die on one’s feet rather than live on one’s knees.

The sacred expression of the Left is to recognize that secular belief systems are just as religious as spiritual systems. The Sacred Left leans into the universal expression of spirituality, recognizing the truth that unites all religious traditions and independent spiritual paths, while not favoring one over another. The Sacred Left recognizes suffering and injustice where it exists, especially in places where it has been invisible, taken for granted, or assumed to be impossible to change — not just among humans, but also among non-human animals, ecosystems, and the whole of Gaia. The sacred Left seeks healing of these hurts, using compassion, empathy, and generosity of spirit as medicine — and to inspire innovative approaches. This healing is guided by the sacred oath of healers: to do no harm. The Sacred Left encourages and expands democracy, with greater levels of opportunity and autonomy for regular people. It supports the free expression of unusual, eccentric, and even offensive ideas and art — believing that medicine is found in the unique, in those members of society dismissed by the mainstream as oddballs, weirdos, and eclectic. The sacred expression of the Left addresses disparities in concentrations of ownership, recognizing that democracy and the free dignity and rights of people is harmed and diminished when vast disparities of wealth exist. The Sacred Left does not just rectify inequalities in ownership, but also promotes the release of ownership, the return of property that is currently owned to the realm of the unowned.

I am suggesting the move to a sacred politics, based on the sacred qualities in both the Left and Right listed above. Authoritarian control, domination, and boundary violations can be found on both sides when the sacred is dormant — and become totalitarian when pushed to the extreme. Likewise, an authoritarian Center can play Right and Left against each other, encouraging authoritarian expressions on both sides, ensuring that neither side will unite with the other in sacred agreement. This is the situation I see playing out now in the US and elsewhere. By shining the light of truth on authoritarian forms, the sacred political expressions of Left, Right, and Center become more accessible.

I believe there is also an elephant in the room that is driving the greater shift toward authoritarianism in recent years. What has happened to us? Why don’t we say, “It’s a free country” anymore? Why don’t we want to say it? Covid didn’t create the new politics, it revealed them. I noticed the shift start to take place after 911, but I suspect that event merely unleashed the new politics, rather than creating them. I was similarly shocked in 2001 at how the whole country lined up behind the program to erase their democratic rights and wage an unending war against the entire planet. (Those who were not “with us” were “against us.”) It hadn’t occurred to me that the American people were so weak, so easily frightened and misled. Was there more at work under the surface than fear of terrorism?

I think the turn of the century changed things. I remember how it was in the ‘90s — a lot of our focus as a people was on reviewing the events of the 20th century — it was hard to imagine the future in a new millennium. The year 2000 had always seemed like kind of an ending point. But then it came. We started looking forward at the next century to come, wondering what it would be like. We did a few mental calculations about what humanity was doing to the planet and projected these calculations forward 100 years. And we started to despair.

Behind the ways the Left is shifting today, I detect a rising sympathy for a kind of Ecofascism (or Eco-authoritarianism, if we’re to understand fascism as a specifically “right-wing” threat). In particular, the covid lockdowns are subtly suggested as contributing to a beneficial eco-authoritarian purpose. I suspect this is the real elephant in the room that helps explain why the Left, and society at large, have become friendlier to authoritarianism and more hostile to democracy in the past 20 years. It also helps explain why there seems to be a rump contingent on the Right that defends liberal democratic rights — it is common on the Right (at least in the US) to doubt that the world is truly in ecological peril due to human activities. But for those of us who agree that this ecological peril exists, we are faced with the need for a significant global change in human behavior to avert or mitigate ecological catastrophe. As the decades progress without such a global change, the anxiety, grief, and dread we feel compounds, as does our openness to drastic measures.

When the lockdowns were imposed globally, I noticed left-leaning eyes light up, beholding the opportunity. The ability to induce radical behavior change was precisely the thing that had previously seemed hopelessly out of reach. And look! It has now happened overnight. It requires three ingredients: elimination of individual rights, induced obedience to technocratic authorities, and most important, crippling terror, as first recommended by Robespierre.

It was only by inducing terror into the global populace that the lockdowns and total transformation of our human lives was achieved. It seems clear to me that the transformation of our human lives has always been the actual point of all this. That’s why it’s important to continually flood our minds with case and death counts, with cautionary tales about “long-covid;” it’s why we need people everywhere in masks, to remind us visibly of our danger at all times, why we are simultaneously told both that we can’t have our lives back until we get the vaccine, and that we can never actually achieve immunity to covid with a vaccine or through natural exposure. It’s why we need to censor, shame, and otherwise silence dissenting voices that urge us to calm down and release our fears.

If our meritocratic technocracy can impose total control over people due to the fear of the virus, they can use that control to force people into eco-friendly behaviors as well. People just don’t have enough terror of ecological collapse to accomplish this — they need the terror of the virus — a terror more immediate. As we’ve seen, this terror has been more effective than anything in human history to induce mass obedience to authority. We even see how the wagons are circled around covid-skepticism just as they have been around vaccine-skepticism and climate change-skepticism. These are all denounced as conspiracy theories, disinformation, and anti-science — and are accordingly subject to censorship and silencing — removal from the public discourse.

People cannot be allowed to consider or even entertain these ideas, because if the authorities lose control over people’s ideas, beliefs, and trust, they lose the ability to leverage terror as a means of obedience. Activation of shame and anger are also powerful motivators to induce obedience to authority. That’s why our toxic discourse on race and gender is encouraged on both the right and left sides of the divide — to promote obedience to one’s side as a defense against shame, and then anger at the other side — who should feel ashamed but don’t. Both sides conscripted into war against each other, in service to the terror that rules from the center.

It seems we have a golden opportunity to induce unprecedented levels of behavior change due to fear of covid. The same logic that applies to covid can be applied to any other infection, any other disease, real or imagined. That logic as applied to infectious disease from here on out will result in a permanent regime of autocracy by the public health authorities over human rights and sovereignty. Since the public health authorities are one and the same as the Merito-technocratic class at large, they can also impose a restructuring of society that will save the environment. Because the environment is more important than anything else, it’s worth it to surrender our rights and sovereignty to the technocrats. They will exercise their total power wisely and save us all. In fact, we can’t trust regular people to vote on this and have a democratic say — we’ve already seen how they will fall prey to conspiracy theories in their ignorance and weak-mindedness. Henceforth, the human being is to be seen as an inherently selfish — as a loathsome vector of disease, violence, self-interest, bigotry, delusion, and destruction — unless properly controlled. When fully obedient and controlled by the meritocracy, the human being can be transformed into an efficient unit of positive change.

We will save the planet. All we need to do is end democracy (or prolong the illusion of democracy, reserving veto-power for the merito-technocrats when the people are about to choose incorrectly). We will continue living in fear of infectious disease with abdication of our most personal and sacred rights and dignities to the public health authorities. We will continue to believe only what we are told to believe by the authorities and other voices cleared by the censors. Even if sometimes (or a lot of the time) those authorities turn out to be wrong — even if they are outright lying to us — we must continue to believe and obey, recognizing that sometimes they will need to deceive us in order to maintain the necessary emotional and cognitive states that perpetuate our obedience. They will need to deceive us to induce the behaviors they have wisely chosen for us. They even declared that they were lying to us, for the greater good, when they told us not to wear masks. Now we’re meant to believe that they are not lying now when they tell us to wear them. But even if they are lying now, desiring to train us into unquestioning obedience and submission, we ought to obey them anyway. Their choices for us have been selected for the greater good whether based on lies or truth. It is the duty of all good people to get with the program and comply.

Now, you might ask me — “I hear you railing against totalitarianism, advocating for democracy and the sacred rights of man, but if your way of life were allowed to prevail, who would control the humans? How would we prevent them from continuing to gobble up the world and destroy it in short-sighted pursuit of self-interest, in a planetary tragedy of the commons? I didn’t realize I was an authoritarian before, but now that you mention it, I’m all on board for whatever it takes to save the planet. I mean, I’d like to live in freedom and democracy too, but that is just a naïve, childish dream. Besides, I’m sure the Merito-technocracy will allow us as much freedom as is good for us. It’s time to wake up to the hard truth of adulthood and recognize that we must sacrifice ourselves and our freedoms for the good of the collective. Those unwilling to sacrifice must be made to do so, by force, if necessary. It’s the only way we can survive. We’ve now confirmed that European people inflicted a failed experiment in democracy and individualism on the world, induced by the egoic illusion of separation. Their diseased and ruined individualistic outlook on the world has now spread across the planet, causing the sixth mass extinction. The only way forward is collective obedience to an authority who can force people to take correct action for the sake of Gaia.”

I understand sentiments of this kind because there is a part of me that responds to the logic of that argument: Ecocide is an existential threat that takes precedence over everything else. Humanity needs to act as one — to change every aspect of how we live our lives to successfully address the threat. Therefore, Eco-Authoritarianism is the correct response for the planet. It will require giving up things like individual rights and liberties, and democracy.

That part of me does not win out in my internal dialogue. I don’t know how to avert ecological crisis without ecologically-oriented global authoritarianism — but I’m also very skeptical that global authoritarian rule would successfully reverse ecocide. Indeed, I believe it is likely that the types of minds our Merito-technocracy elevates to power in such a system would choose the wrong responses. They would likely see the world as a mathematical equation to be solved. As more power and more force was applied, more adverse consequences would arise, and the crisis would continue to deepen. They would try to do things like geo-engineer the atmosphere and oceans. They would attempt things like the genetic engineering of plants and animals. They would try to bioengineer human beings themselves. In fact, they’re already attempting these kinds of things.

They would try to redesign the entirety of Gaia to fit the mathematical model produced by the algorithms of their AI supercomputers. In the process, they would produce more dysfunction, disease, and ill health for Gaia and all her organs, organisms, water, soil, and air systems. They would also do immense damage to human beings, not just as individuals, but to humanity collectively. Human beings are one of Gaia’s most remarkable productions. Our freedom, love, independence, and dignity is the freedom, love, independence and dignity of Gaia herself. In extinguishing these through authoritarian dominance of human beings, these qualities would be extinguished in Gaia as well.

Why would it go this way? Why wouldn’t our merito-technocrats rule with wisdom instead of folly?

They would rule that way because that is the way of authoritarianism and the technology of dominance and control. It is the way of the Machine. It is the imposition of machine principles onto Gaia that is causing the harm in the first place. The Merito-technocracy is a machine, and it selects for human beings adapted to machine thinking.

What happens then, if we go my way, and we respect the dignity and divinity of individual humans in our human laws and ways? My answer is that if we’re able to pull that off, we also have a chance of respecting the dignity and divinity of animals, plants, land, water, air, and Gaia herself. In fact, I don’t see how we have a chance of seeing those qualities elsewhere if we’re not able to see it and respect it in ourselves.

I don’t have a plan for how this works. I don’t have a flowchart. I admit that my suggestion is a spiritual call to trust in Life, to trust in the Light, and to trust in Love. There can be no guarantees there. I don’t know how it plays out in the succession of events. Instead, I tune into those qualities of Light, Life, and Love — and I intuit that it is wrong to force people to be apart when they wish to be together, it is wrong to force masks onto people when their trust in the need for masks has not been earned, it is wrong to silence people when they long to speak their heart, it is wrong to force or coerce medical treatment on people who do not consent. I believe we can trust people to be free because we can trust Gaia, and people are part of Gaia.

If we are faced with an extremely dangerous infectious disease, people will be able to tell, and will respond appropriately. For instance, if there were a virus going around right now that killed 1/3 of people, it would be obvious to all. I would be keeping my distance from most people on my own accord — I wouldn’t need my rights to be taken away — and neither would anyone else. If I thought masks were helpful to protect against or stop the spread of a disease like that, I would wear one — I wouldn’t need to be forced. If I thought a vaccine was a good risk to protect me against it, I would take it, I wouldn’t need to be forced. I’m sure it would work the same way for others. The very fact that there is resistance to all these restrictions of our humanity shows that the evidence isn’t strong enough to convince everyone that the restrictions are justified. If some people were convinced but not others, it would indicate a mid-level danger, and a mid-level degree of precautions would be adopted voluntarily, appropriate to the risk. We can trust people to be free.

Or maybe we can’t. Maybe we can’t trust Gaia. She produced human beings, and that was a mistake. We can’t trust people or Gaia either. We can’t trust the wisdom of people to know when mixing with the others is a good way to develop immunity for ourselves (and for the vulnerable others who will benefit from our immunity) and when the risk is great enough that we need to keep our distance. We can’t trust people to fall in love with Gaia again if left to their own devices. We can’t trust people to take action in harmony with and in service to her. But there is one thing we can trust. Even though we can’t trust Gaia, and we can’t trust humans, we got lucky when humans discovered and invented machines. We can trust the machines.

Machines are trustworthy, unlike Life. Machines are a perfectly contained system of abstraction, power, and control. They operate with precision, measurement, and mathematic certainty. The more complex the machine, the more we can trust it. And the most powerful, the most trustworthy machines are those mega-machines that transcend physical form and extend into the realm of the conceptual. We can trust bureaucracy, a mechanized system of hierarchical relationships, programmed to take action according to its prime directives. We can trust the machinery of academics, which converts raw human substrate into trusted machine-honed technocrats. We can trust the machinery of meritocracy, which selects for the best functioning and well-oiled of the mechanized humans — and places them at the top of the mechanized bureaucracies. We can trust computers, AI, algorithms, and probabilistic modeling. They all analyze data with unbiased precision and produce answers the technocrats can rely on. We can trust economics and finance — mechanized systems of assigning value to objects and actions that guide us into the most efficient and sensible allocations of our resources and energy.

The good news is that humanity has already put its fate, and the fate of Gaia, into the hands of these machines. And the verdict is in from the machinery: human beings and other forms of life are too unpredictable and irrational. They do not behave as they should. They are teeming with disease and contagion. They must be sequestered, quarantined, vaccinated, re-engineered, surveilled, and silenced, with reprogrammed DNA. They must be improved, by integrating machinery and algorithmic AI processes into their biology. Computerized implants, microchips, and neuralinks, with continual and universal wireless internet connection must be maintained — continually moderating and modifying the human with input from the mechanized intelligence of AI. The only danger is that the humans will remember they are alive, that they don’t want to be machines. They will reclaim control of their lives and let Life be the guide — they will demote machinery to the service of Life. That must be prevented at all costs if we are to salvage the future. Human beings and Life itself must be forced to serve and obey the wisdom of the measured precision and controlled, relentless logic of the Machine.

Or maybe that’s not such good news.

Finally, my answer is that my spiritual attunement tells me to trust Light, Life, and Love. I wish to stand or fall by that. I wish to live and die by it. I will live in trust of these guides, and when it comes time to cross the threshold of death, I will die into the trust of these guides. I will trust that this trust will serve Gaia best, either to help her live and heal, or to die with dignity. Gaia won’t live forever, any more than humanity will — anymore than I will. I suggest that human beings live and die with dignity and love.

If we really are coming to the final years of humanity, I suggest that as we die out, we die together — in our sovereignty, holding hands, hugging, kissing, breathing, singing, dancing, and facing our fears with love and gratitude of being.

And if we are not coming to the end of humanity, if humanity and Gaia continue to live for some time yet, I suggest that we live together — in our sovereignty, holding hands, hugging, kissing, breathing, singing, dancing, and facing our fears with love and gratitude of being.

~

Companion Articles by Raelle Kaia

The following series of eight articles were written over the course of 2020–21 in response to the wave of authoritarian governance, thought, and belief that swept the world in that year. They represent an appeal to freedom of thought, speech, and conscience, and they advocate for a return to democratic, human, and spiritual values. These articles also offer research, critique, and insight regarding the nature of the crisis of this time and the possible intentions and implications of these events.

Part of the Problem. An encounter with the surreal in June, 2020. An invitation to open up to deeper questions at a pivotal moment in American and world history. June, 2020

Lockdown Evoked a Political and Conceptual Earthquake in my Life. A description of the unraveling process that occurred for me in the summer of 2020 as my prior alignments and sense of truth and trust were shattered by the advent of authoritarianism. September, 2020

The Sacred Left and Right.An analysis of the sacred and authoritarian forms of both left and right political orientations — with a call to support the sacred forms and resist the technocratic authoritarian forms. October, 2020

What to Make of Covid and the Lockdowns? My original article stating the case against lockdowns, masks, and social distancing regimes. An appeal for open discourse. December, 2020

Why Are They Doing This? An exploration of the possible reasons or motives for the continuing lockdown regimes in light of the evidence that they are neither necessary nor useful, and in light of the considerable harm they have caused and continue to cause. March, 2021

On the Mind-Altering Power of Taboo. A critique of censorship as antithetical to human flourishing accompanied by an examination of taboo and censored areas of inquiry, and of who is protected and harmed by their taboo status. April, 2021

Toward a New Religion.An exploration of the “New Normal” societal changes in values and belief that have accompanied the lockdown regimes, seen through the lens of religion and spirituality. April, 2021

Understanding Technocracy. An exploration of the nature of technocracy in further depth, examining it from psychological, ideological, and spiritual perspectives. April, 2021

Fact-Checking is the New Pravda. A dissection of the propaganda technique of fact-checking, which has become a ubiquitous phenomenon in the corporate press in recent years. Fact-checking is perhaps the most effective and important tactic available for shaping and controlling popular thought and belief.  July, 2021