This is not a post about disinformation. This is not a post about the way information is consciously targeted at fear and dissension. If you are interested in that work I can highly recommend the Conspirituality podcast.
 
I want to talk about how the slant of information shapes our thinking and how people co-opt that to cushion themselves from what’s happening.
 
Patriarchy and the media.
 
Ok before you switch off hear me out… traditional media is fast paced big business. It relies on attracting “consumers” and has come to be, in many cases like fast food information; shallow, lacking in deep nourishment and harmful to us in the long run. It’s reflective of our culture; very production oriented, valuing hierarchical processes and narrow measures of success, a force for dominance over, versus engaging collaboratively.
 
Media focuses on very masculine lead pursuits, by that I mean archetypally masculine; production, outer world action, measurable, hierarchical type processes. We have business news, reporting on the stock exchange and currency markets (I know the word FTSE for God’s sake, I have no idea what it means but it has come at me so many times my brain has kept it as an oddity…) which takes up a whole section on the national news and things like health and education are lucky to get any airtime unless it’s to criticise some failing in their overloaded systems.
 
We have developed systems that favour the quantifiable, the logical, the scientific and thank heavens for that because that part of human thinking matters hugely and has made immense contributions to human life.  But to imagine that numbers and facts are all there is neglects a large part of what it is to be human.
 
We are thinking creatures. We are creatures with a big frontal cortex that helps us plan, strategize, prioritise and create new solutions.  We are also feeling creatures. We are creatures with trauma who have had to create coping strategies that are not always good bets long term. We are creatures who learn not only from facts and figures but have been much more shaped by story. We are creatures who can create, learn, love, destroy, heal, grow, change, be a bridge between the world and play. We contain multitudes.  How do we know that?...
 
Story.
 
Story is the way we learned to instruct; “I ate the red berry. I was sick. Don’t eat the red berry.” To comfort; “Yes this stage of childbirth hurt me too- I suffered in my time and I am here to help you as I was helped. To mend; “When my mother hurt me I felt so very sad. I don’t want you to be hurt like that.” With story, we reach into the life of another and notice our suffering reflected, feel ourselves open to the possibilities of what may be available from their experience and try on how it might fit for us. With story we learn, change, soften and grow.
 
Jungian psychology works on the premise that myths help us to understand what it is to be human; the universality of them instructs someone in the veld of Africa in the same way it instruct me in suburban Aotearoa; it goes to the heart of what it means to be human.
 
Story, whether it be the archetypal power of a myth or the retelling of what happened at work over the dishes, story is a deep connector of humans, to each other and to life.
 
SO WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH THE BUSINESS REPORT?

Well I think the weighting of our media on business, production, economics, dominance etc. shapes us to see those as the most valuable facets of the world. When we soak in a bath of this kind of thinking, we come to value quantitative over qualitative, it seems like a natural thing. Numbers count. Thoughts and feelings don’t.
 

How does this impact us around Covid19?
 
I have seen many people retreat to numbers in order to contend with the challenge we face as a species. Today I read someone saying something ageist, fatist and ableist. (it’s in the bottom of the page if you want to look but consider this a trigger warning.) They talked about "30k cases and 2% death."
 
They recounted these numbers like they were cans of baked beans. Like this was some new stock issue that had gone down on the FTSE (no idea if I did that right but you get the picture). But they are not beans or stocks. They are People. People with lives and families, fears and loves, gifts and failings are getting sick. It’s a lottery that’s stacked against you if you have disabilities, have pre-existing conditions like asthma. It’s a very, very human experience being explained away, defended against by the distancing power of numbers.
 
If I make you into a number I don’t have to face you. If I make you into a number it’s easier to pass by the discomfort of seeing you suffer. If I make you into a number I can keep it theoretical and not have to accommodate the immensity and natural fear of a pandemic.
 
How do I know this is happening?
 
I see people shaming others for “living in fear”. If the threat of a pandemic doesn’t give you the willies I would say there’s something wrong with your neurobiology. We are supposed to react with fear to a threat, and use that fear to take action, come up with solutions to mitigating the threat.
 
These statistics don’t hold the truth of the suffering underneath and all around them. The distress of dealing with a potentially life threatening illness. The isolation. The time away from loved ones. The sheer physical cost of dealing with a powerful virus, one that has been proven to have unpredictable and often long lasting effects. Perhaps, having to be in hospital. The stress and distress of the hospital staff. The exhaustion they are facing. The threat to their own lives, their families’ lives with continued engagement at work with a population who are in no small part, cavalier about what they are facing. For all the people who make up that two percent, there are grief stricken families, broken communities, scarred workplaces. The ripples are immense.
 
This doesn’t count the proportion of people who have long tail covid. Three of my friends in the US are still dealing with quite debilitating symptoms a year on. Yes, they are lucky they didn’t die and their lives have been altered to become much more difficult.
 
When we leave people to only exist on the plane of broad brush statistics we excuse ourselves from the distressing truth of what covid19 actually does.
 
I am hearing people say “The Spanish flu killed more. This will just be another virus, we’ll adapt.” It’s offered up like a trump card. Like a call to get over hysteria. As if we were playing some team building game that was theoretical, that could technically be true, but we are talking about humans. Does it justify a whole lot of people dying because humans have been here before and will be again? Does it justify the levels of suffering and trauma inflicted on people?
 
Sadly, it seems, that unless we know someone well, someone we care about, whose story we are intimate with, these statistics are actually a bolster and protection to some people. They seem to become a  barricade about odds and how invulnerable we still are. It’s the bravado that these numbers seem to inspire that perhaps would start to unravel in the face of another human telling the story of their suffering. 
 
It’s my hope that we who hide behind numbers and othering, like the “it’s only old people” that I believe would crack in the face of my friend’s story about 12 months of inflammatory problems, brain fog affecting her work, pain, breathing issues etc.
 
Stories hold us in our discomfort alongside another human. Someone with families and fears, work and communities, hopes and dreams just like us. Stories help us stay with each other, even when it’s hard. That’s where we are meant to be in times of crisis, with each other. Not hiding behind piles of seemingly reassuring numbers. Those numbers are cold when they are the face of your best friend’s suffering. Stories keep us on the side of humans. And that matters.
 
 
SO WHAT’S POSSIBLE.
 
“When women speak, the story of human history changes.” Elizabeth Lesser.
 
Does this quote mean only women get the mic now? No. It means that all people willing to talk about and value story, connection, meaning, feeling need airspace, need to be placed in positions of influence.  These voices and stories are not the ones we currently see in a vacuous stream on social media. Not the “look at my shiny life” stories. These polished-surface stories are the ones that are keep us on the treadmill and contribute to hierarchy.
 
We need the real stories. The truth of the feelings and challenges people navigate. The impact on their lives of their conditions and experiences.
 
It’s my hope that if we began, and continued to understand the experience of others through this new illness* that we would re-humanise our response. We wouldn’t be so ready to say it’s just 2% because we would see the faces of those 2%. They would have names. They would have families. They would have gifts and contributions and connections. They would leave legacies and challenges. They would become part of us that we would have to engage with and care about. They would matter.
 
To use statistics to describe and quantify is one thing, but to use them to distance ourselves from the harm that is being done minute by minute in our communities is something we can consciously change.
 
Human Stories soften. Human Stories connect. Human Stories mend and heal. Always have done. Always will.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
“30k new cases and only 2% death. Don’t know how many are elderly, obese or have other conditions.”
 

 
If we look at the world that is coalescing since the impact of Covid 19 and the it’s-already-too-late of the Climate Catastrophe, we are having to sit with some very uncomfortable facts.
 
The world is not the same. The choices and cushions we had have changed.
 
Our capacity to fly around the world when we have the means and the inclination has fallen away. Our capacity to use technologies and go through summers without bushfires, or winters without floods seems to be a thing of the past. The world has changed.
 
The concurrent change in people’s choice making doesn’t seem to have changed however. 
 
People seem to want to make the same choices while finding themselves in a different world.
 
The changes in the world around us have to factor into the way we live, the choices we make, the way we move in the world. People seem to want to claim freedom and their rights while not considering what impacts this has, as they could for a couple of generations. The fact that we have to consider what our choices do to the people around matters in a whole new way.
 
As I wrote before, I was anti-vaccination in the old world. I had thought and read long and hard and considered, on balance, that not vaccinating was the right decision for me.
 
Now, that decision is upended. The world has changed. The risk my unvaccinated self poses to others means that I can’t make a choice based on what works best for me without realising it impacts my community. I am making a new choice because the parameters are different.
 
I have been watching the way many seem to be holding onto the idea, any way they can, that life is the same, that the world is more controllable than it is.
 
Uncertainty is a deeply difficult thing for humans to manage. We have to feel some sense of certainty to feel safe and often we reach for that through trying to control things.
 
Some seem to find a sense of control through the belief that they have been party to secret information that blows the lid off the hoax. (What makes a mind available to believe that there is power diabolical enough to engineer a hoax where 4.3 million people die to prove a point?) Some seem to just want to carry on as normal and convince themselves it’s their right to do what they have always done (my bach my rights!). And some rally deliberately giving rise to super-spreader events, to protest about tyranny from the comfort of their white middle class lives.
 
The way people seem to be incapable of taking on board the understanding that things are different now, whether you like it or not, is alarming. We are being required to take a new stand, to make a change in the parameters of our choices and decision making. But not all people are capable of doing that.
 
When people show up unwilling to change perspectives or take on the situation at hand they often also ask to have their opinions respected.
 
I have a problem with this. Firstly, as someone way wiser than me pointed out, choice is choosing chicken chips to salt and vinegar, not I choose not to believe in this pandemic.
 
Secondly, whether you protect me from your potential infectivity or not, matters to me. It’s taking my choice to be safe and healthy away from me if you don’t wear a mask. It puts me at risk. That’s not you exercising a right, that’s you valuing your stand over my wellbeing. If I have disabilities or immunity issues or am at risk because of other health conditions, your actions, put me at risk.
 
Now let me backtrack. Is big pharma a beneficent fount of goodness? No. Are all the decisions the Government make wonderful and in line with what I hope for? No. Is the medical system all it could be? The education system? The housing system? The welfare system? NopeNoNope.  Does this make me mistrust everything they say and make them the bad guys who have sinister motives at every turn? Also no.
 
Part of developing an adult competency is the capacity to not split. Splitting as a psychological principle is where someone, in order to build certainty, wants things to be all good. Or if there are some flaws, they then “split” and that object/person/structure etc, becomes all bad.
 
There seems to be little tolerance for or resilience to the messy middle, which unfortunately, is where most of human life sits. The flawed messy middle, where we have to roll around with hard  stuff, make decisions that aren’t always a HELL YES. We are often confronting confusion, complexity, dissonance, nuance and having to come through a good deal of discernment before we find a place we are mostly comfortable with.
 
When we are able to do this, look into what is the best choice from a range of tricksy ones,  we are required to hold the tension of the opposites, this is where the new way comes from. Not from flinging from bad to good and back again but from being both flawed and wonderful and finding a new way to engage, to grow from that place.
 
Climate change has overtaken us, in part because of splitting. There was a reluctance to bear the weight of the change, the friction of what was called for so the original scientists were poo-hooed, some sceptic was always trotted out to refute the claims and time was wasted. Some parts of our communities made the climate scientists, who were ringing alarm bells out to be fools. They put them in the bad end of the split and so we were held in place dithering while , well, Rome burned.
 
Over the last few weeks, I have been noticing a call to “respect my choice.” when they are not making a choice based on untruth. A call was put to me to be kind to a man who reportedly yelled and spat at the supermarket when he was told to put on a mask. In pointing out how his choice, frustratingly, I believe made because he was filled with the same kind of disinformation, put me and others I care about at risk, I was told to be compassionate. His freedom to not wear a mask could well have put others in the same queue with immunity issues at serious risk. I could have been standing in that queue unwittingly having been infectious from a recent trip to Auckland. I could have made him sick. How is that freedom?
 
There are calls in my community to just be more compassionate, be kinder, let the choices they make stand.
 
And this is where Randi Buckley’s wisdom comes in. Randi is the developer and teacher of the radically beautiful Healthy Boundaries for Kind People work. Do her workshops (or one with me using her work!) you won’t regret it. One of things she teaches about is Idiot compassion. This is a Buddhist term that describes a glossing over of hard things in order to be nice and avoid conflict and to act as if being compassionate, when in avoiding the hard conversation, you are not serving compassion at all. Compassion is served when hard things are confronted with care.  Letting harm continue in the name of compassion is not compassionate; hence idiot compassion.
 
My experience is that in letting people continue talking about ‘respect my choice’ and ‘tyranny’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘hoaxes’ without challenging them I am not serving compassion. Compassion has to stretch wider than discomfort. It’s got to hold the impact of choices on others. It’s got to hold the wellbeing of the community, it’s got to hold our planets survival in our view.
 
Let’s not be idiots in the name of compassion.
 
 
If you are in Aotearoa NZ and have concerns about your wellbeing please go to this website for a range of community resources.
 

We are in a shitstorm and no one knows 100% what is going to happen.
 
We are in a shitstorm of a mess on a global scale. I imagine it feels like a world war without a classic enemy.
 
We sit in the middle of this shitstorm with evidence of results-of-war-like  devastation and destruction all around us., in the mess and tragedy that is covid19*, in the mess and  tragedy that is the fires in Greece, Bulgaria, US, Canada and Turkey, flooding in Sudan, North Korea and Iran , humanitarian crises in Yemen and Tigre, the Rohingya refugee crisis, the Climate Catastrophe that has been glaringly obvious and now starkly stated.
 
It’s a shit ton of hard, right here, right now. It’s healthy that we are scared right now. It’s right that our systems are in deep distress that we are on the lip, or already part way down the bowl of irrevocable change.
 
Each of us live in an animal body that is responding in a physiologically sound way to this shitstorm, this unavoidable change; it’s reading the threat all around us and is preparing us to do something about it.
 
Classically, humans get hunkered down in the face of overwhelming hard and wrong. We take our fear and we polarise. We become right and the others, wrong. We become good and the others, bad.  The stronger the fear the more polarisation and the less room there is for discernment and the grace required to reach each other.
 
Yesterday I was told I lacked compassion and intelligence, that I had been brainwashed because I disagreed that having a vaccination card meant I was living in a place that is becoming a totalitarian state. There is a distinct lack of grace and nuance there. My disagreement was grounds for making me not only wrong, but bad and defective. The righteousness and high emotional tone, the emboldened inhumane response that was in that brief and in my experience, typical exchange, is likely when shadow is present.
 
Shadow is the unknown, hidden and often, but not always, negative parts of ourselves. Shadow is the parts of us that we are unable to consciously own and therefore hide from conscious view. These parts, although hidden, are alive in our psyche and work through us in sneaky ways, looking for attention.  They are, when they erupt, often accompanied by strong feelings, undifferentiated blobs of tangled thinking and confusion. It’s very much a wtf presence. In that presence we need to find a reason for this wtf?ness often leads the shadow engulfed person to want to find someone to blame.
 
It might look like this. I am scared. There is so much going on that is unsettling and it feels like a big fucking mess and I can’t face these fears because I risk overwhelm. I need to find a source for my fear because I think feeling scared is somehow wrong or weak and I think acting from fear is a failing. I look to find something that matches the big scared/unsettled feelings I have. It’s got to be someone or something “out there”. And so we look for an enemy, a bad guy to take responsibility.
 
We look to match the intense (and remember highly valid) feelings we have and so we need a BIG bad guy, a big pharma or a big government or even better still a big international cabal of shady figures that reaches everywhere, that and only that, matches the intensity we are feeling. Just because the feeling that everything is wrong is matched by stories about cabals, and communist plots and and... and doesn’t make any of those stories true, it makes us scared and at risk of manipulation. It makes us want to protect ourselves and damn everyone else, which in a culture that prides individualism and names community values as communist is a pretty easy reach. It makes us scared and we take a grain of truth and build a whole sandcastle out of it. For example, Bill Gates plan to microchip us all via vaccines. Yes, his funding was, at one stage going towards seeing if there could be a way of tracking vaccine records but not personal information. It was in the research phase and has not been actioned but man the idea that one of the richest men in the world who controls computers could one day have information to track me inserted into me and I wouldn’t know … well that’s bloody scary. If I read that information from someone important (like an ex advisor to the then president…who sounds plausible….I might feel like my fears, my uncertainty was now justified and I would perhaps look for more proof.
 
So let’s pause for a bit.
 
I have been a nurse. I no longer practice. I didn’t like a lot of what I saw in the medical system and big pharma. I didn’t like vaccinations while I felt there was some leeway in my choice. I have a healthy side eye for everything I encounter. Expecting something to be all good is something I reluctantly grew out of some time ago. It hurts to see corporate greed and self interest in the world. Sitting with the discomfort of the ambivalence, the good and bad in just about everything is tough.
 
But it’s not lying. 
 
All that to say I mistrust big pharma, I question a lot, A LOT about medical systems but I can bear the nuance that mostly there is reason to engage in the efforts that are being made to keep me safe. Why do I believe that? Because the capacity to bear the truth that we are in a terrible situation matters. The need to find a bad guy to explain, an enemy to fight in this catastrophe, is not nuanced and well, responsible enough, to make the slim chances we have left matter.
 
We have to develop a capacity to tend to our shadow. To come alongside our own fear and our automatic responses to fear and learn to navigate them with less blame and projection and more nuance. The drive to polarise to good and bad to right and wrong takes us out of community and connection, things that soothe and settle our nervous systems and responses, and into enmity and mistrust, things that activate our nervous systems and make us more likely to be reactive and act from a primitive defensiveness.
 
What if then, the enemy was both outside us; the harm of global warming and the very real (yes I know people who are suffering because of corona virus) harm of Covid19, and within us; our lack of capacity to tolerate our discomfort and fear.
 
What if we developed the capacity to meet discomfort with nuance and a thought for both ourselves and our values and also our community. What if it was time to stop blaming everyone else for the shitstorm and picked each other up and got to work cleaning it up?
 
 
 
(*and if you think the virus is a hoax then it’s likely you won’t like what I write from here on in but I’d love it if you could tolerate the discomfort of reading the information on shadow because it might be useful, even if to explain why what I am writing makes you angry.)