Maybe you noticed it too, the summer of 2020, when the CDC put out a serious warning about Ivermectin, a medication effective for lice (applied to the scalp) and for use with livestock as a deworming treatment (injected, commonly).

“We’re not cows,” they said. But the feedstores just couldn’t keep their shelves stocked.

You may also remember “doctors” warning that ovarian cysts were caused by demon sperm after having sex with reptilian aliens in your dreams, or something to that effect. In our society, nothing seems to disqualify the experts.

While I was looking at the Covid stories again, I got sidetracked and started to follow a thread about birds (some birds/all birds?). They apparently are not birds but technologically sophisticated drones that spy on us from the trees.  I eventually learned that this is a movement, Birds Aren’t Real, young people claiming that spy drones disguised as everyday birds’ recharge by landing on powerlines. It’s satire and meant to be so. But so far down the rabbit hole, satire is no longer even registering.^[i]

I’ve no doubt if humans live long enough, if we don’t kill each other or destroy the planet during one of our frequent mass-psychosis events, then there will be spy technologies that are indistinguishable from wildlife. So, Bird’s Aren’t Real are just a little ahead of their time like all great prophets. More than anything, I’m fascinated by the level of paranoid delusion around us, worthy of a long stay in the local psychiatric unit. Such a disconnect from reality is not going to be helped by a brisk renewing walk in Nature (something I’ve otherwise prescribed for unreasonable anxiety), not when the forests are filled with feathered monitoring machine/devices, recording every step, each facial expression evaluated remotely by an unnamed agent of social control.

What Else I’ve Learned

Small egos thrive on circumstances that feel like a crisis. It allows them to declare that any “different” way of experiencing life and reality is naivete and foolishness and dangerous. Outright lying is not often repudiated because it’s voiced in places that exhaustively stoke gaslighting and bullying. To belong to such a group or community requires heavily-stylized performances—almost a form of Kabuki—often with cruel intent.

The same phrases are repeated; the same ego states demand attention; nasty (addictive) emotional energies become unstoppable currents. Conflicting (often meaningless) beliefs build in a back-and-forth shouting match and find a crescendo in physical violence. Until, at last, it feels enough like a pervasive emergency that control is justified, by any means. And, on the stage of such actors, a slight of hand occurs, a scapegoat is found; the less powerful are the ones who ultimately are made to submit to authority and to keep their mouths shut.

The burgeoning forces of factionalism on social media mirror what I’ve seen in organizations, in families, and within the psyches of the wounded and terrorized. In our culture, there has been a lessening of respect for meaningful action, a turning away from democratic systems with almost gleeful defiance: What are you going to do about it? Such provocation is met with, if not fawning, protective submission: There is nothing to be done.

[i] Official site of the movement: https: birdsaren’treal.com