We don’t have Covid because we don’t believe in Covid

Dispatches from an alternative universe on Day of the Dead

“The Mexican...is familiar with death. He jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it. It is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love.” – Octavio Paz

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To read the Spanish language version, click here.
Para leer la versión en Español clic aquí.

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Since March 2020, official responses to Covid-19, inflamed by lurid 24/7 media fearmongering, have turned death into a kind of grim celebrity statistic used to frighten and intimidate people worldwide in order to implement what an Oxford University Press (OUP) report calls an “authoritarian pandemic.”

The OUP report notes that governments are using Covid and “science” as a pretext to systematically violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights, the American Convention on Human Rights, and the Arab Charter on Human Rights. This is happening as tens of trillions of dollars in “stimulus” are pumped into the failing corporate and financial sectors worldwide without comment.

At the same time, an enormously profitable and historically unprecedented new subscription model of vaccination requiring regular updates (boosters) like computer anti-virus software, is being implemented everywhere on earth, often by state mandate. This loss of democratic proportion and restraint, what the OUP report calls “unmistakable regressions into authoritarianism” in which fear of death is used as a daily instrument of state coercion, is a threat to civilization everywhere.

As this new globalized regime was being rolled out during the first year of Covid, a young Mexican filmmaker in the city of Oaxaca shared an incredible story with me over coffee one morning that flew in the face of what was happening elsewhere. He had just returned from a month long session teaching traditional photography and darkroom technique in a tiny indigenous pueblo in the mountains far outside the city. The people of the pueblo said they did not have Covid because, they did not believe in Covid.

This may not be very “scientific,” but it makes perfect sense psychologically. Bernard Henri Lévy has commented on the “psychotic delirium” created by Covid. This delirium is driven by a destructive and socially debilitating global obsession over the dangers of a virus that has both a very low Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) and high survival rate as well as a myriad of readily available preventive and early treatment protocols.

All statistics can be, and are, manipulated constantly, and globally sketchy Covid stats are even more of a minefield than other kinds of data. One can lose lifelong friends over numbers that bear almost no relation to the reality of daily life on either side of the discussion. Disagreements over Covid are religious. No one will ever “win” such arguments.

Yet the need to dig deeper for meaningful answers and broader context has an unexpected urgency as the connective tissue of civilization itself is riven, and possibly severed irrevocably, from its cultural and philosophic roots by the stresses of this pandemic.

Oaxaca and the annual Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) fiesta offer a good starting point from which to explore alternative perspectives.