Cults, Masks, UBI and DNA Tests Purchasing Freedom
How long can this go on? We can use the latest DNA science to make life more livable--and exciting.
TLDR: If you want your freedom back you’re going to have to get DNA sequenced. The state has a compelling need in knowing your DNA, especially if it’s going to be paying for your health care.
In my short dalliance with a cult I learned a few things that they left out of my comparative religion courses. The first lesson: Few religions ever come at you and announce that they are religions. Instead they offer something more fulfilling and sustaining — what they say is the truth.
In the totalitarian faiths this truth is supported by the experts, they say, and everyone has to do it. It’s universality binds the community together in a shared purpose, don’t you know, and there’s nothing we love more than shared sacrifice, not even perhaps a shared blessing. We must be felt — and more importantly, seen — to be doing something, anything. We must assert control and there’s nothing we are in control of more than our own bodies, namely our hygiene. The germaphobic among us know what’s up and how to put down a plague. Writer John Durant makes the plausible case in his book, The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health, monotheism itself sprang out of the Bible’s obsession with hygiene.
God wants you to be clean in every sense of the term. The term “kosher” is both the Jewish law when it comes to food practices but also, less formally, a way of testing if is genuine and legitimate. “Is this contract or deal kosher?” we ask, so as not to get into trouble with the authorities, who are, after all, just a stand in for the supernatural authorities we can’t quite see but who govern our everyday life.
“Cover your head in order that the fear of heaven may be upon you,” the Talmud states in its section discussing the yarmulke. How different is that from the health authorities telling you to cover your mouth and nose lest the fear of the virus may be upon you?
Never you mind that there’s a lot of debate about the role of the face mask actually spreading coronavirus asymptotically. Who knows. Who’ll test it? Do scientists dare doing research against the state’s new found religion? The replication crisis suggests we use science to confirm our biases and not to discover new truths. The state funding definitely plays a role.
Still another religious garment — the veil — permits the Muslim woman her autonomy. She is free to go into the world — a man’s space — so long as she complies with the rules and sometimes even the laws governing her modesty. Our liberal values recoil at such an idea. Men and women are equal, aren’t they? Of course they are, just sometimes more or less equal as circumstance permits.
But this is almost exactly like the face mask where we cannot gather together unless we follow the rules set by the authorities. We can’t even go outside to pray, lest we risk jail. In the soul of every rule follower is the petty tyrant who yearns to force you to obey, obey, obey.
Social media and our antisocial media enforces the rules over social distancing. Every serious decision has slowed to a crawl, as we Zoom with one another. We aren’t Zooming anywhere. We’re chitchatting in endless meetings. Nothing is getting done but then again this is hard to notice because so many jobs are meaningless anyway.
These rules don’t enter into a de novo world. There are all kinds of businesses and ideas that were present long before the novel coronavirus entered the world. How are they going to contend? The virus has gotten to a truly weird place. Since the pandemic began I’ve been to both strip clubs and Twin Peaks — neither was my idea — where scantily clad women paraded around while wearing a mask. And this was seen by all those present as normal, and perhaps just.
Religions, like all human creations, fall apart in closer examination.
We are not supposed to notice that initially the health authorities told us not to wear a mask or that the health authorities, namely Anthony Fauci, had gotten the HIV/AIDS crisis so wildly wrong so often. He claimed that HIV/AIDS could be spread by casual transmission. And now he tells us to wait for a vaccine which he, and everyone else, is totally sure will work despite the CDC constantly changing its own recommendations.
Say, isn’t it a conflict of interest for a 79-year-old Fauci to be proscribing the rules for everyone when the virus’s death rate is much, much higher for the elderly than the young?
A more honest assessment would allow Americans to make their own determinations on whether or not to wear a mask. Whatever happened to my body, my choice?
From faith we know that every person has dignity. From science we know that every person is unique, thanks to his DNA. You know this from observation but you also know it from experience. Some of you have even gotten partially sequenced using one of the DNA companies, AncestryDNA and 23andMe.com. Not all of us are affected in the same way by foods, drugs, and experiences. So why do we pretend?
Happily this fact — that we are all different — fits with another quasi-religious idea in America—that we are all special. It’s this specialness that has convinced enough of the public that everyone needs to have a basic income. That this project has more or less failed everywhere it has been tried is seemingly no deterrent. Mark Cuban—that most bombastic, yet oddly conventional of billionaires—calls for universal basic income, or UBI.
A UBI was touted by presidential candidate Andrew Yang as a way to respond to the coming automation. There were always problems with this analysis of a tradeoff between automation and job losses. How to make sense of unemployment being low while the economy is quickly automating?
Entrepreneurs waste what is abundant to preserve that which is scarce. If humans become abundant they’ll be those out there who find a use for them. Historically that’s meant a war. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen here. It may yet. Too soon to tell.
The more optimistic take is that the data harvested can be put to work on a public project. Indeed I have a different idea on what’s to be done regarding the tech transformation of the American economy — the American Sovereign Wealth Fund — but that’ll be a topic for another time. To tease it a little: if data is the new oil can you use government data to fund an American transformation?
A UBI will do little for the goods we need most — health care, housing, education — and the cost of which are rising far faster than inflation. It is precisely because these goods are positional and scarce that they are getting more and more costly. Giving everyone more money will simply lead to price inflation.
Think about how colleges merely raise prices when student loans are factored in or the way rents increase when soldiers or sailors are awarded money for their housing. There are positional goods in American life. Not everyone gets to drive a Ferrari or a Lamborghini. The cost of housing in the city isn’t high because of a lack of a will to build new housing as the Stripe brothers would have you believe but because of immigration and foreigners using America’s real estate market as a bank. America’s relative stability and real estate market is a good place to park some money from the old country. That is, until the rioting starts up. You used to buy a nice piece of art now you buy a property. Why they might even give you citizenship. That is, before the remote work forces you out of the city.
To be sure UBI is good politics. If everyone gets a check no one thinks too hard about where all the tax money is going. The thinking is that you’ll be freed up to pursue your best self and live your best life.
This isn’t true, of course. We are haikus, not free verse, and there’s a limit to what each and all of us can achieve in this life. The poetry of our life — our potential — is encoded in the genetic information we all carry within us. This isn’t quite fortune telling but it’s getting a lot closer than we dare to admit. At $300 it’s a great way to emancipate people from the dread of not knowing.
Others are catching onto the value. From CBS News:
The nation's largest private equity firm is interested in buying your DNA data. The going rate: $261 per person. That appears to be what Blackstone, the $63 billion private equity giant, is willing to pay for genetic data controlled by one of the major companies gathering it from millions of customers.
Each of us has a compelling interest to know our own personal story. This is why Ancestry is more valuable than 23andme.com: it’s better storytelling to know your past than to your future death of heart disease.
And yet the more interesting question is explaining our present. Who am I? What am I capable of? How do the stars affect me? The market for astrology and fortune telling never goes away, even in our rational age. The fantasy is deeply appealing, so too is its oddly explanatory power. Are we really so surprised it would find a home in the White House?
Speaking of interesting ideas finding their ways into the White House…
"You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn't it, don't you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we're so different? You have good genes in Minnesota." — President Donald Trump, Bemidji, Minnesota, September 18.
Are we so different from the animal kingdom? That was the intemperate Dawkins question.
A better question we should be asking is:
Are we so different from the United Kingdom?
Britain is whole genome sequencing their whole country. It is using the data from their UK biobank to better serve its population.
Russia is already fast at work using genetics to determine who might be a good soldier.
Health care, education, and labor all suffer from the same fundamental problem of an asymmetry of information. Genetic sequencing paves the way forward on all fronts.
We should begin with the coronavirus. After all a virus is simply a packet of DNA and protein, genetic information.
The alternative is far worse: a sort of forever virus TSA.
In 2003 the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, failed to blow up an airplane. We still must take our shoes off at their airport.
The idea that we might role back TSA is all but unthinkable. And so seemingly are the mask mandates.
Let’s hope that more genetic information can free us to live better lives.