How to make Covid-19 quarantine errors impossible

It wasn't the system. It was the people who couldn't speak up about it.

Recently in New Zealand there was a serious and bizarre border-control failure. New entrants to the country coming from overseas, who were in mandatory quarantine, were supposed to be tested for Covid-19 before being released. Yet literally thousands were not tested, leaving the country vulnerable to the development of a second-wave infection.

But the question is - how could it happen? Of course the people working at the coalface would have known what was going on. It's impossible for them not to. They would have at least wondered if what was happening was right. So the question is, why did they not inform senior management, and if they did inform senior management why then did senior management not respond? At heart, the problem can only be a communication breakdown - on some level.

With this example, I believe we can see a kind of communication problem that exists everywhere, in just about any large professional organisation. And it's rooted in the fact that subordinates cannot speak as freely to their bosses as they can with their co-workers, and for ultimately understandable reasons...

If you open your mouth when it's not invited, then guess who's going to be the first cab off the rank when it comes to restructuring and redundancy - probably you. Especially if you embarrass your boss with ideas or problem-finding that, in principle, they should have recognised for themselves.

The problem is, in large organisations no one really works for the company, they work for themselves, and no amount of idealised 'company policy' will change that. Having the "right attitude" as companies demand, is pathetic. No one really has the 'right' attitude. What they have is personal incentives. That is the real world.

In turn, the only good assertion from you, as far as your boss is (quietly) concerned, is the one that makes him look good - not the one that makes you look good. This is why I believe bosses typically don't want your input outside day-to-day operational specifics, and why they will tend to be agitated if you give it to them. Ego is part of it too of course...are you telling your boss "how to do his job"?

The question is, how do you break down the game so people can communicate freely from bottom to top? It boils down to power structure and again incentive. The way to do it, I believe, is to isolate all hiring and firing and promoting and demoting decisions to an external personnel department, and also by creating a kind of 'court' within personnel for all staff assessments, so subordinates can have a right-of-reply with respect to everything their supervisors might say about them. Assessments should be completely open.

This way, for the sake of example, when an employer treats an employee unfairly due to maybe ignorance or personal bias, the employee can then feel comfortable speaking up and out immediately. They could even be superficially abusive and say "piss off!" to their boss if the conditions warrant it, and know that it probably won't lead to a fault-finding operation to be rid of them at the first excuse.

Imagine the openness you could get when staff are not inordinately worried about company politics, and when they know they will always have a legitimate defense against the threat of unprofessional bias and the abuse of power...

Mistakes like New Zealand's outrageous border-control error would then be almost impossible, I believe. There would have been a loud "what on earth is going on!?" right from the beginning, and the error would have been corrected before it could even begin. But alas - no one wanted to embarrass the boss?

Message to Jacinda Ardern: Let's fix this. We can start with government departments. Maybe do an experiment with just one? Because when people can't or don't speak up, you have a problem.

-Andrew Atkin

Covid-19 and distorted Compassion

We have invested incredible monies into the life-extension of those who were and are close to death, and who typically had and have a poor standard of living due to a weak and worn-out body. This is what we bought for our countless billions sunk into the Covid-19 crises. A relatively small number of people living a few months longer.

The question is, should we have done it? What was or is the correct and most compassionate investment?

I believe that those on death's-door in rest homes and the like, are driven to live not so much out of a love for life but a fear of death. They have not made peace with death. And I believe this, in large part, is a result of the materialist-atheist mindset that is prevalent in modern society. Most of us are terrified of death, premature or not, because we basically think that biological death is absolute death (which may be irrational. See here).

The result I believe has been the distortion of our compassion. We've gone a bit crazy with our fear.

The natural investment priority for any species is the young fertile family, and for obvious reasons. Yet we have instead sold the fertile family out because of our materialist faith, making us desperate for life-extension which is again, as I believe, derivative of our failure to make peace with death. We have abandoned balance.

As a society it's killing us, as we have now made it too hard for young people to breed in a healthy and low-stress way, and at the right time of their lives. Too much is given to the elderly and at the wrongful expense of youth. Children are now being born in unusually small numbers, and often they are born in response to some kind of midlife crises, when really they should be born to parents who are young with spirit and energy.

This needs to change. Our compassion is distorted. When people come to the end of their lives they, and the rest of us, must accept that death is ok. We need to stop making this absolutist religion out of life-extension as though it doesn't come at a cost. When we go too far, as we have, it comes at serious cost - and we are today paying for it dearly. We are not breeding properly.

-No more mass qurantines.
-Means testing for pensions and health services.
-Prioritisation of welfare towards youth, when prioritisation is required.

-Andrew Atkin

The Logic of Primal Therapy

Let me give you an excellent example. When a woman describes being raped at the age of eleven, a brutal and sadly common trauma, then if she recalls the event at all she will describe herself as being "like outside of her body" when it happened.

That is the subjective experience of going into heavy shock, and repressing an event. If the girl did not split from the trauma she would literally die from the terror and emotional pain, as the trauma of rape is that extreme especially for a child.

In regression psychotherapy (primal therapy) the woman would have to relive that event - to be done with its effect. But 'relive' is a poor word, because the truth is when you feel a prior repressed trauma, you will in fact be experiencing it for the very first time. Relating to the rape example, you would experience the trauma from inside your body - not outside of it. You associate with the originally disassociated pain.

-No child or adult can feel their pain until they are ready, and until they are properly supported. The body will open to trauma for integration, for as much as it can handle, and in only small doses at a time when the pain is too great. But that's a long story and an aside.

The thing is, it makes perfect sense. How can you process an old trauma when you do not even know it? How can you know an old trauma when you have not yet even experienced it, as a psychological event? The body must know what it's dealing with to deal with it. It's that simple.

To better clarify, the pain of true trauma is repressed into the hard-drive, yet not run though the CPU. No pain is integrated until it runs through the CPU. To feel and experience the pain is to run it through the CPU - where it is then processed.

When prior repressed pain is finally experienced and known to the body and mind, the event is then properly categorised within the system. The past stays in the past. For example, the woman raped as a child will no longer fear men once she has integrated her pain, unless of course the fear is rational in present-day terms. And she will not need to act-out her trauma once it is left in the past.

So how do you deal with trauma when you do not experience it, and therefore do not know it? Well you can't and won't deal with it. Not really, anyway. You will only manage its effects, at best. The brain cannot process what it simply does not know. Old trauma is going nowhere until it's first taken out of cold-storage and let into the light. To know the trauma is to experience the trauma.

Though feeling old pain can give the most tremendous relief, there is no other easy way out. You cannot cheat the demands of your body. To deal with the past is to deal with the past. You have to go to the past.

For further understanding read here: The Walking Man Story.

-Andrew Atkin