I Want to Believe: Pt 2

(In viruses)

Continued from Pt. 1

At first I began with a fable. In it, a deaf prophet arises, who insists and convinces his flock to believe that music is not real.

After all, it is not visible.

After all, no one has “isolated” it.

After all, some who can “hear” seem to be affected by exposure to it, yet some do not (a parody of Koch’s Postulates). So why should the deaf believe it exists?

But, I wasn’t sure how this fable advanced the goal I had set in writing the essay to begin with, which was to “liberate” belief in viruses from reliance on appeal to authority - to demonstrate that viruses are at least as intuitive as the claims of Host Theory. Besides, didn’t Part 1 already provide two “introductions” into the epistemic landscape into which the essay would wade? It seemed that the entire essay would consist of a series of introductions, by the end of it.

What’s more, I had been field-testing the intuitive arguments in confrontations with the Virus Truthers who have infected Covid vaccine skeptical substack comment-space. I thought this would provoke at least some curiosity. Instead the universal response was, “I am trying to understand what you are saying.”

This is human-speak for, “I am not interested in understanding what you are saying.”

Finally I realized I wasn’t playing the game the right way. There was a reason my attempt to find the best approach to dispelling “Virus Trutherism” was leading me in circles - why after every direct attack on the meme, it becomes necessary to backtrack and start over again. Virus Trutherism is not, as it purports to be, an attempt to arrive at an understanding of life without relying on expert assertion. It is a war of attrition on the invader (Germ Theory Dogma). This is why attacking Virus Trutherism - by pointing out that the Truthers are not any more “visible” (online) than viruses, so why should anyone believe they are real either, for example - is not successful. The Virus Truthers do not care if most of their arguments lead to epistemic nihilism. The game is to bring the score to 0 on both sides.

They “win” this game via two conceits: Embracing the experts’ conflation of belief in viruses with Germ Theory Dogma, and ignoring all biological knowledge after 1960.

They lose this game as soon as they are denied both those conceits.

Thus, instead of a fable, a table:

So, there’s the whole thing. The meme of Virus Trutherism consists of playing the game as if the last sixty years never happened (because, after all, that’s what the experts on TV do as well).

I have tried to score the results fairly (a blank version of the table will be appended in an update after posting). This was a bit difficult; while I can appreciate the intuitive value of Host Theory, for example, I believe viruses should be scored as more intuitive: I have gotten sick before, and did not imagine it.¹

Where I found it most easy to credit Host Theory is in the realm of promoting a healthy lifestyle, both in the circa 1960 and modern portions. It is clear is that if the “player” only knows what was known in 1960, they would be well served to reject a belief in viruses in favor of Host Theory. They would turn off the news, tune into Jack LaLanne, expand their nutrition, reject vaccines, and raise healthy children. And even today, Host Theory outperforms Germ Theory in this realm. The best advice for not getting sick, even if you believe in viruses, is to take care of yourself.

But as the advances in understanding of innate immunity have only reinforced this wisdom, I think it is now fair to score a belief in viruses (not attached to Germ Theory Dogma) higher than the primitive and frankly superstitious notions of Host Theory in promoting health (I put an equal score on the table anyway).

The fact is, it is no longer 1960 (or is it? has anyone ever isolated the date?), and Host Theory has not aged well in the intervening decades. Meanwhile viruses, once a mere place-holder concept, and later akin to Germ Theory’s ugly step-child, have flourished, now representing a limitless font of insight into life as biology, and life as information, preserved and evolved through time.

But when Virus Truthers are confronted with insights from the last sixty years of advancement of human knowledge - when they are offered a glimpse of ascending beyond the illusions of the experts - the result is befuddlement: After all, what is the point of playing the game if it isn’t rigged?!

Thus, bringing up anything discovered since 1960 is waived away as “appeal to authority.” But remember, the appeal to authority charge is just one more self-own in the Virus Tuther war of attrition: The Truther, after all, always has their own Authority - always a link to some “Host Theory Scholar,” who has devoted decades to erecting mythological counter-explanations for every instance of infectious disease in observed human experience.

Or take the problem of studying the function of viruses, which requires removing them from their dynamic relationships with their hosts and with each other, essentially rendering them into a simulacrum of themselves, a digital abstraction of a nuanced, emotional reality: The same is true for host tissues, as well. In fact, the more “narrow” itinerary described by the conventional understanding of how viruses operate, even if you regard it as an “unproven” assumption, and even while it disguises the quantum ambiguity of viruses in reality, makes the study of the function of their parts at least as simple as the corresponding elements our own cells. Thus everything that we know about our own biology - the knowledge used as the raw fodder for Host Theory mythology - is just as, if not more poisoned by the paradox of measurement than is our understanding of viruses.

This can be illustrated by attacking the “assumptions” behind both viruses and host biology with the problem of feasibility. An example was provided during an exchange in a comment thread yesterday:

I only ask for proof that any dna fragment even just one time went into a living cell and modified its dna so that he could make a copy of himself. So your burden of proof is very light. go to it!

Ok: Sperm.

Human sperm contains a “DNA fragment” (an incomplete genome); enters a living, human cell (an egg); modifies the DNA of that cell; and (in 50% of cases), results in the eventual creation of more sperm that contains the same DNA. Along the way, a billion, trillion additional cell divisions must take place, not just among the direct progeny of that “infected” human cell but among the universe of microbes and other organisms that will go on to coexist with that cell, or be consumed by it - for no organism exists in a vacuum. All so that the “invading” DNA of the sperm can successfully copy itself.

To the Virus Truther, allegedly, it is absurd that some genes would figure out an easier way to do this, skip the billion trillion intervening steps, and just turn a cell into a factory for more copies of itself. I submit, again, that this is not an authentic or sustainable relation to reality. I submit that Host Theory requires more appeal to authority than a belief in viruses - speaking for myself, I have never looked at my own cells in a microscope. I “know” what my insides look like because, after breaking certain things, machines made print-outs of those insides; print-outs which could be computer-generated fabrications. I then went on to fashion my own strategy for healing, regardless of the grim portrait issued by those print-outs.

I thus have no more been “proven” to conform to the postulates of biology than have any viruses, if not even less so. Nor have any Truthers.

It is time for them to reject biology altogether, or embrace what it has revealed about viruses.

To any Truthers reading: The point of exploring the improved insights into viruses revealed after 1960, is that the war against Germ Theory can be won, not just brought to a draw. The point is that a better understanding of disease - one which reincorporates the mysteries of contagion rather than denies their constant presence in human life - is possible. The point is that you don’t have to spend all day sounding just as brainwashed and confused as the Believers in the Experts.

(Discussion of the table will be added in Part 3.)

1. However, this intuition may be an artifact of my not being born into the modern era of complete divorce from (virological) nature, and universal poisoning of children, via vaccines: I had chickenpox, for example; modern children do not get it. Virus Trutherism may in part be a creation of the West’s banishment of childhood viruses; without a survey of the age of Virus Truthers, this is only a guess.