Preface to Immune Equilibrium

Self-indulgent diarizing excerpted in advance, for the good of the final essay.

Balancing Act

If you’re still reading this, I have to wonder what you’re thinking.

The hall lights are sure to switch off any minute. If you aren’t on the upper deck of this sinking ship by now, you should at least be gathering your things and calmly making your exit. Yet here you are, mysteriously reading some lone crank’s theory of immunology, vainly obscured by a diaristic introduction no less, when you could be on a ranch out in the countryside. Do you think schedules for perimeter security and agricultural training of late refugees write themselves? Nor for the upkeep of the horses - no matter how much fuel you set aside, it isn’t going to keep the cars moving forever. Even the government of your home state doesn’t bother to keep a stockpile, despite the fact that the Federal Department of Energy spends millions of dollars every year updating a two decades-old report that recommends that all regions without multiple pipeline inputs should do so.¹ We live in an uncertain era; and not for the first time, the government seems to like it that way.

The oil supply chain, the internet, the money in your bank or stuffed in your mattress, your local water treatment network, your local power grid, the airlines, the undersea cables, the latest generation of solar cells which were never sincerely meant to fulfill their promised 50-year lifespans, your hyper-specialized skillset within the service sector that all these things sustain - at a certain point, these things or the value attached to these things will simply switch off, and there is no telling how long they will take to return. Not that it matters, to you, here, still reading. Chances of making it to the ranch at all are slim, if you continue to sit and wait. The moment you realize it is time for panic, your fellow passengers will already be doing everything in their power to get out before you.

So, I am no less mystified at the fact that I am even writing this, still lodged deep inside the floating, metallic, leviathan tomb we call industrialized society as I am. If the sinking is at hand, I should be practicing how to put corn into a basket; google image-searching “an actual chicken” and printing the results for future reference; maxing out my soon-to-be-defunct Wells Fargo American Express®️ on crossbow accessories. I have been officially declared an unperson; yet do I really believe the crisis is here, or not?² It’s hard for even me to tell. Old habits die hard; the habit of play-acting as if a collapse of the economy itself - not just the financial system, but the material transfer of essential goods - will somehow avert itself forever particularly so; but at a certain point one must call anesthetized paralysis what it is.³

But I have, as well, a particular salve against the self-directed frustration inflected by my paralysis. See, my mind also harbors the fantastical notion that the theory I am trying to articulate, even if its arrival is in fact imminent regardless of any work on my part (despite already being years late to appear), is one which will contribute to a better understanding of the world and of ourselves - an understanding which might help dismantle the invincible machine of medical immiseration once and for all. I believe - and I’m almost certainly lost in narcissistic psychosis to do so - that possession of this theory will enable the lay man and woman to dismantle the intellectual framework of this machine from a sitting position, as if it were nothing more than a poorly constructed gingerbread house. The self-serving deceptions of Germ Theory Dogma, knowingly perpetuated almost a century after their sell-by date in order for a subset of the human economy to prey upon society at large, will seem laughable in their flimsy stupidity. No society capable of free discourse would ever take the current principal paradigm of medicine seriously again. It will be consigned to the dustbin of history, like every other medical superstition before it.

So of course only an outsider was ever going to voice the theory. That even more extensive efforts have not been made to censor the late discoveries which lead to the theory, in fact, speaks to the disdain the contemporary practitioners of medicine who must have already perceived this theory by now hold for their fellow man. We no doubt appear to them - we must appear to them - as a herd of blithering idiots, who deserve whatever torture they inflict on us.

But then, perhaps this understanding will only be used to foster even more harmful attempts to divorce humanity from our biological nature, as if the lesson of the futility of this two-century war on death - the fact that it is and always will be simultaneously a war on life - has not already become abundantly clear. To divorce humanity from biology, is to make humanity ill. Will Immune Equilibrium merely be used to sell more false cures, more promises of deliverance from our supposedly broken-by-design natural vessels in life that serve only to leave us drowning in a cycle of drugged despair? It’s possible. But if man is reeling irrevocably toward a Leibowitzian Cycle anyway, pulling one more marble out of the technological doomsday pouch at this late stage can only help, not harm.⁴

Whatever the final significance of the understanding, it is so humble in its expression that only nine words are required…

1. https://govtribe.com/vendors/aoc-petroleum-support-services-llc-3h3l3

2. For my accidental trilogy of political commentary on the recent concerted media/state escalation of scapegoating the unvaccinated, see “We Silly Rabbits,” “Fully Vaccinated [Revokable],” and “Reducing the Number.”

3. Cliche disclaimer: “Old habits die hard,” is often just as true without the “old.”

4. A reference to A Canticle for Leibowitz. The cycle begins with the post-apocalyptic hunting-down of all surviving members of the sciences, and the destruction of all written human knowledge: a true “great reset.” I believe the analogy of novel technologies as marbles pulled from a sack, meanwhile, may belong to Toby Ord.

Bonus - Alt cover:

The flawed, faker-looking version which was used is clearly superior in general, as well as for its coincidental reinforcement of the clock motif used elsewhere in Unglossed and resemblance to a certain letter which embodies that motif.