My Coronavirus Hygiene Protocol

By Glenn Campbell, last revised 20 March 2020

I stopped updating this document in mid-March 2020, when I was admitted to a hospital in Boston for an affliction not related to COVID-19 (lymphoma cancer). In my ward, everyone is screened for COVID, so I don't need to worry about it anymore. You should regard the advice below only as a starting point.

I travel continuously within the USA for work—driving other people's cars and pets around the country. I travel by car, plane and public transit, and I visit stores, restaurants and public restrooms almost every day. I am reasonably fearful of the coronavirus, since I am a not-technically-young citizen with some past health issues, but I believe I can reduce my chances of exposure with the steps and observations below. I don't mean these instructions to be definitive. They are just a starting point. At this early stage of the pandemic (March 2020), there's a lot we don't know, but we can make some reasonable assumptions based on past outbreaks and known information.

I know that I can't completely eliminate all risks, but I believe I can reduce them by 99%. Instead of protecting myself from every possible vector of contamination, I focus on the most likely ones.

These are my assumptions, based on current information:

1. There's no risk in touching something that no one else has touched within the past three days (the maximum external life of the virus according to study).
   — This means I can enjoy complete freedom in nature and other places people rarely visit. It also means you can "sterilize" an object simply by not touching it for 3 days. 
2. Unlike bacteria, viruses can't "grow" on surfaces, they can only be deposited there and degrade from that point on.
   — This suggests that I should focus attention on surfaces that other people have touched recently with less concern about objects touched days ago.
3. The virus prefers cool, dry environments. It is more likely to degrade in warm, humid environments. This contrasts with bacteria, which usually prefer the opposite.
   — Virus is more of a concern in winter and in cold climates. Virus won't survive very long in places where you are sweating.
4. Porous surfaces like fabric or paper are less likely to transfer the virus than non-porous surfaces. This is because the virus becomes embedded in the fibers and can't easily transfer to the skin.
   — This suggests that if you touch objects with your clothing or with paper products like tissues, the virus is unlikely to transfer to you before it degrades.
5. The main vector of entry for the virus is touching an infected object with your hands then touching your face with your hands.
   — This means the most important rule is to not touch your face at times when your hands might be tainted.
6. The highest risk comes from touching something that a lot of people have touched, like elevator buttons, door handles, gasoline dispensers, etc. There is less risk from an object that only one or two people have touched.
   — This means my highest vigilance should focus on "high-traffic" surfaces.
7. When people cough or sneeze, the highest risk is within about two meters of them, since the droplets they emit tend to settle from the air quickly.
   — This means you should stay more than 2 meters away from anyone coughing or sneeze. However, you do need to worry about the surfaces where the droplets may have settled.
8. "Aerosolization"  may be possible, but I assume it is unlikely until I hear evidence otherwise. Aerosolization is the distribution of the virus in "microdroplets" that can travel long distances of more than 2 meters, as opposed to bigger droplets from sneezes that fall out of the air quickly.
   —Aerosolization, if a significant vector, is something I can do very little about, so I am choosing to ignore it for now. If it were a real source of infection, then you could never go to a store or other public indoor space.
9. Masks are relatively useless for protecting yourself from the disease.
10. Handwashing with soap is the most effective way to sanitize your hands, since it destroys the lipids that form part of the virus' shell.
11. In the absence of soap and water, hand sanitizer and alcohol are effective ways to sanitize your hands.

I am only ASSUMING these things are true. I am always watching the news for evidence otherwise.

Based on these assumptions, I can assemble a "good enough" protocol that protects me from most sources of infection. I am concerned not just about protecting myself but protecting others. I also don't want be a jerk to people who aren't following the same protocol. I still want to engage in normal human interactions.

Here is some specific aspects of my protocol:

My Safe Zone

I consider the car I am driving (or my home if I had one) to be my Safe Zone, assuming it hasn't had much traffic from other people. I am also safe in nature or places that other humans rarely visit. I can do anything I want in my Safe Zone, the same as before; I can touch my face anytime, and I don't need to use hand sanitizer or wash my hands. I have to take special precautions only when I step out of this zone.

Hand Washing

I wash my hands with soap and water whenever I have the opportunity. Soap is said to be highly effective in killing the virus because it neutralizes lipids, which are a component of a virus. It is okay to touch a soap dispenser or faucet before I wash, but not after, so I use my elbow to turn off the faucet. Paper towels are safe, since no one has touched them, so long as I don't have to touch a dispenser. I use a paper towel or toilet tissue to turn a doorknob or pull a handle to exit a restroom.

Hand Sanitizer

I always travel with a bottle of hand sanitizer and a small bottle of alcohol (over 70%) for times when I can't wash my hands. I prefer hand sanitizer, but I can use alcohol instead. Since these things are currently in short supply, I use them sparingly. I apply just enough to wet the parts of my hand that actually touched a foreign surface. (There's no point in applying it to the back of my hand or between my fingers.) To apply alcohol, I purchase a bottle of perfume with a spritzer top (available at the dollar store). I throw away the perfume and replace it with alcohol. This lets me spray just enough alcohol to do the job without wasting any.

Leaving My Car

Whenever I leave my car, I take some paper napkins with me, and I leave a bottle of hand sanitizer on the driver's seat to remind me to use it when I return. I usually leave my cellphone in the car. This prevents me from being tempted to use it and cross-contaminate myself.

Using My Left Hand

After I leave my car, I try to use only my left hand to touch foreign objects that other people may of touched, like door handles. Once my hand has touched these objects, I treat it as "poisonous". I avoid touching my face or my right hand with it until I can wash or sanitize that hand. I use my left hand to leave my right hand free to touch my face or operate my cellphone (if I have it with me).

Napkins

I try to carry restaurant napkins in my pocket wherever I go. I can use them to protect my hands when I open doors. When practical the napkin can be thrown away immediately, but even if I keep it with me, I figure it is better than touching a door handle directly. Porous surfaces like paper and cloth are said to transfer the virus less effectively than non-porous surfaces. I consider a napkin or paper towel safe because no one is likely to have touched it prior to my taking it from the dispenser.

Air

For the time being I assume that the air in stores, airports, restrooms and most other places is safe, so long as I am not in close proximity to someone who looks sick. I can't do much about the air I breathe, so for now I am mainly concerned with surfaces, including places where droplet from an infected person may have settled.

Touching My Face

Not touching my face is a lot more difficult than it seems. It requires a lot of attention, so I attempt to do it only for short periods when I am away from my safe zone. If there is an itch on my face that I must scratch, I use a napkin from my pocket.

Money

Handling cash could be a problem, since it changes hands frequently. Bills are a porous surface, which less likely to transfer the virus, but coins are non-porous.

One way to avoid money is to use a credit card. Unfortunately, a credit card transaction usually requires you to use a keypad or touchscreen to enter information. These will have been touched by far more people than money you receive in change.

Instead, I "quarantine" the money I receive. As soon as I receive change for a cashier, I put it in a pocket that I only use for this purpose. Thereafter, I treat my pocket and my hand that handled the cash as "poisoned". When I return to my car or home base, I put the money in a plastic bag and don't touch it for a couple of days. I assume the virus will expire on its own.

Restrooms

I consider public restrooms to be easy to handle, since there are washing facilities on-site. After I wash my hands, I use my elbow to turn off the faucet, and I use a paper towel or toilet tissue to open the restroom door. 

Contact between buttocks and toilet seat is a potential source of infection, but I don't think it is a significant one. Outside a restroom, I don't often touch my own buttocks, so moving the virus from there to my face would be a long journey.

Restaurant Food

Restaurant food could be a big problem. It is not the food I'm worried about but the packaging and other things that the server or preparer might have handled. I have to analyze each situation to see what I should do to avoid touching something that someone else has touched.

Store Products

I see store products as relatively low risk. Someone has touched the product when they put it on the shelves, but it is likely only one person many hours ago. I try to use my left hand to touch products. If the epidemic becomes severe, I may wipe down the products with alcohol after I buy it, but for now it doesn't seem necessary.

Clothing

When possible I use my sleeve or another part of my clothing to open doors or otherwise touch foreign objects. For example, I can push open a door with my shoulder or hip. I also use my sleeve to touch elevator buttons. I figure virus in my clothing is highly unlikely to reach my face before it dies.

Shaking Hands

The custom of shaking hands should clearly be avoided, but I'm not going to be a jerk about it. If someone wants to shake my hand, I do it warmly, but I consider that hand "poisoned" until I can sanitize it.

Public Transit

Public transit can be a nightmare, especially when it is crowded. It's nearly impossible not to breathe other people's air and touch things that other people have touched. If things get bad, I may avoid public transit altogether. In the meantime, I am careful not to touch my face until I get off the bus/train and can sanitize my hands.

Health Club

A health club represents a special set of challenges. You are touching all sorts of equipment others have touched, and you're surrounded by a lot of sweating and heavily breathing people, no doubt spewing water droplets. There is not a lot I can do about the ambient air, but at least I rarely come within 2 meters of anyone else (except when the club is crowded). The one thing I have control over is what I touch. The only equipment I use is a treadmill and the showers. I usually use the treadmill for 30 minutes, and during this time I am touching the equipment, touching my face and touching my iPhone (because I can't live without it for 30 minutes).

My solution: I bring two clean rags with me, preferably of different colors. I wash my hands before my workout and take a shower after. During my workout I use one rag to touch my face when I feel I need to. I use the other rag to operate the equipment. This means I can keep my hands clean to operate my cellphone. 

There are a lot of risks in the health club, but at present I feel the benefits outweigh them. I want to be in top cardio-pulmonery shape when the coronavirus finally strikes me.

——

These are my starting rules. Since I'm now in the hospital with unrelated cancer, I will not be updating them.

Glenn Campbell

31. The Crash Begins (Demographic Doom Podcast)

This is the script for my Demographic Doom podcast episode (#31) released on 29 February 2020. It may differ slightly from the final broadcast. This episode is available on major platforms, including Podbean, Apple Podcasts and a video version on YouTube. See the description on the YouTube version for anonations, links and corrections. You can also comment on this episode there. (If you leave comments on this blog post, I might not see them.) The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com

I’m Glenn Campbell. I call myself a demographic philosopher. I’m looking at life and trying to predict the future through the lens of demography, or the study of human populations.

Today is Saturday, February 29, 2020, the last day in February. In previous podcasts I made some predictions about the economy in response to the coronavirus epidemic, and it looks like I was vindicated. In the past week, there's been a massive selloff in worldwide stock markets. US markets were down roughly 12% in the last week. That's the biggest drop since the Global Financial Crisis and roughly comparable to the initial fall of the stock market at the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929.

I want to talk about what this means for our future, but first I want to take a moment to pat myself on the back. 18 days ago I released my episode entitled "Coronavirus Predictions."At that time, February 10, investors were still in full denial. Even though the coronavirus news was getting worse by the day, investors were treating bad news as good news and were continuing to bid up stocks. If you go to the end of that episode, around 27 minutes 30 seconds, you will hear me say, quote, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that by the end of February, stock markets will be in obvious distress, unquote. So I got it right. Can I get a medal for this, maybe a free buffet? You should call me Nostradamus now.

In fact, I've been predicting economic collapse long before the coronavirus. In Episode 22 on December 13, three and a half months ago, I predicted the 2020s would be a horrible, no good, stinky decade when financial systems would collapse and everyone would be miserable, and I'm sticking with it. My previous predictions of financial doom go all the way back to my first Demographic Doom video recorded in the Canary Islands over a year ago.

Of course, I knew nothing about any virus at the time. I only knew about three things: the world's colossal debt, its absurdly high asset values and its ominous demographics, where old people were retiring in large numbers while the workforce supporting them was shrinking. The shrinking workforce meant that, ultimately, the debts could never be paid and high asset values couldn't be justified. I knew a crash was coming but I didn't know when or what would trigger it.

Well, now we know. It's happening now, and the trigger was a random epidemic. Epidemiologists have long predicted something like this, but its timing was unknowable. No one gets to choose their Black Swan. When it happens, it happens, and you have to deal with it. The coronavirus and its unstoppable spread means the day of reckoning can no longer be put off. I have no idea how long the crisis will last, but we now have a clear start date. It was this past week, February 24-28, 2020. Things can only disintegrate from here.

Now to be honest, I also made the some prediction in December 2018, 14 months ago, when the stock market took a dive. In that case, the stimulus was pretty mild: The Federal Reserve tried to raise interest rates to inch them back to normal levels. This triggered an unpleasant stock market correction, and the Fed quickly reversed course, lower interest rates again. 2019 turned out to be an banner year for the stock market, which I certainly didn't predict, but it was based mainly on the free money the Fed was essentially giving away. Stocks reached new highs without any fundamental business improvements.

So what makes it different this time? This time we are facing an undeniable external threat, the  coronavirus, that would be crippling to the economy even in the best of times. It is not virus itself that is sabotaging the economy, but the widespread fear of the virus and all the actions that flow from that fear. No one wants to die or even accept a 1% chance of dying. Whether we're talking about the actions of governments or the behavior of individuals, in the end hardly anyone can ignore this threat. The epidemic is rapidly changing people's behavior and the behavior of governments in ways that can only be bad for the economy. Couple this with the huge unpayable debts of the world, and you've got an unavoidable disaster.

As of this week, it is becoming clear to any well-informed citizen that the virus has gotten loose and is coming after us all. Some people are still in denial, but I think they will accept it as soon some celebrity dies, like Tom Cruise or the Pope. There's a lot of debate about what the fatality rate is for this disease. Is it 1%? 3%? It's pretty clear that at least 85% of those who get the virus will suffer only mild to moderate symptoms, but no one wants to take the chance of being in that other 15%, where they have to depend on the medical system to keep them alive. Even if only 1 out of 100 die, no one wants to spin the big roulette wheel to see if they're the chosen one.

So the virus is going to change human behavior, and this can happen incredibly fast. I think in even the past week, a lot of people outside China have changed their opinion from "This is no big deal" to "Maybe I should be stockpiling food."

When a significant portion of the population goes into self-protection mode, it changes everything. Consumers have great discretion over the way they spend money, and most of the products and services they normally buy can be canceled or delayed at a moment's notice. As soon as great masses of consumers adopt a bunker mentality, our current economy isn't sustainable anymore, and the fear is self-perpetuating. When people stop using non-essential services, the people who provide those services get laid off, then those people stop spending money, and the cycle repeats.

The stock market is not the economy. The fact that it fell 12% this week doesn't affect most consumers directly, but it has ripple effects. It's just one more piece of evidence that tells consumers it's time to hunker down. It doesn't matter if you are hunkering down to avoid the virus or hunkering down because your 401K just lost 12% of its value. As soon as you stop spending money like you did in the past, and millions of other consumers do the same, the real economy begins to plunge, and once it begins it may be unstoppable.

So now that I'm a little cocky over my success in predicting the past week's stock market, what are my predictions for the coming week? The truth is, I don't know. Stock prices could go up or could go down. The Fed could lower interest rate, which could fuel a temporary bounce back. I don't know what's going to happen next week, but in the long run these indexes are going to keep falling, and I don't know where they will stop. At some point the whole integrity of the monetary system is at risk.

Consider this: As investors are pulling out of stocks, they are putting money into bonds, especially US government bonds, where the effective yield is being pushed toward zero. People, in effect, are loaning the government money for ten years and getting virtually no reward for it, and this is one of the most dubious assets of all. Given its deficits and soon-to-be-plunging tax revenues, the government can't possibly pay back all the money it owes, yet investors are treating its promises as though they were gold. Something has to fail here, and I don't know what, when or how.

And what about real gold. Where is that going? I have to admit that gold is the asset I understand the least. You can't use it for much, but people treat it as a store of value. How high can the gold price go? I have no idea. What happens when everyone on Earth tries to buy gold? What does this do to the price of all the other assets? I just can't get my head around it.

If you sell your stocks and put you cash in a bank account, well, banks can fail, and they will. You may think your deposit is guaranteed by the US government, but what does that mean? What good is the word of an insolvent debtor?

Keeping you cash in a mattress? Well, I don't know if dollars tomorrow will have the same buying power as dollars today. Ultimately, if the Federal Reserve keeps printing money, there has to be more consumer inflation, but I don't know when it is going to come. In the meantime, deflation might be the order of the day as foreign investors seek the perceived safety of dollars.

The bottom line is that I don't know where things are going in the long run. I only know that there are more perceived assets in the world, more perceived wealth, than can possibly be backed up by reality. You may think you own a house worth a million dollars, but in the long run it is really worth a lot less. No matter how you cut it, most of the wealth people think they have is going to evaporate, but I know yet how that evaporation will take place.

I feel more comfortable making predictions for the medium term, say the next few months. It is clear now that the coronavirus has breached its containment walls and will race through countries outside China, including Europe and North America. Regardless of the fatality rate, it's going to change human behavior. People are going to be a lot more cautious about where they go and what they touch, and they know that they safest place to be is at home. This may be great for Netflix, but it's bad for any business that requires people to go out and do things, or that requires people to give up money they could otherwise hold onto.

We've already established that the travel industry is already screwed for the rest of 2020, but think of all the other industries that require people to step outside or otherwise interact with other humans. Restaurants seem vulnerable, along with retail stores and shopping malls. Who's going to want to go to a sporting event or the Olympics? If your retirement fund just lost 12% of its value, who is going to feel comfortable initiating a home renovation project. You might not even go to the dentist for routine checkups, because things like that can be put off.

Right now, the main fear is the virus itself, but I predict that in the next month or two this will morph into financial fear. People will either lose their jobs or fear losing them. Retirees and prospective retirees will discover that much of the wealth they thought they had has vanished. Everyone who thought they were financially comfortable will feel less comfortable. The virus itself encourages people to not leave home, which only incidentally prevents them from spending money. Financial fear encourages them to hoard their money and spend as little as possible. Up til now, people with money were spending it in all sorts of insanely wasteful ways, and in an instant, all that wasteful spending can dry up. This is disastrous if your whole economy is built on wasteful spending, as is ours.

I think that within the next few months, we're going to start seeing massive layoffs. As of today, there is no evidence of it. The unemployment rate in the U.S. is just about the lowest it has ever been, 3.6%. Just about anyone who wants to work and is functional enough to show up can get a job. It may not be a great or well-paying job, but it's a job. I predict in the next few months, those jobs are going to start going away. It's going to start in industries that are already under stress, like travel. Around the world right now, there are already a lot of idled airplanes and unoccupied hotel rooms. The people who service this market are going to get laid off or have their hours reduced.

And that's just the most obvious example. Any product or service that could be labeled as "luxury" or "fashion" or "entertainment" or "relaxation" or "self-fulfillment" could take a hit, and a lot of people in those industries are going to get laid off. Laid off people are especially tight with their money. They spend only the bare minimum they need to stay alive. When push comes to shove, they're probably going to pay for food and their electric bill, while debt and mortgage payments will start to slide.

Debts are so high in all sectors of the economy that it takes only a small downturn to trigger widespread defaults. When people default on, say, their car loans, this is going to have a chilling effect on the whole automobile industry. For one thing, it's going to push a lot of repossessed cars onto the market, which will suppress used car prices and make new cars less attractive.

Debt is a big interrelated web. Once one class of debts fail, then other kinds of debt follow. We saw this during the global financial crisis, where the crisis in subprime mortgages in the U.S. eventually led to a sovereign debt crisis in Greece and other countries far from the U.S. Last time around, central banks were able to intervene. They lowered interest rates and pumped cash into the economy to to stimulate spending. That's not going to work this time. If you are hunkered down at home because you fear the virus, and the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates, it's not going to change your behavior. It's not even going to change the behavior of businesses that are hunkering down. Nothing the central banks can do will encourage people to spend when they are fearful. They won't get on a cruise even if the cruise is 50% off.

Here's a specific prediction for you: I think the cruise industry is dead. I think all those massive Princess of the Seas ships with five swimming pools and fifteen restaurants are going to get mothballed in 2020 and most of them will never be returned to service. If there was anything emblematic of things you don't need, it's a cruise. You need a huge economy of scale to run those things, and I don't think the traffic will ever be back, even after the virus abates.

If enough purchases get put off or canceled, the Doom Loop begins. Once a certain threshold of fear is crossed, a feedback cycle takes over, and it can't be stopped. Companies that are on the edge of solvency right now are going to fail. Consumers are going to lose confidence, and there's nothing the government can do to bring it back.

Even if we could just stop the virus in its tracks right now, I don't think things can ever go back to the way they were. The trigger has already been pulled. All the market absurdities built up over the past decade must face a reckoning. Governments can't pay their bills—especially the US government. Consumers can't pay their debts. Assets values for things like real estate are fundamentally unsupportable. Everything has to crash in some manner.

I can't envision what this will look like on the ground. I only know that a lot of people will be in dire straits. On a worldwide basis, I honestly wonder whether starvation will kill more people than the virus. That's what happens when millions lose their jobs.

So as of this moment, the last day of February 2020, the official unemployment rate in the U.S. is 3.6 percent, which is just about the lowest it has ever been. I predict that by the end of June, 4 months away, it will be at least twice that: 7.2 percent. Although the viruses—both medical and economic—will move more quickly than that, there will probably be a lag time before people get laid off. As a reference point, unemployment in the US peaked at 10% during the 2009 crisis, from a prior level of 5%. After June, I think things will continue to get worse, but my crystal ball gets cloudy at that point. There are too many variables to allow me to see beyond the summer. Everything I foresee is bad, but I can't make out the form of that badness right now.

If you want to see the news I'm seeing and read what I'm reading, you should subscribe to my Twitter feed, DemographicDoom. Every significant article I come across is tweeted here. I try to focus on significant changes in the coronavirus story and the financial crisis, without too much repeated information. Furthermore, all my tweets are linked together by an indexing system based on hashtags. I have my own set of special hashtags that begin D-D-O-O-M underscore. This lets you call up my tweets from the past relevant to a certain topic.

When I started the twitter account last year, I wasn't concerned with pandemics, only with demographic and economic collapse, hence the name "Demographic Doom". Now that a pandemic has begun, I realize it is a demographic issue. For one thing, this pandemic is probably going to trigger the financial crisis I talked about all last year. That crisis, in turn, is partly fueled by falling birth rates and the growing proportion of old people in the world.

A pandemic also has an direct effect on demographics because it kills off people in certain predictable proportions. Right now it's clear that children and young adults will be largely spared by the virus, which is good. We can't afford to lose any of them. Old people are much more likely to die. Fatality rates are extraordinarily high for the elderly. It's at least a 10% death rate for people 80 or older. Ironically, this going to have an effect on pension plans, reducing their costs, but I don't think this will be enough to rescue Medicare or save fragile retirement systems.

Here's a definite demographic effect: If this week was the beginning of deep, long-lasting recession, it's going to suppress birthrates even further than they are. No one wants to bring a child into a world that seems to be falling apart. If South Korea's fertility rate is 1.0 right now, it is certainly not going to rise during a prolonged financial crisis. Women are going to be having half a baby each. As long as people lack confidence in the future, they're going to have fewer babies, which is only going to exacerbate the workforce and retirement problems decades later. In a global financial collapse, babies are one of the first luxuries that desperate people are going to do without. Outside of Africa, the world's baby making system could essentially seize up. No one with foresight is going to have a child if they are not sure they can safely raise them.

The more I think about the coming economic crisis, the more my brain malfunctions. The only thing I can equate it to is the devastation of World War II. The best I can say about the coming crisis is that I don't think it will be that bad. 85 million died in the war. I can't say whether the virus will kill more than that or less, but at least it is targeting the old and sick, and it isn't blowing up cities and killing children. So that's my worst-case prediction: Not as bad as World War II. I know this doesn't sound very reassuring, but it's the best I can offer.

30. Pandemic + Financial Collapse = Chaos (Demographic Doom Podcast)

This is the script for my Demographic Doom podcast episode (#30) released on 23 February 2020. It may differ slightly from the final broadcast. The final episode is available on major platforms, including Podbean, Apple Podcasts and a video version on YouTube. See the description on the YouTube version for possible notes, links and corrections. You can also comment on this episode there. (If you leave comments on this blog post, I might not see them.) The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com

I’m Glenn Campbell. I call myself a demographic philosopher. I’m looking at life and trying to predict the future through the lens of demography, or the study of human populations.

Today, I’m trying to comprehend the great worldwide social and financial crisis that’s bearing down on us, triggered by the coronavirus out of China, and the bottom line is that I can’t. It’s just too big for anyone to get their head around. It’s like someone in 1939 trying to predict what World War Two will be like. It seems evident that a lot of bad things are coming down, but it’s impossible to predict how they will unfold.

I’m talking to you from a motel room in Laramie, Wyoming, in the early morning hours of Sunday, February 23, 2020. The epidemic in China has been known for about a month and a half. January 10 is when the first official death was reported. As of today, most of America seems to be in denial. I haven’t been outside the US during this period, so I don’t know what the rest of the world is thinking, but here in my own country it’s business as usual. No one seems to be altering their plans or taking any precautions for the coming epidemic.

I know you may be listening to this episode a long time after I record it, so let me summarize this moment in history. Until a week or two ago, the coronavirus seemed like a Chinese problem, but over the past few days, it has become increasingly clear that this is a pandemic involving the entire world. There are now uncontrolled cases in South Korea and Iran and probably North Korea, Italy and a dozen poorer countries that don’t really have the means to test for it. The virus now seems unstoppable. The majority of the world population is probably going to get it. At this point, it is only slow-downable, meaning that with good hygiene and a cooperative population, some countries might be able to slow its spread.

This is important, because survival rates depend on what kind of medical care people can get.
At this early stage, it’s hard to come up with good numbers on the fatality and complication rate, but it’s clearly huge compared to routine bugs like influenza. The best information suggests that at least 80% of the population will have only mild, non-life-threatening. This is good in the sense that most people are going to survive with minimal physical effects. It’s bad, however, in that most people who get the virus probably won’t seek medical attention or take appropriate actions to protect others. It appears that some people can even spread the virus asymptomatically, meaning that can get the disease and spread it to others without even knowing it.

The real danger lies in those other 20%. A significant proportion of people who get the virus will suffer serious complications requiring hospitalization, and some of them are going to die. We have only ballpark numbers now. Maybe 10-20% will suffer serious complications and 1-2% will die. Deaths seem to be weighted toward the old and sick, but 1-2% is still a big thing. It means that someone you know will die—possibly you—and millions will die worldwide. Millions more will require hospitalization or will be struggling to try to get it. This isn't the common cold. This is something no one can ignore.

The1-2% figure depends on people getting good medical attention. If they don't, many of those in the "serious complications" category are going to die. That's why it's really important to slow the infection down, so medical systems have time to respond.

North Korea might become a perfect test case, along with other poor countries. Although officially North Korea has no cases, it is clear that it can't keep the virus out from neighboring China. Here you have a malnourished population with an incompetent government and virtually no medical care. In North Korea, the epidemic will progress in its purest form, much as it might have done in the Middle Ages. In this case, the fatality rate might begin to approach the complication rate of 10-20%.

But the epidemic itself is only one aspect of the worldwide crisis. The other side of it is the coming financial crisis that's certain to result. I want to emphasize that there is no major financial crisis as I record this. In fact, a couple of days ago, the NASDAQ and S & P reached all time highs. This indicates that most investors in the U.S. are in denial. They don't comprehend how bad things are going to get. I don't think anyone can truly comprehend it right now. Even me. I know a lot of bad things are going to happen, but I can't get my head around how those bad things are going to be experienced by myself and others. Humans tend to focus on minutia. They have a lot of trouble grasping the Big Picture. This is understandable, because there are so many threads involved.

Today, we generally understand how World War II or the Great Depression unfolded, but it's hard to see things clearly when you right in the middle of it. It's like you're strapped into a roller coaster, in the dark, and you just have to go where it takes you. There have been no safety inspections on this roller coaster. You don't know how long it's going to last or how bad it will get. You just have to ride it out, doing whatever you need to do to survive.

As I record this, I think the business world and general public outside of China are right on the cusp of recognizing they're in big trouble. I predict the coming week will be a busy one, with lots of news on both the medical and financial fronts. In the past few weeks, the coronavirus has hardly made the front page of American newspapers. The main story has always been Donald Trump and the Democrats trying to unseat him. In fact, the main story has been Donald Trump for four years now, all the way back to 2016. It will take a powerful worldwide crisis to displace him, and so far the coronavirus hasn't managed to do it. Maybe it could happen this week: coronavirus becomes that main story in the American news.

Right now I feel like an ant in an underground colony at a construction site. I know the bulldozers are coming, but I'm too small to understand how things will unfold. I'm pretty sure a lot of people are going to lose their jobs and lose a lot of money in failed investments. I'm also pretty sure that within the next few weeks we'll all be living in deadly fear of a domestic epidemic. The chance of it not taking off in the US and Europe are increasingly slim. I know a great social and financial collapse is coming, but I don't know how it will unfold or how people will adapt. You can't predict it. You can only live it.

The best I can do is point out all the bad factors that are ganging up on us. The world economy is at the peak of an Everything Bubble. The coronavirus didn't create the bubble. It's just the thing that's going to pop it. For many months, I and an number of more reputable experts have been predicting a major economic collapse. To call it a "recession" would be an understatement. The basic problem is that after the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, central banks lowered interest rates, which resulted in all sorts of unsustainable dysfunctions in the economy. Assets like stocks and real estate have exploded in value, while wealth inequality has increased and the lives of average people in developed countries have gotten relatively worse.

It is particularly telling that stock markets have continued to boom even as the news out of China has gotten worse. Even if the virus never leaves China, supply chains are going to be disrupted, and traditionally stock markets are supposed to fall on such bad news. These days, stock markets seem to RALLY on bad news. The reason appears to be that investors expect the central banks and big governments to intervene. They will supposedly lower interest rates and pump more money into the economy to save the stock market. Unfortunately, there's a limit to how much the central banks and big governments can do. Since interest rates are already low, even negative in some cases, they can't lower them much further, and governments can't keep spending themselves into debt without some eventual consequences.

For months, I and the reputable experts have been saying, "This has to end badly," but it was never clear exactly WHEN it would end badly. The saying goes, "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." For months, most investors and economists have said, "There's a recession coming," but the timeframe has been elastic. The most common advice you hear on the business TV shows is that a recession is coming, for sure, but not right away; maybe next year.

Well the coronavirus is guaranteeing that "next year" is actually going to be this year, 2020. This is the year the whole house of cards starts collapsing. There's no way to stop the march of coronavirus around the world. At the very least, the whole Eurasian continent is going to get it, and it takes only one uncontrolled case to bring it to America. Based on countless epidemics in the past, we have a pretty good idea of how they unfold. They happen fast. Just look at how fast the virus spread in China, in spite of all their Draconian measures to stop it. In less Draconian countries, it could spread even faster.

This podcast is supposed to be about demography, and it turns out that the spread of epidemics is a demographic problem. Demography isn't just concerned with counting people and measuring their reproduction rates. It can also be applied to any living thing—like a virus. An infection rate is a lot like a fertility rate. A fertility rate is the number of babies an average woman gives birth to in a given community. If each woman, on average, has more than two children, and all those children survive, then the population will grow. If each woman has less than two children, the population will fall.

It's pretty much the same with a virus. Instead of a fertility rate, a virus has something called an "R-naught", which is the number of new people that each person with the disease infects. In this case, since there are no "males" in the virus community, the cutoff point is one instead of two.  If each person with the disease infects more than one other person, on average, the epidemic will expand. If they infect less than one other person, the epidemic will eventually fizzle out.

In the case of the coronavirus, the R-naught is very high. It's not yet clear what that number is, but it could be anywhere from 2 to 6. There are some people who infect many more than that, like so-called "super spreaders" who infect many. One woman in South Korea infected at least 40 members of her church, which means her personal R-naught is 40. With the high numbers we've been seeing, the infection is certain to expand fast. It's like a ooor country in Africa having fertility rate of 6 babies per woman: You know that over time the local population will explode. It just does it slowly, over years, because it takes nine months to make a baby and about 15 years for that baby to reach reproductive age. In the case of a virus, the "pregnancy" of the virus is only a few days, and it's ready to reproduce immediately.

So what you have with a virus is a real population explosion. The only thing that stops it is running out of victims. Pretty soon, everyone in the community gets the disease. Either they die or they gain immunity, at least to the current form of the virus. That's when the R-naught falls below 1 and the disease fades out.

You can try to erect a wall around your community, but there's a limit to how effective it can be. You can try to build a wall around China to keep the virus from spreading, which is what other countries have tried to do, but if there's the smallest breach in the wall—just a single case—a new community is infected, and the virus will start expanding exponentially there.

I can imagine there will be some island communities that will hold the virus at bay for a lot longer than a connected continent would. New Zealand comes to mind. It's surrounded by water, so it can control its borders better than, say, France or Italy can. New Zealand already has some stringent border controls in place to prevent the introduction of pests and new invasive species, and I'm sure they're putting into effect some serious controls on visitors from China. If need be, New Zealand could suspend all international flights, which might be necessary if people from outside China are spreading the disease asymptomatically. So far, New Zealand has had no reported coronavirus cases, and it is within their power to keep it that way—but at what cost? What is the life-blood of the New Zealand economy? It is tourism. If you cut off international flights, you cut off the country's economic sustenance. There's going to be a massive recession. People in the tourist industry are going to lose their jobs. Everyone will suffer, even if the virus never gets in.

And it might not even be necessary to suspend flights. Foreign tourists may decide, on their own, not to come to New Zealand. Even if all the firewalls hold and the disease doesn't spread beyond its current locations, 2020 is certain to become a truly horrible year for tourism. Tourism is discretionary. No one has to do it, and if people feel that their lives are at risk, they won't. Think of the passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. They found themselves trapped on the ship and subjected to a potentially deadly disease. Given how well it was publicized, who in their right mind would book a cruise right now, anywhere in the world?

New Zealand's dilemma is a microcosm of America's. America could be seen as a sort of island state, at least compared to the countries of Europe or Asia. It can close its borders relatively easily, but at what cost? America's life blood, like New Zealand's, depends on international trade. In particular, it has outsourced most of its industry to China. Even if the virus never gains a foothold in Amerca, where are we going to get all the products we need? America is pretty much self-sufficient on food and services, but it seems like everything else is Made in China. Furthermore, America needs China to sell its own products to. If America had to live without China, it might eventually adapt, but in the meantime, the losses are devastating. You can't close factories in China and prevent people there from buying things without huge disruptions across the ocean in America and Europe.

All of this ought to trigger a huge stock market correction. It ought to lead to layoffs and defaults everywhere in the world. So far these things haven't happened yet, but they will. There's no avoiding it.

Things will only get worse if the virus starts spreading within the US. As of this moment, all US cases—officially less than 100—seem to be controlled, but that can change in a minute. Once the virus is known to be spreading domestically, everyone is going to start taking defensive measures. They're going to hunker down. They're going to leave their homes as little as possible, and they'll stop spending money. The greatest vulnerability of the American economy is that very few of the products and services we buy are truly necessary. No one really needs a new car, a new home or meals in fancy restaurants. Once people lose confidence and stop spending, the whole economy starts collapsing in on itself. The collapse becomes a self-sustaining feedback loop when lower spending means more layoffs, which leads to even fewer people spending money.

In the background of all of this is absolutely astounding worldwide debt. Whether you look at governments or corporations or individuals, there's more debt out there than ever before in history. When the economy takes a dive, a significant portion of the debt becomes unpayable. Debtors will default, and the people and institutions who lent the money are going to lose their investments.

As I say, I don't know how it's all going to go down. I only know that it will go down. You can't put the virus genie back into the bottle, and you can't restore a healthy economy if it was unsustainable to begin with. I don't even know how to prepare for this myself. What should I do apart from buying hand sanatizer? My impulse is the same as everyone else: Just hunker down, conserve my resources and wait for the storm to pass.

Unfortunately, hunkering down is the worse thing possible for the economy. For the past few years we've been high on drugs—the drugs of low interest rates and irrational exhuberance. Now we have to experience the downside of those drugs, which is the terrible withdrawl symptoms when you take them away.

Ep. 29: Introduction to Triagism: A Philosophy of Life Based on Medical Triage (podcast script)

This is the script for my podcast episode on 21 February 2020. It may differ slightly from the final broadcast. This episode is available on major platforms, including Podbean, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. This script has not been proofread for publication and may contain typos and minor errors. See the description on the YouTube version for possible corrections. You can also comment on this episode there. (I might not see any comments left on this blog post.) The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com

I’m Glenn Campbell. I call myself a demographic philosopher. I’m looking at life and trying to predict the future through the lens of demography, or the study of human populations.

Today, I want to talk about “triage”. In a medical sense, triage is the sorting of patients and allocating of resources to save as many lives as possible. If you go to the emergency room at a hospital, triage is the first station you encounter. Here, a nurse will make a quick assessment of your condition and decide whether you need to be taken immediately into the operating room or whether you can sit in the waiting room for a while.

Triage happens to be highly relevant at this moment in history, on February 21, 2020, because it’s an important part of the coronavirus response. Emergency rooms around the world could soon be deluged with more patients than they can handle – as has already happened in China – and somebody, somehow has to decide which of those patients are going to be served and where they’re going to go. That’s literal medical triage, and how well it is conducted has a strong correlation with the fatality rate.

But I am also interested in figurative triage. In fact, I have built a whole philosophy of life around it. I call my philosophy Triagism. That’s T R I A G I S M. Triagism. I invented this term about four years ago, in November 2015, when I made four videos about it. I had forgotten about them until now. You can find my videos by searching YouTube for Triagism as I just spelled it. The basic idea is that every choice in life is a triage decision. You’re trying to choose your own actions in such a way as to maximize certain outcomes or minimize damage.

For example, if you are visiting a new country for the first time, and you’ve only got two weeks to see it all, you have to make some triage decisions about what cities and attractions to see and which to skip, and you’ve got to make these choices in advance in spite have having never been to the country before and having limited information about it.

In this episode I’m going to focus on medical triage because it is easiest to understand and most relevant to the current moment, but I hope you will see by the end how this could turn into a whole philosophy of life.

First I want describe the current moment. I realize that you could be likely listening to this episode months or years after I recorded it, so I want to summarize my current positio in history. Today is Friday, February 21, 2020. The coronavirus has spread across all of China and seems to be on the verge of erupting in several other countries if not the entire world. The growing consensus among disease experts is that the disease will eventually become “endemic”, meaning it will become a permanent disease of humanity, much like the common flu. The difference between this virus and the flu is that it is far more transmissible and deadly. It might kill 1 or 2 percent of the people who catch it, compared to a tiny fraction of that for the common flu.

I already recorded a couple of podcast episodes on the coronavirus, so I don’t want to repeat that discussion here. The most remarkable thing I have observed since my last episode ten days ago is the high degree of denial here in the United States. Virus-related shutdowns in China are already severely disrupting supply chains around the world, yet stock markets like the Nasdaq and S&P have been making all-time highs. This is insane to me, but then again, the markets have been insane for quite some time thanks to central bank intervention. I still believe this epidemic is the Black Swan event that will bring down the economy, but the panic hasn’t yet begun. Don’t worry, it will, and as a denizen of the future, you may already know about it.

The disease experts on TV all “hope” that the virus is contained, but I think most of them know that it won’t be. The big challenge now is not stopping the virus but slowing it down, so new cases don’t overwhelm medical resources. A relatively low fatality rate depends on people with serious complications getting adequate medical care. Even though hospitals have no cure for the disease, there are things they can do to keep people alive, like giving them supplemental oxygen or antibiotics for secondary infections. If people with serious complications can’t get treated, the fatality rate goes way up. If everyone who needs treatment gets it, the fatality rate goes down. Since there are only limited medical resources in any particular country, you want to slow down the rate of infection as much as possible so hospitals aren’t overwhelmed.

When hospitals are overwhelmed, you get into the realm of triage. Triage is the sorting process that takes place when casualties enter a hospital. Someone has to decide who gets treated and who doesn’t and how patients are going to assigned within the hospital.

What happens when a hospital with only 10 intensive care beds gets slammed by 1000 sick people demanding attention? That’s the essential triage problem. How do you decide who gets into those 10 beds? The general goal of triage is to save as many lives as possible, and that means selecting the right patients for treatment.

The default form of triage is what I call “First Come First Served”. The first ten patients who show up at the hospital’s door get admitted, then the doors are barricaded and no one else gets in. The trouble with this method is that not all the 10 people you let in are seriously ill. They might have survived anyway, but now they are occupying a bed that could have been used to save someone in greater need. You might also be admitting someone who is already too far gone. No matter what you do, they are going to die, so your efforts are wasted. The bottom line with the First In First Out method is that it doesn’t save as many patients as it could. It’s an inefficient use of medical resources that might end up saving only two patients when it could have saved, say, eight.

Another form a triage might be bribery. Only the richest people get treated. If you can slip some cash to the guard at the door, maybe you can get one of those precious 10 beds, but the problem here is the same as the First In First Out method: You aren’t maximizing the number of people saved. This method is effective only if you believe rich people are inherently worth more to society than others, so they deserve special treatment.

A third method a triage might be to admit only your own family members and allies. You try to save your clan or the people who you identify with. Everyone else gets locked outside. I can’t say that this is morally wrong. People do it all the time: They prioritize their own kin over others. All you can say is that it’s not saving the maximum number of patients, because some of those family members might not be seriously ill.

The most effective form of triage is something called “yield management”. Someone takes a broad survey of all the 1000 people outside the hospital’s doors and selects the 10 patients who they think will benefit most from treatment. You’re going to ignore the people who are only mildly sick, because they are probably going to survive anyway. And you’re also going to ignore the people who are so seriously ill that they’re probably going to die anyway. Why waste your resources on them? Finally, you might make a judgement about who is going to most benefit others if they survive. For example, if you save the life of a doctor, that doctor might go on to save 100 other lives, so in an epidemic, it is appropriate to prioritize medical personnel.

And there you have triage in a nutshell. It is simply the judicious allocation of resources to maximize final gains. The basic concept isn’t hard to understand. Triage is difficult only in its real-world implementation. For one thing, you usually have to reject more people than you select. If you choose 10 people for treatment from the 1000 outside your door, the other 990 people aren’t going to be happy about it. They might rush the hospital, ram down the doors and lynch all the doctors, in which case no one gets saved.

I’ve been thinking about triage since around 2009, when I first wrote a one-page essay about it. You can find it by Googling for “Triage Kilroy Café” That’s Kilroy K I L R O Y space C A F E. The essay is called “Triage: Doing What You Can With What You Have.” Although I hadn’t invented the word “Triagism” then, I pretty much captured the essence of it. Every decision is a relative one based on the goals you are seeking and resources actually available. There will always be more needs than resources, so you have to judiciously apply those resources to maximize outcomes.

I’ve always thought of triage in abstract philosophical terms. Everything we do is an exercise in triage. But the coronavirus pandemic means that triage is now being practiced in pragmatic medical terms. Triagism isn’t just academics discussing things. People are living and dying based on this philosophy.

Prior to the outbreak, if you went to a hospital emergency room in North America or Europe, you knew you were going to be treated. You would still see a triage nurse upon entering the E.R. but this only determines how long you wait. In wealthy countries not yet in crisis, there are usually enough medical resources to go around. The people who are shot up with bullet holes get wheeled into the operating room right away, while others may have to wait for a while, but ultimately everyone gets served and an optimal number of lives are saved. In more of a battlefield situation, like a pandemic, Triage decisions have a huge effect on who lives and dies. In this case, the triage nurse may actually have more power than the doctors in determining how many live and die, because they are determining who gets treated.

In a modern emergency room not in crisis, every patient is evaluated in isolation. The nurse takes them into an exam room, assesses their symptoms and decide what the best practices are for this kind of situation. There are all sorts of rule books and procedures for this, and a triage nurse can take pride in making the optimal decision for every patient. In a battlefield situation, you don’t have the luxury of looking at each patient in isolation. You have to have a broad overview of all the patients who are vying for medical attention. The decisions you make when the ICU has plenty of beds are different than those you make when beds are at a premium and only a limited number of patients can be served. In this case, you have to look at all of the patients and select the few who are going to benefit the most from treatment.

Medicine in wealthy countries usually has the luxury of treating every patient equally, at least in the emergency room. It doesn’t matter who you are or whether you deserve treatment; when a doctor sees you, they are going to make the best decision for your particular case. This is true even in the United States, with a notoriously screwed up insurance system. If you turn up at an emergency room full of bullet holes, a doctor is going to treat you, and they are not going to discriminate against based on your ability to pay or whether you’re a gang-banger who deserved to be shot full of bullet holes.
Doctors, in fact, face great legal liability if they discriminate against a patient for any reason. If someone comes into the hospital with cancer and they’re 90 years old, the doctor is obligated to offer them the same costly treatment they would give a 25-year-old – assuming, of course, that they both have health insurance. The doctor can’t say, “I’m not going to treat you because you’re too old and are probably going to die anyway.” That would be a breach of his Hippocratic Oath and could get him in trouble.

Things change when you’re in a pandemic situation and you’ve got all ages and conditions scrambling for medical attention. The triage nurse might have no choice but to discriminate. It’s not a discrimination based on skin color but a discrimination based on the probability of survival. If you have two patients with the same life-threatening condition, one is thirty years old and the other is eighty, the triage nurse might select the thirty year old for treatment, because they have a better chance of survival.

I want to emphasize how hospitals and medical personnel in the United States and elsewhere aren’t set up for this kind of triage. Triage in America means directing a patient’s treatment. Triage in a crisis might mean denying treatment altogether. Every medical professional has been trained to pursue the best practices of each individual patient. They haven’t been trained to balance the needs and prognosis of one patient against those of another. They haven’t been trained to look at 1000 people and pull out the 10 who can most benefit from treatment. They haven’t been trained to ignore some patients and let them die. This is the sort of triage decisions that a battlefield medic had to make in World War One, but I don’t think modern medical staff are prepared for it. They have been trained to give optimal care to everyone who comes through the door. They haven’t been trained to balance the needs of the entire community to maximize overall survival.

Consequently, I don’t think modern healthcare systems in democratic countries are going to handle a pandemic well. I think the kind of triage they will use, at least initially, will be the First Come First Served method. All the hospital beds will fill up with the first patients who come in the door, then police will be called; the doors will be bolted, and no one else will be let in.

That’s not to say that non-democratic countries will do any better. Right now, in February 2020, no one outside of China has a big-picture view of how well the epidemic is being handled there, but I would wager it’s being handled poorly. China famously built a hospital in about 10 days, but that doesn’t mean they have competent staff to man it or that they’re using the facility effectively to save the maximum number of people. At every hospital, there is an entry point where choices have to be made about what happens to each prospective patient. Will this patient be admitted to the hospital, and if so, where will they go? Do they go to the Intensive Care Unit? Do they go to an isolation ward? I doubt China is making these decisions well, because they weren’t prepared. No one is.

Even in the United States, the health care system is finely tuned for the mix of patients we have now. A hospital might have its cardiac ward and its cancer ward, and most of those beds are already filled with routine patients. It might have only ten ICU beds available for emergencies, because that’s the number of emergencies they normally have. If they get slammed by a thousand virus patients demanding to be seen, they’re going to fill up those 10 beds on a First Come First Served basis, and they won’t know how to deal with the rest.

When and if the virus invades the U.S. Authorities might have to do what they did in China: set up temporary hospitals to deal with the influx. Gymnasiums can be turned into makeshift hospitals, but then how do you staff them? All the doctors and nurses are already occupied at their own hospitals, so who is going to man the new makeshift hospitals? What is prevent these makeshift hospitals from turning into pandemonium? Everyone is crying “I’m dying, please help me!” but there’s no one to help and no system in place for effectively distributing resources.

Our only real hope lies in slowing down the spread of the disease to give us more time to prepare. This means educating people on how to avoid infection. People WILL pay attention if they know their lives depends on it. If you can limit the number of new infections each day, then you give your country more time to develop new systems to handle them. Unlike the medical systems we are used to, these systems are going to seem imperfect and brutal. You can no longer say, “We’re going to save every patient.” When the system is overburdened, you have to say, “We’re going to save as many people as we can with the limited resources we have.” This is a brutal philosophy because it means many people are going to be denied care, and those people won’t be happy.

This is the essence of triage, and it extends to all aspects of life. In everything you do and every decision you make, you are engaged in triage. You’re not going to be able to go everywhere and do everything, just like you can’t save everyone during an epidemic. You have to parcel out your limited resources to the options that offer the most gain, which means denying your resources to many noble causes.

I hope you can begin to see how the concept of medical triage can morph into a whole philosophy of life. This is what I tried to do when I invented Triagism back in 2015. Maybe it’s time for me to reactivate that project. Triagism. How do you get the most you can from the limited resources you have? I’m sure there will be plenty of opportunity to think about triage in the coming weeks. Everyone will be thinking, “If I catch the disease, what is going to happen to me?” What happens to people when they go to the hospital and there aren’t enough beds. In country after country, we’re going to start putting this question to the test.

I didn’t start this epidemic, and I can’t control its spread, but if its going to happen, at least I can use it for something. It can help me refine this philosophy that I had forgotten about. Assuming you and I survive, we might come out of it with some new tools for dealing with life.

The main lesson of Triagism is that there are no perfect solutions. There are only solutions that are relatively better than others. It all depends on your resources and how you choose to divvy them out.

[Note: Episodes prior to this one (#1-28) and earlier videos were recorded without scripts. I simply thought about the topic, then starting talking.]

Agency: The Ability to Initiate Actions

I have identified a personality trait that doesn't seem to be discussed much by psychologists: agency.

In general use, agency is defined as "action or intervention, especially to produce a particular effect."

My own definition is more specific: Agency is "a persistant trait exhibited by individuals where they frequently and consistently initiate constructive actions deviating from a fixed pattern."

The opposite of agency, in my view is reactivity, or the ability to respond to outside events.

A simple example: If I throw a ball at you, and you catch the ball and throw it back, you are not exhibiting agency. You are exhibiting reactivity. You are reacting to the actions of someone else. On the other hand, if you see a ball, pick it up and throw it at me, you are exhibiting agency. You are no reacting to any outside event (apart from seeing the ball). You are initiating your own independent actions.

Another word for agency is initiative. Some people display a lot of initiative; some show very little.

Everyone is capable of reactivity. Something happens to you, and you respond. Not many people exhibit agency, at least on a consistent basis.

If a gunman walks into a school and shoots the place up, he is exhibiting agency in that particular instance. He hatched the plan all by himself and put together all the elements to make it happen—buying the gun, stockpiling ammo, etc.. This does not necessarily make him a high-agency individual because keys parts of my definition aren't met: "frequently and consistently initiates constructive actions." Shooting up a school isn't constructive for either the students or the gunman, and it isn't frequent or consistent. This is probably the first time he has taken such an action. If you look at the gunman's life, you will probably see a persistant pattern of passivity, where he doesn't take much action to address the problems of his life. The school shooting is an explosive reaction to all the pent up frustrations caused by his passivity.

People can be evaluated based on whether they exhibit high agency or low agency. Most people life their whole lives taking very little initiative. In fact, some highly successful people can have very low initiative. In school, assignments are given to them, and they complete them. When they go to work, they do the same. They join a company; assignments are given to them, and they are evaluated based on their reactive performance. People who do well are promoted. Their life disintegrates only when the structure around them goes away and they are forced to come up with their own assignments. Low-agency people can't do it. They fall back into a pattern of repeated acts that aren't usually very constructive.

Choice is not the same as agency. If ask you to choose between Coke and Pepsi, and you take Pepsi, you have made a choice, but you haven't exhibited initiative. I set up the assignment for you, and you simply fulfilled it. Agency requires thinking outside the box and coming up with your own assignment. You may be prompted by a outside event, like seeing a ball on the grass, but the impetus for action is coming from inside you, no from an outside force. The ball on the grass isn't pushing you to do anything. It is you who turned the inert ball into action.

People with low agency tend to be followers, while high-agency people often become leaders, but the fact that someone is in a leadership position doesn't make them high-agency. Many people who have been placed in leadership roles are in fact very passive. They follow the direction of their advisors and take few proactive actions. A certain President of the United States appears to exhibit high agency. He is always tweeting things to upset people. This is certainly a frequent and consistent behavior, but it it not constructive—for the country or himself—and it doesn't deviate from a fixed pattern.

Busy activity is not the same as agency. Doing a lot of stuff according to a pre-existing pattern does not imply initiative. It would take initiate to deviate from that fixed pattern and do things differently.

Meth addicts and manic-depressives may exhibit agency during their manic phase, but it isn't consistent and it usually isn't constructive. They may initiate a lot of actions but they rarely complete them. If we are treating agency as a personality trait, we have to look at their behavior over time. The manic phase of stimulant use or bipolar disorder is balanced out by the depressive phase, when the person initiates few actions.

I observe that habitual drug use of any kind tends to result a loss of agency. The stereotypical pothead lounges around the house, watches TV and does nothing new. He may hold down a job but he isn't particularly motivated to improve himself. I am not a drug user myself—Only caffeine has tempted me.—but watching friends and acquaintances fall into various drug habits over the years, I have seen them transformed from Go-Getters to Do-Nothingers. They may still be nice people, and if you throw a ball at them they'll throw it back, but the won't pick up the ball and throw it themselves. This suggests to me that there is a specific brain structure involved in agency that gets burned out by drugs.

Unpredictability does not imply agency. A lot of people try their best to be outrageous in everything they say and do. They may get a lot of tattoos or dress flamboyantly or need to be the life of the party. They want attention above all else, and they try to get it be constantly breaking the mold, but even breaking the mold can become a tired pattern after a while. Liberace, for example, was always trying to be outrageous. Each new outfit or sequin-encrusted possession was more over-the-top than the last. At a certain point, however, he became a caricature of himself: completely predictable in his unpredictability.

The key to constructive agency is foresight: looking ahead to try to predict and improve the future. Doing outrageous things doesn't necessarily improve your future. Your life is improved by anticipating future problems and trying to prevent them before they happen. Someone with genuinely high agency is always playing a chess game with their future, trying to anticipate the game many moves ahead. On the surface, their actions may seem inexplicable, but internally they are motivated by a long-term plan.

High-agency people tend to be more successful than others, but it depends on how you define "success". Many materially successful people have very little initiative, while many with high initiative have few rewards to show for it (like yours truly). There are ways to define success other than material reward. Something easier to observe is the prevalence of self-destructive acts. Because they can solve problems pre-emptively, high-agency people are less likely to engage in actions that hurt them in the long run.

Agency is difficult to change in others, if not impossible. You can't just tell a pothead to take more initiative. You can force them to react—say, by stealing their pot—but you can't force them to take new actions at their own initiative. They either have this ability or they don't.

Cultivating agency in yourself is a different matter. You can take initiative to take more initiative. If you are lying on your couch and you realize there is something you should be doing, you can either (a) put it off until later, or (b) get up and do it now. If you choose (b), you are exhibiting agency. If you repeat this pattern of behavior often, it strengthens the pro-initiative connections in your brain. It's like exercising a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets.

I consider myself a high-agency individual. When I woke up this morning with an idea, I could have filed it away as an interesting thought and gone ahead with my plans for the day. Instead, I decided to stop everything else and write this essay. No one assigned the essay to me; it was entirely self-motivated. It would have been a different if I was a journalist and my editor had assigned the job to me. In that case, I wouldn't have had anything interesting of my own to say. The best I could have done is call up some experts and get their opinions. The resulting article might have been interesting, but it would not have been original.

In general, the best people to have in your life are high-agency. You want people who take initiative and solve problems pre-emptively. If nothing else, high-agency people tend to be more fun, since you never know what they'll think of next. On the other hand, high-agency people are hard to hold down. A employer may hire someone because they are a Go-Getter with a lot of initiative. They may perform well for a while, but if a better offer comes along, they are likely to jump on it.

That's the peril of Go-Getters: They get up and go.

Bifurcated Breeding and the Fate of the World

By Glenn Campbell

In an opinion piece in today's New York Times ("The Cost of Relativism"), David Brooks discusses the growing divergence between the college-educated and the non-college-educated in America. An excerpt...

The article goes on to discuss the things the author feels must be done to reverse this disturbing trend.

But what if it isn't reversible? What if this is the permanent fate of America and the world? Maybe there are now two breeding stocks: the Upper Class that breeds only with the Upper Class, and the Lower Class that breeds only with the Lower Class. It isn't fashionable to talk about Upper and Lower classes in America, but that doesn't change what is happening. If you have ever had a chance to dwell among the unwashed proletariat, as I have, you realize how intractable their dysfunction can be and how it goes on and on, generation after generation. No government program can keep up, because they won't stop having babies.

It is unfair to judge people based on their educational attainment. It is not education or lack thereof that is causing this division. Lack of education is more a symptom of household instability, which reflects, in turn, many generations of self-reinforcing dysfunction. You won't fix these families just by giving them better access to college. I contend, in fact, that you can't fix them at all. The underlying problem is that the dysfunctional classes breed so quickly and haphazardly that social services are always stretched to the breaking point.

The organized Upper Classes, living in nice suburbs or cushy countries like Norway, breed more deliberately and cautiously. They tend to choose their mates wisely from members of their own strata. College professors breed with other college professors, are more likely mate for duration of child rearing and tend to limit their breeding to the few children they can responsibly care for.

To simplify things: You have dumb people mating with dumb people and producing large numbers of offspring they can't care for, and you have smart people breeding with smart people, producing only as many offspring as they can responsibly raise. Over time, this has to lead to a splitting of lineages. The lower classes become more and more chaotic, while the upper classes become more organized and insulated from the lower classes.

I have just invented a name for this process: "bifurcated breeding." As the Times piece points out, many graphs show a "scissors" phenomenon where the two groups diverge in just about everything. Unless some miraculous social policies reverse this trend, the groups will grow further and further apart until you have two distinct classes not unlike the traditionally separated classes of old, the Brahmans and peasants.

As long as there have been large civilizations on Earth, mankind has had a bifurcated breeding system. The leadership class of kings and gentry bred only with each other, sometimes going to other countries for mates within the same class. It was unthinkable for the nobles to mate with commoners for most of human history. It was only in the 20th Century that modern societies began to think of themselves as classless. I contend that this apparent classlessness is only a short window in history and that it is rapidly disintegrating before our eyes.

This growing division essentially means the smart get smarter while the dumb get dumber. Meanwhile, the population of smart people remains relatively constant, while the dumb classes expand rapidly in size. There is no appetite in any democratic country for any kind of government mandated birth control program. Having a child—or ten—is perceived as an inalienable right. Given this privilege and no outside control like predators or disease, the undisciplined and chaotic are always going to out-breed the disciplined and deliberate.

And then they vote! The growing numbers of the undisciplined mean that their representatives increasingly come to control government. Dumb voters tend to prefer populous leaders at the extreme right and left of the political spectrum. Either they are voting to cut off all social services to people like themselves (the arch-conservative agenda) or voting to nationalize everything and destroy the capitalist structures that keep society alive (the arch-liberal agenda). Undisciplined voters make undisciplined choices, and their huge numbers mean that the disciplined and rational voters in the middle of the road are overwhelmed at the polls.

No one in the Western world seems eager to abandon democracy, and for good reason. The alternatives always seem to turn out worse. But you still have a growing crisis within democracy itself: dumber and dumber voters consistently voting against their own best interests. I am not trying to offer solutions like the Times author. I don't think effective solutions can be deliberately instituted by any government because it is too big a problem for government to handle and in the end you have ever dumber voters calling the shots.

Things were different throughout most of human history. While breeding was bifurcated, it was the upper classes that were the more prodigious breeders. They had better access to resources, so more of their children survived. In the lower classes, dumb people bred with dumb people, but getting too dumb had a way of killing people off. Today the opposite is true: the lower classes are now the major breeders. Universal health care assures that nearly every child survives, so the haphazard breeders are obviously going to produce more than the disciplined ones even without the resources to safely raise them.

Bifurcated breeding is a phenomenon of both Nature and Nurture. It is foolish to believe that dumb people mating with dumb people isn't going to draw down their stock. You breed a dumb dog with a dumb dog, and you are more likely to get a dumb dog than a smart one. At the same time, you have deteriorating social conditions—violence, drug abuse and instability passed down from generation to generation. No matter what a child's innate talents are, little be achieved in an environment of chaos.

Meanwhile, the organized classes sequester themselves in isolated suburbs that the chaotic classes can't easily reach. This isn't deliberate segregation, but everyone wants to live in a better, safer neighborhood if they can. Every wants to find a mate who is more like them. Over time, this is naturally going to lead to greater practical segregation of gifted from the ungifted. It is not segregation based on race or ethnicity, per se, but on discipline and talent, whether innate or trained. In the modern world, unlike the ancient one, talented members of the lower classes now have the opportunity to rise into the upper classes and be accepted on an equal footing with anyone who was born there. Unfortunately, as they are doing this, they are further depleting the genetic and cultural stock of the lower classes.

What happens when someone in Nigeria shows extraordinary talent, say in music or science? Of course they move out of Nigeria to someplace like Germany or America where their talents can be better used. This further depletes Nigeria of talent, be it genetic or learned, and Nigeria becomes more and more ungovernable. This same sort of brain drain is happening within countries. The best and brightest move out of chaotic or deprived environments as soon as they can, leaving those neighborhoods even more chaotic and deprived.

Is there any hope for humanity? Sure! You still have smart people breeding with smart people on protected islands away from the chaos. These people will continue to lead humanity in science and the arts. They will man the starships of the future and go out into the cosmos as Earth's representatives. Democracy aside, humanity is largely defined and propelled forward by its organized intellectual elite, not its seething masses.

The main risk is the growing time bomb the seething masses represent. If they control democracy, then some dangerous leaders are bound to emerge (and already have). Give these leader control of the nuclear button or any other environmental bomb and they could very well destroy the world.

And the suffering of the seething masses never ends. As the world population grows from 7 billion to who knows how many billion, things are going to break. The organized classes will seal themselves in protective bubbles as chaos swirls around them. More and more of the world will become like Nigeria. The population will keep growing and growing, mostly among the chaotic classes, until something happens to stop it.

What will that something be? I have no idea. I only know that it probably won't be a democratic something. It won't be a conscious decision by world leaders to follow a disciplined plan, because world leaders have never agreed on anything of that scope and never will. World population growth will be stopped only by a great catastrophe, or perhaps a series of them. Pressures will build until something breaks. Bureaucrats in western nations may try to head it off, but what power do they have when the rest of the world is growing uncontrollably and their own voters are working against reason?

What solution am I offering? None, really. You and I don't have the power to change the world any more than we can change the course of the stars. We can protect ourselves and perhaps our neighborhood and cast our one vote against the legions of idiots, but in the global scale, you and I are powerless. We can observe, record and analyse, but we can't tell someone in a chaotic environment to stop having babies. If you have a workable plan for population control, I'd like to hear it, but you can bet that the very people most damaged by uncontrolled breeding are exactly those who will vote against any such controls.

The dumb people have God on their side, and God told them to "go forth and multiply."

As If You Had Only a Year to Live

By Glenn Campbell

My alter-ego the @BadDalaiLama just tweeted:

Guideline for any decision: If you die within the next year, what do you want the world to be left with?
— Bad Dalai Lama (@BadDalaiLama) January 16, 2015

This is a variation of the old adage, "Life each day as though it were your last." I'm just extending the timeframe a bit. Living solely for today tends to be hedonistic. What can any of us accomplish in a day? You can make others around you a little happier, but that's about it. Living for the day neglects the most important human skill: planning ahead.

But if you plan too far ahead, you tend to get lost. If your main goals are 5, 10 or 20 years down the line, it is easy to put things off. Timeframes beyond a year don't convey much urgency. You figure that even if this year is a waste, you have plenty of time to make up for it later, and this attitude goes on year after year.  If your goals are too far ahead, is easy to lose sight of how fragile and temporary life is and how quickly it is already slipping away.

If you are always planning for a one-year lifespan, you may be pleasantly surprised to see it extended, but the satisfaction of "a life well lived" shouldn't depend on having more time. You can have tentative backup plans for 5, 10 and 20 years, should they come to pass, but a single year, looking forward from today, should be your primary focus.

Longer term plans are notoriously unreliable. Many a 10-year plan has been mucked up by unforeseen circumstances, and even if it isn't, your life a decade hence is never quite what you thought it would be, so it is best to keep the planning period short. One year seems like a good compromise between prudently planning ahead and over-planning what you cannot realistically foresee.

A lot of things change when you have only a year to live instead of decades. All of those 365 days become more valuable. The urgency of everything you do is sharpened and enhanced, leading to many changes in strategy.

You have to work with the resources you have. Resources are the skills, time, money and other construction supplies available for your projects. Over the course of a year, you can't count on having more of them, so you have to carefully manage what little you have.

The most valuable of these resources is time, so you've got to stop wasting it right now! Your time should only be used for things that are worthy of a person with only a year left on Earth. You know what I'm talking about. As soon as you sit down in front of the TV, you have broken a rule. You have unconscionably wasted time when you have so little of it left.

One year is arbitrary, of course, but five years would make you lazy. In a practical sense, if a project can't be completed in a year—or at least safely turned over to someone else within a year—maybe it isn't one you should engage in. If a novel takes you five years to write, there's always a chance you will die before it is done and the whole thing will be worthless. A project completed within a year is a little safer.

It is fine to engage with others in open-ended projects lasting more than a year—like the long-term survival of humanity—but your personal contribution shouldn't be essential beyond that time. If it is, you may be doing others a disservice, because when you do step away they won't be able to get along without you. Your job on Earth is not to make yourself indispensable. Your job is to plan for your own demise, so that other can take over when you are gone. Either you wrap up each project on your own, or you give others easy handles to continue it for you.

Your goals over the near year have to be modest. You can't expect to save the world in that time. Frankly, you can't expect to save the world even in 100 years, but a shorter schedule helps you dispense with that delusion more easily. You can't say, "Someday, I'll become a billionaire and then I'll do great things." On a one-year schedule, you can only expect to do relatively simple things with the resources you have.

What matters at the end of your life is what you leave behind. There is a record of your presence in the systems you have built. If you built a house, the house will stand long after you are gone. You just want to build something more meaningful than that.

Unfortunately, I can't tell you what you should build. That's the $64,000 question. I'm only saying that working on one-year timeframe—as though you had a year to live—is better than kicking the can down the road and pretending you have forever.

Istanbul Protests: My Eyewitness Report

By Glenn Campbell, writing in Santorini, Greece, June 12, 2013

A few days ago, on June 6 & 7, 2013, I visited Gezi Park in Istanbul, the epicenter of huge ongoing anti-government protests. (See my photos and video.) I have the feeling I was a witness to history, and I want to set down my impressions while they are still fresh. In a few days, I will pass through Istanbul again and we will see what has changed.

My visit on June 6—arranged before the protests—happened to come during a lull in the violence when police had withdrawn and protesters had taken control of Gezi Park and adjoining Taksim Square. The protesters were peaceful and had no weapons apart from huge numbers. At the time of my visit, to call it a "protest" was almost too strong a word. It was more like the Turkish version of Woodstock or Burning Man—more a spontaneous cultural festival than a traditional anti-government demonstration. Any organization with a progressive or counter-cultural message set up a makeshift booth to hand out flyers. Street vendors moved in to service the crowds. There were even vendors selling gas masks, hard hats and Guy Fawkes "V for Vendetta" masks.

Rather than describing the scene, take a look at my Facebook photos and video. The gathering was entirely peaceful, involving people from all walks of (non-conservative) Turkish society. From appearances, it could be a urban cultural festival anywhere in Western Europe, except for a complete lack of visible police.

To clarify the geography: Taksim Square is the central crossroads in the newer part of the city, Beyoğlu, which is far removed from the old quarter and tourist sites like the Hagia Sophia. (I actually made a video in Taksim on my first arrival in Istanbul three years ago.) Before the protests, Taksim was a major crossroads, but once the protests began around May 31, it was taken over entirely by pedestrians, essentially extending a long pedestrian-only shopping street, İstiklal Avenue. Although Taksim seemed central to traffic on my previous visits, the blocking of roads there turns out to have very little effect on the rests of the city. Traffic has simply rerouted itself around the blockage, and the life of the rest of the city appears unchanged. It is certainly not true that Istanbul is burning down. You would have to be close to Taksim to see any obvious change in daily life.

Taksim is a big open plaza, ideally suited to big rallies. Adjoining it is Gezi Park, a greener and more confined space with trees and a bit of grass. The protests began when bulldozers moved in to demolish the park and a handful of activists blocked them. This lead to clashes with riot police that involved liberal use of teargas and water cannon. It is clear that police created the bigger protest with their harsh attempt to dislodge the original protesters. Soon there were thousands and then hundreds of thousands of protesters, many of whom had never taken part in a protest before. Gezi Park was the rallying point for hundreds of divergent cultural, liberal and anti-government forces who previously had no common ground. Even if they couldn't agree on anything else, everyone could agree on saving Gezi Park and a nearby cultural center, and everyone was opposed to police oppression.

I walked through Gezi Park about six months before the protests, before I even knew the small park had a name. It didn't strike me as a particularly interesting place or a frequently used park. It was almost empty when I was there, and I would guess that few of those who are now protesting the demolition have visited it within the preceding year—if ever! It is mainly a symbol. For the generally secular and Western-leaning protesters, unilateral demolition of the park was seen as the final straw in the steady erosion of civil rights under the 10-year rule of conservative Islamist Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. If Gezi Park had not been the spark that set off the protests, something else would have.

Gezi Park just happened to have all the elements needed to make it go "viral" in social media. Essentially, this is a social media revolution because all the mainstream media in Turkey have turned into fearful puppets of the regime. (The local CNN affiliate famously ran a documentary on penguins during the initial violence.) However, there seem to have been no significant attempts to suppress the internet or cellphone coverage in Istanbul. In fact, you will see in my photos and video that Vodaphone had set up mobile cellphone towers to serve the crowd, just like they would for a big sporting event. As long as the internet is available in Istanbul, the protests will continue and be coordinated in ways that the government has no control over. If internet users can't get reliable news from the major media in Turkey, they can certainly get it from the overseas media and from increasingly sophisticated social networks in Turkey.

When I was there, the protesters were continuously occupying the park with the aim of keeping the government from demolishing it. When I say "occupy", I mean that virtually every available spot of grass was covered by a tent or other encampment. The gathering of humanity here was truly massive, especially in the evenings when people came here after work. After 8:00pm on June 6, the crowd was so thick in the park I could hardly move (and I would not have been able to shoot a video like I did in the afternoon). The symbolic message of the crowd was, "To demolish this park, you have to dislodge us first."

Although the level of fervor my vary, the number of people involved was staggering! This was probably the biggest spontaneous, unmanaged rally I have ever attended and probably ever will attend. By "unmanaged", I mean there were no clear leaders and absolutely no police in evidence anywhere. New Years Eve in Times Square is probably a lot bigger, but in that case the crowd is carefully managed by a huge police presence. Gezi Park was self-managed and extremely orderly. Although a lot of people were chanting political slogans and many were openly painting graffiti on every available surface, I saw no other hint of conflict or lawlessness. There were families with children in the park, and I myself felt absolutely no danger there, even knowing no Turkish.

Clearly, this benign situation could not continue indefinitely. Either the government would crack down, or the gathering would go sour on its own. Imagine if Woodstock had gone on for weeks: Sooner or later there would be some sort of disorder, crime or major accident, but no authorities to respond. Sooner or later you need police and a credible government to maintain the functioning of society. (There was volunteer-staffed MASH-style medical compound in Gezi, and municipal services were picking up bagged trash, but there were no other services like restrooms.)

I predicted at the time that the stalemate would go on for a long time. Apart from the huge crowds, the park was crawling with international media, and any police response would be instantly and widely reported. Now that the police had withdrawn, the government wouldn't be so stupid as to bring them back to do battle with this huge force of peaceful citizens. I figured the police would wisely stay away, and the protest movement would slowly disintegrate from within.

I was wrong! From what I read tonight in the news, the police have now cleared Taksim Square by force. This is relatively easy, as this is a flat and open square that riot vehicles can easily move into. Gezi Park is more of a problem, as it is naturally fortified by trees, stairways and sunken courtyards—a sort of Helm's Deep for the protesters. As of last report, protesters are still occupying the park, and I assume the police have them surrounded. Since the protesters are unarmed, how long it takes to remove them depends on how much force the police are willing to use. They could move in by force or simply wait the protesters out.

Any government in any real democracy would do the sensible thing and back off from the park—let the protesters win and suspend the construction project. That is the best way to deflate the symbol. Erdogan, however, has chosen the hard-line and stupid route. He has apparently chosen to attack the symbol the protesters have laid before him. When the police gain control of the park, I predict that Erdogan will do the despotic thing and immediately demolish the park. It is like turning your opponent into a martyr. "Remember Gezi Park" will be the new rallying cry—much more powerful than holding the park itself.

I actually see this as a blessing for the protesters. If they had continued to hold the square and park, their protest movement would have eventually lost steam and disintegrated from within. Demolishing the park will just make the protest even bigger and push it to a more sophisticated level.

Erdogan seems to have firm control of the government, and there is no credible political opposition to challenge him. This is actually a problem for Erdogan, because it means he has no one to negotiate with. The protesters are essentially a leaderless group, so there isn't anyone to imprison who will make a difference. Erdogan has essentially created his own perfect opponent. He can jail opponents and journalists, but he can't imprison the whole internet or half the Istanbul population. Turkey is still fundamentally a free democracy, and Chinese-style censoring of the internet is far beyond the government's means. (If nothing else, all the internet talent is on the side of the protesters.) The government can only unplug the internet altogether—which Mubarak tried unsuccessfully to do in Egypt.

Slightly more moderate elements of the government have called for "dialog" with the protesters, but there is no one to have a dialog with! There are no recognized leaders in this movement, only hundreds of thousand of highly motivated citizens with smart phones. Every act of oppression just forces them to get more creative.

Istanbul is fundamentally different than Syria or Egypt, although they may look similar on the news. This is overwhelmingly a safe and peaceful uprising. As of the latest reports, "only" five people have been killed, which is a remarkably low number given the hundreds of thousands of people involved. In Syria, the government is using real bombs and bullets, and in Eqypt there is real anarchy and lawlessness. In Istanbul, there has been remarkably little bloodshed, but what there has been has been videotaped and instantly broadcast. Istanbul looks like Syria on the evening news only because every explosion and act of violence is being recorded by a hundred cameras.

Who are the protesters? Since I don't live in Turkey and don't have to be polite, I can state things bluntly. The protesters are all the smart people in Turkey—all the lawyers, all the doctors, all the professionals, anyone who regularly uses the internet, everyone with half a brain. Erdogan's supporters are all the dumb people in Turkey—the farmers, the laborers, the traditional religious believers, the simple country folk who fall for his populist rhetoric. As in every country, the dumb people outnumber the smart people, which is why Erdogan is in power (and why America got George W. Bush). Unfortunately for the dumb people, they are dumb and can't handle new technology like the internet. They can only try to suppress opposition the old-fashioned way: by force. This just pushes the smart people to become ever-more creative and clever in their opposition.

This is a relatively safe and lively uprising, more a blossoming of culture than a civil war. I compare it to America in the 1960s. Back then, opposition to the Vietnam war brought people together and created, for a short time, a movement of flower people and free love. It couldn't go on forever, but it was fun while it lasted.

STOP PRESS!!!!! New update on June 14!!!

I wrote the above last night, but I wasn't happy with the conclusion. It turns out I am not a neutral observer of the Turkish situation. I actually have a horse in this race! My first "real" book was published in Turkey! The Case Against Marriage was published in Turkish translation months before it came out as an English ebook. It is still my only physical book published by an outside publisher. Arguing against marriage may be routine in America but it is much more risque in a traditional culture like Turkey.

Like it or not, I have become part of the counterculture in Turkey.

Right now I am in Santorini, the perfect peaceful Paradise, but I have been here for five days, and Paradise is beginning to wear thin. As the news heats up in Istanbul, it occurs to me that I need to get back there. I was planning to pass through there in a week, but maybe it should be earlier.

I just changed my reservation. I'm heading back to Istanbul by ferry and plane over the next two days. I'll be there for the Saturday Night Riots. I won't put myself at any risk, but Istanbul seems a lot more interesting right now than any dumb Paradise.

Maybe then I can come up with a more meaningful conclusion about the protests.

Update: Much Later

I did return to Istanbul, just in time for a big crackdown in Taksim Square. I could write a whole book on this experience, but, alas, I just don't have the time. You'll have to make do with the photos....

• Last Day of Gezi Park
• Police Crackdown
• My Teargas Experience (video)
• Protest Aftermath

—GC