The Bigger Picture

BY SOFO ARCHON

It’s been over two years since the start of the pandemic, and people are still talking about vaccines, masks and antiseptics.

But who’s talking about poverty, malnutrition, stress, pollution and environmental destruction? Where are the trillions of dollars spent to resolving those problems that are at the core of our public health crisis?

You see, our priorities are upside down.

We deal with symptoms, but not their causes. We focus on control, but not understanding. We fight disease, but don’t cultivate health. We see parts, but we’ve neglected the whole.

Our myopic attention prevents us from seeing the bigger picture. And please, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying don’t get vaccinated, don’t wear masks or don’t use antiseptics. What I’m saying is simply this: Let’s not pretend that such actions are going to fix our public health crisis.

The enemy is neither the virus nor the unvaccinated. The enemy, so to speak, is a system of thought and the social structures that arise from it. But this enemy is unlike those in movies: He won’t be defeated by fighting against him, but by understanding him, as well as changing the conditions that gave birth to him.

Disease doesn’t occur in isolation of the environment it appears in. Disease is an expression of disharmony between parts embedded in a web of relationships. Disturb that web, and disease arises. Bring harmony back to it, and disease disappears.

We cannot disturb the planetary ecosystem and expect not to harm ourselves. We cannot keep the human species under chronic stress and expect that it can cope with illness. We cannot poison the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe, and expect that we won’t get sick.

The health crisis is nothing but a result of a cultural crisis, which is a reflection of a consciousness crisis. Hence, unless we see it for what it is and deal with it from its root source, it won’t go away.