Counting Lives Instead of Souls

New York Times CDT Covid data above.

Outside of the nuclear launch codes, there’s never been a set of numbers that have more power over the world than the daily publication of Cases, Deaths, and Trends (CDT).

CDT dominates headlines, drives policy worldwide, closes businesses, cuts off debate, eliminates choice, ends relationships, isolates people, is causing an explosion of diseases of despair, and is the basis for the latest wave of online hate and social division.

How did statistics - that utterly fail to capture what it means to be human - come to dominate our lives?

Here’s my theory: when we started counting lives instead of souls, we lost track of everything that makes life worth living.

If you are thinking “no life equals no soul”, that’s an argument used by those that have rearranged our world around the death math of CDT. They say “If you're not living, you're dead. Period.”; as if it was only that simple. If you can get close enough, ask the sad, the anxious, the fearful, the lonely, the isolated, the addicted, the untreated sick, and the suicidal if it’s possible to be both dead and alive, or barely living.

We live to nourish our souls and the souls of others. However, I can’t think of a single COVID directive that wasn’t soul draining. In service to Cases, Deaths, and Trends, we got social distancing, masking, shutdowns, the uneven application of rules, coerced vaccinations, censorship, racist passports, media sensationalism, and endless propaganda.

History won’t be kind to the neurotic CDT maximalists or to the petty tyrants that pushed CDT mandates.

There are more meaningful numbers in the world. We just lost track of them.