What If We Are White Blood Cells?

Well, it’s flu season again which got me thinking about viruses. Many of these are floating around in the air in homes, buses, offices and schools at this time of the year.  When we breath in a virus cell, it can enter a cell, say in the throat, where it highjacks the living cell and tricks it into reproducing more virus cells.  On its own, a virus cannot reproduce.  Once the new virus cells are formed, they escape from the cell and travel throughout the body.  Luckily most of us have good immune systems with white blood cells that recognize, ingest and destroy the virus cells until they are gone and we are well again.

Viruses (photo credit: https://www.quantamagazine.org/viruses-have-a-secret-altruistic-social-life-20190415/)

This reminded me of several things.  The number of scam phone calls that people are receiving seemed to mirror viruses floating around looking for cells to enter.  Some people I know don’t answer the phone now at all and wait for people to leave a message before returning the call.

Even bigger, some of the ideas that governments around the world are promoting seem obviously dangerous and yet there are representatives of those governments trying to sell the idea.  Just like a virus, they want the idea to take up residence in your mind where you can replicate it.  Some old school ideas like racism and sexism seem like well established viruses that are hard to eradicate.  But the ideas that lead to climate change seem more like cancer cells which will destroy the hosts entirely.

photo credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_blood_cell

Now in the body, our natural immune system fights intruders.  So, how might that apply to societies that are socially ill?  What if some of us were like white blood cells, recognizing harmful ideas and world views.  We can’t go around killing anyone who is a host to these world views, although some people seem to think that that is a good idea.  What about looking within ourselves and seeing if any of this thinking exists within us and if so, working to change that. For example, “Is any of my thinking colonial? How can I recognize that?  How can I decolonize my thinking?”  For this example, I have found that reading the perspectives of many Indigenous authors highlights my own colonial thinking and allows me to figure out how to decolonize those thoughts.

And what about when we encounter world views that we find harmful, being expressed by other people.  It seems to me that world views are brought into peoples’ minds unconsciously and then they replicate like viruses.  Even in the face of evidence to the contrary they may stick to their beliefs.  This is one possible explanation for the continuing popularity of the leader to our south.  Getting into shouting matches or facebook wars seems only to lead to polarization and strengthening of world views. It does not seem to achieve a white blood cell’s task.

I had an interesting experience recently that may shed some light on this idea.  I was taking part in an organized circle of people.  We were using an object as a talking stick which is an Indigenous way of ensuring that the one who holds the object gets to speak and the other people listen.  It is a way of preventing people from butting in with comments and questions as is so often the case in Western culture.  On the first go around of the circle, the leader who was an older man decided that one woman was going on too long and he cut her off saying that he wanted to give other people a turn.  This was surprising as we still had an hour and a half left of the two hours allotted.  In this man’s mind, the goal was to go around the circle twice in two hours even though there were quite a large number of people there. 

On the second round, he decided that I was taking up too much time and he cut me off.  Surprised, since I was in the middle of speaking, I nevertheless passed the stick to the next woman who had been cut off in the first round.  She passed the stick without speaking, as did the next ten women.  One woman spoke briefly and then passed it on.  It turned out that we finished early and the circle just kind of fizzled out.

I took some time to process this experience.  It was certainly not the first time that a man had silenced me.  I felt sad that he had, by shutting down two of us, effectively silenced all the other women in the group.  It was during the night that the deeper feelings bubbled up.  Although this man was trying to give everyone two turns by hurrying everyone, he actually took away the women’s voices.  How did this happen?  I felt my feelings and became aware that the strongest one was that he was in effect saying that my speaking was taking time away from someone else.  That is one good way to silence women.  We are taught not to take up space and certainly not to take up someone else’s space.  He had his eye on the clock and some idea of fairness but it backfired. 

I wrote out my feelings and came to understand that although we were supposed to be working in a paradigm that was circular and had a talking stick, he had supplanted his own paradigm of linear time and his own hierarchy on top of the circular paradigm.  When the two paradigms clashed, I am imagining that it didn’t feel safe for the other women to take a chance of having this happen to them as well and they simply chose to not participate.

So, when it was my turn to lead this group with my friend, I didn’t attack this man or even talk to him about what he had done.  Instead, I designed a way of making people feel safe, of honouring the talking stick and the circle.  I thought that it was important that everyone spoke once if they wished and then let the circle end after the two hours with whoever the last speaker was.  It worked well. 

If I had stayed in the man’s paradigm, which is after all the dominant paradigm in this part of the world, I could have fought him for space and finished what I was saying.  I could have embarrassed him.  This would have strengthened the paradigm or virus of competition.  These responses actually didn’t occur to me at the time as I was simply surprised by his actions.  I could have sent him an angry email, or complained to the organizers.  But that would be replicating the virus so to speak.  Instead, I chose to act out of the paradigm that I think is more helpful, banishing the virus and allowing the whole group to flow in a healthy way.  Maybe that is what imagining myself as a white blood cell looks like.

This is not a new idea.  Gandhi is famous for saying, “Be the peace you want to see in the world.”   I don’t think that I could have changed this man’s world view with arguing.  What I did instead was give the group the experience of working in another paradigm and see how they enjoyed that.  Sometimes, we just can’t imagine a new way of getting things done until we experience it.

So perhaps, by reflecting on our own thinking and our choices, we can ground a new paradigm here, now.  One white blood cell can’t fight millions of virus cells, but enough of them can restore the organism to health. 

So, when I see the posters on the train and subway about viruses being “everywhere” I will think of myself as a white blood cell, not replicating the virus but deactivating it and allowing health to flourish.