Orgel’s Rules

[Rowan Pryor]

I recently came across Orgel’s Rules. They are relevant to the global COVID-19 pandemic situation. The careless unleashing of the viral pandemic to rip through the global population as social Darwinian democide is a clear outcome of late stage capitalism. The normative axioms and algorithms of capital (as accurately elucidated by CasP) prescribe the operations of capital, doing so in the pseudorational, autocatalytic manner accurately characterised by Ulf Martin. What is notable about these axioms and algorithms of capital, being wholly notional and hermetically circuitous, is that they take no cognizance of the feedback of real systems (earth systems, the biosphere and populations of humans, animals and plants).

Let us consider to Orgel’s Rules, quoted here from Wikipedia.

“Orgel’s First Rule

Whenever a spontaneous process is too slow or too inefficient a protein will evolve to speed it up or make it more efficient.”

This “rule” comments on the fact that there are a great number of proteins in all organisms which fulfil a number of different functions through modifying chemical or physical processes. An example would be an enzyme that catalyses a chemical reaction that would take place too slowly to benefit an organism without being sped up by this enzyme. (Comment: Another example would be the continuous evolution of the spike protein (SP) on the SARS2 virus particle to improve access to human cells via their receptors.)

Orgel’s Second Rule
“Evolution is cleverer than you are.”

This rule is well known among biologists. It does not imply that evolution has conscious motives or method but that people who say “evolution can’t do this” or “evolution can’t do that” are simply lacking in imagination.

Orgel’s second rule tells us that the process of natural selection is not itself intelligent, clever or purposeful but that the products of evolution are ingenious.” – Wikipedia.

In a sense, this pandemic becomes an example of the evolution of life (as one of the smallest forms of quasi-life, an RNA virus) being able to confound the greatest of human systems, namely global, late-stage capitalism. The dominant discourse of capitalism itself would have it that capitalism is not confounded at all. It proceeds in its circuits with the “creative destruction” of all external to it but what is elided from this triumphalist narrative is the destruction of the vulnerable. However, the vulnerable are only the first.

As any fascistic or proto-fascistic system shows, the vulnerable, the different, the proscribed, the “eugencised” are just the first to be elided, disappeared or incinerated. We only need read Martin Niemöller’s prose poem (which I have no doubt quoted before on this forum):

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

We can reapply it to the elderly, the immunocompromised, the marginalised and so on. The establishing of this new precedent, to leave vulnerable people to die (with inadequate leaky vaccines and few other measures) presages an intensification of this general process and an extension of it to ever wider sections of the population. The science is now showing children are far more vulnerable to the insidious effects of this systemic virus than previously propagandised. The virus which attacks endothelial tissue and organs throughout the entire body has rapidly become a major cause of hospitalization in all age-groups leading to serious levels of morbidity and death. These coagulating facts in real system are dutifully ignored to keep the circuits of capital flowing in nominal systems.

The interaction of  capitalism’s pre-programmed decisions and non-evolving responses with the seemingly chameleonic virus reveals the quintessentially anti-real and fascistic nature of capital; the dictatorship of capital which treats and disregards all of humanity and nature as static background, not as dynamic interactor. In turn, the evolution of the virus to outstrip pharmaceutical progress (escape variants winning the vaccines arms race) illustrates that evolution is “smarter” than both our science and our capitalist systems. In a vaccines-only war (the method decreed by capital), the pathogen always has the initiative and produces escape variants at a rate many orders of magnitude greater then the production of updated vaccines. Multi-valent vaccines are then belated responses to evolution. The one general method which could wrest the initiative from the virus, infection control by basic centuries-old physical methods, quarantines and cordons-sanitaire, supplemented by new but still simple methods, virus-filtering masks (invented in the 1990s), PPE and HEPA filters, are decreed virtual non-starters by capital as they might temporarily affect circulation of capital by limiting circulation of people and of aerosols. This is notwithstanding the fact that prevention of infection by a pathogen like SARS2 is far easier than dealing with the downstream morbidity, death, social and economic disruption.

The evolution of the virus has also as it were outstripped cultural, emotional, ethical and ideational development in our society. Indeed, we have retrogressed under the assault of the virus. People cannot learn or change fast enough to respond to the reality of this virus, at least not under this capitalist system. Addiction to old modes of life, to consumerism, to selfish entitlement and their encouragement by capitalism have only intensified the internal and external contradictions of capitalism. Only prevention of infection (up to and including elimination of the virus by holding R(0) below 1 long term) could short-circuit this process. But the rules and circuits of capital preclude this action along with the habits and proclivities of the masses indoctrinated and captured by capitalism’s effect on them neurologically, on their dopamine reward systems.

But the rewards now are being withdrawn steadily upwards in the capitalist structure. Health and amenity are clearly being withdrawn as the death and disablement effects, including long covid, of COVID-19 spread through the base, first through the underclass and then into the working class. On the one hand, death and disablement tamp down revolutionary pressure. The dead cannot revolt and neither can the seriously disabled who are left on a trajectory of chronic decline. The latter are often neither intellectual or physically able anymore (specifically not energetic enough anymore under COVID-19 damage and fatigue) : hence could scarcely conceive nor execute revolutionary change. COVID-19 destroys the body and brain including dysregulating the immune system, cognition, executive thinking and other functions.

In this sense, COVID-19 is the “perfect” disease, insidious but subtle, to exploit capitalism and for capitalism to exploit it.  The capitalists are currently exploiting COVID-19. It is ideal for their purposes. It is a disease seemingly tailor-made for the extermination of the undeserving, the old, the halt, the lame, the sick: all the “useless mouths”. References have been made in the mainstream to “the reaping” of old people and others “due to die anyway”, and also references to “burning the tinder” with its association of dead-wood. These references are not even under the surface. They have been expressed openly, even by public medical figures in Australia.

However, the billionaires and apologists of capitalism have forgotten Orgel’s second rule, “Evolution is cleverer than you are.” The above outline is a process which the capitalists and oligarchs think they can control. They cannot conceive that the “burning the tinder” can blow back and engulf their whole system in an unstoppable conflagration of endless pandemic. Yet this is possible. SARS2 is a pathogen sui generis due to its novel zoonosis status and its punctuated equilibrium evolutionary potential. It is a one of a kind, remarkable in so many ways that our best virologists and epidemiologists are continually shocked by its emerging characteristics. The rest, the unimaginative, the “essentialist and traditionalist” (to use Blair Fix’s phrase) virologists and epidemiologists who are quasi-scientists, hacks, at best, truly do not understand what is happening. They have also been bought and suborned as money and politics, or rather capital as power, has recruited them to the current creordering process of  pandemic capitalism, the latest variant of disaster capitalism as per Naomi Klein’s general analysis. In this way their science, their rather base, essentialist and traditionalist science, gives the answers, opinions and rationalisations which the capital system demands.

But as the axioms and algorithms of capitalism, wielded by the capitalists, oligarchs and functionaries, exploit the SARS2 virus, it evolves to exploit the system exploiting it. We see an extraordinarily adaptable, novel mutating virus in collision with the humans with immune systems not adapted to it. That adaptation takes decades to generations to happen for a new virus and will not categorically happen benignly even then. Chronic pandemicity to chronic endemicity to human extinction are all possible. This is a radically new pathogen. We see an extraordinarily adaptable, new mutating virus in collision with a wholly prescribed system (capitalism) which absolutely refuses to adapt behaviourally in any way. Which in fact is fundamentally unable to adapt. This is certainly a crash or crash-through strategy which is capitalism’s approach to everything and not an approach which can be continuously successful. Eventually the insuperable barrier is found and it may not be the one generally predicted. Raw forces on a planetary scale are stronger than we are and evolution is cleverer than we are.

• This topic was modified 1 year, 6 months ago by Rowan Pryor.

Topic