One day almost two years ago in October of 2022, I sat down in my reading chair in the small, old house I have lived in (at that point) for 23 years and opened a book I’d just received from Amazon called The Quest for Community by political philosopher Robert Nisbet. Published in 1953, it was the first of the 18 books Nesbit would write, and remains his masterpiece and the book for which he is best known. The book is a study of our shared, if not instinctive, drive to be with others and an indictment of governments the world over, particularly authoritarian governments, in their attempts throughout history to keep us apart. They do this because it is easier to control people who are isolated and lonely.
In one of the many sentences that I underlined in The Quest for Community and that might sum up this entire magnum opus, Nisbet writes: “The prime object of totalitarian government thus becomes the incessant destruction of all evidences of spontaneous, autonomous association.”
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If there was ever a time when we suffered a gale force blow of totalitarianism, it was during the government-imposed lockdowns and mandates—social distancing, masking, and so-called vaccines—and the weaponized propaganda and increasing surveillance and invasion of privacy that were thrown into the toxic soup we’d all been force-fed. It not only happened here in America, but also throughout much of the world. It was the most widespread attack on freedom in human history. And all for no reason but for governments nearly everywhere to demolish the lives billions of us had built up and long enjoyed, individually and collectively, and then to claim their control over us. We were told it was all to “stop the spread” of a mysterious and supposedly lethal virus and to “flatten the curve” of rising cases of illness. That was just a ruse, a massive, well-orchestrated, and demonic sleight of hand.
The aftershocks are still with us. And what we experienced during the peak of the so-called pandemic may well come around again. And the next time, it may even be worse. As the billionaire psychopath Bill Gates said (smirking) a few years back, it “will get our attention.” So, I thought it would be a good idea to read about our quest for community and how governments often cleverly and, sometimes, brutally seek to destroy those natural communities while rounding us up into contrived communities of their own making.
At the outset of this essay, I will say this about the quest for community: it never made much sense to me. I love solitude and am very much a loner. Except for 10 years of marriage from 1984 to 1994, I’ve lived by myself. At school, I never joined a team sport nor attended any games or homecoming celebrations or pep rallies. In college, I went to plenty of keg parties in the dank basements of fraternities, but I never even thought of pledging one. More often than not, I’ve traveled alone to places near and far, from the Himalayan mountains in Nepal; to a remote, off-the-grid cabin on the coast of Maine; to the 500-mile Camino de Santiago pilgrimage across Spain; to a motorcycle trip to the end of the road where northern Ontario’s James Bay meets the southern end of the Arctic Ocean. And in all my life, no matter where I’ve been in this big world of ours, I’ve rarely been lonely.
I also wanted to read The Quest for Community because I was curious to find out exactly what this quest was all about. I approached it almost from an outsider’s point of view, as if it were a kind of anthropological study of another culture. But as I got deeper into the book, it prompted me to look at the ways that I sought out community; community that I had not really noticed because it was all around me. For years, I was like those proverbial fish that do not know they’re in the water that sustains their very existence. Nor did I notice how much I had immersed myself in one particular community and had counted on it for emotional and spiritual sustenance, until it was taken away from me. I found, as Joni Mitchell once so famously sang in her hit, “Big Yellow Taxi,”…“you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.”
***
Because I had the good sense not to get injected with a bioweapon (aka, the COVID vaccine), I was not allowed to set foot on the sprawling, countryside campus of the nation’s largest retreat center in the Hudson Valley of New York, where I’d spent some 20 years working in executive positions of marketing and program development. When it reopened in 2022 after the New York State government had shut it down for all of 2020, and then partially for 2021 and 2022, only those who had been fully jabbed and had the papers to prove it were welcome to return to the office and attend programs there. It was as if the unjabbed, like me, had become instant outcasts, like lepers of the days of old. Or, even worse, scapegoats for the world’s ills, as not-my-president Joe Biden declared in the fall of 2021 by pronouncing that there was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” sweeping o’er the land. Which was a lie; a lie that was turned into a soundbyte and then into sacrosanct truth flogged by the true believers of the COVID cult. I know plenty of other people who did not get jabbed and we never even came down with the sniffles.
A few years before covidmania hit, I had reduced my commitment to the place by becoming a consultant. In that role, I continued to manage a large program with a popular Buddhist teacher who attracted several hundred devotees to her annual retreat on the campus. I was among those devotees. What’s more, I had the enviable pleasure—and the immense responsibility—of overseeing that program for more than two decades. I’d grown fond of the teacher, of her assistants, and of the hundreds—many who returned year after year—who came to be in her wise yet lighthearted presence. And they had grown fond of me. It was always a beautiful community—a kind of joyous but introspective celebration—while we were all gathered there for a weekend. A weekend that gave us fond memories and much food for thought that we took home with us and remembered long after it was over.
But during her annual program there in the spring of 2022, not only was I banned from setting foot on the campus, I also could not even visit with the teacher. I watched the program in sort of sustained state of disbelief, at home and online. It felt like an out-of-body experience. The strangest thing of all was that the only thing said about me during the on-stage welcoming comments that I had facilitated and enjoyed for 23 years and were now being delivered for the first time by someone other than me, was that I “could not be here.” It seemed to me that it was said as an after-thought, a parenthetical note to rush through, like those rapid-fire warnings that you hear on television advertisements about the side effects for whatever pharmaceutical is being pushed. No reason was given for my absence. Had I died? Had I been fired? Did I quit? Had I fled the country? Was I in a coma? Was I in jail?
What was also strange was that no one on the staff, some of whom I’d worked with shoulder-to-shoulder in the trenches for several years, emailed or texted or phoned me to ask me why I “could not be here.” Or even to find out how I felt about being ostracized in this way. For more than two, sometimes difficult yet mostly splendid and fulfilling decades of my existence, this was a community to which I had given all of my professional and much of my personal life. This was my tribe. And now it had spit me out. And all because I’d chosen to draw a line in the sand about what I wanted to do with my own body and not inject myself with a toxin that was known then, if you knew where to look, to be completely useless in protecting anyone from contracting COVID or spreading it.
I did not know until all of this unfolded as I watched the weekend program on my laptop at the breakfast bar in my kitchen, feeling millions of miles away from an event that was geographically only a few miles away, how much I missed being there, missed seeing a teacher I adored and respected. My girlfriend took a photo of me. I look like a person who had just found out that someone close to him had died.
What I also missed was the thrill of hanging onto the teacher’s every word, feverishly taking notes so as not to forget her secrets to living a good and meaningful and, above all, compassionate life. I missed that because now her words rang hollow to me. Here was a teacher whose core teaching, grounded in centuries of Buddhist wisdom, was all about being fearless in the face of life’s uncertainties—even in the face of death. Now I felt betrayed by this same teacher who had succumbed to the very same fears she was teaching the world to face with fearlessness and had willingly taken the jab (which she had to have done to teach there). I also felt betrayed by the organization itself whose foundational mission claims to promote well-being, enlightened living, and community. Suddenly, to me, it was none of those things. Something close to me had died, after all; my faith in a teacher and a group of people with whom I had long aligned myself to “walk the talk.”
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Indeed, this organization, which for decades had proudly stood above the fray with its alternative and holistic approaches to healthy living—and for which in its early days was mocked by mainstream American culture—had now become the very thing it scorned. It had now thrown itself into the ring of compliant sycophants; handmaidens to a compromised coalition of alphabet agencies—the FDA, the CDC, the DOH—which, working in cahoots with the pharmaceutical mafia and a shadowy alliance of neo-Marxist globalists, want to maim and kill us. Instead of doing what it was scolded into doing “what you’re told” by another psychopath, Anthony Fauci, the center could have taken the lead and stood up against the toxic jabs and the inhumane mandates just as it had taken the lead in offering alternative and holistic healing modalities upon which it had been founded. But it had chosen to enforce those depraved mandates and divisions. I was devastated.
The incomprehensible hypocrisy I witnessed that day in my kitchen must have shorted the bunch of neurons in my brain that govern reason and logic because, to this day, I still feel the bile simmering in the fortress of my soul and hear a strange hissing in my mind. I walk around feeling slightly off-balance, as if I’d taken a hard whack to the back of my head from which I have not recovered. On my laptop, I watched several hundred masked hopefuls dutifully sitting six feet apart, looking so isolated and, I couldn’t help but think, so sad. There was none of the cheerful talking to each other among the participants. There were none of the warm, lingering hugs, God forbid. Everyone was just sitting there like in a time-out in grade school. I’ll never forget it. Because I thought they must be surely killing their souls in such passive compliance to vicious mandates and agreeing to live with this lack of genuine human contact. Isn’t this genuine human contact precisely what the organization had long claimed to offer people who went there seeking respite and solace from the suffering of their isolated lives? From what I saw of that retreat, I might as well have been watching a live reenactment of one of Dante’s circles of hell.
