Create Dangerously
A Meditation on an Essay by Albert Camus
Welcome to the inaugural edition of Underlined Sentences. I’ve never read a book without underlining sentences. And in the many books I’ve bought and read, I’ve underlined a lot of sentences. I used to think it an odd habit until I read what the renowned mythologist, Joseph Campbell, had to say about it: “I remember when Alan Watts one time asked me, ‘Joe, what yoga do you practice?’ I said, ‘I underline sentences.’” In this column, I will explore underlined sentences from books and assorted texts both old and new that I’ve read years ago and only recently, popular and obscure, on a wide range of topics, from the arcane to the topical to the spiritual, focusing on one book at a time, or possibly two or three but addressing a common theme. I will set them in the milieu in which they were written—a kind of exegesis—and reflect on them in the context of what they have to say to the world today and on how they have inspired and changed my life and how they could inspire and change yours. This post is longer than subsequent ones will be because of the backstory on how I found my way to writing this column. So as not to distract you, I’ve listed the sources of information for this essay at the end. Thank you for reading. Please comment, share, and subscribe (links are below).
“One may long, as I do, for a gentler flame, a respite, a pause for musing. But perhaps there is no other peace for the artist than what he finds in the heat of combat. ‘Every wall is a door,’ Emerson correctly said. Let us not look for the door, and the way out, anywhere but in the wall against which we are living. Instead, let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of the battle.”
—Albert Camus, “Create Dangerously”
The essay, “Create Dangerously,” from which the quote above is taken, was translated from a lecture that the French Algerian writer, Albert Camus (1913-1960) delivered at Sweden’s University of Uppsala on December 14, 1957. He’d gone to Sweden from his Paris residence to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was 44 years old, the second youngest writer (only Rudyard Kipling had been younger) and the ninth French writer to win the Nobel for Literature since its inception in 1901.
Camus delivered his acceptance speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, on December 10, 1957. In that roughly 12-minute speech, while dressed in a black tuxedo and a white bow tie and speaking in French before an international, glamorous audience, and perhaps feeling out of place for someone who grew up poor and now considered himself “a man rich only in his doubts,” Camus hints at the responsibility of the artist that he will speak about four days later at the University of Uppsala: “Whatever our personal weaknesses may be, the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression.”
That was a long time ago and many miles away from where I live in New York’s Hudson Valley. But Camus’ Nobel acceptance speech and, even more so, his “Create Dangerously” lecture, collapsed the time and distance between there and then and here and now. Delivered nearly 67 years ago, his “Create Dangerously” lecture is acutely relevant to our time—and to me. When I first read it in the spring of 2021, it was as if this thin, chain-smoking writer on another continent, then almost 30 years my junior, was standing directly in front of me in a dark, baggy suit and, with his usual brooding look, admonishing me to have the courage to write not so much what I want to write but what I need to write. To “create dangerously,” he said, adding: “The time of irresponsible artists is over.” Herbert Lottman, in his biography, Albert Camus, wrote of the lecture: “It was a wide-ranging speculation on the necessary involvement of the artist in affairs of the world, with a sharp critique of the dangers—the subordination of art to the state, socialist realism.”
***
I stumbled upon Camus’ work when I had lost my way as a writer. Writer’s block, I would learn, often troubled Camus, as well. For me, it was not because of anything troubling within, at least not at first. It was because of what was happening in the world around me. For many years, in addition to my day job in marketing and program development, and later in a consultancy role, at a popular retreat center near where I live in New York’s Hudson Valley, I’ve had a satisfying avocation writing personal essays published in various magazines and newspapers. It is a form I enjoy. I’d also created online courses (with others and on my own) focusing on personal growth and spiritual development. All of that seemed hopelessly out of touch with the world that was then emerging—or rather being ripped to shreds. Suddenly, I didn’t know what to write about.
Also, I had just completed my first novel after many years of painstaking labor. By March 2020, I felt that had I worked it over plenty enough to begin the long and arduous task of finding an agent for it. I’d sent out my first query, and soon after the world was shut down. I intentionally use the passive voice here. I state that “the world was shut down” instead of using the active voice, in which I’d have to define who exactly had shut down the world, which, in addition to the vast network of criminals behind the closures and the mandates that followed, I would have to include all of those who eagerly supported it all. I would have to grow billions of additional fingers to point out everyone who brought this on. That query of mine had apparently vanished into the ethers of the eerily quiet, locked-down Manhattan skyline as the alarming news spread about how a supposedly new and deadly virus had infected a bat in a cave in the hinterlands of China, which then got passed along to a pangolin in a wet market hundreds of miles away in Wuhan, where, Joseph Mercola writes in his book, The Truth About COVID-19, “a series of controversial genetic engineering experiments involving the weaponization…of coronaviruses were being conducting in several badly managed, accident-prone labs.” Then this bat virus, according to the popular narrative, skipped species and got passed along to a human being in Wuhan. This supposedly new and deadly virus then supposedly spread quickly and uncontrollably all around the world.
In what seemed like the blink of an eye or, rather, a hit on the head from behind, after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, I found myself spending all of my days and nights at home, along with countless others also in their homes all around the world, under a kind of house arrest. It was if we’d all committed some horrible crime just by being alive. Which was the point. The only thing missing were the ankle bracelets. I thought it best to hold off sending out any essays or soliciting agents. It made no sense to me to follow that shimmering star for now; drawing near, it had suddenly been swallowed up by storm clouds, and not entirely because of chemtrails this time but by the outgassing of collective hysteria and mass delusion. Talk about climate change. I decided I’d wait a few weeks—after all, we were told “two weeks to stop the spread”—for it all to blow over, for the sky to clear, for things to settle down, and for life to return to normal, such as it was. Then I would begin again.
We all know by now that life in the civilized world did not return to the way we’d known it—for better or for worse—nor did the powers-that-should-not-be ever have that in mind. I soon figured out, along with many others, that a shadowy international cartel made up of an unholy trinity of governments, the pharmaceutical industry, and the mass media had launched a highly coordinated, cold-blooded, surprise attack to condition us to get used to a “new normal” of having to work from home; of having our schools closed and having to attend classes through Zoom; of having to talk through plexiglass barriers at stores and banks; of having to stand six feet apart from everyone wherever you went; of having to wear face masks; of being forced to stay away from people we love held in hospitals and nursing homes; of having our churches and parks and beaches and restaurants and small shops and gyms closed; of having sporting events, concerts, and plays canceled and all their venues go dark. At the same time, big box stores, grocery stores, and—of all things—liquor stores, deemed “essential” businesses, were allowed to remain open. This certainly was not normal, new or otherwise. It was insanity. What was even more insane is that the entire, ruinous operation was based on a lie so deep and so vile that the only tactic that could get anyone to believe it was a 24/7 barrage of televised fear. Fear that became so addictive that its detractors, such myself, called it “fear porn.” And hundreds of millions became its willing prisoners.
Almost from the very first hours of the so-called “pandemic,” I smelled a rat. So did many others. I don’t know how they knew. But I found myself gravitating to them online and in person. I also don’t know exactly how I knew what I knew when I knew it, but I have three reasons that I think might have saved me from taking the bait. First, since the contagion of terror had been principally driven by television, I believe I was, well, immunized from this fear because I have not been exposed to television in decades. Even as a teenager, I was suspicious of television’s capacity to hypnotize and manipulate the human mind, and by my early twenties I had completely unplugged myself from it. I recall one internet meme in which a journalist asks two Amish men with their beards and straw hats why the people in their communities aren’t getting COVID and they reply: “We don’t have television.” Second, having lived and taught in Beijing, China in the late 1980s, when the nation was still picking through the ruins wrought by the Cultural Revolution and the ruling regime maintained its iron-fist grip on the population, I witnessed how government propaganda neutralizes critical thinking while bending or burying the truth and belittling, berating, demonizing, discrediting, and sometimes imprisoning as renegades or revisionists or paper tigers or some such epithet anyone who dares question the legitimacy or authority of the regime’s narrative. Lastly, I came into the world attuned to the road less traveled and with a kind of sixth sense for knowing when I’m being lied to, both of which over two past decades have been increasingly informed by a humble faith in a higher power and by my Christian roots passed down to me from my Mennonite ancestors, whose faith has been bred in my sinew and bone. My ancestors also include soldiers of the militia in the American Revolution here in the Hudson Valley of New York, where I live. As if speaking from their graves, their fight lives on and might very well be informing me of the tyrannical dangers we face today.
These have been my front line of defense against the treachery that rained down on us like acid during the peak of the COVID tumult. In video clips from mainstream news organizations like CNN and MSNBC that appeared on alternative social media sites, I saw charts depicting rapidly increasing COVID cases and deaths; I saw a long line of socially-distanced, masked people waiting to get into an emergency room because they were apparently so sick with COVID but managed to drag themselves to a hospital and stand outside on a chilly and damp spring evening in New York City; I saw the raising up for hero worship the first human sacrifice who lined up for what would become the world’s deadliest game of Russian roulette and who said she was “happy to inspire others” to do the same; I saw images of children, demonized as COVID super-spreaders, reaching up to a pane of cold glass to meet the withered palms of their grandparents with their fake smiles and sad eyes isolated on the other side in their homes like in an aquarium, supposedly to keep everyone safe from COVID. I saw so many things like that which, to me, were theater. And bad theater at that. If it were possible, I would have walked out minutes into the opening act. But it was happening all around me in real time everywhere I turned. There was no escape unless I crawled under a rock, which I was often tempted to do.
I remember when the frenzy was really whipped up as tented emergency field hospitals were assembled in cities all across the nation. Additionally, in New York City, at the end of March 2020, the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort came plowing through the gray swells of the Atlantic Ocean to New York City, seeming to pose for a photo-op as it sailed past the Statue of Liberty, and to bail out the city’s supposedly overwhelmed hospitals during the supposed COVID outbreak. Over the next three weeks, it had treated a mere 179 patients, and none for COVID. A month later, it was determined that the city hadn’t needed the help in any case. Did the city ever need it aside from inciting even more fear in millions of people already in the grips of unprecedented panic? This is the stuff that psychological manipulation and trauma are made of. Which, again, was the point. With little fanfare, the ship returned to its home port in Virginia, with whatever mission it was supposed to have accomplished vaporizing into the ocean mists and yesterday’s news. And those emergency field hospitals, set up to the tune of more than $660 million of tax dollars, decamped just four months later. Most of them had not treated a single patient.
***
“An event can be both real and orchestrated or hyped,” one of my favorite writers, Naomi Wolf, observes in a Substack column about the widespread college campus chaos regarding the war between Israel and Palestine. “A threat can be both real and exaggerated.” Warning that COVID regulations were paving the way for despotism, former British Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption in a March 2020 interview with the BBC said: “The real problem is that when societies lose their freedom, it’s not usually because tyrants have taken it away. It’s usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return from protection against some external threat. And that threat is usually real but usually exaggerated. That’s what I fear we are seeing now.”
This was indeed what we were seeing throughout the war on COVID. Because when you can see past the theatrical curtain you can see it was all really a war on humanity, not against a virus, but against our freedom. I am not a scientist. I am not a doctor. But I am also not uninformed, incapable of mature insight and critical thinking, or blind. All the big players in the COVID racket scolded us again and again to “trust the science.” If I trusted any science it had to be based on fact, not fiction. And the science we were all relentlessly bullied into believing—that closing down the world, that wearing masks, that staying six feet apart from everyone, and that getting tested and jabbed would all stop the virus from spreading, and which billions believed without questioning—was based on lies to terrorize everyone and anyone to submit to this heinous and inhumane protocol whose endgame was to get everyone on earth to take the shots or else. And to turn the rest of us, those who had the good sense and courage not to get jabbed with this experimental gene-editing substance—about 25 percent of Americans—into social pariahs who, according to the increasingly invisible, pale phantom haunting the hallowed halls of the White House, “Joe Biden,” speaking during a televised broadcast in September on 2021, were causing a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” That was not happening. What was happening was a “casedemic,” in which even untold numbers of asymptomatic people who tested positive for COVID, often falsely, were sure they were going to die from this invisible but deadly pathogen if they didn’t get jabbed and boosted—and force everyone else to do the same.
The empty threats and trickery were driven home to me by personal experience and direct personal observation with my own eyes. No friends, acquaintances, or colleagues of mine had died from COVID. Only two had even gotten sick with COVID, although neither had gotten tested to verify it, so it might have been just a bad flu. Whenever I swung by the emergency department of the local hospital that serves a large swath of the New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley to see for myself the mobs of COVID victims gasping at death’s door, I saw no lines. I saw plenty of empty parking spaces. I did not see one refrigeration trailer stacked with body bags containing dead COVID victims as we’d been shown by the mainstream media. You had to wonder.
When the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, said at a media briefing: “This is not just a public health crisis, it is a crisis that will touch every sector.” Why did I not see any signs of this crisis where I live? If a pandemic touches “every sector,” then why was it not spreading from the supposed COVID epicenter of New York City a mere 90 miles south of my home—at the time New York City had supposedly become the worst-affected area in the United States—especially as throngs of anxious urbanites were fleeing the city to come to the countryside during this so-called pandemic? During the massive COVID histrionics, my girlfriend and I had a friend (a single mother) and her two teenage children, who were among those who fled the madness in Manhattan, stay with us for three months, sharing meals together, eating from the same bowl of popcorn, hanging out. None of them quarantined when they arrived. None of us got sick. You had to wonder.
We also gathered with other new, awakened friends at my home and at their homes like the clandestine dissidents in what had been the dystopian Communist East Germany depicted in the movie The Lives of Others—or like the early Christians secretly huddled in private homes amidst the Roman persecutions—when we were all supposed to be locked in our houses or apartments absent of visitors and staying six feet apart from everyone everywhere we went. And there we were hugging, eating together, sipping on gorgeous wine, breathing the same air in close quarters. We did this repeatedly. None of us ever got sick. You had to wonder. And wonder again.
A handful of people I’d long followed on Facebook began to speak up. Phrases like “psy-op” and “hoax” and “coup d'état” to describe what was happening to us began to crop up in my feed like the beautiful daffodils blossoming in the gardens outside my house. What these people were saying made much more sense to me than what the talking heads in the mainstream media and government, reading from prepared mockingbird media scripts like crises actors, not journalists or government officials at all, were purporting to report about the supposed dire nature of this supposed deadly pandemic. These dissenting voices, including legitimate doctors and esteemed scientists, were saying that this mystery virus was not a deadly danger to any healthy person under 70 and that 94 percent of those who allegedly died from the COVID had multiple (2.6, to be exact) co-morbid conditions. In other words, COVID was the only cause mentioned for 6 percent of the coronavirus deaths reported to the CDC. So, to be blunt, many were going to die soon anyway, virus or no virus. Clearly, locking down the entire world made absolutely no sense from a scientific and life-saving point of view because the threat to the general populace was nowhere near what the medical-media-governmental-industrial complex had made it out to be. You had to wonder yet again what the hell was going on?
The many-layered depths of the crimes at hand have left many of us still searching for clues. Reports began to emerge that those who did end up in the hospital supposedly sick with COVID sometimes died not from COVID but from medical interventions. One was the administration of remdesivir (which some nurses called “run, death is near”), although the WHO determined it to be ineffective in the treatment of COVID. Then there was secondary ventilator-associated bacterial pneumonia caused by mechanical ventilation. The number of supposed COVID deaths also spiked because those who died from many other causes—cancer, accidents, murders, suicides, diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, liver failure, loneliness and isolation, and just plain old age—were being labeled as COVID deaths because the deceased had supposedly tested positive for COVID, even though numerous reports proved that the common testing method (polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, test) was flawed and often produced false positive readings. Also, flu deaths miraculously “disappeared.” It doesn’t take much pondering to surmise that these flu deaths were still present and simply folded into the COVID death toll.
And observing the classic “follow the money” logic, we discover that the federal government was offering hospitals big payouts for categorizing any deaths as COVID deaths. Hospitals were paid $13,000 per person admitted as a COVID case—a tidy sum just for fudging some data—and another $39,000 for every patient put on a ventilator. Even the CDC has admitted that these perks might have incentivized hospitals to categorize any death within their walls as a COVID death. So, you get run over by a bus, your corpse tests positive (perhaps falsely) for COVID, and voila. Chalk up another COVID death.
Reports in the social media outlets I follow and trust began reporting that death rates spiked again after the so-called “safe and effective” vaccines were rolled out and plunged into billions of arms beginning at the end of 2020. Presently, those who got the jabs began dying from COVID at a higher rate than those who did not get jabbed. In fact, one study now indicates that twice as many people died from the vaccine as from COVID. Vaccine deaths, which are continuing to take down tens of thousands of the unsuspecting, are being caused by myocarditis, pericarditis, strokes, aneurysms, and many other sudden illnesses and “medical emergencies” of people who were mostly in good health. One study reported in the National Library of Medicine found the number of myocarditis reports in the federal VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) after a COVID-19 vaccination in 2021 was 223 times higher than the average of all vaccines combined for the past 30 years. To date, more than 1,600,000 reports of adverse effects from COVID jabs have been submitted to the VAERS, which has been found to underreport vaccine injuries and deaths so the numbers are most likely much higher. While I know no one who died from COVID, I know several people—healthy young or middle-aged men and women—who were murdered by the jabs.
Throughout all of this, doctors, social critics, politicians, and professional and citizen journalists who were questioning the official narrative citing troublesome (to the establishment) facts, were increasingly censored and deplatformed—and remain so—for spreading “misinformation” or for “violating community standards,” as if telling the truth had fallen out of fashion and lying was the new black. Those who simply raised questions about COVID and the injections on Facebook had their posts blocked. The same started happening on Twitter and YouTube. You had to wonder. Why? Additionally, these days the numbers of deaths continue to climb abnormally with the onset of rapid progression cancer, or “turbo cancer,” also linked to the COVID injections. Also, mounting research suggests a serious side effect of the COVID mRNA jabs could be dementia, and the prions that cause it may be contagious.
In a nutshell, many medical freedom experts and other alternative news sources are now claiming that the COVID mRNA jabs are, according Mercola, “the most dangerous medical products to ever hit the market.” British MP Andrew Bridgen has claimed that vaccine deaths are eventually “going to be bigger than the Holocaust.” Many, many others agree on all of the above.
Back in the spring of 2020, I had anticipated this happening. No, my awareness and my decisions during COVID were not based on “luck,” as Atlantic magazine writer, Emily Oster, claimed in her October 31, 2022 plea for COVID amnesty for people like her. Oster insisted that she and other jab pushers made a variety of horrible decisions during COVID because at the time, she said, there was no way to know those decisions were misguided. I knew, and not only because I’d lived in communist China, but because I had also twice visited the Soviet Union while it was still under the gangrened thumb of its dying Marxist dictatorship, and also because I’ve been studying the history of tyranny for years. I’ve seen this movie before and when allowed to play out, it does not end well. No deus ex machina is lowered into the drama to save the day. And the dark, dictatorial machinations that I’d experienced in those two countries was now happening here in the United States. That—not COVID—was what terrified me. I concluded that nothing was as important to write about as the widespread individual and societal degradation I was witnessing everywhere all around me and at a rate I’d never seen before, as if we were all suddenly under attack by a hydra-headed beast from which there was nowhere to run.
Still, I balked. I was torn. Lo, how I longed for “a gentler flame, a respite, a pause, for musing,” as Camus also had longed for. How I longed for the pandemonium, like some vomit-inducing carnival ride, to stop. I didn’t even want to post anything on Facebook about what I saw happening because I didn’t want to risk alienating my Facebook friends, many of whom also happened to be real friends. Most of them believed with whole-hearted obeyance in what I became increasingly convinced were complete fabrications. In my Facebook feed I saw that many posted photos of themselves lining up in their cars to have those long swabs stuck painfully deep into their nasal cavities to test for COVID and then posted photos of themselves getting or having gotten the jabs. They were posing as good citizens, dutifully adhering to what the government and media hucksters were recommending and eventually mandating to “stop the spread,” even though all along medical freedom doctors—and later jab manufacturer Pfizer itself—revealed that the jabs did not stop transmission of COVID, nor was it even tested to do so.
Each and every day I could not believe my eyes when I saw all of this on social media and in real life, no matter how hard I rubbed them to make these horrific images go away. I watched with the helplessness, as my Buddhist training taught me about compassion and grief, of an armless mother watching her child get swept away in a river. It all seemed like a bad dream in which nearly everyone I knew—friends, colleagues, spiritual teachers I considered bright and astute and fearless—as well as billions around the world, had completely lost their marbles.
***
At some point in that topsy-turvy time, I remembered a novel called The Plague by Albert Camus. I’d never read it and thought maybe it was high time I did. I ordered it from Amazon and as the days were growing shorter and the nights were growing longer in December of 2020, I sat next to my woodstove in my small house in my small town and read it straight through in a couple of days, sometimes putting the book down on my knee for a few moments to gaze into the flames behind the soot-covered glass door and think about how the story mirrored much of what was happening now. I remember looking out of the window next to the stove and seeing that the big silver maple tree had been stripped bare of its leaves. Winter was setting in. And it felt to me that it was going to be a long, cold, dark one as a relentless and an even darker agenda far beyond my window was also setting in.
Camus’ story is about an outbreak of bubonic plague in the French Algerian city of Oran shortly after World War II. Camus was born and lived in Algeria in his youth before moving to France. I saw similarities between what happens in The Plague in what Camus wrote was “194–“ and in what was happening in real time in the United States and around much of the world. Some reviewers of the book have observed that The Plague is less about a pandemic than it is an allegory of Nazi occupation of parts of France, which must have been still fresh in Camus’ mind when he wrote this book in France almost immediately following the end of war. A lengthy review of the book in the New York Times, which nowadays might disparage Camus as a conspiracy theorist, noted that the novel is a “far more powerful parable of the evil which man wrecks on man.”
The dust jacket of a new English translation of The Plague spells it out: “An immediate triumph when it was published in 1947, Albert Camus’ The Plague is in part an allegory of France’s suffering under the Nazi occupation as well as a timeless story of bravery and determination against the precariousness of human existence.” The Plague can be read today as an allegory of America’s, and even the much of the world’s, suffering under an emergent global dictatorship using lies and fear-mongering to shut down society, creating the human isolation and atomization and division that totalitarian dictators salivate over. And it happened without them having to barely lift a finger against us because billions readily, if not enthusiastically, complied as unwitting conscripts into an army bent on gutting the inner framework of what remains of the free world.
At about the same time as I was reading The Plague, I finally mustered the courage to post on Facebook evidence that I believed highlighted in no uncertain terms the insidious lies of what I and so many others saw through, yet was being covered up by governments, the mainstream media, and many social media outlets. I was beginning to feel, as Camus had, that “there is no other peace for the artist than what he finds in the heat of combat.” Facebook was my first foray into the battle. There, among a parade of the usual cute cat videos and photos of splendid homemade meals, were my posts that must have appeared to come from some wannabe biblical prophet screaming against the wind (“My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge…”—Hosea 4:6) about our dire circumstances and the lies fueling them. And there, except for a handful of “likes” and supportive comments, I was either ignored or attacked.
I kept up the good fight but gradually determined that I wasn’t educating anyone because no one was willing to learn. Worse, I was losing several friends. I was shocked and saddened in equal measure to see that after years of professional and social camaraderie—dinners out, birthday parties, holiday gatherings—these friends suddenly determined that I was their mortal enemy who they slammed the door on and needed to stay far away from so they could stay healthy and alive. I found this to be ironic because as a friend, on Facebook and in real life, I was trying to keep them out of harm’s way, if not save their lives. Ultimately, the Facebook thought police blocked my own posts because of that ubiquitous and vague warning about “missing context.” After a year, I stopped. It was futile. I was wasting my one precious life as if trying to turn around an ocean’s rip tide and rescue those who’d been swept away by it. My final post was in December 2021. Soon after, I scrubbed all COVID related posts from my public Facebook page and abandoned Facebook altogether.
Throughout all this time, I had accumulated dozens of books written by or about Camus (translated into English as well as a few in their original French) and stacked them in tall towers on my living room floor. After I’d had a taste with Camus’ novel, The Plague, I now wanted a feast. And what a mighty fine feast it was. The layers and depth of his interpretation of the historical and eternal human condition stunned my mind and stirred my heart. I read his books one right after the next, filling my troubled soul with the words and thoughts of one of the most brilliant, unequivocal, and, in many instances, lyrical and enchanting writers I’d ever come across. I found in his writing and transcribed lectures an articulate, indefatigable advocate for truth and freedom at any cost, even at the risk of alienating personal friends and professional relationships, which had indeed happened to him, too. Camus wrote to a friend, Jean Gillibert, “Only, truth…that is the uninterrupted seeking of it, the decision to tell it when one sees it, on every level, and to live it, gives a meaning, a direction, to one’s march.” He also wrote and spoke against violence of any sort. One particularly inspiring piece about truth and the artist’s responsibility to it is called “Create Dangerously,” from which I quoted at the beginning of this essay. Camus’ insights in that essay proved exceptionally helpful for me in trying to figure out what to write about now that the world and everyone in it was being systemically brought to ruin and degradation on a scale not rivaled since the visions of destruction set down in the Apocalypse of St. John.
Reading “Create Dangerously” proved to be a turning point for me. Through the mental fog of disorientation and indecision, I found the necessary coordinates and I got my bearings. I felt like I’d been lost in a dark wood for time. It is said that when you get lost in a forest and start panicking it is often best just to stay where you are and eventually you will figure out which way to go. So it was that in the still of my interior redoubt, I had oriented myself by that inner compass and knew what I needed to write about now. I felt tremendously relieved. But I also felt tremendously uneasy. I was entering uncharted territory.
Before 2020, never in my life would I have envisioned writing about a deadly so-called vaccine, medical freedom, toxic propaganda, tyranny and oppression here in America, and the primacy of universal individual sovereignty. Never in my life did I think I would come to the long-simmering but inescapable and deeply concerning conclusion, along with many others who’ve tapped into the dark wisdom that our ancient ancestors have passed down to those of us with eyes to see and ears to hear, uninvited but unmistakably clear, that we’ve long been in the midst of a ghastly war on humanity—an eternal spiritual war against evil and its instinct of death and division and misery and chaos and hate—currently orchestrated by an elite cult of tech giants, big pharma, and the military-media-industrial bio-warfare complex determined to cull the human population and turn the remnant of useless eaters into digitally tracked and traced serfs, all the while attempting to demolish everything good and precious and sacred about life on earth—families, children, honest work, farming, a safe and inviolable place to call home, friendship, freedom, religion and spirituality, beauty, mercy, enchantment, intimacy, love. Never in my life have I suffered so much grief over so much loss. Never in my life did I expect to feel a kind of bitterness for which I am not made, as Camus had also felt amidst the vast swarms of the shockingly evil crimes pummeling humanity during his day. Never in my life did I expect to feel so betrayed and overwhelmed by such sudden and massive waves of blunt naivety, ignorance, hypocrisy, and malignant satisfaction. But rarely in my life had I ever felt such clarity.
***
In the summer of 2021, while I was still wasting my time on Facebook, I set down to write what I now needed to write—what I now wanted to write—and to fashion an essay that I believed measured up to the high standards of tone and accuracy I had set for myself in terms of what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. Something longer and more detailed than a Facebook post. “The artist chooses his object as much as he is chosen by it,” Camus writes in “Create Dangerously.” So it was with me. I decided to model my first essay on a series of essays that Camus had written called “Letters to a German Friend” (“Lettres à un ami allemande”). Camus had written and clandestinely published in resistance journals four of these “letters” to a hypothetical German friend in the last two years of WWII and the German occupation of parts of France, including Paris, where Camus had spent much of the war and post-war years, including a stint as an editor and writer of the French resistance newspaper, Combat, from 1943 to 1947. His first of four letters is dated July 1943 and his last is dated July 1944. The letters were written as a protest against what he saw as the German embrace of nihilism and to proclaim France’s eventual victory over Germany.
In 1948, when Camus agreed to their publication in Italy, he wanted his readers to know the full context of his writing these letters. He was concerned for the now defeated German people, and he felt the tone of the letters could be misunderstood. So, he added this caveat: “When the author of these letters says ‘you,’ he means not ‘you Germans’ but ‘you Nazis.’ When he says ‘we,’ this signifies not always ‘we Frenchmen’ but sometimes ‘we free Europeans.’ I am contrasting two attitudes, not two nations, even if, at a certain moment in history, these two nations personified two enemies.”
I mention this because I wrote my “letter” with the same caveat in mind. I did not want be critical of those who had been mandated to get jabbed, some against their will and with no allowance for exemptions, to keep their jobs. My aim was to call out the many who championed the jabs and attacked those who were sounding the alarm about the dual threat of a merciless regime taking over the world and the roll-out of toxic injections, which one of the social media pundits I follow calls, “a bioweapon masquerading as a vaccine.” My first “letter” to a hypothetical friend like Camus’ German friend, is called “A Letter to My Vaccinated Friend.” I emailed it to the renowned libertarian Lew Rockwell on September 21, 2021, not even sure if he’d post it in his online daily newsletter. It was a leap into the void. I’d been following other writers on his site for months and liked the direction they were going, what they were saying. I now wanted to throw myself into the fray, at last. I figured I’d hear back from him or from someone on his staff one way or another maybe a few days or a few weeks later. This is the normal procedure when one submits unsolicited material to publishers of any sort.
Exhausted from a long and tedious day of putting the final touches on my essay, I went to bed. The next day, I woke up just as dawn was breaking outside my bedroom window and checked my email on my iPhone. I saw through my blurry, sleepy eyes in the stark, white light of the phone, a slew of emails from people I’d never heard of. For a dreadful moment I feared that my inbox had been flooded with spam or that I was being stalked or that my email account had been hacked. I remember thinking, “My God, what have I done?” It turned out that overnight Lew Rockwell had posted my piece at the top of his list of the day’s dozen or so posts. And all of these emails were from strangers thanking and congratulating me for what I’d written. I was shocked. And thrilled.
I’d never before experienced such swift publication and response in my entire life. The writing of the piece took months but everything else took place overnight.
***
Camus again:
“It is essential to know that, without liberty, we shall achieve nothing and that we shall lose both future justice and ancient beauty. Liberty alone draws men from their isolation; but slavery dominates a crowd of solitudes. And art, by virtue of that free essence I have tried to define, unites where tyranny separates. It is not surprising, therefore, that art should be the enemy marked out by every form of oppression.”
That phrase “a crowd of solitudes” recalls to me the lockdowns and social distancing measures that were forced upon humanity by governments around much of the world and that had nothing to do with protecting us from getting sick with COVID—that was just a ruse. Rather, the agenda was—and remains—to not only kill us off and to turn the survivors into slaves, but also to browbeat people into remembering nothing about justice and beauty, which Camus rightly believes are lost without liberty. It is hardly possible that one can even acknowledge that justice and beauty exist when one is terrified by a deadly pathogen, even if—or especially if—it does not really exist except in the imagination. With so much fear being spread around, the acquiescent mind has no room to consider anything other than survival. This is all part of the nefarious operation attempting to overtake us, crushing the freedom of expression at every turn. Here is our war of the worlds. It is between those who cleverly camouflage the snares of domination with free donuts and dancing nurses to capture their prey and those who see the snares for what they are and refuse to be tricked into them. Either you’ve been programmed or you are aware of the programming. That’s the long and the short of it. Take it or leave it.
Who were the oppressors and tyrants Camus was addressing? During his talk there was no PowerPoint display. No slides citing facts or figures. No charts or graphs spray-mounted on foam core boards. No visuals to alarm and dazzle and convince. Nothing but a man alone on a stage speaking his mind, speaking truth. So, let’s look at some possible backstory to fill in the blanks.
During WWII, as I noted above, Camus was the editor of a daily French Resistance newspaper called Combat, in which he published under a pseudonym for fear of being found out and possibly killed by the Nazis. (To avoid his capture and possible torture and execution, the printer who produced Combat committed suicide as he was about to be arrested by the Germans.) By the time Camus had won the Nobel prize and given his “Create Dangerously” lecture, the war had ended in France just thirteen years before. Which is not a long time considering the irreversible physical and psychological damage inflicted upon those who’d lived under the Nazi occupation. So, there was that.
In addition to that, the Spanish Civil War had officially ended in 1939, but was actually still going on with the victorious fascist government ruled by Francisco Franco silencing the dissenting voices of the defeated Spanish Republicans, often by shooting them to death by the thousands, up into the 1950s. Stalin was also not too far away, ruling the Soviet Union with the same, if not more, widespread destruction, death, and despotism that Hitler and Franco had used. All of which Camus was agonizingly aware.
And there was, I suspect, always in the back of his mind throughout all this time, the ongoing fight back home in Algeria, whose mostly Arab population was aiming to wrest back governing powers from France’s colonial reign. Camus stood on both sides of the fence about this. On one memorable occasion he returned to Algeria to speak about working out a peaceful solution for both sides—taking his stand on humanitarian rather than ideological grounds that threatened violence and the death of innocents, including his illiterate mother still living in Algeria—and he was shouted down by a mob of pro-liberation extremists calling out “Death to Camus!” After this incident, he decided to no longer express himself publicly on the subject of Algeria.
Whatever else Camus had in mind I cannot know. I suspect one thing might have been his break with a friend and literary colleague, Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom Camus was often at odds and who, much to Camus’ dismay and disbelief, backed the Communists in the Soviet Union, who were working, Sartre believed, for the betterment of humanity. Camus was simply unwilling to overlook the persecutions and abuses of state power manifested by the Communist regime. No surprises there. But what must have been a surprise was to have such a close and intelligent friend ignorantly support such a ruthless dictatorship. It must have felt like a betrayal driven straight to the heart. How does anyone overcome that? I’m not sure he ever did. (According to The Black Book of Communism, it’s been subsequently reported that Stalin was responsible for some 20 million deaths, second only in the history of the world to the 65 million deaths attributed to Mao Zedong in China. So much for the betterment of humanity.)
Indeed, an additional reason I found myself inspired by Camus and his writing was because I, too, felt betrayed by friends much to my own dismay and disbelief. Most had taken sides with the brutal powers running roughshod over us with careless impunity. These were my same peers who in our younger days in high school and college wore “Question Authority” buttons on our denim jackets and book packs. But when the so-called vaccines were pushed on us, they caved without question as these powers issued boot-stomping vaccine mandates, heartlessly kicking loyal employees out of their jobs, severing relationships with contractual personnel, and fomenting division between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, all in such a way that history shows was little different than the way the Nazis early on in their terror in Germany had banned the “unclean” Jews from participating in society like everyone else was allowed to do.
Camus’ “Create Dangerously” speech stands the test of time because the oppression and tyranny he singled out happening in his day is a timeless scourge. It’s an old story endlessly updated and repeated. From a biblical perspective, writes mythologist Martin Shaw in a Substack column about his visit to the cave on the Greek island of Patmos, where St. John is said to have written his Apocalypse, “Nothing in the bible has stopped happening.” What’s happened the past four years has increasingly confirmed for me not only the ever-present nature of oppression and tyranny, but also its evil intentions. I don’t believe Camus ever identified the tyranny of his time as the workings of any spiritual dimension of evil. Although generous to Christians, he was an avowed atheist who did not believe in a divine creator or its opposite, satan. He once told a gathering of Catholic bishops, “I shall never start from the supposition that Christian truth is illusory, but merely from the fact that I could not accept it.” According to a biographer, Oliver Todd, Camus said to his audiences in the Nobel ceremonies, “I have Christian concerns, but my nature is pagan.” Whatever his religious or spiritual affiliations, what Camus offered in “Create Dangerously” about oppression and tyranny, and the need for artists to oppose it, spoke to me as if from the sacred heart that is certain of humanity’s divine rights and responsibilities.
***
Here is Camus in his closing lines of “Create Dangerously”:
“Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own sufferings and joys, builds for all.”
“Create Dangerously” appears in a book of 22 political essays that Camus himself chose and considered most worthy of preservation in English. The English version of the book, called Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, was first published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. January 1, 1960. The edition I used for quotation in this essay was published by The Modern Library in 1963. Both editions were translated by Justin O’Brien. The text of “Create Dangerously” is available as a separate book, Create Dangerously, translated by Sandra Smith and published by Vintage. Camus died in a car wreck January 4, 1960. He was 46.
“A Letter to My Vaccinated Friend” was the first of four “letters” I posted with Lew Rockwell. I also posted with Lew Rockwell several other essays. All of them are listed here in chronological order of when they appeared:
A Letter to My Vaccinated Friend
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/09/no_author/a-letter-to-my-vaccinated-friend/
Second Letter to My Vaccinated Friend
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/01/no_author/second-letter-to-my-vaccinated-friend/
Third Letter to My Vaccinated Friend
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/02/no_author/third-letter-to-my-vaccinated-friend/
Fourth Letter to My Vaccinated Friend
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/06/no_author/fourth-letter-to-my-vaccinated-friend/
The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, Covid-19 and the War Against the Human
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/07/no_author/the-bodies-of-others-the-new-authoritarians-covid-19-and-the-war-against-the-human/
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/07/no_author/the-promise-of-pleasure-or-the-threat-of-pain-reflections-on-brave-new-world-and-nineteen-eighty-four-and-the-future-of-life-on-earth/
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/03/no_author/a-tale-of-two-deaths/
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/05/no_author/863243-2/
Selected References and Relevant Links
Text of Albert Camus Nobel Acceptance Speech
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1957/camus/speech/
Recording of Albert Camus Nobel Acceptance Speech
https://www.openculture.com/2013/11/on-his-100th-birthday-hear-albert-camus-deliver-his-nobel-prize-acceptance-speech-1957.html
Long line forms outside NYC hospital where 13 have died
https://www.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-news-13-die-covid-091358272.html
First person to get Covid vaccine is happy to inspire others
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-59566578
U.S. Field Hospitals Stand Down, Most Without Treating Any COVID-19 Patients
https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals-stand-down-most-without-treating-any-covid-19-patients
https://www.businessinsider.com/usns-comfort-nyc-coronavirus-timeline-2020-4?op=1
Field hospital that treated coronavirus patients in Central Park to close
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/field-hospital-that-treated-coronavirus-patients-in-central-park-to-close/
US Campus Chaos: A New Oct 7 on the Way?
LISTEN: Lord Sumption on the national ‘hysteria’ over coronavirus
https://unherd.com/newsroom/lord-sumption-on-the-national-coronavirus-hysteria/
World Health Organization Declares COVID-19 a ‘Pandemic.’ Here’s What That Means
https://time.com/5791661/who-coronavirus-pandemic-declaration/
New CDC data: 94 percent of people who died with COVID-19 had other health issues
https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_ad07390c-eba6-11ea-9ae0-7b9c88ebb96a.html
The ‘very, very bad look' of remdesivir, the first FDA-approved COVID-19 drug
https://www.science.org/content/article/very-very-bad-look-remdesivir-first-fda-approved-covid-19-drug
Remdesivir shouldn't be used on hospitalized Covid-19 patients, WHO advises
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/remdesivir-shouldn-t-be-used-hospitalized-covid-19-patients-who-n1248320
Remdesivir Fails to Prevent Covid-19 Deaths in Huge Trial
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/health/coronavirus-remdesivir-who.html
Medical Coder- "I knew they (Hospitals) were killing people."
What really killed COVID-19 patients: It wasn't a cytokine storm, suggests study
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-05-covid-patients-wasnt-cytokine-storm.html
Ventilators are being overused on COVID-19 patients, world-renowned critical care specialist says
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ventilators-covid-overuse-1.5534097
In New York’s largest hospital system, many coronavirus patients on ventilators didn’t make it
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/22/coronavirus-ventilators-survival/
Nearly 9 in 10 COVID-19 patients who are put on a ventilator die, New York hospital data suggests
https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-ventilator-deaths-new-york.html
Evidence Shows Nearly All N.Y. COVID Patients Die After Being Put on Ventilator
https://blackdoctor.org/study-shows-most-ny-covid-patients-die-after-being-on-ventilator/2/
THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY: Tens of Thousands of Elderly Secretly Euthanized to Boost ‘Covid Deaths’
CDC ADMITS FINACIAL HOSPITAL INCENTIVES DROVE UP COVID-19 DEATH RATES
https://www.organiclifestylemagazine.com/cdc-admits-finacial-hospital-incentives-drove-up-covid-19-death-rates
https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/overreporting-covid-19-as-an-underlying-cause-of-death-inflated-mortality-numbers-during-pandemic-analysis-5652159
Colorado amends coronavirus death count - says fewer have died of COVID-19 than previously reported
https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/colorado-amends-coronavirus-death-count-says-fewer-have-died-of-covid-19-than-previously-reported
The CDC lied; people died
Determinants of COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38293564/
Why Do Vaccinated People Represent Most COVID-19 Deaths Right Now?
https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/why-do-vaccinated-people-represent-most-covid-19-deaths-right-now/
Our latest polls show twice as many people died from the vaccine as from COVID
Edward Dowd Breaks Down Findings on Excess Death, Disability, and Injury Statistics
https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/shocking-number-of-excess-deaths-disabilities-and-injuries-revealed-edward-dowd-5633806?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2024-04-28&src_cmp=gv-2024-04-28&utm_medium=email&est=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAa%2BsmfgYAxcDG6LYcnmJUCr12hUABKq5iTaiYCFHCR1vU0da9kIo%3D&utm_content=2
Steve Kirsch: Over 10M people worldwide HAVE DIED from COVID-19 vaccines
https://www.newstarget.com/2023-12-20-kirsch-over-10m-people-dead-covid-vaccines.html
Excess deaths soaring in every country where covid “vaccine” uptake is high: data
https://genocide.news/2022-02-02-excess-deaths-soaring-countries-covid-vaccine-high.html
Turbo cancer evidence in California
Doctors Predict Epidemic of Prion Brain Diseases
https://media.mercola.com/ImageServer/Public/2024/April/PDF/prion-brain-diseases-pdf.pdf
MP Andrew Bridgen: I’m Afraid COVID Vaccine Deaths Are ‘Going to Be Bigger Than the Holocaust’
LET’S DECLARE A PANDEMIC AMNESTY
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/covid-response-forgiveness/671879/
COVID: The illusory LIE that allowed tyrants to take complete control of the world
https://chemicalviolence.com/2024-04-15-covid-illusory-lie-tyrants-take-control-world.html
German Gov’t Admits There Was No Pandemic
https://rumble.com/v4n41a6-german-govt-admits-there-was-no-pandemic.html
No Vax, No Service: COVID Vaccine Mandate Starts Tuesday for NYC Restaurants, Venues
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/no-vax-no-service-covid-19-vaccine-mandates-goes-into-effect-in-new-york-city/3222505/
These Businesses Lasted Decades. The Virus Closed Them for Good.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/nyregion/coronavirus-small-business-nyc.html
The Donkey Path: Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild, (Part Three)
Books Mentioned in This Essay
Camus, Albert. Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New
York: The Modern Library, 1963.
Lottman, Herbert R. Camus: A Biography. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1979.
Mercola, Joseph and Cummins, Ronnie. The Truth About COVID-19; Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal. Foreword by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2021.
Camus, Albert. The Plague. Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage International, 1991.
Camus, Albert. The Plague. Translated from the French by Laura Marris. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.
Courtois, Stéphane, et al. The Black Book of Communism. Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999.
James Kullander writes at the intersection of current affairs, history, theology, and memoir. He worked for many years in executive positions in marketing and program development at the Omega Institute, the nation’s largest retreat center for holistic health, personal growth, and spiritual development. Educated in journalism, psychology, and theology, his opinion essays and personal essays have appeared in a variety of print and online publications, including the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, The Sun magazine, and The Shambhala Sun magazine (now called Lion’s Roar). Recently, his work has appeared on Lew Rockwell’s site (lewrockwell.com). He is the author of the forthcoming novel, The River Between Us. (The Prologue can be read on jameskullander.com) He was born in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in Westport and Weston, Connecticut, where he worked as a house painter, well-driller, garbage man, road builder, groundskeeper, and drug store delivery driver before he set off to college. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Keene State College, a Master of Arts degree from Syracuse University, and topped off his higher education with a Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.
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"Never in my life have I suffered so much grief over so much loss. Never in my life did I expect to feel a kind of bitterness for which I am not made, as Camus had also felt amidst the vast swarms of the shockingly evil crimes pummeling humanity during his day. Never in my life did I expect to feel so betrayed and overwhelmed by such sudden and massive waves of blunt naivety, ignorance, hypocrisy, and malignant satisfaction. But rarely in my life had I ever felt such clarity."
This has been my reality. Absolutely beautiful and articulate writing! I will have to read again a few times to fully digest and savor all you wrote and experienced. Thank you 😊
Jim, this is an excellent piece with which to launch your Substack -- a perceptive recap of the nightmare we all shared, coupled with the wisdom of Camus. It is rich with thought-provoking stuff, and I'm prompted to investigate the ways in which I interpret the suggestion to "create dangerously," and explore whether or not I am an "irresponsible artist" out of step with the needs of these times. I look forward to your future columns, and I hope you build a following!