"[Children and young people] should know--and really sense and
feel--that viruses are not 'evil' but a part of our organism, of our
organic 'self, ' and that also the group of mutable coronaviruses has
been known for many years; we also live with them and deal with them,
especially in the upper respiratory tract, although not with SARS-CoV-2,
which is a new challenge for the human immune system, though not quite
as new as initially assumed." -- Peter Selg
Recognizing Reality is a clarion call for broader perspectives in a
time of global crisis, for a differentiated understanding of current
events, especially Covid, and for a deepening of dialogue, in Martin
Buber's sense of the word.
In this book, Peter Selg walks the reader through some of the
lesser-known, and often ignored, contexts of the global response to
Covid. He describes, for example, the role-play simulations and
exercises conducted by private institutions (such as The Rockefeller
Foundation and the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins
University) in collaboration with government agencies and corporations
in the years leading up to 2020. A large part of such exercises involved
the role of the media in public-health messaging, including censorship
of dissenting or alternative viewpoints. Having a "cohesive narrative"
was seen as vital to establishing the mechanisms of control in "states
of emergency" and was used as a justification for restricting
fundamental human rights.
As Selg demonstrates, much of what has played out over the past two
years in response to Covid was actively prepared and rehearsed in such
roleplay scenarios. He remarks that the goal of these exercises was not
"to avert the danger by changing or correcting the system through new
values in ecological, socioeconomic, and political terms--or in terms of
a 'peace policy' with regard to the natural environment--but solely in
the sense of system-stabilizing crisis management, combined with
far-reaching vaccination strategies."
Selg also discusses the disastrous consequences of the global lockdown,
which are often overlooked or outright suppressed in the mass media in
favor of a monolithic narrative that ignores all facts and viewpoints
which undermine its "key messages." He points out, for example, that
"while...the wealth of the approximately 650 billionaires in the US
increased from one trillion dollars to a total of approximately four
trillion dollars during the COVID-19 pandemic, countless people
worldwide became impoverished on a catastrophic scale, through the loss
of all their meager earnings, through the interruption of supply and
production chains, through stay-at-home orders that kept them stuck in
poor conditions, etc."
This book leaves us with the question: Will we say yes to the
dehumanizing, technocratic vision of society emerging across the globe,
or will we seek a future worthy of the human being?
Recognizing Reality was originally published as two volumes in German
as Wirklichkeits-verständnis: Jugend-pädagogik in globaler Krisenzeit
and as Zivilcourage: Die Herausforderung Freier Waldorfschulen (Verlag
des Ita Wegman Instituts, Arlesheim, Switzerland, 2021).
