The Virus, because of its silent, invisible, chaotic, and porous movements, can be anywhere at any time, undetected, and its effects only become known after it is too late, after one is infected and the dice are rolled to determine one's fate.
Protocols to deal with The Virus then take the form of a continually revised ritual, built up upon the less stringent cleanliness rituals unfolding out of germ theory and associated knowledge, experience, and practice.
It is a ritual that has become abstracted from the particular and then universalized, and has to be adhered to out of faith, as one can't respond to the threat with a simple exercise of the senses by situation, as the threat makes its appearance. One has trust in the protocol as a matter of daily operation.
This is a faith that is placed in a whole set of institutions and an ever-evolving body of knowledge and practice, which are interpenetrated with technologies of perception and research which further the knowledge and practice that at the same time produce them. And these technologies of perception and research are embodied in concentrated resources which require concentrated disciplines to marshal them, so that their direct interface with the whole population on a daily basis is impossible.
Which as it happens works quite well in isolation, and the faith is well-placed in theory. But it is knowledge and practice which must be perpetually renewed with both changing knowledge and practice and the underlying reality itself, and the institutions and individuals doing the work must be working in good faith and trustworthy.
Of course as an abstracted and universalized protocol whose power to compel rests upon the health of the institutions invoking it, its efficacy can be damaged by forces of destruction well separate from its locally generated truth. The health of the institutions can be damaged by forces quite remote and seemingly unrelated, such as concentrations of wealth, political betrayal, forces of social destruction set loose by propaganda and social manipulation, and so on.
Small wonder that The Virus has flared up ferociously and perpetually in the United States in particular, where, like lights flickering on and off as the distant power station struggles, the various collective protocols wink on and off in their efficacy and cohesion, ultimately destroying continuity, and accelerating those centrifugal forces of separation.
Yes, The Virus is quite real, I can attest to that. And the protocol is sensible and works. But The Virus itself was given wings by the massive and constantly growing and intensifying industrial processes bound up with the universal institutions of governance, which no longer have the conviction in their voices when they say, "trust us." Now, when an entity like the U.S. nation or a similar imperial industrial nation - at least as a cohesive collective phenomenon - merely moves, say to administer itself or tend to its surroundings, it spreads crisis in many forms and many levels. Viruses in many senses pour forth from its exhalations. It is an open question whether it really wants to "cure" itself.
