Autoimmunity is a hex, a spell, or a curse. And in my ongoing redefinition of it, I’m drafting a counterspell. Because the immune system model on which autoimmunity is premised, the self/non-self model of misrecognition, is antithetical to health. Autoimmunity makes health impossible if we use the self/non-self model of immunity, because you cannot be healthy if you are attacking yourself.
Autoimmunity as a concept is built upon quicksand. Autoimmunity is nonsense because there is no self against which to be immune. There is no individual to defend from an external invader, because the individual is already a colonial, materialist-naturalist construct. The human is an idea that rests upon the definition of whiteness, as elevating us above a so-called nature, so-called blackness, so-called otherness. The human project is failing. The human as an idea might be better off abandoned. We might be better off moving into a felt sense of relationality, into a process with the land.
But if we use the danger model of immunity, Polly Matzinger’s model of immunity, which is to say that immune system responses are premised on danger in the system rather than self/non-self reactivity, then autoimmunity makes sense. Incidentally, the danger model is closer to an ayurvedic view of pathology: the wisdom of the human body is such that it will respond to internal imbalances and fall into disease. Once the disease is deeply installed in the tissues, a feedback mechanism keeps illness increasing. Danger in the cells leads to more danger.
Autoimmunity, in its current cultural moment, in its flourishing, in its ever-presence, in its expanse as a category of disease that people everywhere are subject to, makes sense because there is an ever-increasing proportion of danger moving through ecosystems, across our bodies. An autoimmune response is a response to danger. It is not a response to self or non-self. It is a response to the toxicity on the human side, the flesh side, of the continuum that makes up life itself.
Basically everything I see about autoimmunity online, it doesn’t account for collapse, it doesn’t account for living inside of a decomposing, dying, rotting empire.
No official immune system model accounts for life inside of decay. Every immune system model that I see only accounts for the human in relationship to the environment and the toxicity within the human system. But it takes for granted that the human is a stable being. It takes for granted that a human exists as an individual. It takes for granted that it is possible to be a person with a boundary, and that we can draw a line between what is the human person’s and what is not.
So I’m a naturopath now, which is absurd. Allegedly, what that means is that I’m qualified to help people find natural solutions for their health and well-being. But I’m not living with any model of body or health that I’ve ever witnessed described in a curriculum. Ayurveda gets close. Chinese medicine gets close. I’ve studied these things, I am studying them. But what I’m trying to lay out here, week after week, month after month, is that there is actually no illness that is not planetary. There is no person that is not planetary.
It’s not that the solution to autoimmunity is magical thinking. It’s not that the solution to illness is to think yourself into health. Positive psychology is the end of revolution, said Byung-Chul Han. And I agree. It is, however, a case that we need to live, experience, have a sense of boundless self, unboundaried self, which encompasses, at the level of sensation, at the level of the sense organs, at the level of the indriyas, the perceptual faculties. The fact that autoimmunity might just mean the revelation of being porous and in undeniable relationship to everything. And everything is changing. Everything has a cycle. So it’s high time to lean into the chaos, because it’s only gonna get louder.
It’s perhaps hilarious, perhaps absurd, to listen to people talk about their long-term goals, to listen to people talk about their mortgage, about their retirement. Today, right now, people are still having those conversations because they seem to expect everything to get better. I’m here to tell you, over and over again, that autoimmunity is a planetary condition that does not resolve. Autoimmunity is the result of globalized inflammation.
So the sick among us, who obviously don’t have the energy to go get three PhDs and work for the World Health Organization and attempt to change policy and go knock at the doors of the mining company and go have the conversations with the satanic pedophiles. Well, the sick among us: what is it that is ours to do? What can you do every single day if you are just barely, just barely getting by? What can you do if your body has, for a month, a year, a decade, a lifetime, already been giving you the knowledge that all of this is wrong? If you were born knowing that everything about Western civilization is wrong, because it cannot and will not admit a simple thing. It cannot and will not admit that its way of life is sick and is making all of us sick. What do you do every day?
I have my own answers to that question. I write about them. I get up each day and I pray. And in my hands-on work, I help people’s systems move down into regulation and clear energies that have been held there in their tissues for decades. And in the conversations I have with people, I help them to orient towards the strategies and the tools that make it possible to cope every day, that make it possible to make decisions every day for a little more breathing room, a little more space. Things that cost no money, or things that use whatever resources are available, and prioritize the sanctity of the body.
Illusion that it is, we can still choose what we ingest, depending on our level of privilege. So I’ve decided to make a career out of that. I’m inspired, really, by the barefoot doctors of the last century. I’m just trying to build a toolkit so that I can be as helpful and as useful to as many people as possible. And I write about it, I rant about it, I ramble about it into this internet void, because that’s what I was raised to do. Thank you so much, as always, for reading.
This is so good. So so encompassing and richly untangling of the truth that feels resonant to me too. Thank you. Keep sharing into the internet void, it’s landing and changing things. People. Systems.