Ordinary Men and Women
Naked Lunch (1959)
Context: The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus. (It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host.
“It is not in the interest of the virus to kill the host because it (the virus) will die as well. Through their evolutionary process, viruses tend to accommodate the hosts to live in them. This means they want to cause mild diseases to propagate and that will ensure they can survive.”
Source: Sazaly Abu Bakar (2020) cited in " 'More studies needed on virus mutations' https://www.nst.com.my/news/nation/2020/03/572140/more-studies-needed-virus-mutations" on New Straits Times, 6 March 2020.
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Sazaly Abu Bakar 1
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"Gods and Greens" (1989)
1990s, A View from the Diner's Club (1991)
Source: August 2000, addressing South African Parliament http://www.mg.co.za/articledirect.aspx?articleid=173678&area=%2farchives%2farchives__online_edition%2f http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jun/12/aids.chrismcgreal.
Shi Zhengli (2020) cited in " Coronavirus: Experts dismiss conspiracies blaming Wuhan Institute of Virology for outbreak https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2020/01/coronavirus-experts-dismiss-conspiracies-blaming-wuhan-institute-of-virology-for-outbreak.html" on Newshub, 30 January 2020.
(with Jean Medawar) Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology, 1983, p. 275.
1980s
" Is Science a Religion? http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/articles/dawkins.html", The Humanist (January 1997)
Hitoshi Oshitani (2020) cited in " China’s health officials say priority is to stop mild coronavirus cases from getting worse https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3048993/chinese-officials-say-priority-stop-mild-coronavirus-cases" on South China Morning Post, 4 February 2020.
There was no satisfactory answer.
Academy of Achievement interview (1991)
Speaking to Sky News and referring to the strain of SARS-Cov-2 which became prevalent in London in December 2020 Sky News Website 22 December 2020 https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-england-set-for-new-year-lockdown-as-coronavirus-variant-spreads-across-uk-12169829