(Author’s note: The following critique is not specifically directed at doctors, nurses, specialists or anyone else involved in today’s modern medical establishment. Instead, what is being critiqued here is the larger industrial establishment itself and how it came to be the monstrosity that it is. To grasp and make sense of the following document, one has to step way way back and view the industrial age through a wide-angle lens. All of us are born into, will live and then die, all the while embedded – like tiny, insignificant machine parts – in a complex behemoth of a system, i.e., the modern industrial state. And, being so embedded, few will have the vision or the objectivity to stand back for a moment and question the ethics upon which the greater system is based).
Chapter Four: The Ethics of the Industrial State
The Vicious Circle, the Feeding Frenzy and the Catch Basin
‘Whether western medicine chooses to accept it or not, it is both
an integral component and an equal partner in the vicious circle
that is the modern industrial establishment, the industrial state.
And, being so, the medical institution (wittingly or unwittingly)
has played a complicit role in the mass poisoning of the citizenry
(by the industrial state) since the early days of the industrial
revolution. Western medicine has evolved into, and acts as a
‘catch basin’ within the greater system in which the masses – being
poisoned and diseased by the other partners around the industrial
feeding frenzy – have no other choice but to crawl and limp their
way to the other end of the ‘system’ where the medical, pharma-
ceutical and expensive high-tech equipment manufacturers are
waiting – with open arms. The tacit acceptance and acquiescence
by today’s modern medical institution certainly emboldens the
industrial establishment which further ensures the self-perpetuation
of the vicious circle, the feeding frenzy and the catch basin.‘Mixing ‘big money’ with providing essential health-care services
to the public was, and still is a bad, bad idea. The consequence of
such a union can only lead to ethical compromise’.
The modern industrial state clearly exhibits a reckless and unconscionable propensity towards poisoning it own citizenry. Perhaps the prototypical model for this phenomenon goes back to Charles Dickens’ portrayal of early to mid-nineteenth century England and the burgeoning coal industry. The lower class (the masses) provided the industrial machinery with its ‘grist’ for the mill in the form of a steady supply of colliers (coal workers) who were viewed by the captains of industry as expendable units of cheap energy… nothing more. Coal was the main energy source that fueled the industrial revolution and the revolution required megatons of the ‘black death’ to sustain its growth. Coal mining was the dirtiest, most dangerous and most lethal way of make a living during that era but with Europe’s population explosion, combined with Victorian religious mores and rampant unemployment (caused by the mechanization of labour) the coal-barons were ‘blessed’ with a ready-made work-force which was conscripted to do all the dirty-work…just to put food on the table.
For many of the poor, working class citizens back then, becoming a collier was tantamount to a death-sentence. Emphysema, pleurisy, cancer, ‘black-lung’ as well as a plethora of other coal-dust related health problems reached epidemic proportions and the pastoral English country graveyards began filling up with industrial ‘collateral’. Man’s inhumanity to man, within an early-industrial context, appeared to reach a new bench-mark exemplified by the coal industry’s arrogant disregard for the health and well-being (and lives) of its workers. The captains of industry, succesive governments and the stock-holders were more focused on lining their own pockets with the fabulous wealth gained at the horrific expense of its own citizens.
The early nineteenth-century coal industry’s unscrupulous and criminal practice of knowingly poisoning its own workers (for the sake of profits) appears to have set in motion a deadly and vicious circle that has now (two-hundred years later) evolved into a full-blown dystopia, compete with an ethical deficit that would have boggled even the imagination of George Orwell. And, in those two-hundred years, very little has changed…except for the circle’s viciousness. Industry is still poisoning its citizens and they, together with big government, still display an arrogant and criminal disregard for the human suffering and death their industrial toxins cause but what has changed between then and now is the incomprehensible scale and scope to which the mass-poisoning has evolved. The super-human fascination with control and interference, which began so long ago with the invention of agriculture, has now come full-circle. Modern industrialized man has left no rock un-turned, no single element un-tampered with in his insatiable drive towards complete domination over nature and his pursuit of the bottom-line.
The recent fields of molecular biology, bio-chemistry and genetics have opened a Pandora’s box of poisonous chemical concoctions and carcinogens whose research and development costs have been underwritten by the industry, for the industry and further sanctioned by our governments. The masses who inhabit modern, industrial societies are on the receiving end of this barrage of industrial pollutants and the onslaught is unyielding. The coal, petroleum and chemical industries, which includes hydraulic fracturing (fracking), mountain-top mining, the Alberta tar-sands and other dirty-coal and dirty-oil producers, spew mega-tons of carbon-monoxide and other known carcinogens into our fragile world every day. Like a shroud of death these poisons inundate our mega-cities, our rural areas, our streets, avenues and highways. The toxins seep into our offices, schools, churches, sports-facilities, super-markets, hospitals and homes… no one is immune. Other key players in the ‘mass poisoning’ of our citizenry are; the pesticides industry (fruits and veggies); the hormone and antibiotics industries (flesh-foods); the tobacco, alcohol, caffeine and pharmaceutical industries; the refined-sugar, salt and sugar-substitute industries; the pre-packaged, fast-food and soft-drink industries; the plastics, paper, cotton, building products and construction industries, etc. etc.
‘Industrial-strength poisons produce industrial-strength diseases
requiring industrial-strength remedies causing industrial-strength
dependencies resulting in an industrial-strength vicious circle. And
the profit-driven system is close-looped by design. No where is
there so much as a hair-line crack to allow the healing light of
common sense to shine through’.
The net result of this toxic ‘tsunami’ is an unprecedented epidemic of sickness and disease plaguing modern industrial societies – diabetes, obesity, morbid obesity, leukemia, osteoporosis…. lung, breast, pancreatic, prostate and uterine cancers… brain tumours, arteriosclerosis, heart attack and strokes… ALS, Alzheimer’s, dementia and Parkinson’s… mental illness, addiction, depression and other afflictions – many of which were considered negligible 75 years ago and most of which can now be traced directly back to industrial poisons.
The Catch Basin
There is a segment from the documentary series ‘The Earth’, narrated by David Attenborough in which a group of swordfish surround a massive school of smaller feeder-fish and in a coordinated manner, hem the feeder-fish into a tight formation of undulating chaos. On a given signal the swordfish begin feasting on the helpless masses and in addition, being situated near the water’s surface, gannets, terns and other hungry sea-birds join in on the feeding-frenzy.
The ideological age, the stratification of human societies, the industrial revolution, the feudal class system and the profit-driven western ethos appear to have all collided (colluded) together in creating a complex that can best be described as a ‘human feeding-frenzy’. At one end of the system you have all these industries poisoning the general public with their products (and making a ‘killing’ while doing so) and then, being poisoned, sickened and diseased, the masses have no other option than to limp to the other end of the system where the medical, high-tech and pharmaceutical sectors are conveniently (and lucratively) positioned to act as a ‘catch basin’ for all the diseases and maladies caused by the industries.
Western medicine has unfortunately evolved into an instrument whose primary function is to provide ‘damage-control’ for all the health problems created by its other industrial partners positioned around the feeding-frenzy. And the tacit complicity among these key industrial partners ensures the self-perpetuation of the system. The pharmaceutical industry works ‘hand-in-glove’ with the ‘prescription-happy’ medical industry (hmmm, what’s that all about); the dental industry benefits from the sugar industry’s monopolization of pre-packaged foods, candy and soft-drinks; cardiologists do a brisk business thanks to MacDonald’s Corp (and the other fast food/junk food/ greasy food industries) and the high-tech equipment industry further joins in on the frenzy by designing, manufacturing and supplying all the spiffy and very expensive tax-payer-funded techno-gadgets that flood the healthcare system. Like Attenborough’s ‘swordfish’ in the example above, the various components of the industrial state appear to be feasting and profiteering from the misfortunes of the helpless masses at the center of the maelstrom. Which leads one to wonder about the ethics of such a system…how do these industries manage to get away with poisoning the general public? And how do these poisonous products even make it on to the open market in the first place?
That’s where governments come in…they play a vital role in the vicious circle’s destructive momentum by providing the licensing, patenting and regulatory agencies who approve, control and tax the industry’s toxic wares intended for human consumption. And big-government is ‘belly-up’ to the same trough as the other key players in the industrial establishment. Western political structures are infested with industry lobbyists and influence peddlers who bring truck-loads of cash to Washington to either ‘buy’ the approval of their tainted products for sale, or, to ensure their tainted products already on the market remain there. Not all politicians engage in this nefarious business but many do and it can’t help but add to the general air of corruption that permeates western governments. The lobby industry, the influence peddlers and the ‘back-room’ deals ensure that the mechanism for approval and sale of industrial products is thoroughly compromised… meaning that the standard for approval is not the safety and integrity of the product itself but the amount of ‘payola’ and votes the politicians rake-in.
The Hippocratic Oath
In three separate translations of the Hippocratic Oath (the original is in Greek) the common phrase ‘to protect the patient from harm and injustice’ (or slight variation thereof) appears. If the medical and pharmaceutical industries were really and truly interested in the well-being and health of their patients (and protecting them from harm and injustice) one would think that they, together with big-government would be absolutely up in arms against the industrial state’s unabashed ‘mass-poisoning’ of its citizens. One would think. But in fact there’s nary a whimper of protest coming from the medical and legislative quarters…thereby guaranteeing the unrestricted flow of industrial poisons and known carcinogens onto the open market and into the bodies and minds of the general public. I’m not suggesting (actually, maybe I am) that there is a conspiracy of ‘silence’ within the industrial complex (which would also indicate criminal collusion) but the optics certainly seem to infer a reluctance – on the part of key players in the vicious circle – to ‘rock the boat’. The CEOs of corporations and key industries involved in the feeding-frenzy are not only beholden to their share-holders and investors, but to their own self-interests as well, and are therefore mandated with ensuring that the system continues to run smoothly and that the bottom-line remains their top priority.
‘Western medicine evolved ‘organically’ within the super-structure of
western ideology…the same structure whose ethics and values have,
over millennia, resulted in a global meltdown. It is impossible to
separate the ethos of the institution from the ethos of the greater
mechanism to which it is attached and within which it was generated….
both share the same DNA’.
How many healthcare professionals would have the courage to step back for a moment and try to comprehend the magnitude of corruption that infects the modern industrial state, the same state to which they are integral partners. How many would go out of their way in order to gain enough over-sight to recognize the glaring contradictions that exist in their role as ‘care-givers’ within a careless and callous system that blatantly poisons its own citizens. Industries produce chemical poisons by tampering, altering and screwing around with the molecular and genetic building-blocks of biological life. They then mass-distribute those poisonous products to the general public. The pharmaceutical industry, via the medical profession, then compounds the mass-poisoning by ‘dispensing’ to the same general public an equally poisonous barrage of chemical substances that are produced by tampering, altering and screwing around with the molecular and genetic building-blocks of biological life.
And it is the citizens, the unfortunate masses who get shafted from several different directions. First from the industries that produce the poisons, secondly, by having to turn around and pay (to those very same industries) most of their hard earn wages to buy their tainted products. Then from the governments through exorbitant taxes to pay for the over-burdened health-care system (a system that exists mainly due to industrial poisons). And lastly they get it from the medical/pharmaceutical industries in the form of an over-dependency on prescription drugs…a dependency that has reached epidemic proportions in western industrialized societies and largely accounts for the above statistic ‘one fatal drug over-dose every 19 seconds’. The system is a farce…a travesty of common sense, human decency and natural ethics…and profit-motive keeps the machinery ‘humming right along’.
“Mixing ‘big money’ with providing essential health-care services to
the public is a bad, bad idea. The consequence of such a union can
only lead to ethical compromise”
Providing care for the sick, the elderly and the wounded has traditionally been a noble and honourable vocation…this was true of hunter-gatherer cultures world-wide. The problem with advanced western societies is that the synthetic values of ‘taking more than you need’, acquisition, wealth accumulation, hoarding, greed and profit-motive have contaminated the purity and honour of most western institutions including medicine. Many students who enter colleges and universities have been conditioned, since childhood, with the industrial-age ‘mantra’ that if they can secure careers in medicine, they will be set for life. One has to wonder how much ‘profit-motive’ influences their choices (or their parent’s choices). It’s just the nature of the beast, but these kids are born into an unwholesome, industrial mind-set and therefore have little leeway to think otherwise.
The real culpability for the ethical mess that industrialized medicine finds itself in today does not so much rest with individual practitioners as it does with the dominant and pervasive western system of thinking and the values it promotes. Doctors and medical specialists, like everyone else in a thriving industrial state, are themselves tiny machine-parts functioning somewhere deep within an ideological monstrosity that has been evolving and feeding-upon itself for the past five or six thousand years, and whose poisonous values have contaminated every level of the system.
The sprawling machinery’s tentacular reach has penetrated into every sector of western society which includes justice, education, organized religion, industry, etc. and unfortunately, the healthcare profession exhibits little immunity to the power of its influence. Doctors and medical specialists act according to the dictates of their conditioning – they, like everyone else, are born-into, will live and eventually die enmeshed within the industrial state’s profit-based ethos and, lacking any alternative perspective, will blindly conduct their financial affairs year after year, never questioning the ethics of what they do…which in many cases means reaping exorbitant profits in exchange for providing essential healthcare services to the public. Pursuing exorbitant profits (taking more than you need) was one of the core values synthesized within the burgeoning structure of early western civilization seven-thousand years ago and has remained a core value ever since.
The issue of ethics needs to be pursued a bit further in an attempt to really drive this point home once and for all. Our topic is the ethics of the industrial state. Western medicine, being an integral component of the greater system should itself be subject to the same level of scrutiny. There appears to be a glaring ethical lapse that characterizes the relationship between western medicine and the larger industrial state. To be more specific, that the over-bloated, over-priced, over-prescribed and over-mechanized behemoth (state-controlled medicine) is in fact inextricably linked and beholden to the industrial state’s poisoning of its citizenry.
Can we at least agree on this? That to a large extent the over-bloated healthcare behemoth simply wouldn’t exist (in its present form) if not for an ever-evolving epidemic of cancers, tumours, heart disease, blocked arteries, blood disorders, organ failures, cardiac arrests, osteoporosis, morbid obesity, strokes, aneurysms, neuroses, psychoses, pathogens, ulcers, degenerative brain disorders, senility and other modern afflictions (pant, pant) which are directly attributable to; the pesticides, petrochemical and plastics industries; the junk-food and food additives industries; the hormones, antibiotics and bovine growth industries; the pharmaceutical, opioids and fentanyl industries; the tobacco, alcohol, caffeine and sugar industries, etc. etc. One would be hard-pressed to find a circle more vicious, more dehumanizing or more criminal than this. And to add insult to injury, highly paid doctors and specialists, along with the pharmaceutical execs, their shareholders, the high-tech medical equipment manufacturers, politicians on the take and bankers have all become obscenely wealthy on the back of a corrupted system that deems it morally acceptable to poison (and gouge) its own citizens.
What is wrong with this picture?
The Pin-ball Machine and the ‘Tilt’
The ethical deficit that underpins the modern industrial state (and western medicine) can of course be traced back to the invention of agricultural. (Please bear with me. I know we’ve covered some of this in Chapter One but it is worthwhile revisiting the subject in order to make a point). For tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years before the idea of agriculture occurred, world-wide hunter gatherer cultures conducted their lives in accordance with a strict set of nature-centric codes, rules and ethics. It wasn’t like they had a choice…they were absolutely compelled to abide by those codes in order to survive. And survive they did. By adhering to this natural and unwritten code of ethics and conduct ancient hunter-gatherer societies existed from one generation to the next in a general state of harmony with the world around them. They, like all other living organisms, were integral parts of a delicate balancing act orchestrated by nature. Nature called the shots…nature was in control.
Then, in the blink of an eye, something happened on Planet Earth that so fundamentally and violently shifted the paradigm of biological order off its axis, that in only a few millennia we – and every other living creature on the planet – now find ourselves on the cusp of another major extinction event. How did this happen and, what is equally significant, how did it happen so quickly? There they were, our hunter gatherer ancestors, existing in relative harmony with nature for hundreds of thousands of years and then poof!…almost over night….a social, biological and biospheric catastrophe.
Anyone who has ever played a pin-ball machine knows that, in the process of racking up all those points, one must be careful not to bump or jolt the machine which sometimes occurs when too much body-english is applied or if the player tries to nudge or ‘persuade’ the ball to go in a desired direction. A sudden bump or jolt can cause the delicate inner mechanism to ’tilt’ which is pin-ball-speak for malfunction. When a ’tilt’ occurs the machine automatically shuts down causing the player to first, lose all his points and second, have to start the game all over again from the beginning.
In retrospect, the idea that led to the invention of agricultural can now be viewed as a major ’tilt’ or ‘jolt’ in the three-and-a-half billion year history of biological evolution. Oh there have been other major tilts (mass extinctions) caused by geological cataclysms and extraterrestrial incursions but this is the first time that a planet has been brought down by an ‘idea’. The essence of that idea was the introduction of interference – human -interference – into nature’s system of balance and order. We must place this idea under a microscope in order to understand how something so seemingly harmless could cause a collapse of this magnitude. The idea of removing wild plants and animals from their natural habitat and transforming them into domesticated, mass-bred and subservient monocultures was tantamount to taking control of the natural order of plants and animal species away from nature and placing it in the hands of one singular species group…the early advanced modern super-humans. And that, without a doubt, was the precise moment in which a new, untested and extremely virulent strain of poison was introduced into the Earth’s periodic table. Unprecedented… in all of biological history…the idea that one sub-species of hyper-thinking primates could – slowly, blindly and haphazardly at first – eventually take control of the planet…away from nature.
Like a malignant weed, the poisons within that original seed (idea) went on to infect everything that issued from it…sedentary agrarianism, the dawn of the ideological age, the stratification of human societies, the disparate class structures, the establishment of feudalism and elitism (the church, the royalty and the land owners) and their control over the masses. Add to these the European colonization of the planet, the industrial revolution, environmental degradation, the atomic bomb, genocide (the holocaust, Zyclon-B), the lethal over population of humans and their livestock, globalization and the creation of the military/industrial state. And lastly, factor in a whole subset of human-specific foibles, i.e., greed, hoarding, Euro-centrism, materialism, war mongering, genocide, jingoism, nationalism, expansionism, etc. and you have all the ingredients for a major train wreck. And that is why today, to refer back to our original thread of inquiry, the industrial state and the field of industrialized medicine are irredeemably infected by corruption. They are the latest links in an unbroken chain of events (an Orwellian nexus) that can be traced back and are directly indexed to the poisons inherent within the idea that initially spawned the invention of agriculture.
(Note: One additional consideration on this topic. By now it should be fairly obvious, to anyone who takes a closer look at human history, that the abrupt transition from eons of living in harmony with nature to a few thousand years of trying to control it (nature) was an Earth-shattering development, a ‘game changer’ and a major shock to the planet’s circadian rhythm. That, in essence, advanced super-humans became – very quickly and very violently – a ‘new kind of animal’ all together. This can be easily deduced from a purely social and cultural cross-comparison – pre-agrarian vs. post-agrarian. But there is another deeper, more subtle viewpoint which must be considered, and that is from the perspective of genetics. It is scientifically plausible to suggest that our ancient genetic lineage, its intricate codification, its makeup, momentum and its integrity were themselves irrevocably shocked, scrambled and shaken to their core by the invention of agriculture. It is this ‘before and after’ comparison that provides the most conclusive evidence yet that advanced, modern industrialized human automatons collectively suffer from a unique form of genetic P.T.S.D., i.e., their delicate genetic equilibrium has been ‘traumatized’ by the sudden shift from living for so long in sync with nature….to living in direct conflict with it).