[VISION] [more abstract] The underpinnings of a visionary conversation

[John Harvey]

The underpinnings of a visionary conversation
A different basis
The messages about Janine Roberts highlighted to me the stress that all parents and all citizens who value human freedoms are under. And they led me to the thought that those who are defending basic rights such as the right to informed consent must be able to discuss them publicly without degeneration of the conversation into whether such rights have any priority over purely commercial considerations (however packaged) such as the medical system's own priority on growth.
It seems to me that the struggle to keep discussion of particular technologies and choices rational and to have the voices of rationality heard even when they have access to the discussion is significantly frustrated by the necessity of each rational individual to repeatedly defend true priorities, and by the freedom of degenerate mass media to take good money to attack them. It furthermore seems to me that what exacerbates that difficulty unnecessarily is lack of access to an appropriate universal vocabulary, one by which to refer to the important priorities without reinventing the arguments for them, one allowing us to rely upon unrevised history in referring to them as fundamental values in a fiercely democratic society.
Bearing those necessities in mind, it seems to me that those concerned to conduct a conversation about any technology with social implications -- be it vaccines; genetic food-crop contaminants; cropdusting; or adulteration of paint, food, water, and air with heavy metals -- can make progress only once the conversation is explicitly based on recognition of certain fundamentals.
What I propose is that we take the conversation about medical technologies, both on the list and more publicly, and to put it on an explicitly different basis, one in which the fundamentals are kept in sight. Let me first say more, though, about my understanding of the present conversation.
Hearsay, infomercial, and monopoly versus science and inalienable rights
At present, the basis of the conversations that loosely concern vaccination and its alternatives and homoeopathy and its alternatives is a basis of attacking and defending individuals' informed right to take or leave any medicine they like -- especially to leave it -- and to attempt a justification of such draconium on the basis of throwaway contentions of fact.
Such contentions, even if true, could have no legitimate power to alienate inalienable rights; nevertheless, such power is the power that, for instance, the vaccination fundamentalists are attempting to invoke.
A large part of Big Pharma's strategy for undermining and removing the right to reject its products is to remove all active medical and other alternatives: homoeopathic consultation and self-help; access to herbs, supplements, homoeopathic medicines, acupuncture, chiropractic, and so on; the right to consult a variety of practitioners; the right (even of doctors) to practise a variety of therapeutic methods. It even resorts to painting food as unhealthier than drugs. But the strategic aim over all is to maintain and increase medical consumption, dependency, addiction, subservience, costs, public spending, and power.
The contentions upon which Big Pharma bases its side of that conversation -- via its spokespeople in health departments and regulatory authorities, in clinics and hospitals, in laboratories and pharmacies, and in university curricula and pseudoskeptic campaigns -- rest on two skewed factual bases: that of hearsay, and that of commercially biased publication (such as, in the extreme, the entire journals that Merck created and paid for to resemble independent peer-reviewed journals). Even real medical journals have disintegrated to an extent that we presently see many rushing to divorce themselves from particular articles not because the process of peer review resulted in an article found to be inaccurate but merely because the author has become persona non grata to Big Pharma.
In addressing what sources of testimony to relevant facts may be regarded as reliable bases for factual discussion, the fundamentals needing highlighting are that science relies not on hearsay or commercial convenience, but on attempts to get at the truth by repeatedly testing hypotheses and refining them to meet the results of those tests.
And in addressing societal decisions concerning the mandatory and the forbidden, what must remain unforgotten, what must be impossible to ignore as the basis of the conversation, is that the limits of social control are imposed and maintained not by the power of any majority over any minority but only by the inalienability of liberties conceded by international treaty.
In other words, what the conversation would assume is that those rights are not up for grabs by anybody for any reason. One who insists "You must do =what's good for me, to make me feel better" has transgressed the limits of liberty; and using majority rule is no defence against such transgressions if the majority has been hoodwinked. Minorities need protection, and they need it even if they're wrong; and their liberties need protection even if they offend the majority. Majority prejudice and majority ignorance and stupidity must not overrun the limits set by fierce protection of individual liberty.
The breakdown of science for the violation of the individual
It is evident that the conversation occurring on lists like this and in blogs and newspapers -- the conversation concerning the facts of various medical technologies and the values of a democratic society -- is inherently divisive, threatening, and one-sided, precisely because the fundamentals are continually bulldozed out of sight and some participants are systematically silenced and denigrated.
The conversation is consequently distressing, sickening, spiritually corrosive, and enfeebling. Rather than recharge its conscientious participants, it tends mostly to remind us of all the ways in which each of us is under sustained attack by an unfortunate synergy of
• commercial short-term self-interest;
• rapid unsustainable commercial overgrowth;
• infiltration and corruption of government by the representatives of big money;
• regulatory capture;
• monopoly, perversion, dissolution, and destruction of scientific organs of communication;
• self-perpetuating science mythologies;
• personal attacks upon medical and other skeptics by self-proclaimed pseudoskeptical authoritarian experts elevated by the particular cruelties of their personality disorders, in substitution for scientific discussion; and
• the ready availability of billions of dollars to a disinformation-marketing cartel in a feeding frenzy,
all of which is contributing to a vicious cycle of breakdown in the existence and quality of scientific independence, impartial government, journalistic quality, commercial competition, philosophical tolerance, and personal liberty.
Such an environment does little to make us joyous and healthy.
A robust, constructive, richly meaningful conversation for social, cultural, political, and scientific advancement
What I have in mind, then, is that we begin a fresh conversation.
Its topic might be the vision of how health care may best sustain our health.
Its premises might include the inalienability of the human rights to dignity, informed consent, and informed choice; the undesirability of commercial monopoly; the necessity of regulatory transparency; the values of scientific openness, pluralism, and tentativeness; the desirability of social pluralism, tolerance, and reciprocity; and the necessity of vigilance and engagement to the ascendancy of equity, access, and liberty over corruption, distortion, and disenfranchisement.
I don't have a particularly clear view of these matters, and we can all contribute something to making the conversation constructive and robust as well as dear to our hearts. What I'd like to do is to ask any reader interested in such a conversation on such a topic to help refine its premises.
We might also refine the topic or create several topics. But over all, the purpose I have in mind is that we be able to sustain a conversation with the fundamentals firmly in place: a conversation inherently balanced, reasonable, credible, and safe; one in which scientific scrutiny is not submerged in disinformation and hearsay, in which neither the lessons of personal stories nor the lessons of statistical evidence are ignored in favour of baseless assertions; one that, rather than experience as ratty and debilitating, we can find meaningful and rich even as it contributes to the social, cultural, political, and scientific advancement of the study and practice of matters affecting health.
I see no compelling need to restrict such a conversation from discussing anything relevant to a robust vision of broad health, including all those matters that detract from it. Recognition and treatment of the destruction of healthy processes is something that needs discussion at least as urgently as does the prevention of further such destruction and the building of new visions, methods, and institutions.
Dealing with such matters is not in itself debilitating to our wellbeing; rather, it is frustration of our great capacity to deal with them that is debilitating. Therefore, our conversation could implement the three great arches of important change: analysis, vision, and strategy. But let those of us interested in initiating it discuss first its premises, and later let the topics flow.
To keep communication on this topic clear and distinct, we could precede any subject line with "[VISION]", as I have done above.
Cheers --
John
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"The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside."

-- Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, p. 249.