Model of an influenza virus
One of the greatest revelations that has come out of my research for my book The Natural Enterprise is something that should have been obvious, and should be obvious to all of us: Our education systems prepare us for dependence on employment by large corporations and government organizations.
Why? Because this is the most 'manageable' way to run the system, and
conveniently keeps us in our place. If the system were to equip us to
be independent entrepreneurs, there would be a number of unpleasant
consequences for the established wealth and power hierarchy:
- Large employers would have to offer a lot more to attract the top graduates: more money, more freedom, more flexibility.
- The
burgeoning ranks of informed and educated entrepreneurs would begin to
realize how the economic system is stacked in favour of large
corporations (the accommodation of price-fixing,
uninnovative, choice-limiting oligopolies, the massive subsidies given
almost exclusive to huge multinational corporations, the trade
agreements favourable to multinationals over smaller businesses etc.)
and would hence demand that that system be changed.
- A vastly
larger number of entrepreneurial businesses would network and
collaborate to counter the artificially-maintained bargaining advantage
of large corporations in their dealings with suppliers, and end the
'Wal-Mart' distortions of the economy.
- More agile, innovative
entrepreneurs would threaten the huge profit margins and market
dominance of the large corporations, and possibly innovate them out of
existence.
- Customers, given a much broader choice of
higher-quality, more innovative products from more socially and
environmentally responsible entrepreneurs, at competitive prices, would
desert the large corporations.
Why would the government be
complicit in this? Because their campaign funds come substantially from
these large corporations. Because corporate donations to universities
(although these generally come with a steep 'price'), and to other
parts of the education system, allow governments to run education more
cheaply.
I'm not saying there's a conspiracy here. Education,
like any other complex system, evolves and adapts. I don't think anyone
systematically 'programmed' education to be this way (there are many
alternative education systems out there, but the ones that endure tend
to exhibit many of the same characteristics as the 'mainstream' system)
-- despite the fact that some early education leaders were quite open
about designing and using the system to suppress the population as a
whole, and to meet the needs of the corporate sector.
Like any
large centralized system, education has become unwieldy, inflexible,
and ineffective. It will take any help it can get. It will even
accommodate lots of progressive teachers, locking them inside the
academic system where they can cause minimal disruption, shrugging off
their criticisms of the system that feeds them as 'academic' (i.e.
impractical, unrealistic) harangues, and conveniently blaming them
for the failure of the system to do more than produce 'consumers' who
(to quote Jerry Michalski) are "nothing more than gullets
whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash." Our
entire economic system has evolved around certain accepted rules
(maximize profit for shareholders at any cost, buy and sell favour,
reduce competition and diversity, avoid risk, standardize everything,
ignore 'externalities' like pollution and social costs, grow or die)
and the education system, as a component of the economic system,
inevitably follows those rules.
So
we have people coming out of high school and university who must rely
on finding menial corporate jobs or exploiting connections in high
places to get plum jobs they don't deserve, since they cannot provide
for themselves. They do not know how to 'make a living'.
Entrepreneurship is painted as a high-risk, high-sweat, lonely
alternative, whose end state is, at best, the development and sale of
hard-fought innovations to corporate buyers and early retirement to
something less exhausting, and, at worst, a life of never-ending stress
and strife for subsistence survival. And since we don't teach
entrepreneurship, the students have no way of knowing whether this grim
portrait is accurate or not. Hence -- an endemic state of learned
helplessness. Tow the line, kow-tow to the boss, do what you're told
and maybe, if you're good and lucky, or well-connected, you may work
your way 'up' to a middle management position and inflict learned
helplessness on the next generation in your chosen 'profession'. The
perfect hierarchical system.
Don't get me wrong -- I don't think the purpose of education should be to learn a trade and nothing more. It should teach all the critical life skills
(most of which cannot effectively be learned in a classroom, but that's
another issue) -- of which 'making a living' is just one. One that it
fails spectacularly to do, by any measure except the inculcation of
learned helplessness and the resignation to a life of dependence.
That dependence and helplessness is then further entrenched by the creation of artificial scarcities
-- shortage of houses near (ironically) good schools, shortage of
quality health care (unless provided by your large corporate employer's
'largesse'), a shortage of (perceived) security. These shortages in
turn produce the two-income trap, and addiction to consumption and to
the debt that enables it. The cycle is complete.
This got me
thinking about our health-care systems. Public and private, they, too,
now have produced a cycle of learned helplessness. The first step in
this process was probably the fault of (who else) the lawyers: Until
about a century ago, in most affluent nations you had the right to
self-administer health care. If you preferred heroin or leeches as a
treatment over what the doctors of the day were prescribing, and if you
could afford them, it was your right to treat your body with whatever
medicines you thought appropriate. Then the lawyers and doctors decided we were too stupid to make such decisions, and the concept of 'prescription' medicine was born,
the paternalistic system that says you have to convince (or bribe) a
doctor to let you take the medicines you want. Since then the number of
restricted substances has ballooned. At the same time, in a grim irony,
the number of chemicals we are forced
to ingest, as a result of the pollution of our air and water by large
corporations, and the deliberate poisoning of our food with toxic
antibiotic ("against life") chemicals and hormonal stimulants, has also
ballooned. All in the name of maximizing profit for shareholders at any
cost ("we're not doing anything illegal").
Something
clearly had to be done to protect the corporations and doctors from
lawsuits for poisoning the citizens. What they came up with was a
stroke of genius which entrenched learned helplessness irrevocably: They
told us that illness isn't the result of environmental poisoning --
it's all caused by tiny invisible microbes that 'medical science'
hasn't got around to finding ways to kill yet. The elimination
of some horrific diseases -- notably smallpox and polio -- led credence
to this claim. All that was needed was for the new pharmaceutical
industry to get trillions of dollars of taxpayer money -- some of which
they would generously kick back to the university and hospital systems
-- and the right to charge whatever it cost to find each killer drug,
and (if we could afford it) we would live healthy forever. So we
needn't worry about our own health anymore, or that mercury in the
water or that lead in the air or those hormones in our hamburgers --
the panaceas will all be forthcoming soon with good ol' Western
know-how.
A colleague of mine, Greg Turko, pointed me to an
article yesterday in this month's (March) Harper's Magazine called "Out
of Control -- AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science" by Celia
Farber, which made me realize how much I've fallen victim to this
beguiling myth myself. Farber has been arguing for a dozen years, and
has been much ridiculed, but mostly ignored, for doing so, that not
only is there no compelling evidence that AIDS is 'caused' by the HIV
virus, but that it is not caused by any virus or microbe whatsoever.
I have heard these claims before, but they seemed preposterous to me, the stuff of conspiracy theory. But then I read an article
by a virologist Peter Duesberg, who says the reason we (the medical
profession included) were so willing to believe that AIDS was caused by
a virus is that:
- It simplifies a horrifically complex, intractable, wicked problem
- It
removes all the 'fear of the unknown' that surrounds all new diseases
(consider how we responded to SARS, Mad Cow and now the Poultry Flu),
and
- It removes from us (individuals and corporations alike) all
the moral responsibility that would attach to an illness if it were
caused by lifestyle and/or environmental poisoning.
No conspiracy. We just wanted to believe.
Just some nasty virus spread by some lunatic in Africa fucking monkeys.
Just give Big Pharma a few billion and they'll find something that will
kill it. The appealing thing about Learned Helplessness is we're not responsible for fixing the problem.
Duesberg's
arguments (which Farber also makes in the Harper's article) are very
compelling. Just as Steven Levitt dissected the phony correlations
between gun control, or stiffer prison sentences, and reduced crime in
US cities, Duesberg dissects the equally flimsy correlations between
the occurrence of a certain type of retrovirus (christened HIV) and the
onset of a suite of cascading, often-fatal diseases (only some of which
are immune deficiency diseases) that have come to be called AIDS. What
is most distressing is:
- Because the occurrence of AIDS symptoms and deaths in the absence of HIV can no longer be called
AIDS (it must be reported instead as "idiopathic CD4+ lymphocytopenia")
the connection between HIV and AIDS is now tautological -- so all
evidence counterindicating a connection between the two is
automatically ignored.
- Pressure to come up with a 'killer' drug
to 'cure' HIV was so immense that the toxic drug AZT was rushed to
market despite evidence that it increases, rather than decreases,
mortality.
If you're not persuaded by Duesberg's arguments, or Farber's, here's
another down-to-earth report by a Canadian feminist group. It's not
saying what the cause of AIDS is, it just asks a lot of penetrating and
unanswered questions that cast serious doubt that HIV is the culprit.
You
can see this learned helplessness -- "it's not my/our/anybody's
responsibility, it's just a disease that strikes victims and must be
killed" -- in our response to all health crises, both chronic (cancer,
autism) and epidemic (SARS, Mad Cow, poultry flu). There must be a drug that will kill the virus (and, when it rapidly mutates, another drug that will kill that
virus) or that will kill the 'defective' gene that is the 'cause' of
the disease. Until then we are helpless to do anything but throw money
at it, and shun or kill any group/species that seems to 'carry' it. We
conveniently ignore the powerful correlations between the prevalence of
AIDS and poverty, poor sanitation, toxic environments, and the use of
dangerous drugs, because if we acknowledged them we would have to
accept a responsibility to deal with these complex and intractable
problems.
Suppose we got past this, and accepted that what
triggers many diseases (which collectively kill a rapidly-growing
percentage of humans) is a combination of the lifestyles we live (which
are largely unhealthy), and the environmental toxins we consume when we
eat, drink and breathe (which are also largely unhealthy)? Our entire
economy depends on the very activities that produce these triggers. How
would we offset the incalculable health costs of industry, resource
extraction, transportation, and mechanized, chemical-based agriculture,
against the economic costs of shutting down all these toxic activities
and replacing them with healthy, natural, non-polluting, chemical-free,
zero-waste activities?
Isn't it just easier to go on believing,
against all evidence, that science will come up with a microbe or a
genetic marker to blame for all our health woes, and then a drug to
kill it?
Just as it's easier to believe our economy is the
only workable one, and that, as a consequence, we have no choice but to
graduate from an education system that teaches us nothing of use, and
then beg for work from large corporations or big government
organizations, doing, miserably, exactly as we're told for most of our
waking hours for most of our pathetic lives, living for weekends of
unhealthy consumption, until some damned microbe (that research will
soon have a cure for) puts us out of our misery. |
3:34:20 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
