Is Everything Really Backwards ?

aquaman said:

burtlancast said:

Everything is backwards.
Everything is upside-down.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information, and religion destroys spirituality.

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I know this is off topic (and most likely going to open a can of worms), but since I have to read this crap everyday I thought I'd comment on it. I say crap because it can easily infest people's mind, "everyone's out to get me", "the world is f***ed" etc.

I do partially agree with your statement, but would add MAY to all the sentences.

Doctors MAY destroy health etc.

Religion MAY destroy spirituality.

I think having a blanket statement about the world like you put up there will only serve to make your life worse, and you more negative and less connected to others. Personally I've had doctors help me and my family, I've had lawyers get back 100s of 1000s of dollars stolen from me, I'm f***ing happy to live in the UK and in this era as opposed to most other countries and time-frames etc etc. Religion can be a path to spirituality, equally it can be abused and done incorrectly and lead to hatred and closed-mindedness.

Personally I like your writing but I don't want to read that footer everyday, I don't want to be infected by its negativity. And therefore the only way to not read it would be to ignore you I think. Shame we can't block just the footers.

EVERYTHING is not backwards. Some things are.

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This is of course not my original statement: it was written by Michael Ellner, a gentleman involved in alternative health, and whose main points i do not agree with, except for this statement, that has made him world famous.

This being the Ray Peat forum, i will discuss only the medical aspects, toegether with the obvious ramifications to university knowledge , media information and justice law.

My opinion is medecine is useful only in case of trauma. If you break a leg, get run down by a car, or get shot, you certainly want to go to the hospital.

But when it comes to degenerative diseases, medecine does certainly more harm than good. I can quote some passages from Ray about medecine, university curriculum, media information and law(lessness) that goes much further than the content of my footer.

When it comes to religion, i included it more for the sake of not truncating the original author of this statement, than anything else . All these disciplines that Ellner cites are subtly interconnected and participate in the deception. If current organised religions were trully free and true to their ideals, all the other disciplines would not be able to deceive the masses like they constantly do, because people would be told the truth.

With the internet, we can now research things much deeper that we could ever do before, and it certainly appears that it isn't a case of " IT MAY" as you wrote.
Things are trully backwards; medecine trully kills people, medias trully disinform, governaments and laws trully enslave.

About university curriculum and monopoly laws:

Knowledge isn’t a commodity, especially not a fungible commodity, as the medical business sees it. Consciousness and culture are part of the life process. It is exactly the commoditization of medical knowledge that makes it dangerous, and generally stupid. Doctors buy their knowledge, and then resell it over and over; it’s valuable as a commodity, so its value has to be protected by the equivalent of a copyright, the system of laws establishing the profession. Without its special status, its worthlessness would be quickly demonstrated. When A.C. Guyton wrote his textbook of medical physiology (the most widely used text in the world) in the 1950s, it was trash; as it was studied and applied by generations of physicians, it was still trash. The most compliant patients who bought their treatment from the most authoritative, Guytonesque, doctors were buying their own disability and death.
Each time you learn something, your consciousness becomes something different, and the questions you ask will be different; you don’t know what the next appropriate question will be when you haven’t assimilated the earlier answers. Until you see something as the answer to an urgent question, you can’t see that it has any value. The unexpected can’t be a commodity. When people buy professional knowledge they get what they pay for, a commodity in a system that sustains ignorance.

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About the justice system:

It remains to be seen whether a government can be made to stop giving public funds to corporations, and instead, to begin enforcing the law against them--and against those in the agencies who participated in their crimes.

In the U.S., the death penalty is sometimes reserved for "aggravated homicide." If those who kill hundreds of thousands for the sake of billions of dollars in profits are not committing aggravated homicide, then it must be that no law written in the English language can be objectively interpreted, and the legal system is an Alice in Wonderland convenience for the corporate state.

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Sorry if that seems pessimistic, but i would rather sound that way than accept the current status quo, which makes everyone (but a few) a loser.
We all deserve much better.

@Aquaman This is not meant to attack/critique you bc I understand what you're saying....however you say that it infects people's minds,but have you thougth about the fact that it migth not be a negative effect on the mind but an actual eye-opener?

I think it's a good quote,bc sadly it's true 90% of the time.
Yes,you can let it affect you negatively (it most likely would've for me in my past)....BUT in realizing this, it can also free one from all kinds of imaginary&non-imaginary burdens and say a big :"F*ck It!" and take action&matters in one's own hands. Releasing all the 'shackles' (society,media etc.) and start living the life that YOU want to live,not what's expected of you.
And as a bonus....the once-in-a-blue-moon-situations when things don't turn out backwards,it makes you appreciate it even more.

burtlancast is spot on. When I needed it, I could not get the medical treatment I needed at the time, even with insurance. Making phone calls, and not being able to get immediate treatment, and getting the run around. It was one of the worst times of my life.

burtlancast, what is your response to people who see what you just said and they call you a Marxist?

Westside PUFAs said:

burtlancast, what is your response to people who see what you just said and they call you a Marxist?

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Disbelief ?

Without extremes, the middle would be unlivable.

Wouldn't most anarcho-capitalists agree with burtlancast?

I must say that I always find it funny when people throw the word Marx as if it were a dirty word reserved for the most heinous deeds. There is a certain irrational and Pavlovian response to it that seems to be mostly centered around America.

Hell, I consider myself somewhat of a Marxist and I am a Social Anarchist. Where I live(in the western world) we don't have this Pavlovian conditioning towards that word(which was a result of both McCarthyism and Cold War propaganda).

Not everything medically is backwards (this applies to most areas of human endeavours such as politics and morality). Medicine generally tends to make progress, century upon century. No, we don't have everything figured out yet, and implementation lags behind knowledge and isn't applied optimally based on knowledge, as many human systems tend to do. But it's not backwards as a whole. It's not harmful as a whole either.

Yes but think how it would be without all those good-willed people. What's left would be a noxious skeleton. Now imagine what could be accomplished if those good-willed people could have a healthy productive skeleton to work on and around. It would be great, right? The issue is that good will does not ensure that you will reject a social skeleton that is diminishing to your true contributions and potentials, and it does not guarantee that you will be trying to build alternatives if there aren't already.

I personally have not had good experiences with the medical system, and am starting to think my health issues may be linked to the various drugs (Accutane, bcps, SSRIs) I've taken and procedures (tonsillectomy, ps) I have had. I think there may be a connection and even have wondered if I have residual damage from vaccines and booster shots. Overall I feel quite skeptical and will likely avoid, since what little care I've had has probably ruined my health.

Recently I started reading about a doctor named Robert Mendelsohn who wrote a book in the late 70s called Confessions of a Medical Heretic. His central thesis is that modern medicine is a religion: the hospitals are Temples of Doom, the doctors are the Devil's Priests, etc.:
http://www.whale.to/c/devilspriests.html

....Doctors can’t be counted on to be entirely ethical, either. The dean of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Robert H. Ebert, and the dean of the Yale Medical School, Dr. Lewis Thomas, acted as paid consultants to the Squibb Corporation....

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Fraud in scientific research is commonplace enough to keep it off the front pages. The Food and Drug Administration has uncovered such niceties as overdosing and underdosing of patients, fabrication of records, and drug dumping when they investigate experimental drug trials....

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....Close friendships between doctors and non-doctors are nowhere near as frequent as among other professions....Doctors can develop their philosophy in relative privacy, foray at intervals into the public scene to promote these ideas, and then rapidly re­treat to the security of other doctors who support the views of the in-group.

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Such_Saturation said:

Yes but think how it would be without all those good-willed people. What's left would be a noxious skeleton. Now imagine what could be accomplished if those good-willed people could have a healthy productive skeleton to work on and around. It would be great, right? The issue is that good will does not ensure that you will reject a social skeleton that is diminishing to your true contributions and potentials, and it does not guarantee that you will be trying to build alternatives if there aren't already.

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I think we're in agreement that things aren't optimal and if you had some all knowing scientist who good push a button to auto-implement changes that were known to produce better outcomes, that would be ideal. Obviously that is not possible for humans (maybe if a super AI is created but that's another story). Instead, we have limited knowledge and limited resources to explore alternative paths, and choosing the most optimal outcome is a messy task that no one can get correct. That's not to say we shouldn't try to identify the best paths, just that it isn't clear cut and impossible for us to get consistently correct. Under such constraints, I'm not sure that even if it was possible (which I don't think it currently is close to being) it is desirable to have a reset button. It could be too chaotic and unstable even if we get it right a good % of the time. It may be better to constantly monitor your current situation and reorient yourself as you go along vs starting anew, which is kind of how the system works now if it was idealized.

It is the values taught to children at a young age, and then supported through adolescents which determine the kind of person they will be. Institutions later in life can try all they want to make an individual conform to their dogma, but in the end, the decision will always be with the individual. Rogue doctors, lawyers, farmers, teachers, spiritualists, etc, are a test to this.

And I don't buy into the the whole ignorance factor, as humans by nature are very inquisitive. So, no matter the occupation, deep down, they know what they are doing, even if they don't consciously acknowledge it.

In the end, don't blame the institution, blame man, and his new found processing system.

Follow the money.......”profit over people”.....