"News that's not known, or not known enough."
Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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Predatory capitalism eats medicine alive
To an extent, all this predatory medical behavior is without deliberate intention, and one of the necessary defining elements of a crime is intention. So, at a certain level of abstraction, all of this medical mayhem can not be personalized as crimes committed by fiends. However, I sense that
The genius of civilization is to have created, in aggressive, dominator cultures, sophisticated methods of indoctrination that short circuit these pathways such that the perpetrator does not experience this mirror response, or at least is cut off from the inhibitory effects being generated by this neuronal subsystem, so as to allow for cruelty to be accomplished in service of the founding ideology. The politics of coercion require hardened hearts. Abstract belief replaces direct experience. Witches, for instance, were thought by their torturers to be being helped by the tortures inflicted on them. Belief has nothing to do with reality in these situations. Predatory capitalism is such an ideological system. The people doing these things, the doctors and hospital administrators engineering the deaths of innocent people for instance, are dominated by the ideology of acquisition and accumulation that demands that profit be extracted from every transaction. Profit is greatly increased in the case of scarcity. Therefore, non-victimhood is made scarce in order to enhance the price of the protection provided. This is what I mean when I describe the current manifestation of health care in the US as a system of extortion rather than care. As in, "We have the best Health Care Extortion System in the world." It generates more profit, therefore it is the "best." In the case of the medical scandals that we have been discussing, the function is to create a gradient, a price range if you will, with confident trust in one's physician being the property of only the wealthiest customers. Predatory capitalist religious belief, Calvinist for instance, creates the insane logic that lets the predator say to themselves things like "If God had meant for this person to be spared this useless procedure, He would have provided them with the money to be a high paying cash patient at Stanford [or some other elite institution]." The perpetrators in these situations are usually not straight up sociopaths (though you can bet there are sociopaths somewhere in the loop), but it can be very hard to know for sure. Sociopaths lack a functioning biological conscience. Harm committed to someone has no feedback with these people. They tend to see the rest of us as a form of inferior being saddled with this strange handicap of empathy. But the sociopaths alone would not be able to inflict the great amount of suffering that we see without the cooperation of neurologically normal people who's conscience is malfunctioning. Hence the key importance of investigating the source of these problems and not be satisfied with punishing the proximal perpetrator only. The willing executioner is just the tool of the manipulator of power. Hanna Arendt has done a great job thinking about all this. I am always intending to read more of her. There is also a rich contemporary literature on these issues that is worth delving into. The usual post-hypnotic suggestion (indoctrination has a lot of resemblance to hypnosis) that disinhibits cruel behavior is the identification of the victim as "other," and therefore subhuman. Believer vs. non-believer, saved vs. infidel. Haji, gook, slope, jap and therefore expendable without disturbing one's conscience. The really chilling thing to me is the successful indoctrination of the categories of "patient," "insured" and "case" as creating this sort of us/them barrier that allows denial of the fact of criminal mistreatment. Serial murders at a hospital become a quality of service issue rather than a legal one. Such concepts as "clinical judgement" and "scientific controversy" are marshaled to support treatment that the physician would not submit their mother to (hopefully). Such are the whiles of the worshippers of Mammon. People can justify their crimes slickly with rationalizations of serving "the greater good," as in, "Sure our aggressive approach does kill a few people who would otherwise live, but think of all the other people who are helped as a result of our aggressive case finding and marginal criteria for intervention with life saving [read threatening] therapies." Essentially everyone is prone to succumbing to the twisted logic of ends justifying means. Avoiding this pitfall requires advanced placement work in personal ethics. There need not be shame in failing the test. Sociologically considered, the missing element is the presence of individuals with advanced levels of moral and ethical reasoning for the less adept to "mirror" (emulate). The predatory capitalist system recognizes the threat of these people to the aims of accumulation and does everything in its power to eliminate them leaving those with more larval levels of ethical and moral development to be manipulated at will. Why don't we all just go along to get along? Sometimes, in down times, I think that the process of ethically cleansing our institutions of intact, ethical people has been completed, that ethical impulse has been eliminated, at least at the command and control level. Maybe the "rapture" will actually consist of transporting the sociopaths, who are manipulating us, from our midst by virtue of a sudden insight of the vast majority of us of the need to be rid of these people. After such a concrete "rapture" there would be a lot of fine vehicles suddenly available but, unfortunately, without the necessary fuel to run them.
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