Natural and Unnatural Political Systems

What medicine can teach us about having a healthy government

One of the unifying principles I use to make sense of the world are “isomorphisms” which essentially argues that the qualities which underlie a variety of seemingly unrelated phenomena can be very similar. In turn, this means that if you can grasp the essence of something which is unfolding, it creates a lens which provides a great deal of insight into a variety of other things.

In this article, I will focus on how a few key principles within medicine express themselves in many other facets of life (e.g., politics, governance and war) and tie together a variety of philosophical threads I’ve been thinking about for a while but I didn’t quite feel merited their own articles.

My hope through doing this is to answer the elusive question of “what constitutes “natural” medicine” and use that answer to shed light upon a common mistake humanity has made throughout history that we are again repeating now. Because of the perilous times we live in, I believe it is critical for us to understand this concept so we can understand how to effectively address it.

The Ideal Government?

I’ve spent much of my life considering what constitutes the ideal form of government and as the years have gone by, I’ve come to see that every single one has its own set of issues.

Note: there have been a few “utopian societies” throughout history where a widely practiced and highly developed spiritual practice produced a high level of consciousness throughout the society that knitted everyone together and prevented them from engaging in destructive behaviors. Sadly, each of these peaceful societies (excluding the ones which hid themselves within a larger society) eventually came into contact with a more warlike culture which then rapidly conquered and enslaved them.

In recent years, the Western World has been fortunate to have a moderately functional (and prosperous) government, so many of the challenges most of humanity has had to struggle with throughout history have been very minimal in our society. In turn, those struggles are often simply an abstract idea for those who did not have to experience them and many have hence stopped participating and the civil process because they’ve come to take the current status quo for granted.

However, a variety of recent events have begun to change that (e.g., COVID-19), and we are now moving towards an era of extreme volatility and change which is bringing many of these issues to the forefront—especially since our society is currently in a period of institutional decline where many of the institutions we’ve long trusted to look out for our interests are being overtaken by corruption and incompetence.

Recently, a few events happened which have made me realize this was an important subject to write an article about.

Simplistic Truths and Nuanced Ideas

In any discussion or debate, one is typically faced with the choice to do one of the following:

1. Break the topic down to a few simple soundbites everyone can emotionally understand and then aggressively push the absolute truth of those soundbites onto everyone.

2. Acknowledge that the subject is complex and ambiguous rather than black and white and then try to accurately present the nuances and shades of gray behind it.

The essential challenge is that many issues we face simply cannot be broken down into simplistic truths, but at the same time, a lot of people are surprisingly hostile towards nuanced ideas due to the mental capacity which needs to be expended to understand them.

For instance, through repetition, the media made many people believe that:

•Covid was very dangerous

•That the vaccines are safe and effective (along with many of the other COVID approaches that were used like masking, social distancing and lockdowns).

Because of these two simplistic beliefs, many of them not only fully complied with the COVID measures, but also zealously forced others to do so as well.

In turn, those opposed to this found it was immensely challenging to change these people’s minds because doing so required providing a nuanced explanation that required the person to piece together connected pieces of information. For example, the fact that a vaccinated person “needed” other people vaccinated as well to be safe meant that their vaccine didn’t actually work and hence invalidated the justification for anyone needing to take it. Likewise, the fact that the rates of COVID went up after the vaccines were mass deployed on America (and the majority of the country vaccinated) made it unlikely the “problem” was not enough people vaccinating.

However, as many of you saw, trying to explain either of these relatively straightforward logical chains was a lost cause because it required putting too many concepts together. Likewise, it was even more challenging to provide the somewhat complex arguments (e.g., that documented corruption was driving the pandemic response).

Polarized Topics

Throughout my life, I’ve watched more hot button issues than I can count come along where each side is absolutely convinced the other side is wrong (with individuals on each side often become quite upset at the notion anyone disagrees with their viewpoint) to the point a permanent impasse is created, which in turn leads to me often seeing almost identical debates on the issues play out years or decades later.

From studying each of these, I’ve found in most cases both sides are to a degree “correct,” but people on each side subconsciously make the choice to selectively filter their perception of reality so that they only see the arguments which support their narrative. Thus, I find that to actually move the debate forward in a productive fashion, you must focus on the key points both sides agree upon (which in most cases do exist), acknowledge the inherent ambiguity in the subject, and then focus on providing a solution that moves both sides closer to what they want and allows them to see the other side as well-meaning humans as well.

Note: to illustrate, last year I wrote an article about on my perspectives on abortion (a highly polarized topic) and it received support from both sides of the political spectrum.

Unfortunately, the mass media does the exact opposite, and instead will do what ever it can to turn a challenging topic into a highly polarized narrative where one side is “right” and the other side is “evil.” This, I in turn believe is done because it allows the media to maintain a large audience while simultaneously not having to conduct any type of real journalism (which would threaten its corporate sponsors).

Because of this, again and again, we will see stories (e.g., George Floyd’s death) where a good case either side was at fault be turned into national headlines so the media can continually agitate the public and pit each side against the other—whereas in contrast, they typically will avoid covering stories where one side or the other is clearly at fault, since in those instances, it’s hard to get people to want to argue about it.

Note: in politics, espousing a highly partisan simplistic truth your audience agrees with to rile them up and earn their support is known as “red meat” (which I believe is a reference to throwing red meat to dogs). In this publication, since I have limited time to cover all of the things I want to get to, I try to avoid commenting on these issues unless I have something to add other people aren’t already saying (e.g., that SSRIs are a primary causes of school shootings).

In my eyes, one of the most problematic things about these issues is that people are so acclimated to being riled up about the current issue that they typically are numb and apathetic to something unless their media tells them to get upset about it. This leads to the unfortunate situation where rather than coming together on important issues we can all agree with (e.g., that we are being economically enslaved by the upper class and systematically thrown into poverty), our society outrage is almost always directed towards issues which serve the interests of the ruling elite. An obscure song in turn does a remarkable job of describing this:

And what you'll find
Is hate so blind
It destroys every way out of here

The Polarization of War

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. — George Orwell

The political issue I personally feel the most strongly about is war, but what I’ve seen again and again through my lifetime is that in most cases (excluding those instances where the government is trying to sell a war), people will be are numb and apathetic to the issue because it doesn’t directly affect them and the media has not primed them to become outraged about it. This sadly is the state most conflicts in the world are in (i.e., few Americans even realize they are happening, let alone the horrors happening there).

Note: the recent Israel Palestine conflict is a fascinating illustration of this concept, as when the initial October 7th attacks happened, the media extensive provided coverage of what happened to the Israeli victims, leading to widespread condemnation of Hamas and support of Israel’s military retaliation, but once the alternative and then mainstream media shifted to covering the Palestinian suffering, public opinion largely reversed and people shifted to empathizing with the Palestinian’s plight and condemning Israel.

This apathy was a key reason why I became a doctor as I realized medicine was an issue people would actually care about (as the medical industry’s crimes directly affected them) and hence could serve as a gateway to making people care about the human cost of the innumerable conflicts we ignited around the globe to make money for defense contractors.

In turn, I would say with most of the wars I’ve seen in my lifetime, almost all of the following held true:

•Many of the key facts behind the conflict were deliberately withheld from the American people.
•Some type of story was created to justify the war which was a bunch of hogwash.
•Once the war happened, it dragged out and became far worse than what was initially promised.
•Both sides will lie continuously about what is actually happening.
•There was a massive human cost to the war few people knew about because the media did everything they could to sanitize its brutality.
•The key thing that exacerbated the war was weapons being given to one side (or both sides).
•Once the war was said and done, the area of the conflict was much worse than it had been prior to the war.
•In most cases, the only party that benefitted from the conflict were the defense contractors who profited off the conflict.

I’ve hence come to see most wars as nothing more than the recurring sales model being used again and again regardless of the human cost it entails. In turn, one of the most challenging things for me to deal with is when I see something happen I know from past experience will almost certainly soon lead to an immense amount of bloodshed.
Note: in this publication, I’ve also tried to show how inhumane recurring sales models are repeatedly used by the medical industrial complex (e.g., this article discusses how this is done with osteoporosis, birth control pills and psychiatric medications like antidepressants).

Likewise, as the years have gone by, I’ve gained an appreciation for how often conflicts are left so that they plant the seeds for another one in the future (e.g., the billions of arms we left in Afghanistan are turning up at conflicts around the world—including within Palestine and likewise, arms we sent to Ukraine are also making their way to Palestine). This I would argue is a practice not that different from how the pharmaceutical industry continually sells drugs that treat the consequences of their products (e.g., Moderna and Pfizer are both making a variety of products which are targeted to side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines).

Note: since arms dealing is one of the US’s main industries, you have to see a variety of events through that lens. While there were many criticisms of Trump, one fact that is hard to dispute was his resistance to starting conflicts (e.g., he was the first president since Jimmy Carter to not start wars during his term), which many in turn suspected was a key reason for the media’s hostility to him (as defense contractors are a major media advertiser). Biden in turn has reversed that trend:

The direct military sales by U.S. companies rose to $157.5 billion in fiscal 2023 from $153.6 billion in fiscal 2022, while sales arranged through the U.S. government rose to $80.9 billion in 2023 from $51.9 billion the prior year.

One of the saddest conflicts in the world is the Israel Palestine one, and over the decades I’ve put a lot of thought into what could possibly end it. Unfortunately, despite the fact many there want peace, I can’t see a solution to it, as in addition to the previous points:

•Both sides have fanatics who are not willing to give up any ground (which is what almost any compromise would entail).
•Each time real progress is made towards a peace process, someone steps in and derails it (e.g., in 1995, the Israeli prime minister who came the closest to making peace with Palestine was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli).
•Many outside parties benefit from the conflict continuing and encourage violence (e.g., Iran pays Hamas a lot of money to carry out attacks against Israel because it weakens Western control of the Middle East).
•So much blood has been spilled that many people there will never accept having peace with the other side.

With the current conflict, I personally know quite a few prominent figures on both sides of the issue who have done a lot to raise support for their position. Not surprisingly, each of these individuals has a very strong set of justifications for their stance and simultaneously is extremely resistant towards considering the other side’s perspective (even from me—in spite of the fact they otherwise trust and value my opinion).

Similarly, I’ve noticed very few people providing commentary on the conflict understand many of the key details about it (e.g., that Israel’s irrational response in part stems from their society placing an incredibly high value on the life of each citizen—something to my knowledge no other government in the world does).

Likewise, there is some recognition that Israel has a very pro-war government right now. What is less appreciated about this is that a lot of Israelis do not like the current right-wing prime minister (e.g., 2023 was characterized by massive protests against his attempts to strip away the ability of Israel’s courts to oppose government legislation) and it is very likely that had the October 7th attacks (which were the worst Israeli security failure in decades) not led to the current state of war, the pro-war prime minister would no longer be in power.

Another relatively unrecognized issue in Israel was the government’s decision to have the country be the initial test site for Pfizer’s vaccine. Because of this, the government forced everyone to vaccinate despite many Israelis being injured (which created significant animosity towards of the government and quite a few of Israelis equating the current governments action to that of Nazis). As a result, the Western nations relied upon Israel’s data to claim the vaccine was safe and effective, despite a lot of it showing quite the opposite (best demonstrated by Steve Kirsch proving the chair of the CDC committee that approved the COVID vaccine vehemently refused to look at the Israeli government data).

Presently, I believe the lack of knowledge of what happened to the vaccinated Israelis stemmed from the fact much of it (e.g., the injuries) were shared over Instagram, and since the screenshots were in Hebrew, no one understood what they meant and hence did not reshare them. Likewise, this (subtitled) Israeli documentary about what the injured there went through attracted very little attention:

The Perils of Failed Governments

There are a lot of ways to interpret the recent conduct of our governments, one of which I would argue is that “those governments are not doing a good job serving the needs of their people,” which I believe is again reflective of the general institutional decline we’ve seen throughout the Western World.

Note: a recent poignant example of this institutional decline was seen in an article detailing how librarians across America are struggling to deal with an influx of sex, drug use, lewd behavior and violence in their libraries and that their administrators are refusing to help them.

I find this institutional decline extremely concerning for three reasons.

First, many of us are having to deal with the direct consequences of our failing institutions (e.g., many people’s economic situations have dramatically worsened over the last 4 years and many have suffered from the government forcing through a vaccine which should have never been approved, let alone left on the market or mandated).

Second, few people realize how much work it takes to build up institutions, and that even moderately flawed ones are typically the product of years if not decades of work. In turn, regardless of what is promised, whatever replaces them is almost always worse and dramatically less functional.

Third, the decline of institutions is often used as a pivot towards initiating a revolution. This point was emphasized on a recent Joe Rogan Episode:

Because if you read the marxist literature, which is unfortunately my damn job, you can derive a number of different conclusions. One of these conclusions that you can derive absolutely is do you know what repels a revolution in a country better than anything? Stability. Social stability. So if you can destabilize a population, then you can get them to crave a revolution. Or you can, like with the Patriot act, you can get them to ascent, to sacrificing their liberties for security. So if you can destabilize an area, then you can cause them to want to have radical political change.

We just saw this, this woman who was in the Fox News this morning…She's in the government. She says that she wants to burn the country to the ground so her ideology can rise out of it, out of the ashes. Right. So she said this publicly.

This is turn has led me to really think about what this can lead to as one of the relatively unappreciated facts about revolutions is that they typically lead to something much worse than the government which preceded them (with the only exceptions I know of being the American revolution and Gaddafi’s revolution in Libya). In turn, members of my family have been in countries after the government collapsed and in each case, they’ve witnessed a nightmarish situation break loose no one would ever want to be in.

For this reason, as I’ve aged, I’ve shifted away from wanting to abolish dysfunctional institutions or governments and moved toward towards instead wanting to reform them—even if that process is painful, takes forever and leaves a less than satisfactory outcome.

The Challenges of Governance

If you look at governments throughout human history, they typically run into the same problems. In turn, I believe understanding each of these challenges provide important insights into the “optimal” form of governance.

Political Darwinism

Almost all social systems inevitably select for the most cutthroat and ruthless individuals to rise to power because anyone else who takes a kinder and more ethical approach to how they conduct themselves will inevitably “lose” to someone who doesn’t. This in turn (as explained by the discipline of political Ponerology) plays a key role in explaining why governments so frequently become sociopathic, and likewise why groups are so prone to cutthroat extremists hijacking them (as the less cutthroat individuals typically aren’t willing to confront the extremists).

Presently, I believe there are two ways this can be addressed.

First, if you evolve the consciousness of a society, the populace is much less willing to support the unscrupulous parties (e.g., they won’t support divisive tactics that turn them against each other). This in turn is heavily influenced by having an honest and mature media (which sadly is not the case for the current mass media).

Second, you can design the governmental structure so that it is resistant to these individuals gaining too much power. This is typically done either by:

•Have so much bureaucratic red tape that it becomes extremely challenging for anyone to do anything. On one hand this is extremely frustrating because it results in the government continually self-sabotaging innovative ideas which could move the country forward (e.g., “death by regulations”) but on the flip side, it also often prevents dangerous tyrants from taking too much power.

•Have a series of checks and balances in place which force each party that wants power to compete against others which do as well so that they ultimately reach a moderately stable equilibrium point which is not too bad. This in effect bypasses the natural “cutthroat” nature of (portions of) humanity by having it serve as something which strengthens rather than weakening the health of the government—especially when it is combined with a constitution that places clear restraints on what the government can do (as when needed, a vying factions can utilize those provisions to support their interests and hence bring the government back to what its founders intended)

Note: this in turn illustrates why the judicial reforms Israel’s ruling party pushed for were so problematic as they effectively removed many of the restraints that normally prevent a government from going too far.

Being Present to The Individual

Many observers of democracies have noticed that it tends to work in smaller groups (e.g., villages) but rapidly fail in larger ones. This, I believe is due to human beings having a finite number of people they can remain present too (which is typically around 150), after which point they begin to see humans not as individuals but as points of data that need to be managed into the optimal outcome (which frequently entails allowing the ends to justify the means and abhorrent policies being forced upon the populace).

Sensitivity and Specificity

In medicine, sensitivity denotes how likely a test is to catch something its looking for (e.g., not miss a cancer), whereas specificity designates how likely a test is to get a false positive (e.g., to tell someone they have a cancer when they don’t). In almost all cases, there is a trade off between the two (i.e., if you cast a wide net for something, you will inevitably catch things you weren’t intending to get) so a lot of thought goes into where each test’s thresholds is set so that it does not have too many false positives or false negatives (but even after all of that, there still are often a significant number of errors).

You see a very similar issue come up with social policies. For example, with the court system, ideally, everyone who is guilty should be convicted and everyone who is innocent should have their charges dismissed, but, in reality, this does not happen. A variety of approaches exist to this problem, and the American justice system essentially prioritizes specificity over sensitivity (i.e., “innocent until proven guilty”) which is frustrating since many corporate criminals often get let off, but simultaneously lowers the rate of false convictions. In contrast, “guilty until proven innocent” is a standard that is used in many other countries.

Likewise, Israel is presently trying to eliminate Hamas and its infrastructure through airstrikes (as doing so protects their soldiers from the risk of in-person combat). Since Hamas hides itself within civilian areas, Israel’s military has a similar sensitivity vs. specificity dilemma—it can either miss Hamas targets (poor sensitivity) or hit them and kill innocent civilians in the process (poor specificity), either of which yields an unsatisfactory outcome many understandably object to.

Note: the FDA preventing bad drugs from getting to market while approving drugs which benefit society is another example of where an appropriate balance needs to be struck between sensitivity and specificity.

The thing which I believe is ultimately important to understand about this concept is that striking an appropriate balance between the two is extremely difficult. Typically (at least initially), the decision that’s made on how to do this tends to err strongly towards one extreme or the other (depending on the collective ideology of the individuals who made the initial system), while over time, due to protest from the other side and members of the society working to find creative ways to improve both, a better balance is achieved with improved sensitivity and specificity (e.g., Israel has pioneered a variety of innovative approaches to reduce [but not eliminate] civilian deaths from airstrikes).

So, typically when we observe an institution, we will see many short fallings in how it addresses either the sensitivity or specificity of the task it is assigned to deal with. However, what’s much harder to appreciate is that the current balance we see is typically the result of an immense amount of work, so once the institution is scrapped, whatever replaces it tends to do far, far, worse. Similarly, since the balance between sensitivity and specificity is so hard to meet, once corruption or ideologues enmesh themselves within the institution, you will rapidly observe the institution slide towards greatly prioritizing one over the other (e.g., the increasingly corrupt FDA now is approving a lot of pharmaceuticals it should not be approving). This institutional imbalance I would argue is one of the primary problems America is presently facing.

Unknown Information

Leaders are frequently forced to make difficult decisions in the face of unknown information. Good leaders find ways to do this (e.g., through being very good at listening to their gut) while most leaders will abdicate their responsibility for making a decision and instead depend upon committees and experts. Unfortunately, those parties are frequently not qualified for their positions they hold (e.g., they are corrupt and incompetent) and as a result, they produce poor decisions and often takes forever to get anything done (with the latter being one of the biggest frustrations awake academics experience).

COVID provided an excellent illustration of this issue as our leading experts overestimated the virus’s lethality by over a 100-fold and used that imaginary lethality to justify counterproductive and highly damaging policies being inflicted upon the nation. Scott Atlas MD (who was brought in to provide another perspective on the White House’s COVID-19 task force) saw firsthand that the “expert” doctors on it (e.g., Fauci) had a remarkable lack of basic medical knowledge, yet because of their stature, the irrationality of their positions (which Atlas frequently challenged) became the dogma everyone followed. Recently, a mini-documentary was aired which illustrates how absurd the “expertise” behind the COVID-19 response was:

Note: Atlas also discussed these events in a memoir about his time at the White House which I summarized here.

Limited Power

One of the things many fail to appreciate about government is that its power is actually quite limited, and once a significant number of people oppose what it does, the government becomes powerless.

Because of this, almost everything the government does is an art of utilizing its limited resources to achieve a desired outcome. For example:

•It’s simply impossible for the government to have enough resources to micromanage everything and enforce each existing law (which ultimately is a key reason why significant liberty can always be found within a society). In turn, I believe one of the reasons why there has been such a strong push for AI is that AI systems can be scaled up to the point, that to some degree, they can actually micromanage every aspect of society (e.g., consider how companies like Google use specific algorithms to curate a specific version of reality to their audiences).

•If there is too much cultural resistance against a policy, the government cannot force people to do it. For example, in previous articles, I’ve discussed China’s decision to only allow families to have one child, and how, despite using every means at their disposal (e.g., endless propaganda campaigns, harsh fines and large scale forced abortions) most of the population didn’t comply with it. Similarly, in a recent article about the effects of clothing on your health, I discussed the abhorrent Chinese practice of foot binding (permanently disfiguring women’s feet because it made them more “attractive”) and noted that this practice persisted for centuries, even though leaders with absolute power (e.g., the Manchu emperors) tried to ban it.

•Once more than a few people stop trusting the government, the government can rapidly lose the ability to maintain law and order, and often then collapse. This is currently being highlighted in Haiti, where the entire capitol has been taken over by gangs and the government security services (e.g., the police) are essentially powerless to stop them. In turn, I am of the belief one of the greatest fears governments always face is being faced with some type of catastrophic collapse which will topple the government and they will rationalize justifications for very cruel measures to prevent this.

Note: for this reason, governments will often try to make citizens be scared enough of breaking the law that a small enough number actually will, and the government hence will have enough resources to neutralize those lawbreakers. For example, the main reason most people don’t speed (or at least speed excessively) is because they might get a ticket, but at the same time, in the majority of cases where one speeds, law enforcement isn’t present to provide a citation). Likewise, this is why governments will often try to terrify and fracture protest movements, because once the movement grows too big, the government often can’t stop it.

•Oftentimes, the government will try to accomplish an initiative through laws, edicts, stimulus programs or financial incentives. In some cases these work as intended, but in many others, they do not. As a result, you will continually see disastrous federal programs be enacted, which were at least intended to promote something positive, but the ultimate result to them greatly differed from what was initially intended.

For example, I believe one of the greatest mistakes Trump made during COVID was allowing his administration to enact a policy which had Medicare foot the bill for all uninsured COVID hospitalizations. On the surface, this seemed like a good idea (as many people without health insurance were getting COVID and something needed to be done to make sure there was not a crisis of them dying because they were unable to get the care they needed). However, in reality, all it did was incentivize the hospitals to label everything as COVID and subject their patients to the most expensive COVID protocols (e.g., remdesivir and ventilators), hence massively inflating the number of COVID cases we had, the terror around the disease, and the deaths which resulted from it (largely as a result of those disastrous protocols).

Strengthening Society

In contrast to those currently attempting to break down our society, the challenge all good leaders face is how they can make the society become stronger. As best as I can gather, three things need to be present for that to happen:

•The resources necessary for the progress and development of society (which the United States for example has always had an edge in due to its large land mass).

•The underlying infrastructure being present which can allow growth to occur (e.g., a functional transportation system or an effectively educated populace).

•Something that motivates members of the society to overextend themselves to develop it. This can include greed, patriotism, poverty, or hardship.

Note: I am of the belief many governments which could make life a lot easier for their people don’t because they know that were that to happen, people would become less focused on struggling to survive, which would both make the society less productive and make people more inclined to do things besides working 24/7 (e.g., actively complaining about the government).

Natural and Unnatural Governance

“Natural” is a commonly thrown around word (e.g., “natural medicine”) that has a surprising degree of ambiguity in its meaning. In my eyes, “natural” encapsulates one half of the dichotomy between guiding a naturally emergent process into creating an intended effect or applying an external force on it to create a desired outcome.

Many traditions throughout the ages have observed that when “unnatural” processes are utilized, they frequently create a lot of problems due to the strain external forces can create and the rebound which occurs once the force stops being applied (which inevitably happens since the process of applying the force is a resource intensive process).

For example, most pharmaceutical drugs work by inhibiting enzymes within the body. This forceful approach is very effective for creating an immediate change within the body (since the body depends upon the enzymes to regulate all of its functions) and hence makes it easy to have a justification for approving new pharmaceuticals (as its clear they “do something”). However, applying their force upon the body is also often highly problematic because:

1. Many enzymes in the body are similar in structure (due to how they evolved) so the drug will often affect more than just the target enzyme (which gives rise to a variety of side effects).

2. The target enzyme often is involved in a large number of processes within the body, so giving the drug to inhibit a target process, often results in a variety of other essential processes also becoming disabled.

Note: #1 and #2 are examples of how unnatural forces often end up creating collateral damage because they reach unintended targets. You see this same issue with many other medical approaches as well (e.g., certain types of body work, steroid injections, surgeries or vaccines creating off-target immunity).

3. The drug creates an artificial state which is sustained by the drug being in the system. This hence requires the drug to be given indefinitely to sustain the desired effect, and in many cases it becomes impossible to continue doing that (e.g., because you can no longer tolerate the side effects of the drug or afford to buy it).

4. The system will inevitably adapt to the pharmaceutical being given (e.g., by up-regulating or down-regulating the target enzyme or having a microbe evolve resistance to it), which in turn requires more and more of the drug to be given. In addition to all the other issues giving these higher doses entail (e.g., the costs and side effects), they ensure a lot of problems will arise once the pharmaceutical is withdrawn.
Note: a prime example of this are the SSRI antidepressants which are notorious for how difficult they are to stop using (and is discussed in more detail here).

5. While pharmaceutical drugs and other harsh medical interventions can sometimes be very helpful (e.g., they are often lifesaving for ICU patients), they typically require an immense degree of precision in their application, and relatively few clinicians in practice do that (either because they don’t know how to or because they don’t have time to).
Note: to ensure the desired effect, physicians often “overdose” the pharmaceutical they are using—a practice which in addition to causing a lot of issues, frequently negates the benefit of a therapy. The forgotten art of medical dosing is discussed in more detail here.

Each of these points extends far beyond medicine (e.g., in an interpersonal relationship where more and more force ended up being needed to maintain the existing dynamic or the fact that Israel, despite having an incredibly advanced and well funded military has for decades been unable to prevent terrorist attacks from the Gaza strip).

One of the earliest examples comes from a Chinese Classic which focused on detailing how using excessive force to rule a county was rarely sustainable and in time would create a lot of strain that would eventually break everything apart. However, while this mistake has been repeatedly recognized throughout history, it keeps on repeating because something very deep within the human psyche always wants to grasp onto things and try to control them rather than allowing their natural and uncontrollable spontaneity to emerge.
Note: I believe this mentality is one of the major problems in current practice of medicine along with many other facets of the modern world (e.g., agriculture).

Socialism

One of the classic debates within politics is if “socialism” is good or bad. In my eyes, the common thread which ties socialism together is a need “to control” the flow of society, and since there are many legitimate reasons for that (e.g., the massive wealth inequalities frequently created by the upper class in parallel to rampant exploitation of the lower class), widespread pushes for socialism are a recurring theme throughout history.

Presently, I hold a similar attitude towards socialism as I do towards pharmaceutical drugs—it is beneficial if done in moderation and in an intelligently targeted manner—but in reality, this is often not what happens.

Instead, we frequently see the following things happen (many of which are analogous to what one sees with pharmaceutical drugs):

•Socialists will enact policies which do not take the whole picture into account and end up making things worse. For example, whenever the government subsidizes something so that it is more affordable for people who need it (e.g., healthcare or an education) this frequently leads to a brief alleviation of the problem which is then followed by a massive price inflation that results in it costing more for those who need it, even when accounting for the savings they received through the subsidies.

•Since socialist policies redistribute wealth rather than create it, they often lead to a gradual impoverishing of the society. One of the most well known examples of this was Hugo Chavez choosing to useVenezuala’s massive oil wealth to provide welfare to its poor and to sell it at a discount price to neighboring nations to advance diplomacy rather than investing that money into Venezuela’s infrastructure and economy. Initially, it improved the Venezuelan’s quality of life and made Chavez very popular, but once some strain was placed on the system (i.e., economic sanctions from the USA and the price of oil dropping), Venezuela’s economy collapsed and the country soon followed (with it now being a repressive and bankrupt state many are fleeing) .

•Supporting a socialist system often requires micromanaging each facet of the society. This makes things quite challenging for those who live with in that, especially since the controlling types who run these systems frequently fail to recognize that no amount of control can fix many of the problems they face. This is particular evident when you watch a socialist country enter a downwards spiral (e.g., because the economy failed) at which point the increasingly harsh interventions the government initiates are not that different from the ballooning number of prescriptions a patient receives as their health progressively fails.
Note: one common critique of socialist medical systems is that they “outlaw” the integrative treatment of a variety of complex conditions (e.g., Lyme disease) since they do not want to be financially obligated to treat them. This for example is why many American clinics frequently serve European patients who cannot receive the care they need back home. Likewise, this point helps to illustrate why so many socialist medical systems aggressively forced their populations to receive the COVID vaccine, as the leaders of those systems, like the bureaucrats within America’s military, believed (at least initially) that the overall benefits of those shots outweighed their harms.

•Because socialist systems usurp the rights of the people for policies aimed at the greater good (some of which are a great idea), that lack of individual liberty makes it very easy for the government to pivot to being a totalitarian state.

In turn, when I was younger I strongly supported socialist systems (because I agree that many of the injustices they try to stop are legitimate problems). Yet as time went on, I realized that it was too easy for them to pivot to tyrannical communist regimes, and again and again I would see people claimed to advocate for the common people commit unimaginable horrors to them once they completed their initial rise to power (which in turn is why the people who get culled after they supported a revolution are frequently referred to “useful idiots”). In short, while I supported socialism in theory, I realized the reality is that there will always be sociopaths who grasp the reins of power took precedence over any of the benefits these less “liberty-friendly” governments offered (and likewise that these sociopaths would often utter all the egalitarian talking points but not follow through on any of them once they were in power).
Note: this is somewhat analogous to how many of the progressives in Congress who claimed to advocate for children and the working class were the staunchest supports of the devastating school closures and workplace vaccine mandates.

The Age of Twitter

Since the world wars, our society has largely revolved around policies being decided by a small elite and then being sold to the population through increasingly sophisticated propaganda. This has generally worked to keep things running smoothly, but it’s far from optimal as:

•Very bad policies (e.g., the Vietnam War) are often chosen by the ruling elite and then forced upon the country.

•As increasing corruption enters the system, the government can no longer be relied upon to make decisions which benefit either the state or its people.

•Since the well-being of the people is not a factor in the decision making process (as they effectively have no voice in it), policies are often chosen which harm large segments of the population.

When the propaganda apparatus began taking over society, it was justified by the belief that without it, enemies of Democracy (e.g., the Nazis) would win and the belief that society had become too complex for everyday citizens to understand and hence that the general populace could not be trusted to vote for what was in society’s best interests.

Many prominent figures rightfully argued that it was antithetical to Democracy to have the country be controlled by propaganda, and raised many important points such as the fact it was possible to upgrade our society so the citizenry could be trusted to vote for the best interests of the society.

Sadly, the propagandists won out, and that was the way things remained until the internet, and particularly social media, made it possible to have ideas rapidly diffuse across the society. In turn, by 2016, the internet had evolved to the point it could effectively counter the propaganda campaigns which had formed the cornerstone of cementing public policy for decades.

To preempt this, I was told the establishment had sought to steer most of the traffic online into going through major gatekeepers (e.g., Google or Facebook) and then to have each of those gatekeepers censor anything which went against the current narrative. While this had initially been gradually phased in, after 2016, it kicked into overdrive because too many counter-narratives were leaking into the general population, a process best synopsized by this recent interview:

This process in turn continued to worsen until Elon Musk bought Twitter (now called 𝕏) and made the platform be committed to free speech.

At the time this happened, there was a large debate over exactly why Musk did it. As I can’t read his mind (and I don’t know anyone with less than three degrees of separation from him), I can’t say why he did it. Instead I can only acknowledge him “freeing” Twitter was a big deal, and many people (myself included) directly benefitted from it.

However, I’ve long suspected what ultimately motivated Musk was another manifestation of the tension between socialist “control” and libertarian “naturalism” which has defined so much of history.

Specifically, many of the people in the tech field have come to the conclusion that for our society to function and stay healthy, it must be opitmally micromanaged by their algorithms (which amongst other things is how they rationalize censoring “dangerous” viewpoints). This in my eyes is an exercise in futility (as information will always find a way to leak through the internet) and a mistake no different from what many over-controlling leaders of the past have done. In turn, we see harsher and harsher censorship methods need to be utilized, each of which further breaks the public’s trust in these conglomerates, especially because they can see them repeatedly make catastrophic mistakes which could have been prevented had a vigorous debate from both sides been permitted to occur (e.g., consider many of the COVID-19 policies).

In contrast to their belief that the evolution of our species will arise from a lot of energy being expended to ensure the careful curation of algorithms, I believe Musk has concluded the correct solution is to allow a naturally emergent process occur that cannot be controlled where the best ideas are rapidly selected for and then adopted by humanity, while the accompanying chaos this brings is accepted as a price that has to be paid for that to happen.

Some of the things that have made me believe this are:

•This quote from Musk:

In terms of the Internet, it's like humanity acquiring a collective nervous system. Whereas previously we were more like a... collection of cells that communicated by diffusion. With the advent of the Internet, it was suddenly like we got a nervous system. It's a hugely impactful thing.

•The fact that the Twitter algorithm seems to be “fair” and while many of the ideas we try to put out don’t gain traction, the ones that are well designed frequently are able to create a massive impact (which was never previously possible in human history).

•The fact that Musk frequently speaks out on censored topics (e.g., his and his cousin’s vaccine injuries).

•The fact that Twitter not only refuses to censor content, but has also firmly resisted governments requesting them to and frequently exposed the government’s breaking the law to do that.

The Era of Change

One of the biggest things which characterizes the modern era is that things are happening at a rapidly accelerated pace, and by any lens you look at (e.g., months, years, decades or centuries), the change that has happened in the most recent periods is dramatically faster than any which preceded it.

The upside to this paradigm is that a lot of progress has become possible (e.g., dysfunctional systems which have remained in place for an eternity can now be toppled). Conversely, the downside is that human society generally is not good at adapting to rapid change (e.g., many of the struggles our society now faces are a result of new paradigms emerging which our culture has not yet developed the wisdom to handle correctly).

One of the primary things which has been facilitating this rapid pace of change has been the incredible disruptions being created by the internet allowing the rapid diffusion of information.

As people never like to let go of power and this rapid rate of change is incredibly threatening to the existing power structure, governments around the world have become willing to violate their own laws to secretly pressure the tech companies to censor anything which threatens their power.

While many of us suspected this was happening, Musk made it clear to the world after he leaked the Twitter files, where it was revealed that prior to his ownership, Twitter had regular correspondences with the federal government (e.g., the FBI) where they were given dictates over what content to censor (likewise they received requests from Democrats to censor their political opponents). This resulted in a series of court cases (as its illegal for the government to censor speech) which ultimately prohibited this practice that the Biden Administration is presently hoping the Supreme Court will appeal.

Events in Brazil

Recent events in Brazil have put a lot of this into context. In 2022, the right-wing incumbent Jair Bolsonaro (who had advanced a variety of “controversial” positions such as questioning the vaccines, masking social distancing and the danger of COVID-19 while simultaneously promoting the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin) ran against a left-wing socialist (Lula) who amongst other things, vehemently endorsed vaccination.

Bolsonaro lost the election by a narrow margin, and alleged fraud had happened (as there were numerous suspicious circumstances around the election), leading to widespread protest from his supporters, which eventually on January 8th resulted in them protesting at the capitol and entering its buildings, at which point they were branded as insurrectionists, expelled from the building and have since been being tracked down and imprisoned by the government.

Note: this is not the first time this has happened. For example, as I detailed in a previous article, shortly before America’s Civil War (when the North and the South were fighting in Congress over where slavery should be legal) a comprise was struck for Kansas which said slavery’s legality in the territory should be decided by a popular vote of the occupants there. Shortly before the vote, the territory was flooded with armed companies from a slave state who illegally voted in a pro-slavery legislature. Once this new government came to power, it passed a series of laws outlawing anti-slavery activities, labeled those who opposed slavery as insurrectionists and then sent its forces after them, resulting in a mini Civil War breaking out which proceeded the actual war that consumed America.

Lula’s government has understandably not been popular, and it has attempted to “remediate” its image by paying off the corporate media (e.g., the current government is spending 30 times as much as the previous one on media advertising), which has resulted in its narrative dominating the airwaves. In turn, they’ve also pressured each internet company to only show their side of the story, and except for Twitter (𝕏), every single one has. To illustrate:

Lula’s government in turn has gotten into an escalating battle with Twitter, which included them demanding Twitter release the identities of users who shared hashtags which criticized the government, give them access to the direct messages and login data of dissidents and to censor opposition journalists and elected officials (including extremely popular ones). Since Musk refused to do this (as it was illegal under Brazilian law) and was public about it, Lula’s government in turn has initiated an escalating series of retaliations against Musk and his employees in Brazil.

These events in turn illustrate the common problem observed in socialist systems. To quote Michael Shellenberger:

When I was in my early 20s, I became enamored with Brazil’s left-wing Workers Party (PT) and its leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. I read an inspiring 1991 book, Without Fear of Being Happy, whose title is the English translation of Lula’s campaign slogan. It described Lula and the PT as democratic socialists who embraced anti-poverty measures but also rejected the authoritarianism and censorship of Communist regimes such as the one in Cuba.

In 1994, I interviewed the great man himself in his office in São Paulo. I asked Lula, if he were elected president, would he transform Brazil into another Cuba, complete with censorship? He said, emphatically, “No.” The Brazilian people loved freedom too much, he explained, as did he. After all, Lula had risen to fame in the 1970s when he led mass protests against Brazil’s military dictatorship as a labor union leader.

Note: many Brazilians still remember the censorship that dictatorship enacted.

Yet now, Lula is pushing to enact some of the most draconian censorship measures Brazil has seen in decades, something which is being loudly protested by many members of Brazil’s government:

Similarly, to quote Shellenberger:

In recent days, I have spoken to dozens of Brazilians, including professors, journalists and respected lawyers. Everyone tells me they are shocked by what is happening. They told me that they are afraid to speak their mind and that the Lula government is complicit in creating this climate of fear.

Likewise, many have noticed that the events in Brazil are not isolated, and instead, that globally, we are facing a coordinated campaign of censorship aimed at suppressing the independent voice the internet provides.

From an institutional standpoint, this panic is understandable, as the internet is taking away the power the ruling class has always depended upon. In turn, I would argue that we are at a pivotal point in human history where two radically divergent paths are possible. On one path, the “epidemic of misinformation” will be used to justify some of the harshest censorship regimes in history (alongside artificial intelligence making policies that tyrants of the past always yearned for become possible), while on the other path, a truly free exchange of information will be created which will at last make it possible for the culture’s ideas to be selected on merit rather than corruption and corporate interests.

Autocracies and Democracies

Two of the most classic forms of government are rule by a single person (e.g., a king) and rule by the many (e.g., a democratically elected government). Both of these have serious flaws, but ultimately, I am in accordance with the timeless quote attributed to England’s prime minister:

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for everything else.

Note: the exact quote Churchill gave in 1947 was slightly different, but still had the same meaning.

In turn, throughout history, people have lamented the failures of each form of government, and for millennia, many have argued the ideal government is a “philosopher king” or “benevolent dictator.” Unfortunately, competent leaders who genuinely care for the people are quite rare, and in the rare instances where they rise to power, those who succeed them typically don’t follow in their footsteps (e.g., this happened throughout the chain of Roman emperors).

In modern times, I consider Gaddafi to be one of the best examples of a benevolent dictator, as he was both capable of competing in the ruthless environment being a dictator required and simultaneously was wholeheartedly committed to advancing the welfare of the Libyan people (although as a member of Libya’s government shared with me, Gadaffi gradually became significantly more bitter after surviving multiple failed assassination attempts). Gadaffi in turn was a highly eccentric individual (e.g., he often insisted on honoring his tribe’s custom of sleeping in a tent and erected one in Donald Trump’s yard when he visited New York for the UN in 2009). Many of his unusual positions in turn greatly upset the Western Powers. For example, this was part of the 2009 speech he gave to the UN that year (which I believe was permitted due to him having been elected as the chairman of the African Union):

Today there is swine flu. Perhaps tomorrow there will be fish flu, because sometimes we produce viruses by controlling them. It is a commercial business. Capitalist companies produce viruses so that they can generate and sell vaccinations. That is very shameful and poor ethics. Vaccinations and medicine should not be sold. In The Green Book, I maintain that medicines should not be sold or subject to commercialization. Medicines should be free of charge and vaccinations given free to children, but capitalist companies produce the viruses and vaccinations and want to make a profit. Why are they not free of charge? We should give them free of charge, and not sell them.

Shortly after this speech, Gaddafi was disposed in 2011 of by a highly controversial U.S. led military intervention initiated by the Clinton led State department. Many within the U.S. government questioned the wisdom of this policy (e.g., numerous Pentagon officials thought what Hillary was doing was insane and established a back channel with Libya to prevent her military intervention while Obama considered it the worst mistake of his presidency).

Remarkably, once Gaddafi died, Clinton gloated about it on national television:

Note: since the intervention violated all international norms, outsiders such as Putin used it to justify their belief that the US could not remain the world’s sole superpower. Likewise, the Libyan intervention was what caused me to leave the Democratic party (and for those interested, Jimmy Dore recently gave a detailed interview on the inhumanity of what happened there).

Once Libya fell, the country was taken over by civil war, basic human rights went out the window (e.g., there is now a widespread slave trade there that includes sexual slavery and child slavery which occurs in parallel to civilians being routinely tortured and murdered by the authorities). Likewise, the high standard of living Gadaffi had worked for decades to create through a combination of strategic infrastructure investments and welfare programs evaporated overnight.

Since Libya is still a mess (despite having immense oil wealth), I feel its story is relevant to the subject at hand as it shows:

•Institutions take an incredible amount of work to build up, and once they are lost, they are nearly impossible to replace (e.g., consider Libya’s situation 12 years later).

•Gadaffi case shows that in the rare instance where a benevolent and effective dictator comes to power, they are still at high risk of being taken out by an outside power who opposes their policies.

Conclusion

Modern medicine is somewhat unique in that it is the only system of medicine which does not believe in an innate “health” of the body, and instead seeks to treat people purely through harsh external interventions which force the body to enter the state a treating physician believes it should be in. Many in the natural medicine field (myself included) believe this approach simply cannot treat many of the chronic issues people suffer from, and instead, that we must focus on cultivating the health body so that a desired cure can naturally emerge on its own.

Within government, I believe the best form of government is what America is trying to be (a Democracy existing in parallel to a constitution that safeguards the liberties of its people). Unfortunately, for this system to work, it has to be supported by a culture which promotes those ideals (e.g., by having a free press, by having people in the judiciary who prioritize their responsibility to the legal system over their own personal politics, by having a relatively unified population, and by having a shared moral code which inspires everyday citizens to want to do the right thing). In turn, I would argue we are seeing firsthand the consequences of these democratic anchors being lost.

Because Democracy is beginning to fail, many are either losing hope in the system or wanting to attack those who are weakening it. In writing this article, my hope was to show another more effective approach exists—for each of us to do what we can to cultivate the roots of the health of our democracy.

For instance, the main place where most of us can actually influence the political process is locally at a grass roots level, and beyond this directly benefitting our community, national politics are often shaped by the changes which happen at a grass roots level (e.g., many of the new positions I am seeing dissident politicians adopt were preceded by them being adopted in local communities).

Similarly, I believe cultivating the other things Democratic Republics depends upon such as the independent media (which is why I support Substack) or doing your part to aid in the conscious evolution of the society (which is why I cover many of the topics I do in this publication) is critical for creating the culture which gives rise to a healthy Democracy.

Most of us (excluding those who immigrated from countries with tyrannical governments) have been blessed with the relatively good fortune to exist in a society run by a relatively well functioning government that by and large protected our civil liberties. As I tried to illustrate in this article, that is actually a historical abnormality, and we are now in an era where many forces are converging to try to take that away from us. Fortunately, the internet has offered an unparalleled opportunity to facilitate the diffusion of truth throughout our society, and it is my belief that if we prioritize the opportunity it has given us to reclaim the health of our Democracy, we can move towards a much brighter future.

Note: A complete index of the articles published here on the Forgotten Side of Medicine can be found here.