Data and Dehumanization in the Modern Era

Exploring the tragic consequences of the human story behind a dataset not being listened to

Over the last two weeks, I put together a series to highlight how time and time again the government has rushed an unsafe and experimental vaccine to market despite its own scientists warning it not to, and then as the injuries piled up, done nothing until the media exposed what was happening and forced the government to pull it. This was done to illustrate that there is in fact a longstanding precedent for the “health authorities” to do whatever they can to cover up the evidence those injuries are happening, even when doing so becomes a direct violation of their charter (to protect the public good and save lives).

Since this has repeatedly happened (often with disastrous consequences), one would think that it might cause the government to reconsider the wisdom of rushing “emergency” vaccines to market. However, instead, the “lesson” they learned was how critical it was to ensure the media would not expose what was happening. In turn, over the last 25 years, we’ve seen a variety of changes occur to prevent the public from becoming aware of a bad vaccine such as:

•Allowing the pharmaceutical industry to become the primary advertiser for the mass media and then financially blackmail the networks into not airing any coverage critical of the pharmaceutical industry or its products.
Note: this has also come to apply to the other media platforms.

•Coming up with reason after reason to restrict the public’s access to the data used to claim a product is “safe and effective,” and instead have us be expected to take that pronouncement on faith. This goes hand in hand with data being viewed as our salvation, but no one ever questioning why we only see the data that supports the existing narrative.

•Gradually removing the protections afforded to whistleblowers who tried to expose these misdeeds.
Note: this tactic was pioneered by the military. For example, the Vietnam War was largely ended by analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaking the Pentagon Papers (for which Ellsberg was criminally charged but ultimately faced no consequences) . When Wikileaks did the same a few decades later, both the leaker (Manning) and the journalist who published the information (Assange) were sent to prison—with Assange still serving his sentence. Likewise, another prominent leaker, Edward Snowden, had to flee to Russia to protect himself from being imprisoned after he revealed information he believed to be critical for the public good.

However, despite it being quite challenging to be a whistleblower (e.g., most lose their livelihoods and families), people still do it. The following brief clip provides one of the best explanations for why a minority of the population always exists to take on that immense risk to do the right thing:

Note: I chose to include Peter Gøtzche’s talk in this article because it provides important context for Barry Young’s actions.

Barry Young

Barry Young found himself in a challenging situation. Because of a job he was contracted for, he had gained access to a database which clearly proved the COVID vaccines were killing people. In turn, he had to wrestle with the decision of whether he wanted to stay silent and be directly complicit in those deaths or publicize the data and be severely punished for doing so.

He eventually chose to leak it and gave an interview to accompany that leak. After watching that interview, I realized it touched on quite a few critical points so I edited and trimmed it down to an 8 minute version which highlighted those points.

This interview aired on November 28, and on November 30, Steve Kirsch released his data. Two days later (December 2nd) police surrounded Barry’s house and arrested him. Yesterday (December 3rd) he was formally arraigned in court and charged with accessing a computer system for dishonest purposes, which carries a maximum penalty of seven years in prison.
Note: In addition to the potential prison sentence, Barry Young is also almost certainly permanently blacklisted from being hired again.

Note: the journalist in the previous video who helped Young break this story has gone into hiding. For those interested in supporting the legal defense, more information can be found here.

In response to all of this, NZ’s government chose the only option available to them. They did their best to censor Barry’s data (which is essentially futile at this point), discredit his conclusions (by claiming he was not qualified to analyze it), double down on the safety of their vaccines, attack anyone for scaring the public into not vaccinating and lament the epidemic of disinformation and conspiracy theorists:

Apa [the CEO of NZ’s national health service] said misinformation about vaccines was particularly concerning at a time when Covid-19 cases were high.

"Rates are going up, we are seeing hospitalisations so we really want to keep promoting to New Zealanders who are eligible for Covid boosters to get them."

Note: I feel responses like this have a limited shelf life, given that they disprove themselves (if the cases are high, then that means the vaccines most of the country already took don’t work) and because the public has largely lost the will to vaccinate (evidenced by the lower and lower booster uptake around the world—including within New Zealand).

Likewise, they made sure to find a victim in this story:

The man facing charges had worked in a small team of specialised people who were "incredibly devastated" by what happened.

Note: remember that each of those “devastated” people saw the same data Barry did but did nothing.

Another memorable quote inadvertently highlights the government’s choice to willfully disregard the data showing it was harming its citizens:

New Zealanders give their health information to Te Whatu Ora [NZ’s national public health service] in order to make sure that they are cared for appropriately. When it is used for another purpose and that purpose is vexatious, then that is of course of concern," opposition health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall said.

However, in my eyes the most important quote is this one:

The data seemed to be "large amounts of vaccine-related information" and appeared to have been anonymised, Apa said. Analysis was continuing, but so far no NHI numbers or personally identifiable information was believed to have been released.

One of the most common excuses government’s around the world have used to avoid releasing data on the COVID vaccinations is that they don’t want to violate people’s medical privacy, and that this right to medical privacy must be protected under all circumstances.
Note: one of the best illustrations of the insincerity of this statement is the fact that tech companies are often given a blank check to data mine millions of health records.

Prior to the data being released to researchers, Barry made a point to anonymize the data by giving each person a random medical record number and then randomizing the order of each remaining field in the data set. This maintained the database’s statistics (e.g., the average time from vaccination to death, the average mortality for each age group, and the timing of when the deaths occurred) but prevented the individual entries from being linked to a specific person.

This in turn shielded him (or anyone else using the data) from the accusation they were endangering medical privacy and simultaneously negated the longstanding governmental argument these datasets cannot be anonymized. At the same time, it also initially confused a lot of people because that randomization created a few “impossible” events (e.g., someone getting their “first” dose of the COVID vaccine twice with two different vaccines).

Note: in the week before this story broke, I spent a lot of time verifying that the anonymized database did in fact maintain the critical statistics present in the original database. Today, Norman Fenton (who is more qualified than I am to evaluate these matters) likewise issued a statement affirming the validity of this approach.

Dehumanization

While some humans are malevolent beings who wish for evil, I do not believe most people want to harm others. Rather, I’ve come to believe that the two primary causes of “evil” are:

1. Lacking the courage to oppose something you know is wrong. This, in turn, is often followed by willfully closing one’s eyes to seeing the evidence something bad is happening (as that reduces the psychological discomfort of being a complicit party in what’s happening).

Note: For this reason, I make a point to never turn a blind eye to things I think are wrong even if I know I am powerless to change them. For example, I feel that what factory farming does to animals is horrifically cruel, so to at least “keep my eyes open” I will never eat meat that comes from those sources.

2. No longer seeing the victimized party as individual living human beings.

Dehumanization is commonly recognized in the context of hate where one groups that hates another will often see that group as less than human and hence acceptable to treat in an inhumane fashion (e.g., murdering them). However, I believe it also simply occurs when people’s humanistic processing capacity is overloaded—something that sadly occurs quite frequently in the modern age.

A variety of studies have suggested that (most) human beings have a limited ability to be present to the lives of others which seems to cap out at approximately 150 people. For this reason, a variety of human institutions operate very differently depending on how many people are within them. For example, in smaller societies like a village (where everyone knows everyone else) democracies work quite well, while in larger ones (where its no longer possible for everyone to be present to everyone else) abstract frameworks inevitably come into being that take the place of human connection and integration.

Note: I believe some individuals have the ability to be present to a much broader view of what is happening around them and how people are affected by their actions. Historically, these people have been known to be the best leaders. Unfortunately, in our current times, these qualities are rarely seen in our leaders as the political process no longer selects for it and the spiritual practices that cultivate the ability to bear witness to the suffering of many are no longer widely encouraged within our society.

One of the most common consequences of this is that when people rise to power, the people they serve switch from being human being to abstract concepts. In turn, policies are chosen which favor the collective rather than the individual and a collective mentality or “mass formation” (which can be quite sociopathic) often takes over that leadership. This in turn is how one who is not overtly evil can rationalize implementing policies which are clearly sociopathic.

For example, one of the most well-known critics of the vaccine safety movement recently tweeted something I believe is emblematic of this mentality:

The Nirvana fallacy (that as nothing will work 100% of the time, anything having less than a 100% efficacy is not a valid reason to dismiss it) is agreeable on the surface. However, it quickly becomes used to rationalize very unsafe and ineffective therapies (e.g., Gorski’s career was based around giving patients chemotherapy) and view the collateral damage is acceptable because the overall outcome is “better.” For example, consider the recently discussed WHO bulletin about vaccine injuries which stated:

At a population level, it is considered that these small risks are balanced by the benefits of widespread population immunization. However this means that an individual occasionally bears a significant burden for the benefit provided to the rest of the population.

Data and Dehumanization

When I was watching Barry’s interview, I realized one of the things that most bothered me about the whole story was the fact that each human being (particularly those who were suffering immensely) had become nothing more than a simple abstract datapoint.

Note: since I’ve been quite young, one of the things that has always bothered me about behavioral statistics (e.g., how many people can be expected to buy a product, be influenced by a propaganda campaign, or vaccinate) is that these predictions argue against individual human beings within the system having free-will (as their actions are effectively pre-determined by the existing statistics). As the years have gone by, this has become a bigger and bigger issue because most of the tech industry has morphed into using predictive algorithms to control the behavior of the general population.

This dehumanization, in turn, is not at all unique to the New Zealand data. Rather for decades I’ve come across dataset after dataset which shows something very wrong is going on. Yet in each case, I notice those responsible for administering the dataset fall prey to the same issue our leaders do, and the humans behind those numbers become abstract qualities that must be treated like variables in an equation to get the optimal outcome and issues that emerge for those human beings get rationalized away by the administrators and quickly are filed away out of sight and out of mind.

To his credit, Barry was one of the rare individuals who rather than dehumanize and intellectualize the data, maintained his ability to remain present to the humanity before him and was tortured by the knowledge of what the numbers he saw represented. This in turn was the key reason why I clipped his interview to present it in this article (as he repeatedly highlighted that point).

Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich (1926-2002) was a gifted polymath who recognized a variety of ills within society and accurately predicted what they would lead to throughout his lifetime and well after his death. One of Illich’s central beliefs was that the complexity necessary to maintain the smooth functioning of an increasingly technologically advanced society would result in the socialist governments of the world seeking to use every technological means available to more and more micromanage each aspect of society. Illich argued these (now laughably primitive) technocratic dictatorships were attempting to fulfill a fundamentally impossible task, and because they failed to recognize this, would instead respond to their failures by seeking more and more control over society.

Illich staunchly opposed our countless manipulative institutions and the elaborate mechanisms of control they utilized to force human beings into compliance. He viewed the reality they sought to create as being in direct opposition to human nature. Instead, Illich believed the ideal form of government followed a more decentralized model that supported or encouraged the natural capacities of each member of society and provided the tools each member needed to succeed (which like many idealists I believe the internet was meant to be a platform for). This thesis was based upon Illich’s observations of how well members of radically different societies around the world were able to work together, innovate, and become highly successful once they were allowed to do so.

In many ways, I realize we are in precisely the world Illich predicted. In turn, the current movement to micromanage every facet of our lives “with data” is being spearheaded by Silicon Valley. Conversely, anyone who wishes to act independently (e.g., by thinking critically) is actively disparaged as we are all told to “Trust the Science.”

Catastrophic Errors

One of the major issues with the increased sophistication of our society is that due to how interconnected things are now, the ability to a mistake to ripple out into a catastrophic error has greatly increased (e.g., consider Boeing’s recent decision to secretly put a cost-saving AI system into its new 737-MAX aircrafts which overrode the pilots in order to “stabilize the plane” but in numerous cases instead malfunctioned and crashed the plane into the ground).

When you look at these blunders, time and time again, the same pattern emerges—outside observers could have easily seen and corrected the issue, but rather than let the public be involved, those in charge opted to forbid anyone else from being involved in their deliberations (or even seeing the information they were working with).

I believe this steadfast refusal comes from the inherent neuroticism that comes with craving power. Until you’ve been in those circles, it’s difficult to understand, but leaders, especially those with underlying insecurities (which has become more and more common as we appoint more and more incompetent people to positions of authority) always want to control as much as they can.

In turn, I would argue the COVID-19 vaccine fiasco (along with our failure to use any of the available safe and effective treatments for COVID-19) exemplifies a critical problem with our current system. If our leaders make a “bad decision” regardless of how catastrophic it is, there is no real feedback system in place to end that decision or prevent additional ones from being made, regardless of how catastrophic that error is.
Note: another example is how our political system has shifted in tandem with the increasing corruption of the mass media. The current administration has made numerous horrific blunders that previously would have been national scandals, yet in each case, they’ve received a pass from the national media and hence been allowed to continue making those blunders.

The Greatest Evil

A question I am commonly asked is: “Who was the most evil person in history?”

Due to my ties to the Holocaust (as numerous members of my family died in it), people typically expect me to answer “Hitler.”

However, as the years went by, I came to realize there were actually things much worse than simply being evil and genocidal—as in those cases, there are things that still constrain how far the individual will go. Rather, I would argue that the greatest evil is actually committed by amoral individuals who are completely disconnected the consequences of their actions.

As I was putting this article together, I realized that many of the themes I touched upon (e.g., Illich’s nightmare being birthed by Big Tech) were what gave to birth to the man I consider to be the greatest monster in history, who through his attachment to abstract ideas (which disregarded the humans involved in their implementation) became responsible for more suffering than any other human being in history.

In the final part of this article I will discuss what he did, why he did it, and how in many ways our society is now repeating the exact same mistakes that led to the cruel and catastrophic disasters seen throughout his reign—as in both cases those in charge became fixated on the merits of their idea and closed their minds to any evidence that argued to the contrary.
Note: due to its nature, this is a topic I’ve gone back and forth on discussing for a while.