We’re publishing an interview today with Martin Kulldorff, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and one of the three original signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration. Among other things, he warns of the dangers of censoring dissenting voices during a pandemic, following his own run-in with Twitter a couple of weeks ago.
The media has been very reluctant to report reliable scientific and public health information about the pandemic. Instead they have broadcast unverified information such as the model predictions from Imperial College, they have spread unwarranted fear that undermine people’s trust in public health and they have promoted naïve and inefficient counter measures such as lockdowns, masks and contact tracing.
While I wished that neither SAGE nor anyone else would argue against long-standing principles of public health, the media should not censor such information. During a pandemic, it is more important than ever that media can report freely. There are two major reasons for this: (i) While similar to existing coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 is a new virus that we are constantly learning more about and because of that, it takes time to reach scientific conclusions. With censorship it takes longer and we cannot afford that during a pandemic. (ii) In order to maintain trust in public health, it is important that any thoughts and ideas about the pandemic can be voiced, debated and either confirmed or debunked.
This is a great interview done by the same journalist who interviewed Jay Bhattacharya for Lockdown Sceptics last week.
Worth reading in full.
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“to produce a consciousness of that truth”—–One man’s “misinformation” is another man’s ultimate truth. But what government mean by calling things “misinformation” is that it is truth that is not government approved. There can be no room for personal opinion, and only one opinion is to be allowed or people are in danger of committing “hate crimes” or other such nonsense. ——So essentially what “to produce a consciousness of that truth” actually amounts to is BRAINWASHING.
Or, for a less intellectual analysis on a cheery Saturday morning you can listen to Tom Paxton;
https://www.google.com/search?q=the+thought+went+free&rlz=1CAHELE_enGB1053&oq=the+thought+went+free&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQRRhA0gEINDgyN2owajeoAgCwAgA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:e776dbd6,vid:T8eHTtSlPg0,st:0
When I click on your link I get a very brief glimpse of the Google page to which it links, then my Google home page replaces it. Almost as if someone doesn’t want me to look at it (which seems believable, given the suject of this article!). Anyone having the same experience, or have I got a glitch of some kind?
Exactly so. So search for Tom Paxton The thought Went Free.
Every Opposing View Will Be Crushed
Foucault may have been right about mediaeval pastors’ concept of controlling the soul, but it was seldom true in practice because even good pastors were humans with foibles (and came from among the people), and bad ones took the money and drank or womanised whilst the people sorted themselves out. Popes and Cardinals were as removed from oi polloi as today’s elites.
But if for the sake of argument we accept Foucault’s characteristic (and destructive) reduction of everything to “power,” then one of the worst things about state totalitarianism is its self-evident cack-handedness in deciding the truth it imposes. Christianity (contra the secular myths) took hold because it had a morality that worked for individuals and society , a spiritually egalitarian theology that offered the poor and outcast eternal rewards – and (from my Christian viewpoint) a personal connection with the divine that satisfied the soul.
What we have now is like late Soviet Communism – everyone is forced to parrot it, but hardly anyone actually believes it. And that minority decreases as the health-gospel produces sicker people, the unlimited cheap energy policies freeze people to death, the LGBTQ+ factions fight each other and damage children, and so on. And most significantly, the whole project belongs to an increasingly marginalised Western world, as more and more of us recognise.
So, like other tyrannies, it may well enslave entire nations, but will fail because the slaves know they are slaves, and eventually subvert the system.
Their idea of total control will fail because in their utopia of total control mankind would cease to exist.
This is in line with Lenin’s idea that once communism is implemented perfectly, the state will “wither away”. This is true but only in the diabolical sense that in order to implement communism perfectly the entire population would have to be executed first; in that state of course the state would indeed wither away as there would be nobody left.
I’m always a bit baffled how these otherwise obscure French “intellectuals”, like Foucault managed to acquire such influence – does anybody read these guys? The same with Marx: a good economist at best but as a philosopher?
Nevertheless I believe it was Jung who posited the idea that the opposite of love is not hate, but power. I can see how this is true: the state has an insatiable desire to acquire more and more power, not just over what people can and cannot do but increasingly over what people are allowed to think. In this sense the state seems to be permanently unhappy with mankind; ideally they would like to reduce them to some animal-machine hybrid that it can have total control over. It is highly annoying for the state that, at least at the moment, people’s thoughts cannot yet be controlled like computer program.
In contrast there is not a single example, even a hint in the Gospel, as far as I can see, where Jesus tried to save or heal someone against their will. He offers freedom at all times. In this sense power is indeed the polar opposite of love.
28 Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
It is hard to imagine anyone of the current powers that be uttering any such words.
Especially if it increased the risk of them being unemployed; money talks. After all, what would happen if various Government Departments had less work to do?
I heard Jung said that after meeting Dick Cheney. Seems about right. It’s well to remember that the state is comprised of people, and while we allow, through laziness or selfishness, for damaged and inadequate twats to reach high office, we’ll all suffer the consequences.
If you want utter confusion and real misinformation listen to the philosophers and the sophists. Out of their contempt for reality we have all the isms that have destroyed our world. Once opposed ‘Science’ has now joined in so we have ‘Scientism’. Metaphyics+fraud parading as truth.
Hi David. I think it still is a freewill free speech issue. The problem is with how such is understood . Freewill is about a form of freedom from other wills which allows an element of responsibility, hence free-will. Muddling this with free choice is a mistake.In the bible it is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which marks this freewill either way . The problem with the state is that it has no totem against which freedom from it’s will or ‘truth’ is judged, in fact such is not even within it’s purview; hence by definition which ever way it develops it will become totalitarian. For the state making society better means bringing more stuff into line with it’s truth, when the proper development of all men is quite different. That is a greater actualization of individual responsibility. Mens lives are not a state fragment they are their own hopes and dreams.
Sorry but I think that is vastly over thought.
The purpose of politics is power, leading to wealth and comfort for the wielders of it. And glory and fame.
Dissent among the proles threatens that comfort, and needs to be suppressed. As violently as necessary.
Simples.
Twas ever thus, made easier by technology and pacifying people with material prosperity
That’s exactly it.
Succinct and to the point Jack.
Agreed, follow the money.
You may control your own speech in the manner described by Psalmist 39, but if your speech is controlled by others, it cannot be free.
In the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth describes two sorts of shepherd. The true shepherd ‘lays down his life for the sheep’. The hireling shepherd flees when the wolf attacks. Can the state-as-pastor retain legitimacy as true shepherd when its ‘religious’ – the police and social services – turn a blind eye to the grooming gangs; or when they eventually prosecute a token handful? Or when they diligently arrest some rioters but run away from others?
Unlike in Foucault, no sheep is ejected from the Israelite flock. The metaphor of ‘shepherd’, which has survived to our time in ‘pastor’, came originally from eastern and southern Palestine. Passing into Hebrew poetry, it was constantly used by the three great prophets, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah for both the ecclesiastical and civil rulers of the people. Not only healing the weak, but the pastor also guarded the strong. However, in the Christian churches it was only gradually that the functions of pastor and laity separated to make the pastor the sort of officer of the medieval church.
Moreover, the organisational arrangement of the early Christian churches was provisional until ‘the Lord should come again’. With the Roman destruction of the Temple, the immediate return of the Messiah to a temporal reign in Judea became a distant hope and with the churches ceasing to circulate around Jerusalem this hope began to take the form of a new spiritual empire as wide as the Roman Empire itself. In this there grew up the concept of the new Ecclesia Dei whose limits were the world, an exact counterpart, though on a larger scale, of the old Ecclesia Dei whose limits had been Palestine.
The true shepherd, Jesus of Nazareth declares in the Gospels, goes in search of the lost one. Foucault’s state-as-shepherd is more like the Judean Sanhedrin whom Jesus accused of making up rules that ostensibly made the people moral but in practice only burdened them without improving them. Ejecting the unredeemable sheep is more GDR than ancient Judea. More goat, as in scapegoat, than sheep. The animals that were to be separated, according to Jesus’s parable, were the sheep from the goats.
The Apostle Paul urged his Roman and Greek converts to obey the governing authorities. However, Paul included one easily overlooked caveat. The legitimacy of the authorities lay in that they were a terror to those with bad conduct. But what if they are not a terror? Are shoplifters frightened of the police or the courts? Are illegal immigrants in terror of the Home Office or Border ‘Force’?
Girard was not quite on the money, as they say. When Jesus of Nazareth declared that what was Caesar’s should be given to Caesar and what was God’s should be given to God, he wasn’t exactly making a distinction between government and religion.
If the coin in question that Jesus was talking about in this instance had to be given to the emperor, where was he? He wasn’t in the Temple, where this discussion took place, and if he came there, he would only come as far as the court of the Gentiles. The coin would have to be taken out of the Temple to the place where the emperor was. This is a demand for the separation of the profane from the holy.
In the ancient Roman world, a person could have two religions. There was the religion recognised by the state. Then there were the religions that any person could worship in private.
But the transition from the churches being subordinate and their adherents being merely tolerated at best, even though the early churches were an intrinsic part of Roman civil society organised as all the other free associations that honeycombed the Roman world, to a position of dominance as the religion of the state with its clergy now high officers in the imperial government badly affected the church’s internal organisation which had been democratic and its relationship with the masses. Heresy was now a political crime.
This change in the church’s fortunes combined with the increasing instability of the later Empire due to both internal and external factors caused an intensification of the sentiment of order (or ‘safety’ as it would be termed today). The conception of civil order under the Imperial regime was very different to that of modern times. The tendency in modern societies is to have the greatest amount of freedom that is compatible with order. The tendency in the Empire was to have the greatest amount of order that was compatible with freedom.
(TBC)
It was true, as Girard stated, that in the Empire civil order was thought of as almost divine. The head of state seemed to have by virtue of his elevation some attributes of divinity. This dignity was the same as given by the Apostolical Constitutions to clergy who could celebrate the Eucharist, separating them from those who did not possess it.
When in the later Roman Empire and its successor kingdoms the ecclesiastical organisation was the only remaining stable institution, those who preserved the tradition of imperial rule, by mere fact of their status, seemed to stand on a platform inaccessible to ordinary men.
Update this to the secular polities of the 21st century. The nation-state, like the first century Palestine Messiah-ship, is to be surpassed by world rule. The government minister becomes by virtue of his or her position a pastor, a self-declared servant (Labour’s government a ‘government of service’): a church ‘minister’ means ‘servant’. But at the same time, as the only and self-declared restorer of order (as the later Roman emperors declared themselves to be) to the ‘broken’ institutions, the minister is elevated above the masses, separated as the priest from his or her flock.
In a secular polity the head of state, even if a monarch, has no divine attributes. But instead, the secular state existing solely in its activities carried out as by an incorporeal hand acquires divinity as a necessary legitimisation. The Almighty God-State before whose omnipresence, invisible as Jehovah and just as terrible, goes not the Cross of Christ but the rainbow banner under which absolute diversity becomes absolute uniformity. The ‘servants’ ensure that the will of this deity ‘clothes’ every person, just as the biblical description has the spirit of God ‘clothing itself with Gideon’, the Israelite hero.
But in earlier times there was a grander faith. For the kingdom of God was a kingdom of priests. Not only the ‘four-and-twenty elders’ before the throne, but the innumerable souls of the sanctified upon whom ‘the second death had no power’; each of whom were ‘kings and priests unto God’. Only in that sense was priesthood in the church predicable of Christian men and women. For the shadow had passed: Reality had come: the One High Priest of Christianity was Christ.
(Obtaining a copy of Edwin Hatch’s The Organisation of the Early Christian Churches (Longmans, Green & Co, 1895) from which extracts have been respectfully taken, is of use to those interested).
The direction we are going in means that soon everything we say or do will be either compulsory or forbidden. The space between the two getting narrower every day
“(what is nowadays called ‘global governance’) properly so-called”
Or New World Order!
From the comments, it looks a fascinating article. Could a kind person summarise it for those of us with limited attention span
A couple of AI summaries, but I feel they miss the essence:
CHATGPT:
The core issue is not just about whether we have freedom of speech, but that speech—its link to thought and truth—has become a focus of state interest. In a secular society, resolving this problem will be a major challenge of our time. The solution, however, may lie more in personal, internal reflection rather than in changes to laws, politics, or government structures.
GOOGLE GEMINI:
This text argues that the real issue is not whether we have freedom of speech, but rather the fact that the state has taken an interest in speech itself and its relationship to thought and truth. This is a new development in a secularized society, and how it is resolved will be a key challenge. The resolution may need to be found within individuals’ own souls rather than in legal, political, or governmental structures.
I hope that helps!
makes sense now, thank you very much
I don’t think it is true at al in regard to our relationship to the state. Most people are distrustful of the state but at the same time they are insecure about their own knowledge and wisdom, many believe that science and mathematics are beyond their ken, and in Britain the people are particularly timid hence mass compliance. It isn’t out of trust of the state but fear of it that people go along in my experience. The cowardliness in this country isn’t the same everywhere else. They got addicted to the high life and they worry that it will stop. It will stop because when you worship the materium you lose not only the spiritual realm but also all the gifts of the materium.
Government as God. Socialists (who think the bigger government is, the better) are, in my experience, always atheists. Even if they profess religion, scratch the surface and you find an apostate. One of the main themes of the Bible – Old and New Testament – is free will. That is inconsistent with pervasive, domineering government.
An interesting discussion and commenters above have said all and more than I could even begin to think!! However, I question the benevolence of any modern government and particularly ours in the UK (see ‘the benevolent guidance of government’) – rather, I seriously think if it might be outright evil!
They certainly haven’t got “the man on the Clapham omnibus“ interest at heart.
It was Foucault who argued that the site of social control was the body. We suffered blatant social control mechanisms during the Covid era by the imposition of vaccines and masks. How right he was! That was pretty successfully executed by government diktats.
Also the surveillance of bodies he identified is in full force these days. His work on the inbuilt system of control known as the panopticon was prescient. Fear of being seen to do something wrong has morphed into fear of saying something wrong in public nowadays. The public square of X for example is where you can be punished these days not unlike like the stocks in the past.
We are headed for the outcome of the growth of efficiency of the language system, in AI, and everyone can talk to everyone at little cost but no authority. The outcome is self-referentiality, which, like automation, is max efficiency, and it is also the loss of the meaning which was only represented by the growth that conformity subsumes.
Self-referentiality poses a problem for those in charge because of the loss of authority.
All they can do is to alter the nature of the conformity to a dictatorship, but it is a distinction without a difference.
Talking about language, am I alone in feeling some articles are excessively long – labouring the point until the point is lost
Probably, but people start substacks and then have to keep going !