The Model Citizen

Can't separate fact from fiction

Have you noticed the drive to get us all on board with specific trains of thought over the past few decades? Those trains represent the ‘right’ thing to think and therefore the ‘right’ thing to do.

Let me clarify with a few examples:

Diet: Saturated fat is bad, eat it at your peril. Best to avoid it.

Climate: Man made CO2 is bad, it is warming our climate. We must reduce it, no matter the cost.

Covid-19: Is a dangerous novel virus. We must do everything we can to eliminate it.

Can you see that all these things demand that we accept some ‘truth’ that someone has proclaimed and therefore we must adjust our lives accordingly, for our own ‘good and the good of the planet’? After all ‘experts’ have said it is so. So it MUST be so. Especially if it came from an expert’s ‘model’, right?

For decades we have done our best to do exactly what those ‘experts’, and the governments that are promoting them and their models, have said we should do.

We’ve done that without thinking. Certainly without much questioning on our parts. Questions like, have they really got that right? Are our ‘experts’ and our government’s really speaking facts or are they lost in a fiction? Obviously we want to be good citizens and we’d like to trust that our governments have our good in mind and have the right experts in charge. That is what we have come to expect from government.

And where has that lack of thinking and questioning got us? Exactly where we are. A world seemingly digging itself into deeper and deeper peril on a daily basis.

Fact? Or fiction?

This is were we need to differentiate what is fact, from what is fiction.

You knew after all that dietary cholesterol ceased to be a “nutrient of concern” in 2015, didn’t you? No need to worry about the cholesterol in your diet. After all it’s a large part of our brain, as well as being a part of every cell membrane and the foundation for several key hormones. Those things are kinda useful.

Oh, no. You didn’t hear that? Sorry if you didn’t get the memo!

So, quietly, very quietly, a known ‘fact’ became an unknown fiction.

The same is happening for climate. Even the UN recently came out on the eve of COP27 and said they’d reduced their dire predictions of earth’s warming trajectory by at least 50%. While our governments are still travelling full steam ahead to crash our economies due to fictional dire predictions, the whole story is unravelling in front of their eyes and they can’t or won’t see it. I wonder if they UN is trying to wash their hands of the matter and plead, no it wasn’t me that started that?

So in place of the fictions let’s state some facts.

Diet: Saturated fat is good for you. Best to enjoy it, along with the meat it is often found in nature with.

Climate: Man made CO2 is an essential plant food just like the rest of the CO2 in the atmosphere. Plants would love a lot more if we could give it to them. 800-1500 ppm would be much better.

Covid-19: We don’t know what it is exactly but we know we are not getting the full story and that our governments response to Covid continues to bring us all to the edge of the abyss.

The Model Patient

One of the gems of wisdom I remember from medical school was when one of our professors informed us about what kind of patient we could expect would do the best. As 4th year medical students we were eager to learn the answer. After all, that is why we were attracted to medicine, wasn’t it? Actually helping people.

You’d expect it to be the patients who followed our instructions to the letter, the model patients, wouldn’t you? At least that’s what I expected when he posed the question. There’s nothing like naive optimism to make your day. Or break it.

But no, the patients that did the best, he taught us, were the cantankerous ones. The ones who argued every point. Why? Because they were the ones that were actively engaged in the process of getting well. They wanted to understand as much as they could, they were deeply involved in researching themselves and questioned everything. Be prepared to work with them, he said. Even though you may not want to. It would be less annoying and easier for you if your patients just shut up and accepted what you had to say. But you would see more of those patients suffer and die in your care. Is that what you really want?

I have to ask, have we, as a population, been cantankerous enough with our governments and their ‘experts’? For most of us the answer is a resounding NO. There have been many voices in the wilderness. People and real experts that have spoken out. Only to have their words and their work fall on deaf ears. This has been true in both dietary and climate science for decades. The result for those true experts, who spoke out, was usually professional oblivion. Not exactly rewarding! At least financially.

If you’re old enough to remember you may be able to cast your mind back to the two David’s, David Bellamy and David Attenborough. I’ll leave you to come to your own conclusions on who might have prostituted themselves for a career. Sadly one took on the giant and was completely thrashed. But even so, I know which one I’d go into battle with.

The current Covid fiasco has taken what has happened with diet and climate and put the propaganda and cancel culture on heavy duty steroids. Nothing has been allowed to contradict the narrative from the get go. World class experts have been tossed into the dungeons. Some never to be heard from again.

The only plus in this, is that more people are waking up than ever before to the wool being pulled continuously and determinedly over their eyes. Given the organised take down of dissenting experts, the fate of humanity may depend on the bulk of humanity waking up. Mainstream media are doing everything they can to keep humanity asleep. If we aren’t aware of this humanity indeed may die in its sleep.

I found it chilling when I read what Hannah Arendt says about what makes the model citizens of Nazi and Communist regimes. Like my experience with my earlier professor, it was not what I had expected.

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (that is, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (that is, the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Did you see that coming?

So, totalitarian ideologues therefore want a population that can’t distinguish fact from fiction, true from false. Does that help you make sense of why we have been subjected to an endless stream of “experts” telling us fibs that are pitched to us as truths?

That this has happened in so many fields and that science contradictory to the narrative, or ‘accepted right thinking’, has been profoundly cancelled, must surely point to a hidden hand guiding our institutions.

There is no ultimate good waiting for a population that can’t distinguish fact from fiction. To give democracy the best chance we need to know, to the best of our ability, what is fact and what is fiction. Only then can we, as a populace, make the best decisions. Just like the cantankerous patients that wanted to find out the truth of their situation, only then can we come to know the truth and have that truth set us all free.

Otherwise we might as well be ‘model’ citizens. Or maybe we’d be better off being like Erica?

I’m sure there are those that would prefer to deal with Erica than a full blooded human. Like a cantankerous patient, humans can be challenging to be in relationship with.

Erica can only repeat what she has been programmed to repeat. Whether it is fact or fiction depends on what her programmer determined for her. She has no sense of connection to anything, let alone the Divine. She may sound human but she is far from it. Sadly. a lot of humans are more like Erica than they care to admit.

I argue that it is time to be a cantankerous patient. We need to call our governments and their experts out. There are plenty of experts that deserve their voices to be heard. It is up to us to ensure our governments actually listen to them. Given how blocked their ears are we may need to start with our family, friends and neighbours until our cumulative voices get loud enough to get through to them.

Because if we don’t we might as well turn our brains off, turn our programmes on and join Erica.