An inclusional worldview
Pandemic Pre-emption APN#1
Perhaps nothing pre-empts minority views as effectively as the threat of a global catastrophe that appears to be avertable, if and only if everyone ‘gets on board’ the effort to ‘cut it off at the pass’. For example, if one believes that getting vaccinated will attenuate the spread of H1N1 to the point that it never reaches ‘critical mass’, then it becomes a ‘moral imperative’ for everyone to get vaccinated and, figuratively speaking, lower the lead rods into the about-to-go-supercritical nuclear core of global society.
Managing a pandemic counter-defensive requires a concerted effort by the media to mobilize the masses, and there is no time, under these circumstances, to open the media channels to hear out the ‘minority views’ which question a runaway logic that may be more effective in provoking pandemonium than countering pandemic.
But when the media balks, there is also the internet and Youtube videos such as the interview of Dr. Russell Blaylock by Dr. Joseph Mercola;
It may be useful, at this point, to remind the reader that these Aboriginal Physics Newsletters aim to compare and contrast two ways of ‘seeing the world’, the ‘Enlightenment view’ based on ‘representations’ (‘maps’, ‘drawings’, ‘photographs’) and the ‘flow view’ of Aboriginal/Medieval ‘physics’ which has resurfaced in the ‘thingless connectedness’ of relativity and quantum physics.
So, this newsletter is not to compare the merits of the ‘Medical Establishment’s’ position on H1N1 relative to the merits of Drs. Blaylock and Mercola. Nevertheless, a comparing and contrasting of their radically opposing views on H1N1 and the H1N1 vaccination initiative, exposes more than ‘their differences’; i.e. it exposes the problems with the Enlightenment model of inquiry that they are both using.
If you watch the Youtube Mercola-Blaylock video interview (in several segments which add to about 40 minutes), you will see several seemingly well-reasoned points that run counter to the views of the mainstream medical establishment, based on the mainstream’s own data and studies. These include;
- Damage to the brain development of unborn infants correlates with the mother undergoing an immune system response ‘jolt’, particularly in the third trimester of pregnancy which is where the child’s brain is in its most rapid phase of development. This damage, which can lead to autism and schizophrenia (later in life), is also correlated with infant vaccination programs in the first two years of the child’s life wherein the development of the child’s brain continues to be in its most rapid development phrase.
- As the statistics have been showing, there is a 99.97% to 99.99% chance of the mother avoiding a serious immune system jolt from the H1N1 flu in the case where she does not take the vaccine. Meanwhile, there is a 100% chance of getting the immune system jolt if she takes the vaccine.
Statistics are amazing things. One starts with a mere statistical correlation between an action and a result and one imputes a ‘causal relation’ between the two; e.g. ‘smoking causes cancer’. Well, the statistical correlation only suggests this because we invented the ‘causal model’ and, what’s more, we like using it, so its leaned on pretty hard not only by Western science but by the thinking in our Western culture.
Of course there are always the ‘false positives’, those cases where the person smokes but it doesn’t cause cancer, and where people get H1N1 vaccinations and it doesn’t cause the Guillain-Barré auto-immune (neurological) disorder (500 people who received H1N1 vaccinations in 1976 got this disorder; i.e. it correlated very strongly with being given the vaccine).
A reasonable person, it seems, would conclude that the ‘causal model’ is a very simple model that allows us to draw conclusions about what is going on, without knowing very much about the details.
The ‘what’ of ‘what is going on’ would appear to involve ‘the terrain’, … the ‘condition of our bodies’ as associates with the diverse multiplicity of interdependent processes, wherein the interdependency is not only ‘internal’ but is relative to the dynamics of the habitat in which we are included inhabitants.
So, both Blaylock and the ‘Medical Establishment’ have chosen their duelling weapons and in both cases it is this very blunt instrument called ‘the causal model’.
There is an alternative.
On his deathbed, Pasteur rejected the causal model and conceded to the view of his lifelong ‘adversary’, Antoine Béchamp, that ‘the proliferation of pathological causal agents (microbes) was not the CAUSE of illness, but was the RESULT of illness. In his words ‘Béchamp avait raison, le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout’.(‘Béchamp was right, the microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything’).
What kind of model is this?
It is a model that, in the field of medicine, goes back to Hippocrates who felt that ‘health’ was when we were in balance with nature and ‘illness’ was when we were out of balance with nature. Thus, when we are (our terrain is) out of balance, bacteria and viruses that are otherwise innocuous when they are in our ‘terrain’, proliferate. That is, the terrain, the condition of our bodies (in our body’s dynamic relation with the environment) can be fertile ground for the proliferation of certain types of microbes. When they proliferate rapidly and excessively their waste product become toxic to our systems.
This is the alternative model proven out by the work of Nobel laureate in medicine (in 1937 for his work on Vitamin C), Albert Szent-Györgyi. He contended that it was ridiculous to record ‘pneumonia’ as the ‘cause’ of death on death certificates because there are over 100 different bacteria and viruses that can lead to the condition known as ‘pneumonia’ and the proliferation of any or all of these can arise when the ‘terrain’ of the body is out-of-balance and affords fertile ground for their explosive growth.
In 2009, the medical establishment refuses to let go of its causal model to the point that it speaks of ‘the emergence of ‘super-bugs’ which are ‘anti-biotics resistant’ such as ‘clostridium difficile’ or ‘c. difficile’. C. difficile is innocuous to all but those who have been taking anti-biotics. It has killed thousands, mostly in hospitals, including otherwise healthy people who have been on anti-biotics as a precautionary measure in conjunction with minor surgery. These ‘new, lethal strains of superbugs’ as medical research and the press has labelled them, don’t bother doctors, nurses, hospital workers or visitors, so long as they are not on a course of anti-biotics.
So, returning to the topic of H1N1 vaccinations, one can note that both Dr. Blaylock and the ‘Medical Authorities’ are using the ‘causal model’ and it is a very simplistic model which is why one can make all kinds of causal conjectures, starting from statistical correlations between ‘actions’ and ‘results’.
There are so many apparently ‘causal’ relations that one can pick and choose. As Dr. Blaylock correctly points out, the US Medical Authorities (the CDC) did not ‘include’ the result of a Canadian medical establishment study that suggests that seasonal flu vaccine can increase the possibility of contracting H1N1 (which raises the question, how does the H1N1 vaccine raise the possibility of contracting a future flu strain?
“The study, lead by researchers from the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control and Laval University, found an increased risk of H1N1 contraction for those who had received the seasonal flu vaccine. In the study, the vaccine appeared to increase the possibility of contracting H1N1 by as much as two times. … Dr. Ethan Rubenstein, a University of Manitoba ‘medical establishment authority’ comments; “There are a large number of authors, all of them excellent and credible researchers,” says Rubinstein. “And the sample size is very large – 12 or 13 million people taken from the central reporting systems in three provinces. The research is solid.”” – Toronto Globe and Mail
Statistical correlations really don’t prove causality, but they sure have us all fretting and strutting; i.e. they underscore ‘what we don’t know’ more than establishing ‘what we do know’. The fact that there is a strong long term correlation between the number of fire engines at the site of fires and the damages resulting from the fire does not establish a ‘causal relation’. This is not much more ridiculous than saying that ‘c. difficile’ causes thousands of deaths every year.
Blaylock does not only go after the picking and choosing of causal relations (he picks the ones’ he likes, just as the Medical establishment picks the ones that they like), but he also brings out the fact that once the bit is in the teeth of those leading the pandemic counter-defensive, capturing battlefield details becomes secondary. That is, the fear of the pandemic has everyone with anything from colds and sore throats to allergies believing that they have ‘the swine flu’ and since only a small fraction of people are tested for what they have (those that are admitted to hospital, for the most part), it is difficult to say how much of what ‘seems to be going around’ is the swine flu. Blaylock uses the medical establishment’s own data to show that were the tests have been made for suspected cases, only a small proportion has been H1N1.
testing for and tracking the H1N1 virus
The pandemic counter-defensive was based on some alarming estimates of the incidence and severity of H1N1 flu that have, to date, been far out of whack with the actual. Every death, particularly of a young, apparently healthy person, is a heart-rending tragedy and media coverage during this pandemic counter-defensive seems to bring us to the conclusion that these are indeed extraordinary times, when the facts are that what has happened so far this season is far milder than with seasonal flu in most flu seasons.
The ‘causal model’ clearly makes an impression on us. Unlike Hippocrates’ model of health and illness (the Hygiean model of balance with nature) contrasted with the Aesculapian model of being possessed of evil which it was necessary to expulse. Dr. Robert Herwick gives an account of the historical origins of these two very different views of ‘health’ and ‘illness’ in ‘The Limitations of Medical Science in the Solution of Social Problems’, as can be sampled in the following excerpt;
“One of the most ancient concepts of health was that personified by Hygiea, the Greek goddess of health who watched over the corporeal welfare of the residents of Athens. Health was then based upon a unity with nature, a temperate lifestyle and the belief that good health was a natural attribute. Rather than treating the sick, Hygiea embodied the ideal of the preservation of natural health through living in harmony with nature. Slowly this ancient concept was replaced after the fifth century B.C. by the cult of Aesculapius, the son of Apollo and the god of medicine. Aesculapian temples were erected to which the sick were brought for mysterious healing rituals as well as for mineral baths, exercises (an early precursor of today’s physical therapy) and various unctions. The therapeutic ceremony, performed by the temple priest during a nocturnal trance in which a healing dream was interpreted, was not entirely dissimilar to “modern” Freudian or Jungian psychoanalytic practices. The salient point about the cult of Aesculapius is that it was a therapy of intervention, of combating a disease and seeking its expulsion from the body. The restoration of health was based to a large extent upon superstition: and at times almost charlatan mysticism which effected a magical cure together with an increase in the temple coffers. It is parenthetically somewhat disturbing that the staff of Aesculapius with its single snake has become the symbol of today’s medical profession. This becomes less objectionable, however, when one considers the often inappropriately used caduceus (that winged staff with two entwined snakes). This of course was the symbol of Mercury, the god of commerce and of thieves!”
For those who delve into the historical development of our modes of inquiry, the Enlightenment shows up as a significant turning point due to the advent of ‘representation’ and ‘line-of-sight perspective’. It was a turning point that strengthened the hand of the ‘causal model’, which in medicine unfolds as an ‘attack by evil pathogens’ that must be defended against, rather than an ‘unbalancing of the terrain’ which makes the ground fertile for the disproportionate proliferation of otherwise relatively innocuous dynamical forms.
As Donald Kunze (Architecture Prof. at Penn. State Univ.) observes, Enlightenment society started ‘seeing’ the world in a new way; wherein ‘representations’ such as drawings, maps, and – later – photographs were accepted as reliable substitutes for the visible. The ‘line-of-sight’ was treated as a ‘line-of-control’ and potential ‘power’. The representation was a means of control and power. It facilitated the inward flow of knowledge and the outward flow of power. … Foucault equates visibility with knowledge and knowledge with power and power with discipline. The seeing process is no longer reciprocal or dialectic, it is ‘regulatory’ and ‘disciplinary’.
How does ‘Enlightenment representation’ reinforce the ‘causal model’? An illustrative example is the ‘circulating-cell-in-the-flow’, as in the following representation (satellite photograph) of hurricane Francis
'representation' of hurricane francis (NASA)
There are two ways of ‘seeing’ this dynamical form just as there are two ways of ‘seeing’ in general. Of course, we are already looking at a ‘representation’ so we have to use our imagination of how aboriginal/medieval man would have seen/experienced this ‘from being inside of it’ prior to Enlightment society accepting ‘representations’ such as ‘photographs’ “as reliable substitutes for the visible”.
That is, one way is to see it as a gathering in the sky; i.e. as a dynamical pattern in the mother-flow of the atmosphere. However, Enlightenment society would tend to idealise this by ‘representation’ and to define and name-label it, treating it as a notional ‘local system’ with its own notional ‘local agency’.
This would have us think in ‘causal’ terms; i.e. ‘the storm-cells are stirring up atmosphere, which is much like the damage caused by fires is proportional to the number of fire engines at the scene. That is, the flow of the atmosphere is the mother of the storm-cells (convection-cells) rather than the parentage being vice versa.
The error is in accepting ‘representations’ as reliable substitutes for the visual, a different way of ‘seeing’ that was popularized in Enlightenment society.
In the aboriginal/medieval view, the ‘flow’ came first. For example, nomadic peoples in the desert were drawn to oases in the manner that ants are drawn to honey. The pattern that forms from men coming out of the desert into the oasis and leaving the oasis persists over generations and the dwellings in the oasis village can be seen in the context of a ‘biofilm’ that is precipitated by the continual comings and goings; i.e. the trans-generational flow of people in a conjugate habitat-inhabitant dynamic relation.
Meanwhile, if we consider that a ‘representation’ such as a ‘photograph’ is a “reliable substitute for the visible”, then we can forget about the ‘flow’ and its intricate web of relations being primary and we can point to the representation of the dwellings and say’ this is a ‘local community’. During Enlightenment society’s ‘colonizing’ phase, representations were regarded as reliable substitutes in the sense that a ‘map’ was used to show ‘Land reserved for Indians’ in the same manner that drawings of dwellings were used as reliable substitutes for the visible perception of dwellings, so that it followed that those dwellings could be moved or rebuilt in the new location shown on the ‘map’.
The notion of ‘flow’ in the form of a dynamic web of connecting spatial relations that associated with hunting, fishing, foraging, trading, wherein the ‘community’ not merely the local pattern at the centre of the web (it was the whole web) and the dwellings were not merely local structures, but were precipitates of the continuing ‘standing pattern’ in the manner of a vortex in a flow, … was lost by substituting ‘representations’ for the visible such as ‘maps’ with rectangular boxes depicting land and ‘drawings’ which captured the architecture of the dwellings out of the context of their primary character as a precipitated ‘crust’ at the nodal centre of a web of comings and goings.
Pasteur’s inverting of ‘cause’ and ‘result’ is, in effect, a throwback to the pre-Enlightenment aboriginal/medieval way of seeing wherein ‘the terrain-dynamic is everything’.
Should we say that farmers are the ‘cause’ of the production of grain? Or should we say that the proliferation of farmers is the result of the production of grain? (i.e. ‘that the earth is fertile ground for the proliferation of farmers’). Using representation, we can show maps of the farm, photographs of the farmer, his equipment, his working of the soil and finally the ‘correlated result’ that, notionally, ‘HE has caused’.
As Chris Hedges observes in ‘I Don’t Believe in Atheists’; “But there was a dark side to the Enlightenment. Philosophers insisted that the universe and human nature could be understood and controlled by the rational mind.”, which brings into focus Donald Kunze’s observation that in the Enlightenment society, “The representation was a means of control and power. It facilitated the inward flow of knowledge and the outward flow of power.”
To conclude, there are philosophical problems with ‘the causal model’ but we’re not going to hear them from either Dr. Blaylock or the ‘Medical authorities’ since both are busy running their causal conclusions up the field in opposite directions, and there are plenty of facts to crank through the causal model. For example, another ‘patch’ on the causal model is the notion of the ‘cocktail effect’. Even when we think we know the causal effect of the agents we infuse into the body, when two or more agents are infused (even at different times), the combined effects are typically different from the sum of the causal effects. E.g. two drugs which are innocuous when taken individually, can be lethal when taken together. Hence Dr. Blaylock’s contention that vaccination programs that use aluminum or mercury as ‘adjuvants’ (to amplify immune system response), though in different vacccines taken at different times, collect in the body and are likely to ‘cause’ very different effects than can be deduced from their individual effects, which is the basis for approving a vaccine as ‘safe’.
the effect of two causal effects is ... 'anybody's guess'
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The ‘causal model’ avoids the obvious, that the condition of the ‘terrain’ is altered by what we infuse into it, whether it be vitamin C or D3, or anti-biotics or vaccines. How the ‘terrain’ is altered is what we need to look for rather than to pathogen body-count that we attribute to our Aesculapian expurgatory aka counter-causal agent.
The good news is that there are things that we can infuse into our ‘terrain’ that are not calculated to causally purge the terrain of evil pathogens at the expense of unpredictable‘collateral damage’, but which contribute to the cultivating and sustaining of balance and resilience in the terrain. The same differences in our way of ‘seeing’ the issues are available to us in the macro terrain where the fear of attack by pathological agents has also been steadily mounting. If ‘the terrain is everything’ applies in the macro terrain, then the anti-pathogen strategy of the ‘causal model’ will similarly have to give way to terrain re-balancing initiatives.
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