Pandemic Parallax View

Ivan Illich: Increasing and irreparable damage accompanies present industrial expansion in all sectors. In medicine this damage appears as iatrogenesis. Iatrogenesis is clinical when pain, sickness, and death result from medical care; it is social when health policies reinforce an industrial organization that generates ill-health; it is cultural and symbolic when medically sponsored behavior and delusions restrict the vital autonomy of people by undermining their competence in growing up, caring for each other, and aging, or when medical intervention cripples personal responses to pain, disability, impairment, anguish, and death.
Most of the remedies now proposed by the social engineers and economists to reduce iatrogenesis include a further increase of medical controls. These so-called remedies generate second-order iatrogenic ills on each of the three critical levels: they render clinical, social, and cultural iatrogenesis self-reinforcing.
The most profound iatrogenic effects of the medical technostructure are a result of those nontechnical functions which support the increasing institutionalization of values. The technical and the nontechnical consequences of institutional medicine coalesce and generate a new kind of suffering: anesthetized, impotent, and solitary survival in a world turned into a hospital ward. Medical nemesis is the experience of people who are largely deprived of any autonomous ability to cope with nature, neighbors, and dreams, and who are technically maintained within environmental, social, and symbolic systems. Medical nemesis cannot be measured, but its experience can be shared. The intensity with which it is experienced will depend on the independence, vitality, and relatedness of each individual.
The perception of nemesis leads to a choice. Either the natural boundaries of human endeavor are estimated, recognized, and translated into politically determined limits, or compulsory survival in a planned and engineered hell is accepted as the alternative to extinction. Until recently the choice between the politics of voluntary poverty and the hell of the systems engineer did not fit into the language of scientists or politicians. Our increasing confrontation with medical nemesis now lends new significance to the alternative: either society must choose the same stringent limits on the kind of goods produced within which all its members may find a guarantee for equal freedom, or society must accept unprecedented hierarchical controls[3] to provide for each member what welfare bureaucracies diagnose as his or her needs. [emphasis added] MEDICIAL NEMESIS – THE EXPROPRIATION OF HEALTH (1976)

3 The Honorable James McRuer, Ontario Royal Commission Inquiry into Civil Rights (Toronto: Queen’s Printer, 1968, 1969, 1971). On self-governing professions and occupations, see chap. 79. The granting of self-government is a delegation of legislative and judicial functions that can be justified only as a safeguard to public interests.

Katherine Watt: The goals and actions of the individual humans working on the global Covid-19 democide project are so brazenly and profoundly evil that good human minds shut down the instant they confront the information. We recoil instinctively—emotionally, cognitively and spiritually—from the extraordinary saturation of evil; we struggle to grasp how it can be so comprehensive in its scope and destructive in its force. Legal Walls of the Covid-19 Kill Box, Feb 2022