July 2, 2022
Doctors have no political consciousness just by dint of their medical training. When we see doctors with political consciousness we are surprised by it. “Oh, Che, you are also a doctor?” It’s unusual, because it takes other experience or training to develop that political consciousness. Do you want to live in a utopia ruled by doctors? No, no one does: for good reason we have long since decided that.
The fundamental of the medical profession is the Hippocratic Oath: do no harm. And built up from that. But someone with woke political consciousness says “I can see the problem with that as a qualification for leadership, or a reason forthwith for power.”
I do not see the benefit of someone following the Hippocratic Oath to political power. You can easily see how someone could follow it through a servile advancement to a sycophantic position relative to any political position - in politics, the Hippocratic Oath is value-neutral and therefore gutless, spineless, no one’s leader.
What I have seen vis-a-vis the currently installed emergency powers to deal with Covid, is a lot of people with a doctor’s degree, suddenly coming face to face with real State power. And these M.D.’s are only seeing that they can suddenly use real power to “make us all healthy.” Make us all stay home (they haven’t been able to thus far) or close businesses. But a doctor without political consciousness by default is going to shrug his shoulders when someone talks about the collateral damage done by these policies to suppress the free movement of people.
Because make no mistake: these policies are not policies for health at its core: they are policies to control our conduct. Because the State is involved in enforcing these policies, the effect is made on our conduct and not our health consciousness. I’m not calling for the end of mask mandates in schools, until people are all vaccinated, or until its reasonably safe to lift them - in schools, and so on. But with stay-at-home orders and business closures, observe the real timeline: overall, the rapid response to Covid was not rapid nor strong enough. We needed them right away, along with voluntary masking, and just as much, we needed to reopen as soon as vaccination was the norm. But what really happened was that the medical policy makers of the State didn’t immediately issue stay at home orders and mask policies in essential spaces like schools, and after they issued them too late to have an effect, they keep clamping them down on us, as if they are embarrassed to have wrongly responded to it at first. And shame on them for not admitting that they failed and not that Covid is such a history - stopping disease. Covid is not the most terrifying disease in history - but rather, our failure to respond well made it the catastrophe it became. I have not heard that apology.
The truth we need to not forget is that demographic truth we don’t want to admit: a lot of young people went into the medical field for the wrong reasons: for status and for the fact that tech can “make it really easy” to be passable at it. And the continued seeking for status from these “bright, young” people led them to public health, health policy and so on, as a route to political power. And it’s these people that are hanging around like jackals eyeing the creation of these special emergency powers. A whole class of young “smart kids” leaning heavily on the crutch of technology, overloading the medical profession, grasping at State power now as they start to flame out - do you see any liberty, let alone health of the state in that? And meanwhile underneath that flashy class of tech opportunists, a smaller group of people who are putting in the work in the classic, right way - slow but stable. Who do you want to be your doctors? Who do you want to set your public health policy? Do you see and hear the desperation behind these stay at home and closure policies? They’re made by people displeased with the future they’re seeing, and they’re not planning for the kind of generational leadership that actually exists.
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