THE AWAKENING OF MOE DODSON

PART 1

THE NHS

“The NHS is one of the biggest employers in the world, with some estimates putting it as high as the sixth biggest only behind the Indian Ministry of Defence, US Department of Defense, the People’s Liberation Army of China, Walmart and Amazon...." (https://www.nhsconfed.org/articles/key-statistics-nhs, )

Thus, some PR Department in the huge NHS Megamachine, brags about its Leviathan proportions as if that is a good thing.

The Huffington Post newspaper in a similar example of sycophantic idolatry that beggars disbelief (https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/nhs-birthday_uk_595cb761e4b05c37bb80cc06), published the following set of damning indictments of the NHS, implying instead that its Leviathan size and overspending prove its power and glory, and that its 'success' is proven by people living longer than they did before its establishment.

"1) It’s the fifth largest employer in the world

2) It Will Spend £4,677 Every Second This Year

3) The Most Expensive Treatment Costs Up To £10 Million Per Patient

4) The Most Expensive Non-Specialised Treatment Costs £24,000 Per Patient

5) Despite funding pressures it works: Both men and women live an average of 10 years longer than they did before the creation of the NHS in 1948."

Point by point:

1. Big is definitely not beautiful, especially the more centralised the decisions are, leading to increasing useless layers of bureaucrats who have to manage the bureaucrats, etc. and decisions that are inflexible, insensitive to local nuances and needs, etc. A sclerotic system where incompetence, careerism, and corruption become normalised. Ask any sane person who works for the NHS.

2. , 3. and 4. Who does it spend this exorbitant amount of OUR money on? Again, ask any NHS worker who has eyes and ears - ask me, I used to work for the NHS in 1970. The corruption was not only evident, it was often confessed to me by insiders - a pair of scissors costing the equivalent of £1000 today because the company who made them had a monopoly, and 'friends' on the resources committee of the hospital. Just one small example - multiply by all the other needed and then un-needed expensive equipment and medicines bought instead of much needed inexpensive equipment and materials, etc. And then covid. The waste is beyond my imagination. It is lethal. Murderous. Worthy to be compared with the worst excesses of Caligula. It makes me gag, choke on my words, De profundis clamavi ad te Domine!

4. By what measure of imagination can one call underfunded a spendthrift, bloated, management heavy, overspending (think of the adverts and PR alone!) systemically inefficient and incompetent, proven corrupt, and often evil institution - think of the scandals, many scandalous actions of the institution, including the recent blood scandal. Of serial murderers and sexual perverts. Not that rare: our GP was convicted of having under-age porn and being part of such a network.

5. And the final clinching argument the writer supposes proves that 'Auntie NHS' nurtured us and brought us back to a long and healthy life: "Both men and women live an average of 10 years longer than they did before the creation of the NHS in 1948."

Point by point:

a) Post Hoc is not Propter Hoc: the correlation here is probably incidental - longevity had been climbing for nearly half a century due mainly to more fresh, clean food for more people, better housing in cities and cleaner water to drink and wash in.

b) Even if the actions of the NHS had helped to raise the average age of death,

• How important were their actions compared to other actions/events?

• Could not a localised health, nutrition and exercise service, based on the Peckham Experiment have done a much better job?

c) It ignores 'iatrogenesis', disease caused by medical treatment. Depending on what criteria, 25% to 80% of disease today is iatrogenic.

d) It ignores 'quality of life' - many live longer crippled, bedridden, drug-filled, isolated, pain-ridden, or hospitalised lives among strangers. So effing what?

e) It ignores what the NHS ignores: facts. Nutrition. Pollution. Meaningful Work in Community; Friends and Family in Community; Touch... These or the absence of these predict life-spans better than blood pressure, medical interventions, etc. (For one summary see R Dunbar, Friends, pp.4ff)

f) Are we any happier because of the NHS or in spite of it? Are our lives more meaningful? As it happens, we are increasingly unhappy since the NHS came along by any measure made, from self-reporting levels, serotonin levels compared, mental health rates, etc. Modern humans living in the metropolitan world are the unhappiest in world history. Depression, anxiety, obesity, suicide - climbing up hill on the old graphs at a rate. Pinker can suck his thumb all he wants at that 'fact', but he's lost every time before trying to 'prove' we are on the road to shangrilah with modern science and liberal capitlaism.

And the NHS itself is one of the causes of this unhappiness. It makes us emotionally dependent on a 'social/technological mega-machine' that cannot provide the most important things we need for health, and worse, removes many of these from our mental/spiritual horizon, while often enough causing life-crippling disease and death.

Even worse, it is one of the largest 'arms' of the global techno/financial/military/industrial complex that has grown exponentially since WWI. It has overtly supported eugenics and still does by another name, and has acted on it whether knowingly or not by implementing the 'covid laws'.

As part of the global techno/financial/military/industrial complex it is complicit with the transhumanist project to create computerised humans under the delusion that humans can understand and create life better than life itself, which is not at all, according to this 'religion' , mysterious - but just like any other machine: eventually we'll take it apart, and put it back better than ever - build it back better.

This is a quote from a Canadian Government Research Paper. Similar quotes are found in other Western Government papers:

"What is Bio-Digital Convergence: Section 3. Conceptual convergence of biological and digital systems"

"As we continue to better understand and control the mechanisms that underlie biology, we could see a shift away from vitalism – the idea that living and nonliving organisms are fundamentally different because they are thought to be governed by different principles." (https://horizons.service.canada.ca/en/2020/02/11/exploring-biodigital-convergence/)........

"Instead, the idea of biology as having predictable and digitally manageable characteristics may become increasingly common as a result of living in a biodigital age. Any student of biology today will have grown up in a digital world and may consciously or subconsciously apply that frame of reference to bioinformatics and biology generally."

"Digital technology can be embedded in organisms, and biological components can exist as parts of digital technologies. The physical meshing, manipulating, and merging of the biological and digital are creating new hybrid forms of life and technology, each functioning in the tangible world, often with heightened capabilities.

"Robots with biological brains⁰¹ and biological bodies with digital brains⁰² already exist, as do human-computer and brain-machine interfaces.⁰³ The medical use of digital devices in humans⁰⁴, as well as digitally manipulated insects such as drone dragonflies⁰⁵ and surveillance locusts⁰⁶, are examples of digital technology being combined with biological entities. By tapping into the nervous system and manipulating neurons, tech can be added to an organism to alter its function and purpose. New human bodies and new senses of identity⁰⁷ could arise as the convergence continues." (ibid.)

The stupidity and ignorance of this writing is staggering. Differences of scale in 'science' determine very different laws governing the 'matter' being measured: since Einstein's generation, very different 'laws' for different levels of magnitude, and sometimes no laws at all, but just probabilities. Perhaps they have never heard of Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Einstein....

Any real scientist knows well that science cannot measure or even notice what are the most important things - just pick up Newton, AN Whitehead, Einstein, Stephen Jay Gould - and despite their different positions on metaphysics - a Deist, a Process Theologist, a Cautious but firm Metaphysician, and a Marxist Atheist - they all agree that scientific understanding does not cover what is most important in our lives - the meaning of life, death, beauty, love, goodness/evil. And the idea that reality is no more complex than the measurements we can make of it would be laughed out of court.

All this I well-knew, but did not know well enough to apply to my own mind.

Why? Because I still believed in Auntie NHS and that scientific knowledge had a core of insight that could be used to help create values like the meaning of life. But it cannot. Science is just a varied set of techniques for tweaking and messing with nature. Usually with bad consequences, unless contained very tightly by wise men and women and a society that understands what science is and what it ain't.

The NHS. a very long arm of 'scientism', reaching deep into our minds and bodies no matter where or what we are - is an institution that does not care whom or what it murders as long as its managers can get a healthy profit and not get caught.

It has murdered meaning. Its overt ideology is: Keep the guy alive as long as possible - death is defeat and is meaningless.

Most of us will be born and die in these houses of meaningless deaths, called so misleadingly, 'hospitals' - born and die among strangers who at best feel some abstract care for us - but do not love us, and give us meaning, and help us on to the next road - even if it is, some of us hope, oblivion.

It has murdered millions of us - even though it has saved me twice and others near me. BUT, If its concern was for health, why not tell me to eat unpolluted unprocessed food or else? Why not campaign against industrial/military pollution and experiments? Why not warn me of the dangers of certain vaccines that contributed to our son's suicide? Why not warn us all that sons who go to university are most in danger of suicide, not car accidents, testicular cancer or alcoholism? That suicide is the most common cause of death among this group?

Why not study your own colleagues' research work adequately in order to give me informed advice about the poisons you administer in the hopes that the poison will kill the disease before it kills me? If you haven't studied the academic literature, admit it. Why am I even paying you? Just to pass me on to a tunnel vision 'expert' who will only see what they are looking for, even if it is sometimes not there? My younger brother would have had many more years, but his 'expert' missed the obvious.

And your nihilist pseudo-religion hovers over all our minds and emotions, which dreadful emptiness you paint over with the mask of Nostra Madre della Misericordia - Our Mother of Mercy - upon whom we lean, to whom we turn in times of crisis, in hopes her loving care will cure us if we have enough faith and obey her commands.

To be enlightened we must see through this flim/flam mask: there is nothing behind it. Even the mask-wearers don't realise how empty and sterile it is behind them and beneath them. So they pretend their own private religion is strong enough. Or that their faith in life is enough - good companionship with family and friends and enabling that for their patients if they can. Holidays. Weekend. Leisure and Pleasure. O what a ship of fools we are.

How many times have you heard the' Doctor' talk to 'The Nurse' about their last holiday while cutting your flesh? Or whether their Departmental Rating will be high or Low, while investigating what may be a lethal problem in your nose? Or about what they will do on the weekend while putting stitches into you, as if you were a boring Mannequin in Madame Tussaud's that had come unravelled?

The first step is to free myself from this emotional dependence on this false Madonna della Misericordia - in truth an Agent of the Megamachine - or what older generations might call the anti-christ, Leviathan, . For that dependence ensures that mind-forged manacles chain my spirit, arrest my growth, infantilise me and prevent me from sending smoke signals to others to warn them.

The Megamachine is not just out there. It is also in here - our minds and bodies.

PART 2

Who is more important to me than me? At many times, no one. I wake with a numb hand. What next? I say. What next for poor little me?

A pain in the back that prevents me walking, or eating, reading or any other little comforting pleasure my little selves so depend on? Any little threat to my little comforts?

Do we not each need to be awakened from this after-dinner sleep of consumerist pseudo-pleasures, junk pleasures, empty calorie pleasures, imagined pleasures?

When do we put away childish things?

Moe Dodson is what I am called. I did not call myself that. John Dodson is what I am assigned by law. I had no part in that decision either. Pisses me right off. So many effing decisions made for me without consulting me.

One of my great great uncles, a Dodson in the Ozark Mountains backwoods of Arkansas, refused to name any of his 11 children. He called them by the number order of their birth. He said they had a right to name themselves, so when they reached puberty they each gave themselves a name.

My second father - an English Upper Middle Class Intellectual, joked that I had no self, - I was 'skizzy' so why worry about what "I" did or did not do, as that "I" did not exist.

Ah "I" miss the old days when my second father was still alive. Telling me I had no self gave me a self that my other selves now miss! How I miss that old self!

But now looking back, it feels like me and my brother were like those American Indians the Europeans brought back from America to Europe to show off as 'innocent' and exotic savages, and to educate into 'civilised' ways.

Am I crazy like my mother? Not really. I do not believe the kinds of things she sometimes believed. As RD Laing said, not everyone who wants to be crazy can achieve that: there has, I think, to be a very weak link in some chain that suddenly breaks in the brain. The best I can achieve is neurosis, anxiety, depression, hypochondria, existential doubt, two out-of-body experiences, one terrifying, one joyful. Reading the list of mental diseases in the DSM, aint none that correspond to what I actually feel. Thank goodness the white coats could not get me like they got Mom with a 'diagnosible' wacking great disease - Paranoid Schizophrenia with homosexual tendencies - yes homosexuality was a disease then mes enfants, and it caused other diseases apparently.

Do not, chères lecteurs, let me get started on the DSM and all its evil works...

The anger I feel starts not with our Mom and our Dad being disappointed in me - those are the two oldest memories I have - back to when I was two and half years old. From that I get despair.

No the anger is against the things in the world that hurt them, and I could see that in their faces. The world always was potentially hurting, insulting, humiliating them. Respectable people looking down on them for swearing and drinking and being 'bohemians'. Rich people looking down on them for being poor. More civilised people looking down on them for being less civilised. Bosses - in one case Mafioso-paid bosses - humiliating them, making them do bad things like slap me and my brother just so as they could keep their jobs.

I spent a fair amount of time watching their faces when they did not know I was watching. While they were just sitting and thinking. The pain of it - of seeing the resigned, angry humiliation they could do nothing about - still hurts me hard.

Later, I watched as the doctors and social workers and policemen and judges humiliated them, misunderstood them, harmed them with their absurd ideas and language that dehumanised and insulted them. I watched as circumstances made it impossible for my little sister and little brother to achieve a balanced life. How my little sister would never be at peace because the 'normal' world was no way near a benign community where all would be guaranteed the freedom to live with those they loved and were loved by. A famous philosopher - Popper - implied that this type of benign world was inappropriate in the modern, rational, democratic age (The Open Society and Its Enemies)..

I threw that book across the room so great was my anger when I read it.

So many normal, nice people were more than willing to say things to us, to make judgements about us, to make decisions for us that I knew in my heart at the time, were brutally stupid, wrong and harmful, but did not have the words just then, the knowledge, the courage to confront them, to stand up to them, to find some way of protecting us from these poisonous words and decisions shot-gun blasted at us at surprising moments, ambushing us, while asserting with utter confidence that they were doing this for our own good.

This is not unique. O no.

But for me it is more on the surface than for many, but not all of my friends. Some I know who are still angry like me. It fuels an anger that I cannot find a place for. After 78 years, it still burns and burns and burns.

And I am sure our son Toby, the eldest like me, saw my humiliation-pain on my face many times I brought home from 'the office'. And the pain he felt for me partly fuelled his anger that enabled him to kill himself. For I was humiliated at work as most of us were with a systematic, brutal power that those administering it claimed to be unaware of.

Can you deny that a huge amount of pretentious social science verbiage is devoted to the way our institutions dehumanise us, depersonalise us, in order to make us cogs in the machine as well as tokens of status traded up and down between bosses like cows among the Nuer, but less well treated? No you cannot deny this. Not a whit. And yet, what do those social scientists who write about it do about it? They teach social workers, carers, doctors - who join those very institutions that institutionalise us, and then invent new ways to humiliate us, pretending they are fixing the problem etc. The problem is the institution itself and the society that invents this monstrosity. Just the idea that an institution can substitute for real human contact and community is insanely dangerous.

For each one of us here and now there is a Trail of Tears we inherit from the past, and with that inheritance comes a Pure Anger that has for many of us descended into a desire for thoughtless Revenge. The Thoughtless Revenge Motif has become more and more common in our public stories - fiction and non-fiction - even though it was common enough before. We want to find Villains who have inflicted this pain. For the naive, the Victim (anybody from them to a hostage, the Natural world, the climate, minorities, truth, etc) can be saved and then Revenge extracted from the appropriate villain. For the cynical, the Victim is already dead or nearly so, and only Revenge is possible if we can find the right target . But the target is to all intents, infinite. And it includes us.

So no revenge is possible unless we harm ourselves as well. All we can do is accept that we are all victims, even the 'villains', and be as honest as we can. And if we have the courage to try to help those who are now victims - starting with our neighbours, mes braves, our neighburs. For me, honesty and this courage are nearly impossible, but for you, maybe not...?

Ora pro nobis, Sancta Maria. Ora pro nobis. Pray for us Heavenly Mother. Pray for us.