No. Western medicine is NOT the pot calling the CIA torture kettle black. Not. That can’t be true. Is it? Well . . . that certainly was my instant intuitive hit when I saw this headline.

‘Do No Harm’: Doctors Blast Medical Professionals for Role In CIA Torture Regime

But the two are not equivalent. I try to tell myself this. And here’s how that argument goes:

The torture and death-dealing practices of the CIA and MIC are obviously immoral, and anyone who participates so up close and personal with one whom one is torturing, so that one sees and feels their suffering, and gets off on it, is very different from doctors who, by and large — except for pharmaceutical and institutional kickbacks, perks, and bribes; but let’s not talk about that! — yes, doctors by and large, want to believe that they are at the very least, alleviating suffering as much as possible.

Okay, here’s where I can’t help but veer off my own argument, going a mile a minute, punching through dimension after dimension:

The system in which doctors and other “medical professionals” are embedded is the old Newtonian/Cartesian model: mind/body separation, and billiard ball theory of reality (cause and effect as linear chains), analysis rather than synthesis. Which means its methods too often end up with cut, poison, or burn. Rather than a whole system approach — where we identify and eradicate causes, rather than just treat symptoms, but which, however, itself leads inevitably, if we take it far enough, to the recognition that there are no closed systems in nature! And that therefore everything is bound to devolve (from one perspective) and evolve (from another). Which means you can’t perform repeatable experiments, because everything is changing, changing, everything affects everything else, and nothing stays the same. So you can’t ever “prove” anything, or even “disprove” it. Plus — pant, pant — even what we think of as micro and macro laws or patterns are more likely just habits, or, as usual, dependent on circumstances: this particular space/time field, this amount of gravity, etc.

Okay, back from the nether regions where all is connected and nothing can be isolated from anything else, to the original topic, the distinction, if any, between CIA torture and western medicine. I’ll try again to distinguish between them:

Both CIA torture or western medicine tend to kill people, but the two realms do it differently, and with different intent. The first is slow or fast, deliberately made to be agonizing and to barely keep the prisoner alive, to perform further experiments —

The CIA didn’t just torture. It performed experiments on human beings

and/or to get false confessions.

The disastrous flaw at the heart of the CIA’s torture system

and

We’ve known for 1700 years that torture produces false confessions

In either case, the CIA methods are dramatic and obviously tortuous. Okay, here goes (massive sigh): The second method of torture, i.e., the American medical system is, in some ways, even worse (is that possible?), since most of those who practice it, and certainly most, if not all who — by their own free will?! — subject themselves to it, don’t realize that what they are doing or receiving is torture! This method aims to be slow and gradual (if death approaches) or if the so-called “cure” disfigures, or leaves the “patient” dispirited but does not kill (yet); or, rare, a sudden and miraculous (called “accidental” “spontaneous recovery” takes place), but, when all is said and done, ends up strewing bodies on a killing field.

This is health care? U.S. medical system kills 400K patients per year

Do I claim the American medical system, but not the CIA torture program, works with people who are not prisoners but free agents? Oops. Not so fast. It may be that we need to add another form of torture, that produced by the slow invisible mind-control programs that operate at the heart of Capitalist Consumer Culture (CCC), instilling in its “subjects” from birth on the need to buy, buy, buy while ignoring or denying or medicating pain of any kind, especially that arising from our poor suffering bodies that are trying like hell to get in touch with us (our minds, that is), to tell us to Stop! Something isn’t going right here. Stop! You’re killing me (the body, that is)! But most people don’t stop, they go right on slowly or quickly killing the body (and that includes the planet body) by medicating, poisoning, cutting, slashing, burning . . .

How to talk about these two death-dealing machines — deliberate torture, and the torture produced inadvertently by the worldview of medicine, and now the third CCC that undergirds everything — that slow, insidious torture that takes us out of our bodies, out of our dear planet Earth body onto our screens of a virtual reality where nothing has consequences and we can do as we please. But we can’t. It’s obvious. The chickens have come home to roost.

So weird, how we recognize the first (CIA torture) as torture, but not the second (American medical system), and can’t even see the third (society-wide mind control), since we are breathing and drinking it in every minute of every day. But who cares? How can we truly care, if we don’t live either inside our bodies or the Earth but just above them, as if they don’t count?

So it should come as no surprise, if this poll can be believed, that more than half of us now condone CIA torture.

A majority of Americans support CIA torture program

It’s enough to make me give up. But I don’t. I can’t. More and more of us are waking up, to all forms of torture. To how we have tortured others in the past, one way or another. To how, unless we’re very very careful and aware, we will torture again.

Mea culpa.