Supply and Demandate: Bret Speaks with Dr. Julie Ponesse
Subscribe to our Spotify channel to stay connected and get notified of new releases.*****Bret speaks with Dr. Julie Ponesse who saw her academic career of 20 years fall apart after she refused to comply with a Canadian university's COVID vaccine mandate.Dr. Julie Ponesse has a PhD in Philosophy with areas of specialization in ethics and ancient philosophy, a Masters in Philosophy with Collaborative Specialization in Bioethics from the University of Toronto, and a Diploma in Ethics from the Ke...
When it comes to mandating what goes into or happens to a person's body, there's an intimacy there.
There's something inalienable about the body and the physiological processes in the body.
There's an intimacy that's broken, an invasion into what should be private by the state.
And that's why I think that these health care mandates are trespassing or crossing a line that they should never cross.
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
I have the pleasure and honor today of sitting with Julie Panessi, who is a Doctor of Philosophy, Ethics, and Ancient Philosophy, and until this year was teaching at the University of Western Ontario in the Huron College.
Welcome, Julie.
Thank you so much.
Delighted to be here.
Well, I'm very excited to talk to you.
I'm a biologist, as my listeners will know, but I have a deep interest in philosophy, especially the philosophy of science.
But of course, all the philosophies are tied together.
And this year, we have seen the interaction of the philosophy of science with the questions of ethics.
So I'm very much interested to hear What you have to tell us about the way these things interact, but before you do that, could you?
Tell us the story of what's happened to you this year Sure.
So until last September, I taught philosophy, especially ethical theory, applied ethics, history of ethics, ancient philosophy, political philosophy, history, political philosophy, those kinds of things at Western University, here on college in particular in London, Ontario.
And when they started discussing mandates in the educational sector in the summer, I guess it was, and then we got word about two weeks before school started that my institution was going to be implementing one of the vaccine mandates.
I wrote to some of the senior administration at Huron, so my chair, President and Dean, and just expressed my concerns.
I didn't say that I was opposed to providing proof of vaccination, but I expressed my concerns about the mandate, generally speaking.
And I didn't get a response from that email.
It was a long email with footnotes.
You know, I mean, you ask an academic to provide thoughts on something, that's what you're going to get.
And I didn't get a response to that email.
And then I think it was sort of the first week of September.
I mean, classes here start first, second week of September.
So it was imminent, the start of classes.
And I knew that teaching assignments needed to be sorted out.
I had a big amphitheater style class I was about to teach.
And I didn't know if I was gonna be teaching or not.
And then I got an email from my dean saying, so can I assume from this, and he was referencing that long email I had sent a couple of weeks earlier.
So can I assume from this that you plan not to comply with the mandate?
Initially, I didn't respond because I knew, based on what had happened with other colleagues, that as soon as you respond to that email saying, I won't comply, then most people were getting termination letters within hours, if not, or that day or something.
So I didn't respond, but then I thought about it and I thought, well, I know I don't respond.
I object and I think that it's important.
It's important to be clear about that I mean both for the sake of transparency and for me sorting out what's happening going forward and and for them to Get someone else to teach that, you know, for all involved.
And so I made it very clear that I planned not to comply with their COVID policy, which didn't just require proof of vaccination to be uploaded, but also to mask fully and completely in the classroom.
And I stated clearly that I would not do any of those things.
And then While that email exchange was happening, I can't remember the exact day, but I recorded a video that was meant as sort of a last lecture on ethics to my incoming class that year to talk a bit about the ethics of mandating a medical choice.
And that came out, I think it was Labor Day, and it You know, unanticipated by myself sort of went viral.
I was away for the day and I came back to my phone and my phone was just exploding and I had no idea what happened.
And anyway, long story short, I got a letter from my dean that was a termination with cause letter, both for refusing to comply with the mandate and then also doing so in a public way.
Wild!
Yes, I've seen that video and I will put a link to it in the description of this podcast so people can look at it and I think watching it was extremely emotional for me.
It clearly was for you making it and I think I know why because I remember quite well The last time that I taught my students and events had unfolded very rapidly and it became clear that the college did not intend to create a safe working environment.
And I was literally meeting with my students in a public park because it was not safe to be on campus.
And you know, one invests in a career.
And if one's any good at this particular career, one invests in individual human beings that you come to know and care about and to face them and realize that you are being ushered out the door by an institution that really has no business in that relationship is, it's a powerful moment.
It is, and I think you're not just investing in human relationships, or at least, I mean, you tell me what you think about this, but I feel like over my career, and really from the moment, maybe early in grad school, when I realized that I wanted to teach in a university context, I feel like you're investing in the process of understanding better and trying to develop your skills to do with how to teach.
And for me, that was very much an ancient sort of Socratic model where teaching is not about figuring out, how do I get the ideas in here into the empty vessels that are my students' brains?
It wasn't that.
It was a very complex, interesting process for me, trying to understand, like, how do you How do you become the impetus that helps to grow, not just the ideas, but the mechanism, the machine that helps to generate those ideas in their minds?
Maybe that's sort of unique to philosophy, especially, or what we're trying to do is develop critical thinking.
But I can't tell you how many, you know, how many times in the classroom, usually on the first day of class, that opening lecture where you're trying to explain, okay, what are we going to do here?
What's the project?
What can you expect from me?
What do I expect from you?
And my lecture is always something like, You know, I'm not here to give you the facts, especially in philosophy, right?
It's not really about facts.
It's about building skills and understanding how to develop and exercise that critical thinking muscle so that when you get information from the world, you don't just respond to it as an animal would or as a computer would, but that, you know, you're Your mind kind of works on it, and you decide yourself what to assent to and what not to assent to.
And so, what you've invested in is not just your particular students or your particular relationships with them, but becoming the sort of person who understands how to do that better and better every year, hopefully.
I mean, that's the goal.
I'm not saying we're all aiming at perfection in that respect or at the same pace, but That was the goal for me, certainly.
And there's a loss to that.
I mean, I'm doing different things now, and I guess you could argue teaching in different ways, but that intimate one-on-one relationship in a classroom with a student where you're so sensitive to the vulnerability of someone who is placing their trust in you as an educator is, I think, a unique human experience.
Yeah, it's fascinating.
I believe it was a day, maybe it was two days before my famous incident erupted outside my classroom.
I put a diagram on the board, a model that I was working on, about witch hunts and how they work.
And it was on my mind because a witch hunt was developing around me, so it's not a completely independent data point.
But nonetheless, I described This thing to them and then two days later we were meeting in a public park For the last time and I remember what I said to them was Take careful notes because I do not think we will pass this way again And I knew I could tell that I was in the process of becoming an object lesson.
Right?
I went from teaching about something to becoming the something.
And as you say, it put me in a position where I'm now teaching at a very different scale.
It's not like I've stopped doing the thing I trained for.
But nonetheless, it was a very powerful, visceral feeling to realize that the abstraction Had become real and that it had come for me and I know that in looking at your video I see something very similar right you you're an ethicist and at the moment that you were ejected from your job
You were confronted with an ethical question that you were uniquely equipped to understand.
And yet failed the test, according to my employers.
No, no, you passed the test.
You passed the test with flying colors.
And I guess the problem is that because we are living in a world in which so much is upside down, the spoils of having passed the test with flying colors is the loss of a job that you had invested everything in.
And that is such a, what a remarkable moment.
In history, that's where we are.
That doing the right thing, especially when you know exactly what that right thing is, causes this kind of allergic reaction of the system to you.
That it needs to target you because the last thing it can stand is to have you successfully demonstrate this ancient principle.
That's right.
I think it's, I mean, you use the word remarkable, and I think we often use that now as a synonym for something good, but it isn't really.
The term remarkable is just to be something worthy of being remarked on, focused on, and I think you're right.
We're living in a punctuated moment in history, and the sad fact about that for academia and centers of higher learning is that whatever higher learning is now, It is not learning how to be a free and open thinker.
I mean, having spent time in academia and going to conferences and probably sitting in on Senate meetings and things like that, you will know that it's impossible to get a group of academics to agree about anything.
As it should be, right?
There should always be.
I mean, they always disagree, whether it's within a subject within your discipline, or it's a department meeting about how we're going to change guidelines for progression for undergraduates, or whatever it is, right?
The fact that within presumably nearly every post-secondary institution in North America, There is apparently a 90, well in Canada, a 98% compliance rate with any kind of mandate, any kind of policy, and I don't know what the percentage is on people speaking out against it.
Very, very low.
That is just, to put it in very unacademic terms, weird.
It's just very weird and very anomalous.
And the fact that you have something so significant happening, and you have so few, we call them intellectuals, exercising their minds and entering into an arena of public debate.
I mean, we should be having town hall meetings, citizens' assemblies, The equivalencies at university.
We should be having student unions up in arms.
We should be having student groups forming left, right, and center to consider this, to challenge this.
The fact that we don't have that is, in my mind, a litmus test for where we're at in society intellectually and what counts as being a good member of an intellectual discipline.
What counts is being a good citizen.
And what counts is being compliant.
What counts is being a good cog in the wheel.
And that is antithetical to every, every aspect of the ethos of academia, which started right in Plato's Academy, in Greece 2,000 years ago.
And we have spent 2,000 years with the odd blip and dip and abandonment, but getting back on track only to find ourselves at a place that he would be ashamed of, I have no doubt.
Shamed of.
We're in this kind of vacuum where it's not just that you can't disagree, but questioning is no longer tolerated.
The very act of questioning is no longer tolerated.
We've gone from democracies, I think, in both Canada and the US, that prided themselves on protecting intellectual freedom and freedom of speech at all costs, to now normalizing and introducing legislation to
I guess the idea is to prevent hate speech, but basically to create such a censored system that no outlying thought is even possible anymore.
I went back to my Twitter timeline a few weeks ago, and I searched it for the term dark age.
I joined Twitter in 2009, and in 2009 I was already mentioning that we were headed into a dark age.
And I truly believe that that's where we are and the fact that our universities have turned on us and they've become places of a suspicious level of agreement.
Right?
As you say, getting academics to agree on anything is virtually impossible and yet we have this incredible level of synonymy and it is trying to tell us something.
I mean, A, these places are incapable of doing the job for which we built them at that level of agreement.
They cannot do it.
And so we are sending young people there, and they are no doubt coming away with something, but it isn't an enhanced capacity to think.
In fact, it's the opposite.
And the philosophical implications, I mean, you know, this is your area of specialty, you'll see it very clearly.
And weirdly, I guess my area of specialty is parallel, but at a different scale.
But, you know, as you say, this goes back to Plato, and we've been making progress on these difficult questions, and now we're headed in the reverse direction.
Right?
And we could say the same thing about our species.
What we understand is in some sense the accumulation of hundreds of thousands of years of discovery and for us now to be Willingly taking it apart is just, it's frightening.
It's frightening and I do think it has something to do with a deep vulnerability in the human psyche that we are watching ancient processes and people are not understanding the danger that we are creating for ourselves.
So I'll play devil's advocate for a minute because it just seems so, I mean, I accuse sort of the other side of not doing this.
So I'm trying to develop a practice where I have a tendency to do this more often than I might otherwise.
But I'm always trying to understand, well, what will people on the other side say about this, about people who are trying to challenge accepted norms within academia or within politics or whatever?
And I think that one of the views is that, well, question asking is all well and good, but at some point we have to stop.
At some point we have to accept that there are certain givens so that we have a foundation on which to build the rest of our system.
And so I take it that within science, and you could speak to this much better than I, within science, Within medicine, within medical ethics, within politics, that there's this agreement now that we have achieved a certain level of certainty.
And I think it's not a coincidence that the term science is being used as a synonym for something like perfection.
And never mind the bastardization of the word falsifiability.
I mean, it seems to have It's an interesting idea, right?
the opposite of what I understand it to mean anyway.
It means that you can't question anything now, it means that science is beyond questioning, beyond reproach.
But it's an interesting idea, right?
I mean, is it the case that if we are a human species who, if we're rational, we're capable of critical thought, we're capable of not just responding directly to our environment, but thinking reflectively about it and so we're We're engaged in this process of question and answer.
Ought that go on indefinitely?
Or are we supposed to reach a point at which we feel like, nope, I've got the answers.
I'm settled.
Now we just build on that.
You know, maybe the question now is, well, what are, if that's true, what are the settled principles that we're taking for granted on which we're building the rest of the system?
And I take it that one of them is, within science, that the scientific system that's composed of things like a peer-reviewed journals, double-blind studies, And the involvement of pharmaceutical companies is, I won't say a perfect system, but a system that has a lot of integrity and that we can count on its output.
And therefore we shouldn't question its output because to do so is not only a kind of waste of mental energy, because we've already exerted that mental energy to get to where we are now, but it's a kind of heresy.
Right?
It's like Galileo questioning the teachings of the Catholic Church.
We ought not do that.
That's beyond reproach, beyond question.
Well, I will take up your challenge.
Here's the way I think of it.
If you imagine an ancient hunting party, a band of men headed out into the bush to hunt creatures for sustenance.
And you can imagine maybe one of them is a little more cerebral, a little more prone to look into the sky and wonder about things.
And maybe they're passing some trees and this guy notices that the way the leaves flip back and forth, like imagine an aspen leaf that flips back and forth, implies something about binary.
Right?
And that the universe could be encoded maybe in binary.
Well, that guy's right, right?
He's not wrong.
He's discovered something amazing and maybe thousands of years ahead of schedule, but it's not the time for it.
Right?
His people might starve if he gets overly mesmerized by the leaves flipping back and forth.
And the point is, get up, we gotta go hunt.
Right?
So, I agree with this principle.
And you could do the same thing with a military situation.
You can't have people exercising democracy on the middle of a battlefield.
Right?
They have to actually do the job.
But, that is not the university.
The university's purpose is a place where it is safe to do those things and frankly where it is safe to question Everything no matter how secure Forever.
Forever.
That is its design.
That is its purpose.
And the idea that people like you and me find ourselves ejected from that structure because the structure where it is supposed to be like an intellectual sandbox where we are entitled to question everything and open any idea and suddenly we are not able to do that and there's suspicious levels of agreement is it's like a
Red flag warning that society has just tripped over something very very dangerous and I think What I see more than anything is that what?
we have civilization is Incredibly important it is the stuff that makes the lives that we live possible and Most people because they've never seen what life is like without it Don't understand the danger of playing around with the fundamentals that allow it to function and what we are now doing is we're very focused on what doesn't work in civilization and
And there's a lot of people very eager for solution making, in part because they don't understand the danger.
If we unmake that system, what we are left with is horrifying.
And it is the university, it is the philosophers, it is the scientists who are supposed to be on alert, looking for us to make those kinds of errors and saying, wait a minute, no, you're doing this wrong, right?
Yes, there are things that we have to fix.
But unmaking the system that we've got in the hopes that something better will replace it is the height of insanity and here's how we know.
And so I wonder a little bit, you know, I'm talking to a philosopher confronted with what's frankly not a very difficult ethical question that we seem to be getting wrong.
And I know this also isn't a difficult evolutionary puzzle and yet we're getting it wrong.
And your point about pharmaceutical companies, There's a perverse incentive.
We know that corruption is an ancient phenomenon.
You have to have a system that is capable of pulling the ripcord at the point that something captures an essential process and steers it to its own profit.
And You know, you didn't end up saying whether you had gotten vaccinated.
I can imagine an ethicist taking a principled stand against demonstrating that you had been vaccinated even if you had.
But go ahead.
Well, I was just going to say I'm very happy to say that no, I haven't and I never will.
But I do think it's important to separate the personal medical choice From the political choice to abide by and endorse the mandates and you know the, we can talk about this a little later but the trucker convoy in Ottawa.
Many of the truckers there are vaccinated and are very public about that but it's been very clear that we don't want to live in a system of in a system of mandates.
Right.
You know, even the idea of a mandate, if we think about that for a minute, when you're mandating something that is a matter of health, a personal medical choice, in some sense, a mandate is either unnecessary or unjustified.
It's unnecessary for those who would have done it anyway, complied anyway.
And it's arguably unjustified if we consider the most important thing to preserve for humans for quality of life and for flourishing and for happiness is autonomy.
And that word autonomy comes from two Greek words that mean self-rule.
Right.
And someone might say, well, we don't let people do just whatever they want.
So, you know, you have to get a driver's license to drive a car and things like that.
Yes, that's true.
When it comes to mandating what goes into or happens to a person's body, there's an intimacy there.
There's something inalienable about the body and the physiological processes in the body.
There's an intimacy that's broken, an invasion into what should be private by the state.
And that's why I think that these health care mandates are trespassing or crossing a line that they should never cross.
And, you know, I've had some really interesting discussions with academics, with physicians, about whether or not, in principle, there are situations where a health care mandate would be appropriate.
And my thinking, and I've thought about this a lot, you know, and there's often this reference to the smallpox case, Massachusetts versus Jacobson, right, all of that.
And my feeling about it is, though I want to do more thinking about it, is that If health care mandates are ever justified, there needs to be an incredibly high and almost impossibly high threshold that has to be met that involves things like the severity of the viral threat, which is not anything like what we're seeing right now, right?
So my point to all of this is that to mandate something is not just to impose a blanket rule on a group of people for whom it doesn't matter much.
Right?
Because either there's a percentage of that group that will do the thing anyway, and there's a percentage of that group that will not do the thing, and will either do it because of the mandate under circumstances of coercion, and that's a serious threat to autonomy, or people who will refuse to abide by the mandate anyway, so what's the purpose?
So really the only group it's affecting is a coerced group of people.
Yeah, I agree with this completely.
And I know that we never had the discussion about the threshold of severity and the threshold of safety that would be that would have to be met before such a thing would make any sense.
And I also know that biologically, There was a shell game that was played here where people have gotten used to using a heuristic to do their thinking and their heuristic is vaccines are on balance pretty good.
I think it's more than that in Canada.
Anyway, the heuristic is vaccines are perfect immunity makers and you're virtuous if you get on board.
I mean, it's a I think it's a strong what do we want to call it?
It's a strong messaging system.
It's a strong ethos.
It is very strong, and I believe that it is largely justified.
There's something very beautiful about a vaccine that actually works, right?
It's a very elegant intervention into the immune system.
On the other hand, people mistake the syringe For evidence of how effective and elegant an intervention is.
And they did not properly register how novel this particular vaccine was.
And so they sort of had gotten used to seeing a syringe and thinking, that's not a big deal.
I'll take it.
I'm better off with it than without it.
And those of us who understood what was being said about the contents of that syringe were having a different reaction, which is, wow.
That is a radical departure from the way these things typically work.
We're taking this radical departure at a moment when the disease in question is certainly very unfortunate and dangerous, but not nearly at the level that this short a time horizon on this new technology is sufficient to say what they were saying, which is, this is highly effective and it's safe.
And my feeling, what I said on our podcast, It was, I know you don't know it's safe.
I can't say that it's harmful, but I can say, by analogy, if you walk into a room and there's a gun on the table and you put the gun to your head and you pull the trigger and it goes click, did it harm you?
No.
Was it safe?
No.
And what we knew at the point that they were telling us that these vaccines were safe was that they couldn't possibly know anything about their effects five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road.
So they were lying.
That's so interesting.
I hadn't thought about it that way.
Beware Greeks bearing gifts, right?
It's a bit of a Trojan horse phenomenon.
So if we present to you this thing that you know nothing about or may have maybe different in form than what you believe it to be, but we present it to you using a vehicle that you perceive to be non-threatening, You'll take it and you'll just assume that you're doing the same thing you always do when your doctor says, oh, you're due for a vaccination.
Oh, am I doc?
Okay.
Well, I think the evidence to support your hypothesis is that people were surprised when they were getting COVID after getting vaccinated because they didn't realize that there was this distinction between sterilizing and non-sterilizing vaccines.
And I think that failure to distinguish is preserved to this day.
I think people are still surprised because that narrative of vaccination achieving perfection and protection of the system and integrity of the system.
And now I'm, I'm literally immune, I can go and do anything.
And one thing that's very interesting to me is I feel like alongside this concept of biological immunity, once we've become vaccinated, I think there's also this kind of
Insidiously horrific, but also sort of beautiful metaphor of being morally immune, because now you can enter the public space, the moral sphere, as a presentable human being, as a responsible member of society, as someone beyond reproach, as a moral exemplar, a hero even.
You know, I mean, we've seen this era of conspicuous medicine where people, after they get vaccinated, I haven't seen it so much with the boosters, but when people got their first and second shots, it's like they come out of the clinic or wherever.
And then it's almost like you're walking the red carpet and there are these walls with the vaccination stickers and you can get your photo taken up against them.
It's like a conspicuous event.
And why is that important?
Well, it's because it's important to solidify, I mean, I think, you know, it's important to solidify your place in the social arrangement as someone who has sort of championed the banner of goodness for a group of people, right?
So it's not just in getting vaccinated that you've achieved But you've also achieved a kind of moral immunity.
No one can criticize you anymore.
No one can call you evil as they have done to me.
Absolutely.
And again, it's this strange inversion where earlier we were talking about the fact that the purpose of the university is the sandbox where we can discuss anything so that we will see things coming, right?
It is the place to talk about the implication of the leaves and all of that.
And at the moment, it doesn't tolerate those of us who do that well, it has thrown us out in favor of people who rush to consensus.
And the issue of vaccination is one in which I have no doubt there are some people with an irrational fear of vaccines, who Correctly feared in this case a vaccine they knew nothing about but would have done so no matter how safe it was And then there were many which is just a coincidence that they happen to be fearful of this one, right?
I don't know if the pre-trans fallacy is an important item that in your discipline.
Does that ring a bell?
Pre-trans fallacy is a case where there's a naive position And then there's an educated position, which is the inverse of the naive position.
And then there's an enlightened position that flips back to the original position.
So, for example, if you're at the zoo and a child is looking at a chimpanzee and it says, what a funny monkey.
And the teacher says, oh, that's not a monkey.
That's an ape.
Right.
The child is actually right that it's a monkey.
It's also an ape.
But didn't know.
Right.
But didn't know.
Right.
A phylogenetic systematist who was sitting there would say, well, yes, it's an ape, but it's also a monkey.
Right.
So, this is one of these cases where a true anti-vaxxer would have feared this vaccine because they fear all vaccines.
But then there are many others of us who are not anti-vaxxers by any stretch of the imagination.
I mean, I'm as vaccinated as probably anyone you'll ever meet because I did tropical biology.
I'm vaccinated against rabies, against yellow fever, all kinds of things.
You're loaded up.
I'm loaded up and I feel good about it.
I like being able to, you know, I work with bats.
I like being able to pick up a bat and not worry if it bites me that I'm going to get rabies, right?
But in this case, the The brochure did not correctly explain the risk that people were taking, and did not compare that risk to the risk that they were taking confronting the virus, which of course is so age-stratified that there is no one-size-fits-all policy.
A healthy 20-year-old is in a very different position than a 60-year-old.
That's right.
And what that means, I mean, the practical upshot of that is that the healthier you are, the fewer comorbidities you have, the younger you are, the greater your risk is, because the risk-benefit ratio is more imbalanced, right?
It's actually extremely steep because not only do you face very low risk from COVID But if the vaccine does harm you you have a very long life in which to suffer that harm Whereas somebody who is harmed at 80 years old might lose a decade But you know a 16 year old might lose four or five decades I mean And the potential to have children and future generations.
I mean, it's yeah, I agree that it's quite a steep risk.
Quite.
And.
The problem is, the corruption of our system is so severe that at the point your system is lying to you, I mean, a lot of my friends got caught by the lies because they were used to public health lying to them.
Public health lies because that's part of its job, right?
It oversimplifies things in order to get you to do the right thing.
And so the fact that it was lying to a noble lie, right?
They assumed that's why they were being lied to now Heather and I looked at this and thought Wait a minute those lies Don't look like noble lies They look like corrupt lies and those corrupt lies Resulted in who knows how many tens of billions of dollars being made by particular folks and those folks
Play a game where they use government to coerce use of their products.
Right?
It's a very unusual market where, you know, it's not supply and demand.
It's supply and demand aid.
And that means that there's a reason to be hyper vigilant about the danger that what you're being told isn't actually in your medical interest.
This is, I mean, we actually, I think, have sort of a regulatory capture triad because it's not just the pharmaceutical companies and the government, but there's the media as that third piece, right?
And so the conflicts of interest overlap on each side of that triad.
Working in the history of medicine, history of medical ethics, there were a couple of things on the radar that made me very skeptical about these vaccines early on.
One of which was the SSRI crisis, especially for adolescents and the high suicidality rates.
That really started, you know, came on the scene in the 90s.
And then, of course, the opioid crisis.
And, you know, the literature and medical ethics surrounding those two related crises was quite responsible and skeptical, I think, you know, I mean, even You know, the chief editors of the top medical journals in the world said, you know, I think that science is corrupted.
There's a problem with the peer-reviewed journal article process, and I'm not sure it can be trusted moving forward, and we need a massive overhaul.
But I don't think that any of that information trickled down in the right ways.
Certainly didn't trickle down to the average person.
No non-specialist that I have spoken to has heard about either, maybe the opioid crisis, but not really where it came from and, you know, how regulatory capture was a significant And how, you know, physicians were courted by pharmaceutical companies to downplay, you know, the risks of the side effects of these drugs, and also to create a system of fabricated desires, right?
Where people didn't realize that they had a problem that they now require a medication for, and then they think, oh yeah, gee, I really would like to feel a little happier and sleep a little better.
I didn't realize it, but now that you put it that way, I think I do, you know?
Anyway, I mean, there was a history of I think conservatively two decades where we have seen the harms of regulatory capture.
We know the kind of money that's at stake in the pharmaceutical industry.
We know the kind of collusion between pharmaceutical companies and government.
And so that doesn't mean, I mean, I always like try to be careful when I'm thinking or speaking, not to assume that wherever there's a conflict of interest, the decision will always be made in favor of the wrong interest.
I don't want to make that suggestion because you could have a very benevolent billionaire who really does genuinely care for humanity.
But whenever there's a conflict of interest like that, and we're talking about tens of billions of dollars in stock that are now Being dumped by these CEOs, but whenever you're talking about that kind of money, it's incumbent upon us as the average citizen, as the average drug taker, as the average vaccine recipient, to be skeptical and to ask questions.
Is this necessary?
Am I really in a state where I'm facing a viral threat that has a high infection fatality rate for my age group?
Am I?
And then on the other side, what kind of trials have we seen?
How's that data looking?
We had the data from Pfizer released and, well, gee, it's not looking so good.
I was just reading this morning about a German insurance company that they're saying that the I think 10 million people, 10 million vaccine recipients, there's data on them now.
And it's, I think the word from the CEO is it's shocking and requires further investigation.
So it's not surprising to me that this regulatory capture can happen.
What's surprising and concerning and needs to be addressed moving forward, I think?
is that the average person has the critical thinking skills to ask these questions and be more reflective.
And that physicians, right, that who are, should be responsible for administering these, are not.
Conveniently, right, this practice of vaccinating for COVID has been taken out of the, I think, fiduciary relationship between physician and patient and put in I mean, in our case, you can go to your local sports arena and get it from who knows who, right?
We need to be more critical.
I was talking to Jordan Peterson a while ago.
He had this beautiful metaphor about his tool shed.
He was saying that That thinking and critical thinking is like, you've got all these tools in the shed and you need exactly the right tool for the specific job, and you need to keep them rust-free and sharp and ready to go and know where they are.
But thinking is like that, you know?
And this has been this COVID test, which is not a biological test, by that I mean it's a test of our ability to think through.
A massive onslaught of information coming at us from a perceived set of authorities.
And I think we've failed miserably.
It doesn't mean that failure needs to become, it's not inevitable that we will always fail, but we need moving forward to look back historically.
And figure out how we got ourselves to this place and how we can do better.
We were talking earlier about the past and about historical events, like what happened in Europe in the 30s and 40s, and why we're so reluctant to make analogies to that point in time.
But it seems to me that if we don't, if we close off the possibility of looking at the past as a possible way of informing how we move forward, We are disabling ourselves beyond measure.
Yeah, so I've been focused on pharma and regulatory capture for many years because of a project I did in graduate school that revealed a flaw in the drug safety system, which as far as I know is still not corrected.
It's a flaw that makes things look less toxic than they actually are.
But most people, although until a couple years ago, would have had some sense of yes, pharma corruption is a real thing.
During COVID completely suspended their disbelief.
Amnesia.
Yeah.
And I have this sense that we are We walked into the largest version of a game that pharma plays every day of every week throughout the year, right?
Pharma is constantly in the process of trying to define a need for which they have a pharmacological solution, trying to expand the definition of that need so it covers the maximum number of people.
Trying to convince doctors that the solution that they have is in fact the best one and it is the should be the standard of care Trying to persuade government that the solution is safe enough to be worth the costs and That what happened is that kovat opened up the largest new market sector conceivable
And that this game has been played out where, I don't know, I'm sure you had the same experience I did, where somehow pharma was speaking even through my friends, right?
Pharma was telling me that I was being irresponsible to discuss what I was perfectly well qualified to see.
As a scientist who trained to understand complex systems, as somebody who has studied immunobiology, I was perfectly capable of looking at these vaccines and saying, well, wait a minute.
There are all kinds of ways this could go wrong.
They haven't been around long enough for us to know in which of these ways they will go wrong.
And I'm being mandated to take it over what kind of risk, right?
Those are all And mandated not to talk about it, because we live in this era of this, this credentialism, this expertise, and then, oh, and by the way, what we mean by an expert is only these particular people.
We've sort of deemed these people appropriate mouthpieces or appropriate, I wouldn't even say sort of subjects for debate, because we don't even see debate happening between, you know, amongst themselves.
We're just seeing only these people who are considered to be experts are allowed to speak of these things.
And You're not an expert if you disagree.
Not if you don't have the appropriate credentials or background or education, but what makes you a non-expert is your disagreement with the ideology of the system.
That's exactly right, and it is the most upsetting thing for anybody who's studied logic in any way.
The idea that it is your very disagreement with the consensus that renders you unqualified, when the point is, well then, what is the nature of this consensus?
Right?
If there are those of us who ordinarily would be considered qualified, and if we were in agreement, you'd say we were qualified, but as soon as we disagree, we are not qualified, then that consensus isn't anything.
It's coercion itself.
And, you know, the whole idea that the reason we are not allowed to disagree is that the consensus has been reached and for you to violate it is going to cause distrust in it.
But the point is, if it was coerced in the first place, it's not a natural consensus, right?
Consensus arises over time because something becomes clear.
It doesn't arise in five minutes because we browbeat anybody who disagrees.
Well, consensus, I mean, I think that I think that probably isn't the colloquial understanding of consensus.
I think it probably is just sort of like we took a referendum and this is what right.
It's just it just is agreement.
But what you're suggesting is that consensus is You know, the nature of the term involves a process or a history.
You need to understand how you reached it.
And you mentioned logic.
And what's so important when we're looking at arguments is we're trying to understand which ones are sound and which ones are not sound.
And what makes an argument sound is not that the conclusion is right or the same as someone else's, but that there is the appropriate set of reasons given that are connected in the right ways to support that conclusion.
So, there's a historicity to soundness.
Right.
And I think, as you're saying, there's a historicity to consensus.
And so we do need to look at what goes into the process.
And that's why closing off debate and focusing only on conclusion, whether it's within science and academia, Or, I mean, right now in our House of Commons in Canada, we're seeing this from our Prime Minister, which is just reiterating the same old line over and over and over again.
Vaccines are safe and effective.
Protesters are Nazis.
But without any kind of willingness to engage in that sort of debate.
And, you know, as you're talking or as we're having this conversation, I'm sort of thinking that Like, let's say it's the case that we as human beings are just getting all kinds of things wrong and that we're so self-destructive right now.
We're just, we're blind.
We are controlled by our fear of ostracization.
We are terrified of being labeled heretics and cast outside of the group.
We want desperately to belong to whatever this collectivist do your part sort of system mentality is.
And that's causing an awful lot of harm, it seems.
Why are we doing that?
And as a student of history, I can't help but think of ancient tragedies.
And a tragedy, we use that term, I think, loosely and improperly now to refer to any sort of disaster, but a tragedy, technically speaking, is one in which there's a character who has, your protagonist, your hero, who has a character flaw that forces him to make choices that ultimately lead to his downfall.
So I feel like we are living a tragedy now, and that we are, as this group of humans at this moment in history, we are this protagonist that has A, maybe more than one tragic flaw.
Blindness or myopia is sort of one of them, right?
We're focused only on one kind of threat, one kind of harm.
And only one escape route out of it, and we're willing to vilify, cancel, de-platform, kill maybe anyone who challenges it, right?
And in the process of doing that, we are quite possibly leading to our own self-destruction.
If the ancient playwrights are right, the only thing that solves that kind of tragic flaw is self-reflection.
But we often can't, I mean, the tragic heroes, they never get it until the end of the story.
Things need to become extreme.
That tragic flaw needs to play itself out until the point of destruction.
Where that person has lost everything, they've lost family members, maybe they've even died themselves, but usually not, right?
Usually it's destruction of all persons around him or her, they've lost their city, they've been blinded, whatever it is, and then it's only that level of destruction that puts us into a place where we are left with nothing else but to consider how we've gotten ourselves here.
That's a beautiful description.
And I think it's so, so apt.
If you think about where we actually are, for a year, those of us who looked at the evidence and said, you know, this doesn't look like a natural spillover event.
All of the evidence points toward this being an engineered virus that leaked out of a laboratory.
And lo and behold, it turns out that the people who offshored the work to that laboratory are also in charge of the cover up of the leak.
They are also in charge of our public health response.
And I keep trying to put it in proper context.
You know, we live in A universe that is many billions of years old.
Life has evolved on this planet for three and a half to four billion years.
Our species arose fully a couple hundred thousand years ago.
We each have something usually less than a hundred years.
It is our only opportunity to be conscious and it is a tiny, tiny, tiny blip.
And that blip has been interrupted by fools who decided that in order to prevent a pandemic that they feared from happening, that they had to risk creating it.
They then risked creating it, they then lost control of it, and they have compromised humanity to an incalculable degree.
Right?
That we have a new virus that we may never be rid of, that we may repeatedly get sick with across our lives.
Is such a colossal error and the idea that these same people who made this colossal error about which we had no, we didn't even know, weren't even aware they were doing it until it had already escaped the barn, right?
That these people are in a position to mandate what you and I do in the face of a vaccine that they have done nothing but lie to us about, right?
It's just, it is, it is a, it is a biblical tragedy, right?
It is a Shakespearean level tragedy.
Yeah, and alongside that, you know, sort of geopolitical, pharmaceutically corporate sort of impetus and failure, I think are some other flaws that have gripped us on an epidemic level.
I mean, we are paralyzed by fear.
And it's not clear.
I mean, I think a lot of people in our country anyway are talking about, I can't wait till the mandates lift as though that will restore us back to where we were.
But that's not a remedy for the fear that put us here.
That's not a remedy for the complacency that allowed our situation to become rabid and entrenched.
It's not a therapeutic for The coercion that we allow to take place and the norm, the normalization of things like nudge and behavioral insights propaganda at a national level.
None of those things get fixed when the mandates are lifted.
None of those things get fixed if COVID is magically eradicated.
Those are not just individual psychological problems, but those are group psychological problems, and now with globalization on a global scale.
So how do we address these psychological weaknesses and crutches within the whole human race that are now coming back to what we started with in our universities being taught as virtues?
Yeah, we had something deeply flawed but highly functional, right?
Something that could have been repaired and instead of looking at what was wrong with it and being realistic about how to fix it and what rate we could reasonably expect it to get better, we foolishly Allowed ourselves to become unmoored.
And I don't think people have yet understood how dangerous it is to be unmoored in history.
That we have cut ourselves loose and we are now adrift.
And what we cannot say is where we will land.
We cannot say that we will land anywhere at all, right?
Our species is fragile.
And the fact is our continued existence was dependent on certain agreements that we had reached about how to treat each other, about how processes are required to change.
And then suddenly, suddenly we're in an era where we're seeing just absolutely Processes that are absolutely antithetical to the fundamental nature of the West being deployed willy-nilly over trucker protests, right?
They're going after bank accounts using these electronic blocks.
It's just absolutely unbelievable with all the protections built into our system that we would allow this to take place and that we would think that we could go back.
I mean, your point is exactly right.
The disappearance of the mandates Don't mean anything, because the real story is that we've become unmoored and we do not know where we're going to land.
You know, and then I wonder, why is that?
How have we gotten ourselves so unmoored, as you say, or so unhooked from the past?
And it seems like we are connected to people now, but only across space and not time, right?
So, we are only connected with other current people in the moment.
Right?
On February 24th, 2022, we're connected to them in the sense that we text with them, or we read about what's happening to them in other parts of the world or whatever.
But we're disconnected in time from humans that have come before us.
If you think about the abandonment of the oral tradition, once the printing press was invented, there was a big lot.
I mean, there was something gained there, but there were some good books.
We could share knowledge that way.
But I think what was probably lost in that moment in time was a forced connection with our ancestors and with the events of the past and with the lessons of the past.
And it was preserved in these fables and tales and tales of heroes and tales of loss.
And now we don't I mean, not only do we not have an oral tradition, but I don't know if we're even interested in our written histories.
And without that, I mean, you know, the reluctance to compare what's going on now to what happened in Nazi Germany is not just a concern about trampling insensitively On the horrors of what happened to the Jewish people and other people in 1930s and 40s Germany.
It's not just a moral transgression.
I think the concern is that maybe the underlying concern is with.
As soon as we make an analogy between what's happening now and any moment in the past, we're forcing a connection that we've really lost already.
And we don't know how to do it.
Yeah, I take this one very personally.
I was born in 1969, which at the time seemed a long way from Nazi Germany, and I now realize it wasn't very long at all.
And, you know, as a Jewish kid, my elders made very sure that my generation understood that it could happen here.
It can happen anywhere.
And you probably thought they were crazy.
No, I listened.
What I didn't get, what I never once thought, was that it could happen everywhere.
Right, I always thought it can happen somewhere.
And the thing is you don't want to be late to escape it.
I didn't think it was going to happen everywhere.
But I know that over all those years, we've developed a sensitivity to analogizing that the Holocaust has become too sacred in a sense that we're not allowed to invoke it because people have been too careless in doing so.
But my feeling is A lot of people are now comforted by the fact that what they see doesn't look like Nazi Germany.
It doesn't goose step, it doesn't wear skulls on its hats, right?
There's something comforting about the fact that it doesn't look Nazi.
But I don't think we should be comforted at all, because let's put it this way.
I don't know.
The devil, what is the saying?
The devil you don't see is a lot worse than the one that you do.
Something like that.
I mean, the idea that it's almost sort of hiding in plain sight or something.
Right.
Hiding in plain sight, hiding in the form of Tony Fauci, who just really doesn't look like a Nazi.
Right.
The thing that spooks me is that when I go looking for analogies for the forced vaccination program, for example, it doesn't land exactly on Tuskegee.
It doesn't land exactly on Mangala.
But I know that that's the quadrant of the library that I'm forced to search.
Right.
Right?
That there is no better analogy.
And I think my sense is, A, I think Because of the history of persecution for Jews, that Jews have an obligation actually to speak to this point, and that if anybody is allowed to violate the rules about invoking the Holocaust, it ought to be us, that that's something we've earned.
I think my point is, look, I'm not saying this is exactly that, but I am saying anytime you are forced into that part of the library to look for analogies, that's nature's way of telling you something has gone very seriously wrong.
And I know, I know that's the quadrant of the library.
I know it's that quadrant and I know that in the fiction, it's 1984, it's Brazil, it's Kafka, it's Fahrenheit 451.
Anytime you are forced into that quadrant of the library, you need to think very carefully about how you got there and what you could do to undo it.
And I think, go ahead.
Well, I was just going to say, and what's the point of making an analogy anyway?
I mean, usually it's so that we're illustrating something or we're learning a lesson from something.
So, if we're going through an experience that's a bit intractable to us, or we don't quite understand, we look to something else that shares enough analogs in common.
And then if we maybe understand that second scenario better, we can hope to impart Import some of the lessons from that second scenario into our own that we don't understand very well so that we can understand it better.
So it's illuminating.
It's a very worthwhile project if you do it carefully and thoughtfully, and you've made sure to pick another scenario with enough analogues.
And the reason, you know, as you may know, I mean, there was this Member of Parliament in the House, Melissa Lastman, who is Jewish.
She's a descendant of Holocaust survivors.
I think survivors.
Don't quote me on that.
And, you know, our Prime Minister accused her of standing with Nazis and those waving swastikas.
And, you know, it's almost like we've sort of lost the capacity to understand What she's worried about, or even what our Prime Minister is worried about.
Because if we are making that analogy to a Nazi regime of the past, well, why is that?
Why are we worried about the Nazis?
What is Nazism anyway?
And yes, there's the whole racial purification, eugenics aspect of it.
But basically, I mean, my understanding is that what the Nazis are, it's a kind of fascism that despises liberal democracy.
It despises all things that are about freedom of the individual.
And if what we're feeling in this moment is the greatest threat that we, who are living now, have ever felt to our ability to live as a free person, then trying to learn some lessons from maybe the most recent moment in history that we know of, or the most punctuated moment of history that we're aware of, where liberal democracy and the rights and freedoms of individuals was most at threat, if that's where we have to go in history to understand ourselves better,
Then that doesn't seem to be, that's not only not irresponsible, but it would be irresponsible not to do that, right?
So, I think I can put some flesh on those bones a little bit because my sense, and this is definitely not the consensus in my field, but my sense as an evolutionary biologist is that what we are looking at is a conflict between two levels of evolutionary well-being.
And that the ancient one is based on genes, right?
The reason that you as a 30 trillion cell creature work is that all your cells have the same genes and so they are in perfect agreement about you operating as a cohesive something or other.
A population of people that is very closely genetically related has a similar reason to collaborate and to self-sacrifice in order to move through time.
But there is a second reason, a much better reason, which has to do with the profitability of collaborating irrespective of how genetically related you are to someone.
The university is a marvelous example of this.
You gather with people of every color and both sexes and many different styles of training, many different origin stories, and you talk about What is true and what it means.
And you don't think about the fact that I want that person to succeed because they're more closely related to me than that other person, right?
We reciprocate because the profitability for all of us is so much better than becoming obsessed with genetic relatedness.
And the problem is that the Nazis We're reverting to this other reason for collaboration, a genetic reason for collaboration.
And any time we are faced with that spasm, that ancient evolutionary force trying to overwhelm our modern, enlightened, cosmopolitan belief that it makes sense to put genes aside and to collaborate with people irrespective of where they come from, we are in danger of Going backwards in history.
That's why it's important.
Anytime this pops up, it is The ancient relatedness trying to overwhelm the modern enlightenment.
And we have an obligation to defend the enlightenment with everything we've got, because it truly is superior.
It's a hard-won gain, and our children are entitled to it.
And that's what we're facing.
That's why you and I have been driven out of the university system.
That is why We now have friends demonizing us for choices about medical autonomy, right?
It is that ancient backwards way of seeing things threatening to overwhelm the hard-won games of the last couple thousand years.
It's really very, I mean, it's tragic, as we've been saying, but it's also very beautiful, that story, you know, of how we're failing.
And if we are failing, if we are somewhere on a slope that has a downward trajectory, the bottom of which we have not Met yet.
I think we are now a story of a demoralized people.
I mean that very literally.
We are demoralized.
We have lost what makes humans capable of being moral beings.
It's not just sort of moral Virtues like goodness and courage and generosity, and not just psychological capacities like empathy and openness and humility and things like that, but also intellectual capacities like reason and memory and critical thinking, as we've been discussing.
And if we are really demoralized, if we've lost the capacity to be moral beings, How do you treat those people?
What is the appropriate remedy?
Well, punishing them further, dividing them further, ostracizing them from one another and what matters to them further is only going to plummet us further into this inhuman, demoralized kind of abyss.
What demoralized people need is a kind of moral care so we can rebuild our integrity, our system of wholeness, but not just for ourselves, but between one another.
And so we need to learn how, you know, how is it that our virtues of tolerance, patience, generosity, friendship from a civic point of view were turned on their heads so that now we normalize and prioritize things like intolerance.
I mean, the more intolerant you are, the quicker you can dismiss an outlier from your sphere, your social sphere, the better you are.
We need to understand how to revert that, to revert back to that, I think, older system of virtues that have proven themselves over the millennia to be more successful, not just, I think, from an older system of virtues that have proven themselves over the millennia to be more successful, not just, I think, from an evolutionary strategy, as you would understand or You know, I,
My area of specialty is Aristotle, and Aristotle was a virtue ethicist, and he tried to understand, you know, what is it that makes people happy?
And for him, it's a kind of flourishing.
It's a kind of, you know, like the wholeness of a human being needs to function optimally.
And that's why virtue comes from the Greek word, arete, for excellence.
So, to be virtuous is to be excellent in all the ways that humans are capable of being excellent, right?
It's to develop reason to the best of our ability.
It's to develop our capacities for emotional understanding to the best of our abilities.
And so, when we separate ourselves from each other, when we start hating and dividing each other, when we're falling into this abyss, it's not just that that's Bad for the individual, but we're breaking the integrity of the social system.
And now we're seeing the results of that.
We see protests in Canada, and now you have truckers driving across your country.
And then, I mean, we've been talking for two hours.
I haven't looked to see what's going on in the Ukraine, but I hate it.
I mean, our world is falling apart.
And I think that's because we have a threat.
We don't just have this viral threat.
We have a threat to the integrity of our moral systems as individuals.
And our moral relatedness to other people.
Yes, and we have the oddness of this technological moment.
So, I don't know about you, but I've had the experience of losing my career, losing a good portion of my friend group, losing my home, but For each of the things that I have lost, I have been put in contact with absolutely marvelous people that I never would have encountered otherwise.
People like you that I've never met in person, but you and I are capable of having this conversation.
And you know, look, I wouldn't know that you existed, but for the fact that we had been thrown out of the same academy at different times for different crimes.
And, uh, I guess this is the thing I hope people will understand is that the horror of what is happening, of us losing track of who we are and what we've learned and what it means is only matched by the unusual fact of the dissidents being of us losing track of who we are and what we've learned and what it means is only matched by the unusual fact of the dissidents being driven together and discovering
Right.
And there is a tremendous amount of solace in discovering the high quality people who have said no and have been ejected and are now just becoming aware of the parallel others.
I find something as dystopian as this moment is, I find something very hopeful in all of the marvelous people who have been forced to the surface by it.
It's a beautiful kind of poetic irony in some sense.
It's also, it's very sad to me when I hear people who have been hurt by what's happened over the last couple of years by the mandates or whatever, social ostracization or whatever, that they speak as though sadness and badness in life are inevitable as a result of these things.
As though, and you know, that's coupled with language, like I'm forced to make a certain choice.
I'm forced to, Abide by the mandates or whatever, but I think, you know, one of the things that the story that you are telling shows is that we can be coerced, we can be manipulated, we can face pressures from all sides that make us feel like our scope of choice is not what it was, but we cannot be forced to be other than what we want to be in our souls.
That is a place that is immune to all external influence unless we allow it.
That is true immunity.
Yeah.
What we've seen is, I mean, I'm not insensitive to Moral hardship and the challenges with resilience over time.
I mean, I think we've seen that in the Indigenous community that it's, you know, you can be beaten down enough and it is very hard to recover from that.
But also the circumstances that you described show us that you can have these beautiful Phoenix from the ashes, or whatever you want to call it, moments at the worst times.
You could never have planned it.
The human mind, I think, is not capable of orchestrating that kind of spontaneous beauty.
And all we can do is, I think, be on the lookout for it and embrace it when it happens and try to make the best of it.
Yeah, that's a very poetic way of putting it.
And I think there is something It's accidental, I'm sure, but symbolic about a society that has grown so sick that it believes it has a right to dictate the reprogramming of your immune system and has a right to dictate the reprogramming of your mind.
And I must say, I am very pleased to see how many people understand that that is wrong Who are standing up and saying look you can take everything else, but you can't take that what's inside my mind Is mine and it's it's it's not your right.
This is the one life I'm going to get and I am entitled to use my mind as I see fit and Thank you Well, is there anything else you'd like to say before we wrap this up I We've been through conservatively two millennia of human history and three and a half billion years of the history of life on the planet, so I can't think of anything else.
You're right.
We did cover a lot.
We did cover a lot.
It's very thoroughly enjoyable.
Thank you.
Yes, it's been a lovely conversation.
Where can people find you?
So I am now the Pandemic Ethics Scholar for the Democracy Fund, which is a civil liberties charity in Canada, so people can go to thedemocracyfund.ca.
I also have a new book out called My Choice, so you can go to mychoicebook.ca or find it on Amazon.
And on Instagram, I am Dr. Julie Panessi.
I think I'm also that on Twitter, so I'm around.
Excellent!
Well, I will put links to all of those things in the description.
I very much look forward to hearing what people have to say about our conversation.
I think it was a very good one, and I think the feedback will be fascinating.
