In an earlier post on the promising candidacy of RF Kennedy jr. I discussed his climate fallacies. Then I realized that there is another area where the last hope for the Democrats is somehow trapped in his own reasoning. When Jordan Peterson asks him about the fact that our young generation is totally demoralized by the relentless climate porn unleashed on them, RFK jr. responds with a rather bizarre yet revealing explanation.
I already have a PS in the earlier blogpost where I ask whether RFK Jr. is somehow like the man with the hammer to whom everything is a nail. As an environmental litagist he seems to have a rather linear view of the impacts of environmental toxins on human health and behavior. In a way he approaches the issue in a mirror fashion to what big pharma does when they devise new drugs to tinker with our biochemistry. It’s a mechanistic view of our organism where one input leads to a concrete predictable outcome. Vaccine in, autism out. Plastic residue in, infertility out.
Vaccine in, autism out. Plastic residue in, infertility out.
This represents a view of our complex organism not just as a machine, but as a trivial machine, as the Austrian American scientist Heinz von Förster defined it. This is also exactly what an environmental lawyer needs to have any level of success. In order to litigate corporations I need to know that substance X causes disease Y. In that case the corporation gets convicted, the harmed people get compensation and the lawyer gets his fee. The last thing I want to argue here is that this work is not of the utmost importance to keep large corporations in check and to enforce compliance with science based laws against environmental pollution. To prove my point let me share this horrible hellish video about what Dupont did to make huge profits with non stick pans while ruining the health of people around their plant.
So Kudos to RFK Jr. and any laywer who sticks their head out for ordinary people who get crushed by profit seeking corporations. So drop that hammer any time on big pharma, big food, big agriculture or any other Goliath. But has swinging that hammer for decades made our presidential hopeful somewhat myopic in his outlook on the world? It is fully obvious that the modern generation is quite demoralised by climate propaganda and much less capable and willing to start a family (directly by the climate lies and indirectly because these lies impoverish us). How can RFK Jr. then be so blind to claim that this is due to some toxin in the environment?
They thrived on hope
Let’s start by noting that we as living organisms are non trivial machines. One person who has lived healthily all his life might be stricken by cancer at a young age, whereas some heavy smoker might live happily into high age. The human body is a true miracle in its resilience to cope with vast quantities of toxins like alcohol or sugar for that matter. Yes in the end something breaks and the person gets ill but that is decades later. I am highly sensitive to smell and can’t stand even for a minute to be in a room that gets painted with a thinner based paint, or in a print shop or in a beauty salon for that matter. But people working in those professions will not get sick for decades and decades despite the high exposure. Think about poor people crawling in mines. Their hope, their optimism and their hunger for money (Stemming from the instinct to create a family) seems to vastly outdo the effects that any toxin might have on their organism. Think of hunter-gatherers who ventured into areas with dark winters and chronic vitamin D deficiencies: their “machines” didn’t break down. They thrived on hope.
Of course we want to get rid of non-biological agents in the end. Of course we all want a clean environment. And of course it is the duty of corporations to work towards cyclical non toxic solutions. Even substances for which no harm is proven, should preferably be kept out of the environment. Yet compare the very slow impact of a toxin and our resilience to it, to the devastating impact of societal and psychological harms. People will breakdown into helpless bundles of sorrow given the proper amount of bad luck or malice. People will give up their inner drive to procreate, when the society burdens them with dangerous nonsense or inherited guilt. Depression and PTSS are way more debilitating than anything ever found in the environment (and don’t say to a Vietnam vet or a victim of child abuse, that it is caused by an environmental toxin). Does RF Kennedy Jr. really believe that clean coal is non-viable because minute emissions that escape the modern filters, will destroy us like the meteor that did away with the non-avian dinosaurs? Or that we couldn’t develop a better filter?
Think again. In fact we are so resilient to toxins that even if people live in fully healthy environments, they tend to keep on drinking and smoking forever and do all kinds of other unhealthy stuff. Making people healthy again – ending the public health crisis – is as much about educating young people about health, biology and physiology, as it is about litigating corporations. Do we want another prohibition? This time against sugar, or could we maybe educate young people about it at home and at school?
In general, it is mostly mind over matter! With a strong mind a person can even relocate when a factory nearby is doing nefarious stuff to the environment!
Fit or not fit to be president?
So when Jordan Peterson is upset about what we are doing to the younger generation in our schools and through our media, with direct harmful impacts to their motivating system (dopamine), then … an insightful person like RFK Jr. should pause, contemplate and reconsider. He should not see the human organism as a machine where every disorder is due to a toxin released by a company he can litigate. I believe his net worth is 50 million dollars, certainly in large part a family heritage. If he, as a free man, cannot put his professional hammer aside .. if he keeps seeing each problem as a nail, then I would say he is not fit to be president.
PS An extremely important addendum to this line of reasoning is to note that CO2 is not even a toxin. It is fully vital and biological. Together with O2, and H2O they are most biological substances on the planet. The bedrock of life. Likewise warmth (or cold or swings between both) are also fully “biological”, earthlike. A degree of warming (even if caused by CO2, which is doubtful) is not a horrifically exotic life threatening invasion of a never before seen element, but a fully benign little change to smile about.
Title photo by Moritz Mentges on Unsplash