The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 28
The agriculturalist Trofim Lysenko should be a household name throughout the world in roughly the same way that Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong are or should be. That is, Lysenko shouldn’t be known for his successes, which are none of his legacy, but for his catastrophic failure. He was the agriculturalist of the Soviet Union, first under Stalin, and his ideological biology (Lysenkoism) led directly to the deaths of tens of millions, first in the Soviet Union and then in Maoist China. Lysenkoism implied famine and mass death, and disputing Lysenkoism, despite its catastrophe, meant a trip to the gulag or a bullet in your head.
We should be aware of Lysenko because it is crucially important to understand how the ideological perversion of science, especially the biological sciences, can lead to catastrophes. In fact, if we were more aware of Trofim Lysenko and his legacy of death, we might be more cognizant of the threat we’re currently stumbling our way into under the banners of “antiracist medicine” and “health equity.” These are the dawn of Medical Lysenkoism, which is a tragedy in the making, potentially on a grand scale, and this is already well underway.
The threat of Medical Lysenkoism is rapidly growing around us already, and we have to take it seriously and demand it be put to a halt. In this case, Critical Race Theory and its perverse doctrines of “antiracism” and “equity” are being leveraged to transform healthcare away from a science- and patient-oriented endeavor to an activist opportunity to “level the playing field.” Further, under the banner of “health equity” and Covid-19, our society’s concerning lurch toward medical dictatorship (governed by this new “equitable” Medical Lysenkoism) is becoming the standard throughout our medical schools, hospitals, and research universities. This is a preventable catastrophe in the making.
In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, join James Lindsay as he reads through a recent essay published in Boston Review outlining an advance in the “health equity” agenda wherein even racially preferential care is described as already being implemented and reparations are demanded at a major Boston-area teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard University.
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8 comments
Back in the early 1980’s, I read a book titled “Confessions of a Medical Heretic”. I read a lot of additional literature on holistic and nutritional healthcare. I subsequently reared 3 children to adulthood with no significant health issues. One issue of an allergic reaction to poison ivy and one of swollen glands, which the doctor said was not an issue if there were not other symptoms, and there were not and it resolved with no treatment
Does mistrusting the medical community qualify me as a black person? Can I get reparations too?
Woke Lysenkoism isn’t limited to the medical field. Consider this book being favorably reviewed in the premier journal Science: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6555/630
wow, that book sounds like word salad with a high price. the authors ignore their own colonialism (why are marya and patel in california, e.g.? and bloverating about american indians?) and demanding someone “end incarceration?” every indigenous society has incarceration of its own, prior to any colonialism. patel also ignores the fact that the only indigenous in the americas were the first of five waves of trans-beringia migration and the other four waves from siberia were all colonizers too. why do colonizer-haters marya and patel write in english, presumably the language of the british colonizers who ruled india?
While I appreciate your concerns with woke medicine, making statements about some hidden problem with vaccines to prevent patients dying of COVID-19 does not help the cause. I am not a woke physician, and deeply fear about the silly crap that you have clearly described with the article today under “The Dawn of Medical Lysenkoism”. Having a child being an “immunization star” is simply a means that we in health care will used for decades as a means to reduce vaccine hesitancy and combat anti-vaxxer flat earth nutbars. Where the issue of woke medicine is deeply dangerous is listed in many of your lines of argument in Cynical Theories such as CRT where a black doctor making a serious medical error cannot be held to account because that would be white privilege or labeled a racist act, or that a white doctor supposedly now harms black patients, or doctor trying to better understand transgender issues without losing your job, postcolonialism making indigenous patients less likely to look at their own individual agency as being part of the solution, etc. Focus on how woke philosophy will undermine “first do no harm and then do good”, instead of tangentiating into vaccine conspiracy theories. We need you out there helping the medical cause, not being sidelined by sounding like a quack. If you’re not sure what you are talking about in medicine, then avoid talking about that topic, reach out for help, and move into another area. For example, consider selection to medical school based on different paths (one for black students and one for everyone else), what is the future impact on patients’ trust in the competency of black doctors if the path was made explicitly easier. There is a ton of crap coming into medicine through wokeism, that I deeply fear. Talk about that. Race, gender, sexuality, fatties being a normal body size, psychiatric illness normalization, etc. The crazies are running the asylum. And people will die.
no one should get into med school based on race. “what do you call the person who finished LAST i n their class at med school?” “Doctor.” who wants the doctor who got there by skin color and not ability? crt people always want to dismantle race somewhere, except the NFL or NBA. we nee d more short fat asthmatic white people playing pro sports to be consistent with their argument.
The Covid pseudo-vaccine is just as much Lysenkoism as any attempt to Wokify medicine, and like Lysenko’s catastrophes, we are already seeing its disastrous results being suppressed for political reasons.
There is a bizarre and worrying effect that Power has on otherwise normal, competent, and well-meaning people, that converts them into true-believers, hostile to all dissent. If there was some magical way to penetrate this mass hypnosis, it would be of great benefit to humanity, but as Gustave Le Bon noted, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
O.K. What can the average person do to combat medical Lysenkoism?
Have a familiarity with the subject and talk respectfully to people.
Talk to Anyone who will listen.
People did this for years – even decades – to get CT and CRT enough into the lexicon that the politicians could begin mentioning it and a public resistance could form.