By Rus­sell L. Blay­lock, M.D.

In a pre­vious essay, I dis­cussed a con­cept that is always on the mind of the socialist planner and that is “social utility”. To fully under­stand this con­cept one has to under­stand the socialist phi­los­ophy, if it can indeed be called a phi­los­ophy — in gen­eral, philoso­phies are ana­lyt­ical. In their world view, which is basi­cally a gnostic one, the world is occu­pied by two basic forms of human life — those who are wise and chosen and those who make up the common rabble — the masses.

The wise, in an older gnostic view, are anointed by the divine force to lead mankind and mold his nature based on an under­standing derived from arcane knowl­edge care­fully guarded by mys­tics of the ancient world. This idea, that cer­tain men are chosen to rule mankind has per­me­ated many gov­ern­ments of the world since and in modern times has attained a less meta­phys­ical tint, but which is still divided between those who cling to the ancient notions of gnos­ti­cism, such as the theosophists (Alice Bailey), and the modern view of the New World Order Move­ment. Of course, they inter­mingle quite often. We are wit­nessing an exploding interest in wisdom derived from the gnostic gospels, as taught by its chief dis­ciple Elaine Pagels. Many intel­lec­tuals, high-ranking pol­i­cy­makers and even clergy have accepted gnostic beliefs.

When it is accepted that cer­tain men are chosen to rule purely based on their divine anoint­ment and that they rule not based on raw power, but by the fact that they pos­sess a wisdom far beyond the common man, it becomes accepted that the masses (ordi­nary people) must obey — it is their duty.

In the view of the gnostic, society is chaotic, poorly planned and unjust. There­fore, through a series of care­fully thought out plans, in their view, society can be molded or engi­neered to create a more free, just and hap­pier society than would oth­er­wise occur. This requires that the masses, the people, be con­vinced to adhere to the “plan” and if they are not con­vinced they must be tricked into accepting the plan. As Edmund Burke said, -“The people never give up their lib­er­ties but under some delu­sion”. The last resort is out­right force.

The wise ones see society as a parent views their small chil­dren, they must be made to take their med­i­cine because only the wisdom of the par­ents can know that in the long run it will be good for them — the idea of the pater­nal­istic society. Like­wise, they are assured that the common rabble will never have the vision and intel­lec­tual capacity to under­stand the plan in its entirety. We see this level of arro­gance in all their writings.

Armed with this world view, the self-appointed elite have con­cluded that since they must engi­neer the per­fect society, they alone must gauge a person’s worth in terms of social utility — what does the indi­vidual or group have to offer to the New World Order. In this view, social utility is based on one’s con­tri­bu­tion to the plan. The socialist only deals in terms of society as a whole or to the economy in general.

One who works, pays taxes and is not a burden on the state is of higher social utility than is a retired or dis­abled person, who not only does not con­tribute skills (work) or pay taxes, but more likely is a burden on the state. In the col­lec­tivist way of thinking (seeing society as a whole and having no con­cern for the indi­vidual) the latter person should be removed from the society, either by pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive euthanasia. It is pos­i­tive if one actively kills a person and neg­a­tive if they just deny those per­sons access to life sus­taining care — in both cases they are just as dead.

The Amer­ican gnostic elite have chosen neg­a­tive euthanasia as the system that will be most accepted by the people, the masses. The mech­a­nism for this mode of killing is rationing of health care. It is ironic that during this debate on national socialist health care many vocal defenders deny that the admin­is­tra­tion wants to kill anyone, yet if we read the words of those who designed this plan, that is exactly what they say. More on that later.

His­to­rian Paul Johnson wrote in his book, Intel­lec­tuals, that “social engi­neering is the cre­ation of mil­lenarian intel­lec­tuals who believe that they can refashion the uni­verse by the light of their unaided reason. It is the birthright of the total­i­tarian tra­di­tion.” These intel­lec­tuals are the chosen wise ones of modern times. Socialist Edward Alsworth Ross in his book Social Con­trol, makes plain that some, the wise, must create a plan that estab­lishes con­trol over the society and that it is these leaders who must con­trol the behavior and actions of the people. This book, which was highly influ­en­tial among pol­i­cy­makers, was written in 1910. In the chapter on The Need for Social Con­trol he explains:

“Although the social fabric is at first held together by sheer force of arms, time grad­u­ally masks naked might, and moral and spir­i­tual influ­ences partly replace brute force. It is in the com­posite society, then, where the need of con­trol is most imper­a­tive and unremit­ting, that the var­ious instru­ments of reg­u­la­tion receive their highest forms and finish. Here has been per­fected the tech­nique of almost every kind of control.”

He then goes on to say:

“The only thing that can enable a society to dis­pense with con­trol is some sort of favor­able selec­tion. The way to pro­duce a short-clawed feline is not to trim the claws of suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tions of kit­tens, but to pick out the shortest clawed cats and breed from them.

This, of course is a call for eugenic engi­neering of society to breed for desir­able people and rid society of the unfit and unde­sir­able. It is impor­tant to keep in mind that those sup­porting these dra­conian eugenic pro­grams were not dis­grun­tled dreamers cog­i­tating in some New York coffee house, they were men and women of high social rank, intel­lec­tuals, pres­i­dents of major uni­ver­si­ties, pol­i­cy­makers, cor­po­rate heads and even pres­i­dents of the United States. These were people in posi­tions of power and influ­ence who could enforce these dreams of a Utopian society and that made them very dangerous.

Lily Kay, in her book, The Mol­e­c­ular Vision of Life, a his­tory of mol­e­c­ular biology, she states:

“By the time of the launching of the mol­e­c­ular biology pro­gram, the Rock­e­feller phil­an­thropies had con­sid­er­able expe­ri­ence with eugenics. … they did sup­port eugenics projects, such as the ster­il­iza­tion cam­paign of the National Com­mittee for Mental Hygiene to restrict the breeding of the feeble-minded, The Rock­e­feller phil­an­thropies also acted in the area of eugenics through the Bureau of Social Hygiene (BSH) and the Laura Spellman Rock­e­feller Memo­rial (LSRM).”

Enthu­siasm for social engi­neering and elim­i­nating the “unfit” reached beyond our shores with links being made to the German eugenics move­ment, a favorite topic of Hitler and the National Socialist. Edwin Black in his his­tory of the eugenic move­ment, War on the Weak, says:

“The third Inter­na­tional Con­gress of Eugenics was held in New York City in August of 1932, once again at the Amer­ican Museum of Nat­ural His­tory. Although orga­ni­za­tion such as the Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion were donating vast sums to German eugenics for research and travel, the grants were fre­quently lim­ited to spe­cific activ­i­ties within Ger­many or neigh­boring countries.”

The reason for quoting this mate­rial is to show how even in a country such as ours the brightest and most edu­cated class can some­times be obsessed with dan­gerous ideas that can harm indi­vid­uals. These indi­vid­uals become espe­cially dan­gerous when they con­trol the reins of edu­ca­tion, dis­sem­i­na­tion of news and gov­ern­ment policy-making. As the title of Richard Weaver’s book says—Ideas Have Con­se­quences.

The Modern Social Engineers

Unknown to many, once again a group of our most politically-connected intel­lec­tuals are pur­suing an idea that can harm a great many people in our society.  Much of the funding for these ideas once again flows from the major foun­da­tions in our country, espe­cially the Ford Foun­da­tion, Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion and affil­i­ates and the Carnegie Foun­da­tion. These major foun­da­tions are net­worked with hun­dreds of other foun­da­tions and research study groups, giving them enor­mous influ­ence in society and among politi­cians who can carry out these ideas by spe­cific legislation.

I have chosen the Hast­ings Center for my source of writ­ings on the new under­stand­ings on health care as being pro­moted by this admin­is­tra­tion. I say this admin­is­tra­tion, but I am cer­tain this bill was not drafted in any con­gres­sional office, but rather had been pre­pared long ago by one of the foun­da­tion think tanks. I base this on my knowl­edge of the foun­da­tions’ obses­sion with health care plan­ning and social­ized med­i­cine and the com­plexity of this bill.

The Hast­ings Center, as some will remember, was involved in much con­tro­versy many years ago as the group pro­moting the idea of neg­a­tive euthanasia to estab­lish more equity in health care dis­tri­b­u­tion. They were not as openly rad­ical as the Hem­lock Society, which felt it their duty to elim­i­nate those con­sid­ered unfit for life and for pro­moting the idea of having panels of experts decide to decide who shall live and who shall die in nursing homes.

One of the fel­lows of the Hast­ings Center is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Pres­i­dent Obama’s health care czar and a source of con­stant input on health care “reform”. His schol­arly paper is included in a package of arti­cles expressing the Hast­ings Cen­ters posi­tion on health care reform and life in general.

On this web­site they make the fol­lowing statement:

“Death may not have changed, but dying is quite dif­ferent from what it used to be, thanks to med­ical tech­nolo­gies that have extended life and made dying fre­quently a lin­gering process rather than a sudden event.  People with failing kid­neys can sur­vive on dial­ysis for 20 or more years. People with incur­able cancer can live for months or years with chemotherapy and radi­a­tion treat­ments. Vic­tims of car acci­dents who would once have died of head trauma can now be kept alive by ven­ti­la­tors and feeding tubes. Mean­time, life-saving ther­a­pies for what were once sudden killers, like heart attack, mean that increasing num­bers of us end up with chronic com­pli­ca­tions or decline into dementia.”

In other word, because of advances in med­i­cine we can now give people longer lives, even though they have presently incur­able dis­eases and in their view this is wrong. Why?, because it just means they may end up with some­thing worse years later — such as dementia. That is much like saying it would be a waste to fix the fence because even­tu­ally it will wear out anyway.

A paper from this Hast­ings Center col­lec­tion is one by a senior con­sul­tant for the Center, Bruce Jen­nings, titled—Lib­erty: Free and Equal. In essence, it is a dis­cus­sion of how lib­erty is to be rede­fined in light of the “new thinking”. Social­ists have rede­fined most words dealing with their assaults on free soci­eties. For example, Lenin defined a moral act as one that fur­ther the socialist rev­o­lu­tion. Thus, killing mil­lions in gulags is moral because it pro­moted the com­mu­nist revolution.

On the first page he resorts to the mer­can­tilist idea that a country has a fixed amount of wealth and that it is the job of the social planner to make sure there is a “just” dis­tri­b­u­tion of this wealth. We can think of the economy as a pie of a fixed size in this view. He says:

“Such a con­flict is thought to arise, for example, when allowing all indi­vid­uals the freedom to accu­mu­late as much as they can under­mines the capacity of the entire society to ensure that each indi­vidual receives a fair share.”

In other words, the eco­nomic pie is only so large and if some take a larger slice, others get a smaller slice. Adam Smith, in the Wealth of Nations and many econ­o­mists since that time, have shown that this is not true – the size of the pie is ever-growing in a free market society and is deter­mined by the cre­ativity and genius of those oper­ating in a free society in which pri­vate prop­erty is pro­tected. These socialist plan­ners do not under­stand this because they are socialist and socialism can never create any­thing in terms of eco­nomic growth — it can only redis­tribute by force what the free market has produced.

We also find that socialist often rede­fine cer­tain words that they use to deceive the public. For example, as stated above Lenin taught that an act was moral if it pro­moted the rev­o­lu­tion. This jus­ti­fied the mass killing of tens of mil­lions of Rus­sians because it fur­thered the com­mu­nist rev­o­lu­tion. In his essay Lib­erty: Free and Equal, Bruce Jen­nings, a senior con­sul­tant for the Hast­ings Center says:

“The health reform con­ver­sa­tion has to be re-framed at the grass roots level so that a new way of seeing what lib­erty is and what it requires will grow out of that con­ver­sa­tion. One tenet of this move­ment should be that equity in access to health care, reduc­tion of group dis­par­i­ties in health status, and greater atten­tion to the social deter­mi­nants of the health of pop­u­la­tions and indi­vid­uals are all polity goals through which lib­erty will be enhanced, not diminished.”

So, we see that the def­i­n­i­tion of lib­erty is now turned on its head and we are told to view this assault on lib­erty as enhancing lib­erty. He means that when looking at the larger pic­ture and when wearing the spe­cial gog­gles of socialism, forceful redis­tri­b­u­tion of your earn­ings will appear as greater lib­erty. This is because in the socialist view, engi­neering of humanity will make health care more just.

Again, that depends on one’s under­standing of eco­nomics — if you accept the mer­can­tilist view of a nation’s wealth, that there is a pie to be divided, yes it is true jus­tice demands that access be redis­trib­uted, but in a truly free society where wealth cre­ation arises from indi­vid­uals and groups of free indi­vid­uals par­tic­i­pating in free market oper­a­tions, it is not true. In a free society we are not dividing up a fix amount of resources, we are allowing people to decide what is the best way for them, using their own money, to indi­vid­u­ally sat­isfy their health care needs and desires.

When the social­ists say that they are dividing “scarce resources” one needs to ask — What are the resources in ques­tion? In a free market resource avail­ability depends on demand and cre­ativity of the entre­pre­neur. In fact, in many of their pub­li­ca­tions they com­plain that con­sumer demand is dri­ving the devel­op­ment of more tech­nology and advances in med­i­cine. They cannot have it both ways.

One must under­stand that socialism is about com­pul­sion. The social­ists believes that their view of society is the only cor­rect one, since they are the chosen wise of gnos­ti­cism, and there­fore people must be made to follow their plans. As I stated in my pre­vious paper on National Health Insur­ance: The Socialist Night­mare, when the leg­is­lator encoun­ters resis­tance to the plan they become more frantic and dictatorial.

Jen­nings concludes:

“Lib­erty rethought can then be one of the touch­stones for a demo­c­ratic, grass roots move­ment for health reform that will demand health jus­tice in a nation of free and equal persons.”

In the paper he rejects the wisdom of many of the philoso­phers of freedom that one cannot have absolute enforced equality and per­sonal lib­erty. Using a per­verse logic he somehow twist the prin­ciple of using com­pul­sion by the gov­ern­ment, that is, to take from some (deny access to mainly the elderly, the chron­i­cally ill and the presently incur­able) and give to the ones anointed by those in power.

Equality as a prin­ciple in a free country means that the gov­ern­ment will not make laws that denies access to the ben­e­fits of freedom, which are directed at a select group or indi­vidual. For example, both seg­re­ga­tion laws and racial quotas specif­i­cally target cer­tain groups to be denied cer­tain free­doms or as being anointed. What is being dis­cussed by the socialist is that access should be guar­an­teed to the “poor”, a rather broad term, and selec­tively denied to those with the highest health care cost (the elderly and the chron­i­cally ill), which is mostly through no fault of their own.

Another paper of the series of Hast­ings Center pub­li­ca­tions is by Paul T. Menzel, a pro­fessor of phi­los­ophy at Pacific Lutheran Uni­ver­sity titled—Jus­tice and Fair­ness: Man­dating Uni­versal Par­tic­i­pa­tion. I found this paper to be espe­cially enlight­ening. He opens by stating that it is unjust that one person is cured of their ill­ness and left unscathed by the cost and another dies or is left finan­cially ruined. This health care plan, as with all such socialist health care plans, reverses the sit­u­a­tion and says, in essence, it is they, the elite, who should choose who lives and who dies, usu­ally meaning that the elderly, the chron­i­cally ill and the presently incur­able are in the latter category.

To attain “jus­tice” he says, manda­tory health care must be leg­is­lated. Any time some­thing is man­dated, someone must be denied their lib­er­ties. For instance, man­dated vac­cines means you will be forcibly vac­ci­nated, as in the case of the thou­sand chil­dren and teenagers in Mary­land who were forcibly vac­ci­nated in the court­room by the judge’s order. To man­date uni­versal health care, under their def­i­n­i­tion, means everyone will be forced into the system even against their will. This is the antithesis of freedom, despite their attempt to rede­fine freedom.

He says:

“We have already col­lec­tively decided to pre­vent hos­pi­tals from turning away the unin­sured. In such a con­text, allowing insur­ance to remain vol­un­tary is unfair to many of the unin­sured. The obvious way to alle­viate this unfair­ness is to man­date insurance.”

Like the ACORN intim­i­da­tion of banks, forcing them to give loans to people who were bad finan­cial risk, forcing hos­pi­tals to take non-pay patients in mass num­bers, espe­cially illegal aliens, has led to bank­ruptcy of many smaller hos­pi­tals and serious finan­cial strain on many others. It also means, because of cost shifting, the insured and self-pay patient will pay more than just for their ser­vices. But then, that pushes more to accept the idea of social­ized medicine.

One of the most con­tro­ver­sial issues is the new system of analysis called Quality Adjusted Life Years — which divides cost with how long one would expect the person to live. For example, fixing an 85 year-old person’s cataracts just so they could see well, only to have them die a year later, seem unjust and foolish to a social planner. To the person and their loved ones, it is humane and rational.

If you treat people like a sta­tistic, as do social plan­ners, many inhu­mane things can be jus­ti­fied. We also see that a policy that won approval when the above example is used, soon expands to reclas­sify a person age 55 as “too old” for a health care ser­vice, as hap­pens in both the UK and Canada.

Effi­ciency, Quality Care and Money

In gen­eral, the old adage — you get what you pay for — is true. If you have bare-bones health care, you get mar­ginal care and if you pay more, you can get the best med­ical sci­ence has to offer. Most of the plan­ners for national health care plans intended for the public to get bare bones care, but they sold them on accepting the care by telling them it would offer unlim­ited ser­vice and quality.

Now we are hearing a dif­ferent story from the plan­ners. Sud­denly, we are hearing major players in health care sug­gest that we should “turn back the clock” on health tech­nology and top dollar care. In other words, people should settle for care at a 1960 level rather than a 2009 level. Pro­fessor Callahan states it this way:

“Serious progress would mean turning back the clock; learning to take care of our­selves, to tol­erate some degree of dis­com­fort, to accept the reality of aging and death.”

Fur­ther he says:

“One could make a good case that improve­ments in edu­ca­tion and job cre­ation could be a better use of lim­ited funds than better med­ical care. Social and eco­nomic progress would have double and even triple ben­e­fits beyond improved health.”

Thomas Murray, the pres­i­dent of the Hast­ings center agrees. He says that, “At times the best invest­ment for health may be in edu­ca­tion, job cre­ation, or envi­ron­mental pro­tec­tions, not in health care.”

Daniel Callahan notes that the carrot and stick approach may have to be used to guide people to accept changes in health care. As for the sticks he says:

“The stick will be the mes­sage that you should take care of your­self and not expect med­i­cine to save you when your time runs out — that is no longer an option.”

Already, gov­ern­ment funded med­ical care pro­vides less med­ical care than pri­vately insured patients, espe­cially those with expen­sive plans. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Obama’s health czar, wrote an article for the Hast­ings Center in 1996 in which he said;

“Medicare ben­e­fi­cia­ries receive fewer ser­vices with some dis­cre­tionary ser­vices cov­ered and some ser­vices that intu­itively seem basic cov­ered; Med­icaid ben­e­fi­cia­ries and unin­sured per­sons receive far fewer services.”

Dr. Emanuel goes on to sug­gest that:

“Con­versely, ser­vices pro­vided to indi­vid­uals who are irre­versibly pre­vented from being or becoming par­tic­i­pating cit­i­zens are not basic and should not be guar­an­teed. An obvious example is not guar­an­teeing health ser­vices to patients with dementia. A less obvious example is guar­an­teeing neu­ropsy­cho­log­ical ser­vices to ensure chil­dren with learning dis­abil­i­ties can read and learn to reason.”

Does Doctor Emanuel sug­gest that the Alzheimer patients should receive no care? What about the early Alzheimer patients, should they be seen for a bladder infec­tion, a degen­er­a­tive hip or diar­rhea? Or should we just let the family deal with it so we can use that money for other social engi­neering project, per­haps a new pro­jector to show sex-education pro­pa­ganda to grade-school chil­dren. It is obvious that under such a system, we must mea­sure a person’s “social utility” to deter­mine if they are worth the expenditure.

Who Are the Elderly?

From a series of state­ments by Doctor Emanuel it is apparent that he, and many others in posi­tions of power, con­clude that the elderly have lived their lives and it is time for them to move on, espe­cially if they are costing the state money. This is not a new theme among the elit­ists of society, as we went through this with Social Secu­rity as well.

One must then ask-Who are the elderly and why do they deserve to live? This ques­tion poised by the social­ists, assumes that one must give a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to the fed­eral gov­ern­ment for existing in this society. This is the social utility argu­ment. If you serve no useful pur­pose in the society, as far as some social use­ful­ness, then you have no social utility and are no longer wel­come. This is not really that far away from the German National Socialist Party’s thinking, which referred to those with no social utility as “use­less eaters” and the dis­abled, chron­i­cally ill and incur­ables as “life unworthy of life”.

I remember when I was a boy my dad intro­ducing me to this very old fellow. We got to talking and I learned that the old gen­tleman had fought in the Spanish Amer­ican War. He told me things that I could never learn from a his­tory book and it stuck with me all my life. My dad later told me that there were older people all over who had inter­esting sto­ries to tell, people who had done amazing things and accom­plished much in life. They were a store­house of his­tory, wisdom and inter­esting sto­ries of life during America’s greatest moments.

I have gotten to know many who sur­vived the Great Depres­sion, World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam. I even met a fellow once who saw the Hin­den­burg burn. My mom used to tell me sto­ries of lis­tening to FDR on the radio and my Aunt Ann was working as a tele­phone oper­ator when it was announced that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. These things are invaluable.

To have the older gen­er­a­tion around as long as pos­sible is a great value to us all. There was a time when we hon­ored our par­ents and grand­par­ents as sources of great wisdom, yet in modern times we just see them as old fogies that have no idea how to send emails or pro­gram a DVD. We are now being taught by our “elite leaders” and intel­lec­tuals that we would all be better off if the elderly would just accept death and that denying them health care can speed the process.

There is a polar­iza­tion between the young and old, which can only be wors­ened by the present debate on the elderly’s “social utility”. With so many divorcees, a growing number of youth often feel little real attach­ment, appre­ci­a­tion or abiding love for their par­ents or grand­par­ents. One can make a strong case for the present destruc­tion of fam­i­lies and mar­riages being the result of a series of ear­lier social engi­neering plans and schemes.

We also need to appre­ciate that because of the great number of chil­dren born out of wed­lock, Grand­mothers are often raising these chil­dren for their daugh­ters, so many have “social utility” not rec­og­nized by the elite plan­ners and social engi­neers. Yet, even beyond this, we should appre­ciate that the elderly have lived good lives, worked hard, paid their taxes, obeyed the laws and many have made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions during their lives that have made life better for others.

A great number have served nobly during America’s wars – lost limbs and suf­fered from the stress of war. Are we to dis­honor them now for their sac­ri­fice by telling them they are a lia­bility? Others gave their sons and daugh­ters during wars and lived with the anguish of the loss. Is this how we honor that sac­ri­fice — to tell them that they are of no use? When I read the sto­ries of the young men and women who have sac­ri­ficed their lives in battle in today’s wars I wonder will they be dis­hon­ored in such a way when they get old or sick?

We can hon­estly say that it was the labor of our seniors that built this great country, so how can be betray them now? Even worse is that we are telling them that we don’t even care that they are suf­fering during their last days and that they are aware that relief of their suf­fering exist, but they cannot have it — the money, they are told, would be better spent on edu­ca­tional pro­grams, studies of global cli­mate change and a plethora of other socialist dreams.

If we let this happen, we should hold our heads in shame.