7 ms·

Medicine and psychiatry often seem to be at the center of these regimes. Is there sometihng about doctors and ideology that goes so closely together? Maybe it's

Medicine and psychiatry often seem to be at the center of these regimes. Is there sometihng about doctors and ideology that goes so closely together? Maybe it's the pretext the regimes to suspend rules and rationality. German doctors began a "euthenasia" program several years before the war broke out, and no governing body of theirs seems to have historically been above using prisoners for medical experiments. Even recently, doctors even consult on enhanced interrogation techniques, and seem to favour some pretty heavy handed public health policy. As a profession, is there something fundamentally wrong with many of them that we tolerate for their expertise?

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
I was going to say the Catholic Church often seems to be at the center of these regimes, but I guess we all see things through our own lens.
- wyager 4y ago
  - saboot 4y ago
    The pope may not have been, but several german priests such as Herman Muckermann certainly gave german Catholics a way to support eugenics and race theories.
    - Thorrez 4y ago
      Some priests did, but overall the Catholic Church was very against eugenics.[1] On the other hand eugenics was quite popular among US intellectuals.[2] Forced sterilization of the mentally disabled is still legal in the US.[3] Herman Muckermann was at one point in favor of forced sterilization, but turned against it when the pope denounced it. Herman Muckermann was also against Nazism and euthanasia. >In 1933, he left his post at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, as he opposed Nazi biological racism and the belief that the Nordic race was superior (Dietrich, 1992).[4] [1] https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/103/2/498/1750859 https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/103/2/498/1750... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_law_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_law_in_the_Unite... [4] https://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/tree/5233675d5c2ec5000000003b https://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/tree/5233675d5c2ec500000...
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    I don't think "not as bad as Hitler" is a bar one should be aiming for. I was specifically referring to the Catholic Church's penchant for treating unmarried mothers and poor children like trash. Like in Ireland: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/9-000-children-died-irish-mother-baby-homes-report-finds-n1253862 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/9-000-children-died-irish... And in Britain and Australia: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/03/catholic-church-apologises-for-role-in-forced-adoptions-over-30-year-period https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/03/catholic-chu... And in Canada: https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20220728-canada-says-pope-s-apology-for-abuses-at-catholic-residential-schools-not-enough https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20220728-canada-says-po... I was too tired and angry to search further.
    - picsao 4y ago
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - Eleison23 4y ago
      Hmm, well let's ask a poor child born to an unmarried mother about his experience. I was born in a Catholic hospital, where abortion was out of the question. My father refused to marry my mother, so she felt she didn't have a "choice", and wept many tears as she "voluntarily" signed the papers to relinquish custody to the State, placing me for adoption. I was adopted by Catholic parents who ensured I received the Sacraments regularly, as well as religious instruction and we attended Mass always. They sent me to Catholic schools run by religious orders whose mission and charism involves caring for the poor, needy, and marginalized. These religious orders (including Irish sisters) upheld my dignity, respected me and my classmates, and they demonstrated in tangible ways how much God loves us. They did all of this while giving me a top-notch education, often at discounted tuition or on scholarship as necessary to keep me in school. When I was homeless, unemployed and penniless, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul met my material needs and helped me survive long lonely nights with a few meals and kind words. I dunno, if anyone ever made me feel like trash, it wasn't the Catholic Church. Quite the opposite. Username checks out.
  - dang 4y ago
    We've asked you many times before to stop taking HN threads further into flamewar. This was a doozy—snarkily veering straight into religious Nazi flamewar, which is close to pure internet hell. Please don't do this on HN. It's nasty, repetitive, and off topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - wyager 4y ago
      Why aren't you saying something like this to the comment I responded to? They posted inflammatory nonsense, and I responded with a factual refutation.
      - dang 4y ago
        Two reasons: (1) The GP comment seemed less flamebaity to me because it acknowledged its bias. Yours, by contrast, went straight into battle mode. (2) Your account has a history of posting flamewar comments here and us asking you to stop (including recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32580711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32580711). I've posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33017883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33017883 now though. The word "factual" is basically a no-op in these things since mostly what flamewar commenters do is bash the opposing side with their carefully selected "facts". No doubt some are genuine facts, some not, and some are facts-with-spin—but if the spirit of an argument is to smite enemies, then it's against the site guidelines regardless of how facty it is. (As I've pointed out before, there are infinitely many facts, and they don't select themselves—humans do that.) https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20infinitely%20many%20facts&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... What we want here is curious conversation, where commenters seek to learn from each other, not tell each other how wrong and bad they are. Curiosity is an open state, where flamewar and battle are (very) closed ones.
- aubanel 4y ago
  Do you have rationale supporting the hand of the Church in fascist regimes? The Catholic Church expressed its rejection of fascism via the strongest possible channel: an encyclic written by Pius XI in 1937, _Mit Brennender Sorge_, was read during the Sunday mass in all churches of Germany although the Nazis were already repressing opponents. Even more: according to statistical studies, out of many socioeconomic variables, being Catholic had the strongest positive correlation with _not_ voting for the Nazis [1]. [1]: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/spenkuch/research/religion_nazis.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiX3rWw9bb6AhUE3hoKHWYlB4wQFnoECAsQAQ&usg=AOvVaw28WM-QKyooC2PzjwXPpJSQ https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
  - trasz 4y ago
    An encyclic is just a marketing material. What matters is what they actually did. The Vatican was gifted to Church by… fascists.
    - Thorrez 4y ago
      >In Weimar Germany, the Catholic Church vehemently warned ordinary parishioners about the dangers of extremist parties. Is that doing something?
      - trasz 4y ago
        Nah, that’s just talk. Doing something is cooperating with fascists (Lateran Pacts), supporting Catholic-Nazi regimes (Franco, Tiso, and many others), and helping Nazis evade justice (ratlines).
      - mrguyorama 4y ago
        It's no different than the current day catholic church saying "oh gays are people too we should treat them nicely" and then remind you that the bible says sinners spend eternity in hellfire and sort of wink at the American evangelicals that spend their time screaming that the bible says gay people are an abomination.
  - 4y ago
- hef19898 4y ago
  The Catholic Church worked parallel to some of those regimes, and in cooperation with others. Or completely independent in other cases.
- xani_ 4y ago
  Well, it was the biggest there at the time. Not much option for smaller religions to enforce their atrocities. Even in democratical societies leaders tend to want to please the church so their brainwashes masses vote for them.
wyager 4y ago
Doctors used to be viewed with (justified) suspicion. That suspicion is mostly still justified, but doctors are riding the coattails of several significant medical inventions in the last 100 years, especially antibiotics. This gives them a lot of credibility (justified or not), and the political consequences of this are not ideal. Hopefully this will eventually return to equilibrium and people will stop treating doctors like they're a couple stddev smarter or more trustworthy than they actually are.
- Ligma123 4y ago
  Just look up for the amount of deaths for medical malpractice in most developed countries. Not all doctors and nurses are that technically good to justify that we don't keep a sensible amount of suspicion, or when receiving a diagnosis shouldn't look for a second, or even third opinion.
- chiefgeek 4y ago
  What do you call the person who came in last in the class in medical school? Doctor.
  - confidantlake 4y ago
    I like the joke, but in truth it is often failed to secure residency. What do you call the resident who did worst in his residency? just doesn't role off the tongue as nicely :)
thatguy0900 4y ago
There's bad doctors, just like there are bad people in every profession. How many software engineers does it take to make a dystopian spy state or spy company? You probably need many more than you would need doctors for unethical experiments. What's wrong with software engineers that they would knowingly do such a thing? I suspect the motivations for wanting to push the technological limits in advertising or spying are the same as the ones for pushing the limits of medical science.
- Valakas_ 4y ago
  No. It's not "just like". People with Cluster B personality disorders, especially the ones at the end of the spectrum with ASPD/psychopathy crave power over others. They enjoy looking into the eyes of someone while life fades away, or seeing the tears come out due to powerlessness and suffering. They like, crave direct contact. It is VERY different to cause suffering in a dispassionate way through software and hear about it on the news, or do it yourself in person 1on1. So, no. Besides, it has been shown that there are professions with disproportionately much more psychopathic people than others. Which makes perfect sense, considering what I just said, even though there's more to be said about this subject.
  - axiomsEnd 4y ago
    Do you have any research about other Cluster B personalities that "enjoy looking into the eyes of someone while life fades away, or seeing the tears come out due to powerlessness and suffering" ? Or you just want to write about APD, but want to add some science-based words? Also, the "APD-prone" positions are often higher management. Which are causing every possible type of pain, from 1 to 1, to massive downsizing on the other part of the world, but more of the second type - one would assume they would choose something closer to victims, if their only motive is causing pain. There is also their tendency for risk-taking and ease with making "hard decisions (due to lack of empathy and mentioned tendency for risk-taking), which also explains such high positions in companies.
mannykannot 4y ago
I don't feel there is anything "fundamentally wrong with many of them", but the role medicine plays in our lives makes it susceptible to exploitation by both messianic and psychopathic personalities. As a counter-example of medicine going hand-in-hand with despotism, there's Stalin's Doctors Plot, though there was a a lot of antisemitism there as well.
- candiodari 4y ago
  I think you should probably limit it to psychology. The whole point of psychology is social control. Making society into what someone wants it to be instead of what it needs to be (from the perspectives of individuals who are trying to survive/do well, whatever that means to them). Changing individuals while doing only things to the individual, not touching the problems their behaviour is trying to solve. Pointing out that only a house solves homelessness, there's nothing a therapist can do. And research points out that therapists are destructive rather than helpful as soon as they go further than giving information or providing practical help. So psychology/criminology/orthopedagogy/sociology is a fraud. The basic promise of these sciences is simple: that they can, through talking and "interventions" change the behaviour of unwilling humans (especially children). Time and time again research shows: they can't. It just doesn't work. They can cause extreme trauma, using some combination of violence, isolation and 24/7 stress, which results in specific behaviour patterns that can be summarised as long-term fear and extreme aggression, which, to put it mildly, isn't a recipe for a successful fulfilling life. Aggression by the psychologists is usually masked, by pretending locking up kids, or forcing isolation up to and including the use of isolation cells, "isn't violence". Currently, the popular technique is called "applied behaviour analysis". Lock up kids, in isolation (no contact allowed), and cause 24/7 stress. But variants have many names: "New authority". "Non-violent resistance". "Rock and water". All have essentially been exposed as not changing behaviour, "not sticking", and the like. Not that practitioners actually follow these techniques particularly well. https://elan.school/ https://elan.school/
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    If you think that the elan school and where it got its teachings were genuinely psychiatric best practice at the time those projects were created, then you know nothing of the field of psychology.
zapataband1 4y ago
Medicine? It's racism and classism. People with racist views can become medical drs and other racists can become powerful heads of state to order genocide. What became Germany's eugenics program began in the United States and it was blatantly racist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Sterilization_Act_of_1924 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Sterilization_Act_of_...
eyelidlessness 4y ago
If the postwar trials have any integrity—and I believe they had some if certainly not enough—you could say the same of people organizing rail schedules. And you’d be right if your ire is directed at Eichmann, but probably wouldn’t be able to reasonably generalize it to rail operators. I can’t imagine a similar extrapolation being reasonable to any doctor whose field isn’t directly implicated in the “race science” and various other explicit fascist ideological ideas.
krajzeg 4y ago
Radical ideology craves credibility. I would suppose that for that reason, the regimes interested in treating a subset of people as inferior would look for experts who could testify to that fact. These end up being doctors and psychiatrists, since they are considered authorities on the human body and mind respectively. As for doctors themselves, I would think they are exactly like any other group of people: when a radical regime establishes itself, some will embrace it, some will be bullied into compliance, and others will be violently opposed. You can find examples of all of those in any historical regime.
- motohagiography 4y ago
  I think what twigged me is the expectation that doctors are supposed to be better than that. Doctors are explicity not like any other group of people. The whole point in giving them the immense powers we do comes with the expectation that when it falls to them to be brave or noble, they are willing to take that responsibility. Otherwise, there is no reason not to have barbers do most surgeries, apothacaries prescribe drugs, and nurses make treatment decisions, especially given the technological advances of even the last 30 years. These are people who explicitly must not be seized by mass political hysterias, and it's not a right/left thing, as they seem like a necessary constituency in every totalitarian movement. Other professions, like judges and guards you can just appoint from the ranks of true believers, most professors can be relied upon to be complicit, and their institutions can tell whatever legitimizing story you bully them into. Doctors (and perhaps armed police) are the only ones with leverage, which means it is their personal responsibility to guard against this stuff, imo.
  - confidantlake 4y ago
    In an ideal world yes, but in the real one they are just normal people like you and me. Some are good, some bad, some in the middle. My personal experience has been the overwhelming majority have been kind, intelligent people. But even if 5% are bad, that is still enough for any despotic regime to make use of.
    - motohagiography 4y ago
oilslick 4y ago
- EntropyIsAHoax 4y ago
  Except that people undergoing these surgeries do so willingly, face massive barriers to ensure they are thinking clearly and understand the consequences, show minimal regret rates, often have to undergo extensive psychological counseling beforehand, etc... Except for everything it's exactly the same.
  - Varyag 4y ago
    - EntropyIsAHoax 4y ago
      From number 3: > increased time since last gender-affirming surgery was associated with reduced mental health treatment (adjusted odds ratio=0.92, 95% CI=0.87, 0.98). > In this first total population study of transgender individuals with a gender incongruence diagnosis, the longitudinal association between gender-affirming surgery and reduced likelihood of mental health treatment lends support to the decision to provide gender-affirming surgeries to transgender individuals who seek them. Okay seems to agree that gender affirming surgery is a good thing, thanks for agreeing. [edited because I mistook which of your sources is which] Number 4 is behind a paywall so I can't really comment. But to be honest I doubt that their methodology is valid, and the summary includes no statistics so it's likely the conclusion is overblown With regards to money: this is true of every major health issue in our society, as long as capitalism is at all involved in our health care system there will always be this incentive and we should aim to minimize it. Can you provide some evidence that there is more corruption in gender health care than in other health care? And with regard to Littman, you can't honestly expect me to take the founder of the "rapid onset gender dysphoria" nonsense seriously? She and her "research" methods have been so thoroughly discredited I don't think that even warrants a response. If there's a reputable figure who has similar concerns, this would maybe cast some doubt on more common detrans statistics
    - 4y ago
pyuser583 4y ago
> German doctors began a "euthenasia" program several years before the war broke out, My understanding is the German “euthanasia” program didn’t start until after after the war began. Not in big numbers anyway. So you have a source?
- otherme123 4y ago
  Eugenics was all the rage in the early XX century. A lot of countries practiced mass sterilizations and other niceties to the "unfit", and the catholic church was among the few that opposed to it. Nazi Germany (and others) just pushed it to the limit. You could still see some eugenics going on around the workd after II WW for some time.
- sofixa 4y ago
  The T4 program started in September 1939, same time as the war (in Europe), but the pilot was run in the summer. Considering the Nazis didn't think their invasion of Poland would turn into a general war, it's highly unlikely there's any relation between the two.
aa-jv 4y ago
You're onto something - the roots of totalitarian-authoritarian desire can be traced back to the impulse to be free of the "disease and infection of others". https://phys.org/news/2021-09-infectious-disease-linked-authoritarian-attitudes.html https://phys.org/news/2021-09-infectious-disease-linked-auth... https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0062275 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
komposit 4y ago
Perhaps you could go a step further and say that, whatever the regime, these institutions that decide who is healthy and who is sick, who is sane and who is insane, can never be neutral. They are always also instruments of (social) control. Michel Foucault is probably the go-to guy if this topic interests you[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
logicchains 4y ago
>Is there sometihng about doctors and ideology that goes so closely together? Have you met many doctors? Some are amazing, hard-working people really doing their best to help humanity, but a non-trivial number are just arrogant jerks who only went into the profession for money and social status. It's natural that a profession seen as particularly "high status" will attract a lot of soulless status seekers.
xani_ 4y ago
Or religion. Actually, probably mostly religion. > Even recently, doctors even consult on enhanced interrogation techniques, and seem to favour some pretty heavy handed public health policy. As a profession, is there something fundamentally wrong with many of them that we tolerate for their expertise? Why you want to blame it on a profession and assume the distribution of crazies is not uniform? Only difference is that doctor can pretend it's for medical reasons, while say, a plumber, wouldn't be able to fabricate plausible evidence to support their derangements. And as usual with large groups the extremes are loudest and most noticeable.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

I was going to say the Catholic Church often seems to be at the center of these regimes, but I guess we all see things through our own lens.

wyager 4y ago
- saboot 4y ago
  The pope may not have been, but several german priests such as Herman Muckermann certainly gave german Catholics a way to support eugenics and race theories.
  - Thorrez 4y ago
    Some priests did, but overall the Catholic Church was very against eugenics.[1] On the other hand eugenics was quite popular among US intellectuals.[2] Forced sterilization of the mentally disabled is still legal in the US.[3] Herman Muckermann was at one point in favor of forced sterilization, but turned against it when the pope denounced it. Herman Muckermann was also against Nazism and euthanasia. >In 1933, he left his post at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, as he opposed Nazi biological racism and the belief that the Nordic race was superior (Dietrich, 1992).[4] [1] https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/103/2/498/1750859 https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/103/2/498/1750... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_law_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_law_in_the_Unite... [4] https://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/tree/5233675d5c2ec5000000003b https://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/tree/5233675d5c2ec500000...
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  I don't think "not as bad as Hitler" is a bar one should be aiming for. I was specifically referring to the Catholic Church's penchant for treating unmarried mothers and poor children like trash. Like in Ireland: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/9-000-children-died-irish-mother-baby-homes-report-finds-n1253862 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/9-000-children-died-irish... And in Britain and Australia: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/03/catholic-church-apologises-for-role-in-forced-adoptions-over-30-year-period https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/03/catholic-chu... And in Canada: https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20220728-canada-says-pope-s-apology-for-abuses-at-catholic-residential-schools-not-enough https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20220728-canada-says-po... I was too tired and angry to search further.
  - picsao 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Eleison23 4y ago
    Hmm, well let's ask a poor child born to an unmarried mother about his experience. I was born in a Catholic hospital, where abortion was out of the question. My father refused to marry my mother, so she felt she didn't have a "choice", and wept many tears as she "voluntarily" signed the papers to relinquish custody to the State, placing me for adoption. I was adopted by Catholic parents who ensured I received the Sacraments regularly, as well as religious instruction and we attended Mass always. They sent me to Catholic schools run by religious orders whose mission and charism involves caring for the poor, needy, and marginalized. These religious orders (including Irish sisters) upheld my dignity, respected me and my classmates, and they demonstrated in tangible ways how much God loves us. They did all of this while giving me a top-notch education, often at discounted tuition or on scholarship as necessary to keep me in school. When I was homeless, unemployed and penniless, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul met my material needs and helped me survive long lonely nights with a few meals and kind words. I dunno, if anyone ever made me feel like trash, it wasn't the Catholic Church. Quite the opposite. Username checks out.
- dang 4y ago
  We've asked you many times before to stop taking HN threads further into flamewar. This was a doozy—snarkily veering straight into religious Nazi flamewar, which is close to pure internet hell. Please don't do this on HN. It's nasty, repetitive, and off topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - wyager 4y ago
    Why aren't you saying something like this to the comment I responded to? They posted inflammatory nonsense, and I responded with a factual refutation.
    - dang 4y ago
      Two reasons: (1) The GP comment seemed less flamebaity to me because it acknowledged its bias. Yours, by contrast, went straight into battle mode. (2) Your account has a history of posting flamewar comments here and us asking you to stop (including recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32580711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32580711). I've posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33017883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33017883 now though. The word "factual" is basically a no-op in these things since mostly what flamewar commenters do is bash the opposing side with their carefully selected "facts". No doubt some are genuine facts, some not, and some are facts-with-spin—but if the spirit of an argument is to smite enemies, then it's against the site guidelines regardless of how facty it is. (As I've pointed out before, there are infinitely many facts, and they don't select themselves—humans do that.) https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20infinitely%20many%20facts&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... What we want here is curious conversation, where commenters seek to learn from each other, not tell each other how wrong and bad they are. Curiosity is an open state, where flamewar and battle are (very) closed ones.
aubanel 4y ago
Do you have rationale supporting the hand of the Church in fascist regimes? The Catholic Church expressed its rejection of fascism via the strongest possible channel: an encyclic written by Pius XI in 1937, _Mit Brennender Sorge_, was read during the Sunday mass in all churches of Germany although the Nazis were already repressing opponents. Even more: according to statistical studies, out of many socioeconomic variables, being Catholic had the strongest positive correlation with _not_ voting for the Nazis [1]. [1]: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/spenkuch/research/religion_nazis.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiX3rWw9bb6AhUE3hoKHWYlB4wQFnoECAsQAQ&usg=AOvVaw28WM-QKyooC2PzjwXPpJSQ https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
- trasz 4y ago
  An encyclic is just a marketing material. What matters is what they actually did. The Vatican was gifted to Church by… fascists.
  - Thorrez 4y ago
    >In Weimar Germany, the Catholic Church vehemently warned ordinary parishioners about the dangers of extremist parties. Is that doing something?
    - trasz 4y ago
      Nah, that’s just talk. Doing something is cooperating with fascists (Lateran Pacts), supporting Catholic-Nazi regimes (Franco, Tiso, and many others), and helping Nazis evade justice (ratlines).
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      It's no different than the current day catholic church saying "oh gays are people too we should treat them nicely" and then remind you that the bible says sinners spend eternity in hellfire and sort of wink at the American evangelicals that spend their time screaming that the bible says gay people are an abomination.
- 4y ago
hef19898 4y ago
The Catholic Church worked parallel to some of those regimes, and in cooperation with others. Or completely independent in other cases.
xani_ 4y ago
Well, it was the biggest there at the time. Not much option for smaller religions to enforce their atrocities. Even in democratical societies leaders tend to want to please the church so their brainwashes masses vote for them.

wyager 4y ago

Doctors used to be viewed with (justified) suspicion. That suspicion is mostly still justified, but doctors are riding the coattails of several significant medical inventions in the last 100 years, especially antibiotics. This gives them a lot of credibility (justified or not), and the political consequences of this are not ideal. Hopefully this will eventually return to equilibrium and people will stop treating doctors like they're a couple stddev smarter or more trustworthy than they actually are.

Ligma123 4y ago
Just look up for the amount of deaths for medical malpractice in most developed countries. Not all doctors and nurses are that technically good to justify that we don't keep a sensible amount of suspicion, or when receiving a diagnosis shouldn't look for a second, or even third opinion.
chiefgeek 4y ago
What do you call the person who came in last in the class in medical school? Doctor.
- confidantlake 4y ago
  I like the joke, but in truth it is often failed to secure residency. What do you call the resident who did worst in his residency? just doesn't role off the tongue as nicely :)

thatguy0900 4y ago

There's bad doctors, just like there are bad people in every profession. How many software engineers does it take to make a dystopian spy state or spy company? You probably need many more than you would need doctors for unethical experiments. What's wrong with software engineers that they would knowingly do such a thing? I suspect the motivations for wanting to push the technological limits in advertising or spying are the same as the ones for pushing the limits of medical science.

Valakas_ 4y ago
No. It's not "just like". People with Cluster B personality disorders, especially the ones at the end of the spectrum with ASPD/psychopathy crave power over others. They enjoy looking into the eyes of someone while life fades away, or seeing the tears come out due to powerlessness and suffering. They like, crave direct contact. It is VERY different to cause suffering in a dispassionate way through software and hear about it on the news, or do it yourself in person 1on1. So, no. Besides, it has been shown that there are professions with disproportionately much more psychopathic people than others. Which makes perfect sense, considering what I just said, even though there's more to be said about this subject.
- axiomsEnd 4y ago
  Do you have any research about other Cluster B personalities that "enjoy looking into the eyes of someone while life fades away, or seeing the tears come out due to powerlessness and suffering" ? Or you just want to write about APD, but want to add some science-based words? Also, the "APD-prone" positions are often higher management. Which are causing every possible type of pain, from 1 to 1, to massive downsizing on the other part of the world, but more of the second type - one would assume they would choose something closer to victims, if their only motive is causing pain. There is also their tendency for risk-taking and ease with making "hard decisions (due to lack of empathy and mentioned tendency for risk-taking), which also explains such high positions in companies.

mannykannot 4y ago

I don't feel there is anything "fundamentally wrong with many of them", but the role medicine plays in our lives makes it susceptible to exploitation by both messianic and psychopathic personalities. As a counter-example of medicine going hand-in-hand with despotism, there's Stalin's Doctors Plot, though there was a a lot of antisemitism there as well.

candiodari 4y ago
I think you should probably limit it to psychology. The whole point of psychology is social control. Making society into what someone wants it to be instead of what it needs to be (from the perspectives of individuals who are trying to survive/do well, whatever that means to them). Changing individuals while doing only things to the individual, not touching the problems their behaviour is trying to solve. Pointing out that only a house solves homelessness, there's nothing a therapist can do. And research points out that therapists are destructive rather than helpful as soon as they go further than giving information or providing practical help. So psychology/criminology/orthopedagogy/sociology is a fraud. The basic promise of these sciences is simple: that they can, through talking and "interventions" change the behaviour of unwilling humans (especially children). Time and time again research shows: they can't. It just doesn't work. They can cause extreme trauma, using some combination of violence, isolation and 24/7 stress, which results in specific behaviour patterns that can be summarised as long-term fear and extreme aggression, which, to put it mildly, isn't a recipe for a successful fulfilling life. Aggression by the psychologists is usually masked, by pretending locking up kids, or forcing isolation up to and including the use of isolation cells, "isn't violence". Currently, the popular technique is called "applied behaviour analysis". Lock up kids, in isolation (no contact allowed), and cause 24/7 stress. But variants have many names: "New authority". "Non-violent resistance". "Rock and water". All have essentially been exposed as not changing behaviour, "not sticking", and the like. Not that practitioners actually follow these techniques particularly well. https://elan.school/ https://elan.school/
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  If you think that the elan school and where it got its teachings were genuinely psychiatric best practice at the time those projects were created, then you know nothing of the field of psychology.

zapataband1 4y ago

Medicine? It's racism and classism. People with racist views can become medical drs and other racists can become powerful heads of state to order genocide. What became Germany's eugenics program began in the United States and it was blatantly racist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Sterilization_Act_of_1924 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Sterilization_Act_of_...

eyelidlessness 4y ago

If the postwar trials have any integrity—and I believe they had some if certainly not enough—you could say the same of people organizing rail schedules. And you’d be right if your ire is directed at Eichmann, but probably wouldn’t be able to reasonably generalize it to rail operators. I can’t imagine a similar extrapolation being reasonable to any doctor whose field isn’t directly implicated in the “race science” and various other explicit fascist ideological ideas.

krajzeg 4y ago

Radical ideology craves credibility. I would suppose that for that reason, the regimes interested in treating a subset of people as inferior would look for experts who could testify to that fact. These end up being doctors and psychiatrists, since they are considered authorities on the human body and mind respectively. As for doctors themselves, I would think they are exactly like any other group of people: when a radical regime establishes itself, some will embrace it, some will be bullied into compliance, and others will be violently opposed. You can find examples of all of those in any historical regime.

motohagiography 4y ago
I think what twigged me is the expectation that doctors are supposed to be better than that. Doctors are explicity not like any other group of people. The whole point in giving them the immense powers we do comes with the expectation that when it falls to them to be brave or noble, they are willing to take that responsibility. Otherwise, there is no reason not to have barbers do most surgeries, apothacaries prescribe drugs, and nurses make treatment decisions, especially given the technological advances of even the last 30 years. These are people who explicitly must not be seized by mass political hysterias, and it's not a right/left thing, as they seem like a necessary constituency in every totalitarian movement. Other professions, like judges and guards you can just appoint from the ranks of true believers, most professors can be relied upon to be complicit, and their institutions can tell whatever legitimizing story you bully them into. Doctors (and perhaps armed police) are the only ones with leverage, which means it is their personal responsibility to guard against this stuff, imo.
- confidantlake 4y ago
  In an ideal world yes, but in the real one they are just normal people like you and me. Some are good, some bad, some in the middle. My personal experience has been the overwhelming majority have been kind, intelligent people. But even if 5% are bad, that is still enough for any despotic regime to make use of.
  - motohagiography 4y ago

oilslick 4y ago

EntropyIsAHoax 4y ago
Except that people undergoing these surgeries do so willingly, face massive barriers to ensure they are thinking clearly and understand the consequences, show minimal regret rates, often have to undergo extensive psychological counseling beforehand, etc... Except for everything it's exactly the same.
- Varyag 4y ago
  - EntropyIsAHoax 4y ago
    From number 3: > increased time since last gender-affirming surgery was associated with reduced mental health treatment (adjusted odds ratio=0.92, 95% CI=0.87, 0.98). > In this first total population study of transgender individuals with a gender incongruence diagnosis, the longitudinal association between gender-affirming surgery and reduced likelihood of mental health treatment lends support to the decision to provide gender-affirming surgeries to transgender individuals who seek them. Okay seems to agree that gender affirming surgery is a good thing, thanks for agreeing. [edited because I mistook which of your sources is which] Number 4 is behind a paywall so I can't really comment. But to be honest I doubt that their methodology is valid, and the summary includes no statistics so it's likely the conclusion is overblown With regards to money: this is true of every major health issue in our society, as long as capitalism is at all involved in our health care system there will always be this incentive and we should aim to minimize it. Can you provide some evidence that there is more corruption in gender health care than in other health care? And with regard to Littman, you can't honestly expect me to take the founder of the "rapid onset gender dysphoria" nonsense seriously? She and her "research" methods have been so thoroughly discredited I don't think that even warrants a response. If there's a reputable figure who has similar concerns, this would maybe cast some doubt on more common detrans statistics
  - 4y ago

pyuser583 4y ago

> German doctors began a "euthenasia" program several years before the war broke out, My understanding is the German “euthanasia” program didn’t start until after after the war began. Not in big numbers anyway. So you have a source?

otherme123 4y ago
Eugenics was all the rage in the early XX century. A lot of countries practiced mass sterilizations and other niceties to the "unfit", and the catholic church was among the few that opposed to it. Nazi Germany (and others) just pushed it to the limit. You could still see some eugenics going on around the workd after II WW for some time.
sofixa 4y ago
The T4 program started in September 1939, same time as the war (in Europe), but the pilot was run in the summer. Considering the Nazis didn't think their invasion of Poland would turn into a general war, it's highly unlikely there's any relation between the two.

aa-jv 4y ago

You're onto something - the roots of totalitarian-authoritarian desire can be traced back to the impulse to be free of the "disease and infection of others". https://phys.org/news/2021-09-infectious-disease-linked-authoritarian-attitudes.html https://phys.org/news/2021-09-infectious-disease-linked-auth... https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0062275 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

komposit 4y ago

Perhaps you could go a step further and say that, whatever the regime, these institutions that decide who is healthy and who is sick, who is sane and who is insane, can never be neutral. They are always also instruments of (social) control. Michel Foucault is probably the go-to guy if this topic interests you[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault

logicchains 4y ago

>Is there sometihng about doctors and ideology that goes so closely together? Have you met many doctors? Some are amazing, hard-working people really doing their best to help humanity, but a non-trivial number are just arrogant jerks who only went into the profession for money and social status. It's natural that a profession seen as particularly "high status" will attract a lot of soulless status seekers.

xani_ 4y ago

Or religion. Actually, probably mostly religion. > Even recently, doctors even consult on enhanced interrogation techniques, and seem to favour some pretty heavy handed public health policy. As a profession, is there something fundamentally wrong with many of them that we tolerate for their expertise? Why you want to blame it on a profession and assume the distribution of crazies is not uniform? Only difference is that doctor can pretend it's for medical reasons, while say, a plumber, wouldn't be able to fabricate plausible evidence to support their derangements. And as usual with large groups the extremes are loudest and most noticeable.