The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – Part II

But every Eden has its serpent. The same light that revealed the laws of nature also cast new shadows. When we learned to measure the world, we mistook the measure for meaning. And in the vacuum left by God’s retreat, humanity crowned itself divine – birthing not enlightenment, but hubris dressed as progress.

The Bad

“Where is God? … I tell you – we have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers! … What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving now? Where are we moving?” – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882.

One of the “achievements” of the Scientific Revolution was what came to be called “the death of God.” As science provided more and more substantive answers to questions of the highest order, people abandoned belief in God and an unprecedented wave of secularization swept the West.

But, as we were destined to discover, theistic belief rests not only on external functional needs such as answers about the nature of the world, but also on human psychological and perceptual needs.

The belief that there is a single God who guides what happens in reality provided generations with mental solace and fulfilled the human need to believe that there is something beyond the graspable – that reality has agency over itself. The division Christianity created—where God is good and evil is the responsibility of a being called “the Devil”—answered the question “Why is there good and evil in the world?” and allowed people to adopt comforting idealisms of pure good against pure evil.

To humanity’s misfortune, the replacement for “pure good” did not tarry, and the states of Europe replaced God with a new deity – the State. Masses seeking something to believe in found refuge in new secular religions – the fascist, Nazi, and Stalinist movements. The result we have already mentioned.

But with secularization and the “death of God” came the “death of the Devil,” and the secularization of what had been perceived as metaphysical forces of darkness. Just as “the Holy Spirit” was replaced by pure rationality (and, effectively, by man), and religion was replaces by nationalism, so “the Devil” was replaced by the belief that when malign processes occur that we cannot explain – it is a hidden conspiracy, a shadow government lurking in the wings. This is essentially a secularization of religious narratives about the war of light against darkness and about otherworldly entities dictating events beyond our control. In Europe at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, it was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and after the war movements arose convinced that a global shadow government runs everything behind the scenes and seeks their harm.

These movements gained popularity among both extremes we are discussing: on the right, “the elite” is demonic; among hippies and New-Agers it is “the system.”
When Matan Hakimi asks why this “doesn’t lead the evening newscasts” – that “the system” or “the establishment” is deliberately concealing the fact that the American health minister removed Covid vaccines from the benefits basket for pregnant women and healthy people – he is applying the view that there is a conspiracy here. When in reality – we simply live in a country where the media collapsed completely during the war, and every second a new item lands in the newsroom that manages to be more scandalous than the one that landed yesterday.

The meeting point was around Covid, with the extreme case being the QAnon conspiracy movement – a movement of believers that swelled in online forums where a mysterious figure named Q “leaked” to his followers secrets from what he called the American “deep state.” According to Q, there exists a satanic cult of plutocrats and politicians who meet in the shadows and plan to take over the world by inserting chips into the masses’ brains via Covid vaccines; in his telling, this is a population-reduction operation. Although this is an extreme, it represents the camps’ shared sentiment: contempt for a systemic, “elitist” output – modern medicine.

In principle, this is where I am expected to say how modern medicine improved our lives and extended our lifespans; to sneer at the sneer. I won’t, because that sneer has a good reason to exist. But as we shall see in the final section – it is aimed at the wrong people.

The Ugly

“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”  – Ronald Reagan, 1981.

The 1980s were the Reaganomics years. Ronald Reagan, darling of the neocon right and neoliberal economists, systematically dismantled the federal oversight mechanisms in the United States. Among other things – the FDA’s budget was cut and hundreds of employees were laid off. As fate would have it, in those very years, due to accelerated scientific development – the number of drugs seeking approval rose rapidly. The body that is supposed to protect public safety stood on the brink of collapse. In 1992, in order to inject money into the FDA without involving the state coffers and the taxpayer, George H. W. Bush turned to the market, and the PDUFA was enacted, allowing the FDA to collect “user fees” from pharmaceutical companies – a move that made the regulator funded by those it is supposed to oversee. The success metric set – shortening drug-approval timelines, not, well, caution. This policy did not remain the property of Republicans. Under Clinton (1993–2001) this policy became official doctrine under the banner of “innovation and growth.” The state became the medical industry’s business partner.

And here is the point: in 1995 the FDA approved Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin, with a problematic label statement: “delayed absorption is believed to reduce the risk of addiction.” That sentence, which was not based on research, did not undergo peer review, and referred to a letter to the editor of a medical journal that never became an article, was Purdue’s ticket into the prescription-drug market.
But it does not stop there – two years later, the FDA permitted direct-to-consumer advertising. Drugs began to be marketed on television like chewing gum—smiling faces, simple slogans, and “Ask your doctor.” Science, in effect, was privatized. Within this environment Purdue perfected the method: it organized conferences, offered incentives to doctors, and used language that may sound scientific but had not passed through real scientific protocols – so as to push oxycodone into the chronic-pain market—even when it was not medically justified.

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” – Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West.

Behind the scenes stood a giant strategy consultancy you all know (whose name I will not write because they maintain legal departments of hundreds—feel free to Google). It built a precise strategy for Purdue: identify lightly regulated physicians in small towns and poor communities, and turn them into a distribution pipeline. There, in the American periphery, without oversight and without awareness of addiction – and in places where many people do hard physical labor – oxycodone was sold like a lollipop. The strategy firm even proposed “incentives for overdoses averted” – a chilling phrase for an attempt to profit even from disaster. In less than a decade, sales of the drug jumped by hundreds of percent, addiction became a national epidemic, and more than half a million Americans died from opioid overdoses. The rest of the story, briefly, is that the U.S. government drastically reduced the scope of prescriptions but provided no solution for the millions who remained addicted—they moved to heroin, and then to fentanyl (50–100 times more potent than morphine), in a crisis that exploded fully in 2020–2024 with more than one hundred thousand deaths a year. Makes you want to join Hakimi, doesn’t it? No.

The truly ugly thing is not modern medicine – but the incentive system that the elected echelon built around it – which we all know, built around it. Man is not good from his youth, and there is nothing noble in the savage. He therefore needs strong institutions to restrain his impulses, curb avarice, and protect truth – to protect the public. When institutions weaken, man will find a way to sow ruin – whether through murderous ideologies or a nihilistic hunger for the bottom line.

When Matan Hakimi platforms a charlatan to speak on a field he does not understand- or says that “there are people in the world who claim the vaccine isn’t safe” without supplying the context of who those people are – he reenacts the same moral pattern we saw in the oxycodone crisis: the imitation of authority without responsibility. He is like the consultancy that pushed pills to non-specialist doctors simply because they were easy to persuade. Like those executives who saw in pain a business opportunity.

The two authorities he leans on in the video- Dr. Ladapo and RFK Jr. – are precisely the kinds of figures who enabled the fentanyl crisis. The first is an opportunist who uses public health as a political tool, And who uses concepts like “liberty” as a basis for pushing policies that bring back phenomena from previous centuries, such as measles outbreaks.  just as the politicians of the 1980s dried out the FDA in the name of “innovation” but in practice sought to cut taxes for the wealthy. The second, who speaks of “scientific liberty,” is part of an administration that launched regulation designed to dismantle every oversight mechanism – he is no freedom fighter; at best he is a late-model Reagan who sold the public to plutocrats under the banner of the “free market,” and at worst a man who sold all his principles for a berth in a presidency that turns the United States into an oligarchy of the few.

The lesson is clear: a society rises and falls on its institutions. When we lose the ability to trust regulators, scientists, and knowledge institutions—not because they are traitors, but because politicians cause them to fail, often so they can accrue political capital on the back of “the system” or “the elite” (as Trump adroitly leveraged with the fentanyl crisis that decimated his own voter base after he failed to address it in practice) – we forfeit one of humanity’s greatest achievements: the Scientific Revolution itself. Not “shadow governments” are responsible, but flesh-and-blood people – elected officials who sold off humanity’s capacity to believe in a thing called “truth” in order to fatten their own pockets and those of their friends.

The justified anger and contempt carried by Hakimi’s followers, by hippies and New-Agers, and by the super-Christian rednecks in the Appalachians who were abandoned to die by the very officials they elected to serve them – must be directed toward a mass, unflinching demand to stabilize the system, not dismantle it. The encroachment of capital on oversight institutions and on the guardianship of truth is on track to cost us our democracy. Allowing them to undermine the Scientific Revolution would be, quite literally, adding sin to crime.