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June 11, 2008
Fraud Enabled by Denial (Personal)
This entry will have to be quick because, right now, I have even more to do than ever and even less time than usual. Yesterday evening, quite by accident, while returning from a hospital visit to my (very sick) wife, I happened to catch the entire Terri Gross interview of someone I had never heard of before: Elizabeth Pisani is an articulate epidemiologist with a charming British accent who has just published a scathing denunciation of the Bush Administration's program for combating HIV/AIDS overseas.
What immediately called my attention to Pisani’s message was its brutal candor and the accuracy of her analysis; while giving our government full credit for its program’s (unexpected) therapeutic success in funding AIDS treatment, she was also very efficient in explaining how its moralistic insistence on “abstinence only” education is working to undo that success and helping spread infection with HIV, as well as uncertainty regarding the ultimate fate of those seemingly able to lead “normal” lives on what amounts to life-long, treatment (with expensive drugs produced by the American pharmaceutical companies now receiving a subsidy for producing them).
What especially caught my attention was her recognition that the same bullying and arm twisting support characterize both our HIV/AIDS program overseas and our drug war at home; also that both have a similarly well-documented lack of success. Also impressive was her recognition that both frauds rely heavily on what I have recently come to recognize as humanity’s greatest cognitive weakness: a seemingly built-in willingness to prefer denial to reality as well as the lies we are forced to tell each other in order to sustain faith in such irrational beliefs.
More later,
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at June 11, 2008 01:01 PM