CATERPILLARS, caterpillars everywhere...

In the scheme of things, society moves to the whims of the powerful and the ordinary. This ebb and flow dictate the governance of habits and mores. The powerful exert their influence on the behavior of the ordinary and in so doing force a form of subjugation from them. It is a slow process of innovative manipulation, feigned originality that trends slowly towards a disposition of total control. The academics isolated and happy in their well-appointed ivory towers spew worthless drivel, to align with their masters, that seeps into and slowly soaks the minds of the easily distracted crowd. There is no better way than to remove the virtue of individualism and replace it with the vice of collectivism in order to destroy the desire and worth of a human being. As Theodore Dalrymple states, “There is no better way to destroy the human personality than this. As a result, people become cynical, time-serving, and increasingly self-absorbed. Their impotence breeds apathy. Once they start to utter things for the sake of their careers or their peace and quiet that they do not believe, they lose all self-respect and probity and thus their standing to resist anything. People without probity are easy to control and manipulate; the purpose of political correctness is not to enunciate truth but to exercise power.” Within this diaspora of power and subjugation is a well-armed legion of caterpillars. This army consumes large amounts of gold leaves and protects its clients; the powerful and the virtues of their utopian ideals and feigned piety. The caterpillars lack the intellect they cannot achieve, in order to hoard some of the capital that they long to possess. Yet through subterfuge, they persist and persist until they can claim some of it. We, common folk, on the other hand, are forced to speak in their language of meaningless babble lest we lose our place in their vacuous world where words have little meaning and are devoid of thought and reason. It is a slow convincing slog, carefully manicured by those with little education and knowledge, but rich in quick-wit, quick thinking, and convincing inventiveness by the use of garbled Latin phrases, jumbled vocabulary, and quotations from Shakespeare and Socrates to spread the words of their crafty masters.



Their sanctimonious words are meant to reform society through redistribution of an individual’s property. Individual Property as envisioned by John Locke and quickly adhered to by the asset forfeiture crowd. These caterpillars grow fat and wealthy usurping the ideals of the individuals and implanting the “virtues” of the fatuous ideology of totalitarianism. The good and virtuous people have always been the desiderate of life in the land of liberty. This slow encroachment through careful indoctrination from childhood reforms the psyche of the populace. The caterpillars make manipulated robots out of humans and exact a price on the freedom of ePluribus. They continue to add their straw to the campfire of ideological uniformity. The higher the flames the better the command and control. The compass of probity is easily lost and blanketed over in the canyons of mistruths and half-truths. What is unreal is suddenly deemed real. And nonconformity is met with a stiff penalty of lost liberty, of livelihood and even life.



Arguing with these caterpillars is to be wrested out of one’s comfort. They win with a language filled with hatred and accusations of racial oppression, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or some other commonly recognized and broadcasted forms of oppression. Their power grows and overtime if allowed, becomes absolute. As their power increases so does their form of language transmuting into psychobabble interspersed with complex and overfitted multi-collinearity of discordant words to confuse and obfuscate the underpinnings of their intent: to govern with absolute power, while simultaneously using soothing words to calm any fears. They talk of innovation of a utopian empire, of order and feigned prosperity, of chocolate factories distributing free candy. They build tall crass architectural buildings while destroying historical artifices. "Take a hammer to history so “now” is the only permanence, without a past to reckon," is their motto. But through it all, they never speak about Freedom or Liberty.

Perhaps there is also a no better time in this discourse then now to mention how the joy and desire of medicine as practiced by the physicians in the United States for decades has been degraded enough that more physicians find themselves dejected, depressed and suicide-prone… The caterpillars have imposed a multitude of mandates including the electronic medical records as a means to catalog doctor and patient behavior mostly for resource use and cost of medical care. They couched it in the euphemism of “value care,” …a false premise. Through it all, this mandate made the EMR makers, billionaires and subjugated the physicians into key-punching clerks, wasting 40-50% of their patient care time into providing electronic data for ivory tower consumption. They furthered their cause of demeaning the physicians, by calling them “providers” as if to relegate the intellect and knowledge of these medicine men and women into commoditized beings of little regard. They imposed guidelines and other algorithms of work-flow to prevent thinking, reasoning physician from making the correct decision for a patient rather than a “one size fits all” assembly-lines of “care,” they envision. Such impositions of valueless coercion have undone the joy of understanding the ailment, the comforting touch of a healer and the art and science of caring for another human being. This abjuration has lent itself to years of conflicting thoughts. Such conflicts have raised the specter of increasing suicides amongst these gifted and hard-working physicians. In answer, the ivory tower denizens suggest it is because of this and that and that physicians should try Yoga or spend more time with their patients or try reading novels and other useless drivel to counter the raging fire of depression and worthlessness feelings seeping through the veins of the physician community. But if that was not enough they now counter the question of physician availability due to their lack of foresight of more medical schools and unnecessary regulatory burden by allowing 2000-hour educated/experienced PAs and NPs to take over the management of a 20,000-hour educated/experienced physician. Mediocrity is valued at an all-time high these days.

This imposed hellish drive into healthcare, however, it started a long time ago and culminated with an MIT professor using his psychobabble to create a monstrous burden on the healthcare system in the United States. Lost in his self-congratulatory mood, the litmus of truth turned the color of the strip, when in his hubris, he admitted upon reflection that what he was imposing would not be possible if the American populace was not “stupid.” And another University Professor openly suggested that life after 75 years should not be helped or saved by medical means, because the cost/benefit ratio of doing that is a detriment to society. It does not end with these two authoritarian high brows. There are legions of assistants slinking away in the hallways of the ivory towers, like minions, ready to make their mark on the world and espouse the political correctness of the older, greyer, bent-over decision theorists. This army replenishes itself with its chosen, ideologically uniform legions of mindless, thoughtless sentients, so it may continue to spread its's masters' “virus of virtue” signaling lies and deceit. One is not allowed to argue. Arguing the very foundation of their false statements is mothballed away for no one to hear. If one insists with a valid statement then the response is simply like the one used by Sganarelle in Le Médecin malgré lui by Molière , “Nous avons changé tout cela.” (We have changed all that). Thus, killing the spontaneity, candor, and understanding immediately, exactly how they hope to prevail within the minds of the less glib - via the art of their constant drumbeat. In the end, no ideas are transferred, or thoughts provoked, or comprehension gelled, only rhetoric exchanged for the sake of the rhetoric; like two ships sailing past each other in the night without an exchange. Hence groupthink flourishes, ideas die, the reason is hidden below boulders of conceit and the gyre of control widens.

Today the well-groomed, true intellectual fends for himself or herself through limited means while the mindless, but visually interesting freaks run around in limousines and jets pouring champagne and eating caviar on their way to the self-congratulatory conferences. Today’s medicine has become a laboratory of wicked statistical rules. It isn’t true if the statistics don’t show the reality. Risk calibration is now offered as probability calibration. And questioning that what is projected as the truth as merely a probability expressed, the fangs of rage and anger come out as “How dare you.” And forevermore, especially if you are a young smart whippersnapper, you are banned from the inner sanctums of their elite-ness. Just like a man or woman with a sense of entitlement and bad judgment is diabolical in deeds, these caterpillars swarm in the landscape of decision theorists, leaving their cigar smoke in their wake. Only the ones with a better slogan, better appearance, better presentation, more beguiling glibness while using polysyllabic euphemisms to dress up their craftiness find a place in this slimy repulsive lot. The caterpillar army is pervasive in the local, state and in federal governments of most nations. Inept, vacuous and insecure minds lay waste the fertile crop of the intellect of the land via their hand on the tiller of power and control.

We are indeed in Alice’s Wonderland. And the rabbit hole is filled with hookah-smoking caterpillars asking us at every turn, “Who are you?” One can only see this through the distance of time and a kernel of understanding and reason. The game is afoot and it is gaining momentum. Power is the consolation prize for those who want to outshine but lack the talent for anything except manipulation and betrayal. One cannot idly standby to the feigned despair of victimhood or to the utopian thinking of a pie in the sky, to survive this onslaught of the wretchedness of power and control over the minds of free people. One needs to fight the impulse towards the least hurdled path. Groupthink might land you in a wealthy position for a while but there always be a fatter, smarter, more connected caterpillar to take you down. Smugness might keep you in champagne circles for a while but there always will be a backstabber to reel you in. Eventually, with the force of truth and the will of determination, the real intellectuals with nothing but the clarity of knowledge and armed with facts on their side will earn their wings to rid the psychobabble of these caterpillars and the masters they serve.