How Much Is Too Much?

How much is too much?  That seems to be a question that keeps coming up these days, in one form or another. 

How much surveillance is too much surveillance? How much money is too much money? How many immigrants are too many immigrants? How much state control is too much state control? How much freedom is too much freedom? How much population is too much population? How much food is too much food? How much medicine is too much medicine? How much safety is too much safety? How many mandatory vaccines are too many mandatory vaccines? How much parental control is too much parental control? How much nudity is too much nudity? How much alcohol is too much alcohol?

I could go on and on. The answer depends on where and when you live and what the norms of society are. Not too long ago, it was about how much women’s rights is too much women’s rights? Or, how much tolerance of different religions is too much tolerance?

We take many things for granted now and expect certain things, like our freedom of movement or expression. But norms are always changing. Social perceptions of propriety and safety change over time. As they do, friction can arise and increase until some threshold is met — and then big shifts happen and new norms are born. Women gain the right to vote, own property, and control whether or not they have a child. The divine right of monarchs or the inherent superiority of one group of people over another is questioned and then toppled. But freedoms won can also be lost. Thus, tolerance of philosophical or religious opposition to medical interventions (like vaccines) can be withdrawn, based on perceptions of public safety, whether these perceptions are valid or not.

In general, a key factor that can foster change is our inherent human sense of fairness. And especially, when something personally affects us adversely, we start opposing it. If your child has been injured by a vaccine and you don’t have the right to sue your doctor or the manufacturer, you get angry. If you then can’t can’t protect your other children (or that same child) from further vaccinations without taking them out of school and losing their right to an education — and perhaps even needing to move to another state, you get even more angry. And when this happens to enough people — say, a majority of families — something will be done. That’s why I predict that the recent mandated vaccine juggernaut that is affecting more and more states in the USA will end, one way or another, within the next 10-20 years. But in the meantime, people will suffer.

So do we need to wait until a majority of people are suffering (with respect to any kind of issue) in order to take action? Or can we do something sooner? Only if people are aware of what’s going on. When we see police killing unarmed black people on our cell phone, then it suddenly becomes clear that police brutality has gone too far — whereas before, enough people weren’t sufficiently aware of it to be spurred into action. 

That’s why freedom of the press is essential. That’s why it’s part of the first amendment to the Constitution. If we aren’t aware of what’s going on, we can’t feel it and react to it. And that’s why those who want to exert control over others do all they can to block free access to information. That’s the reason for state-controlled and corporate-controlled press and media.

Unfortunately, that’s also the reason why there is an increasing amount of censorship on the internet today. Most of us still believe that the internet is an open free for all, with the Google search engine indexing it all for us and allowing us to call it up on demand, like an infinite and fair library of the world. Indeed, it started out that way! But things have changed dramatically over the past few years. Under the guise of alleviating or saving us from “fake news from Russia”, whole swaths of information are now blocked from your view, especially on mainstream forums like Google, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. I’ve been seeing this for a few years now, and I’ve even been the victim of it.

My first true realization of this shift occurred in mid 2019. At that point, Google changed their search engine so that it “disappeared” various forms of content. The stated excuse was to filter out “fake news”. The content that I personally noticed  disappearing pertained to alternative medicine and health — even on seemingly innocuous  subjects like diet and supplements. The top-ranked and most trusted website on alternative approaches to health, Mercola.com, was demoted, overnight, so that its links now appeared on, say, page 20 or 30 in a search result, whereas before they would have appeared on page one. I also saw the effects on searches that pertained to me and my writings about homeopathy and autism. In response, I switched my search engine to DuckDuckGo.com (which provided fairer results) and moved on. (Much thanks to Charles Eisenstein who pointed to this search engine in one of his articles.)

Unfortunately, ever since COVID-times began, things have dramatically escalated. At the onset of COVID, information now was being blocked on subjects like the utility of vitamin C or any holistic approach to COVID treatment. Alternative practitioners, like naturopaths, were even asked by their own professional associations not to talk to their clients or write about the importance of  bolstering ones inherent immunity. And just recently, several alternative health sites (like Mercola.com) were completely censored on Google search — many of them sites I personally trust and visit frequently. There are also an increasing number of warnings on sites like Facebook and Youtube, alerting users that this kind of content is “suspect”. Email from alternative health sites is also increasingly filtered out by spam filters, since these filters tend to be created by organizations that share their information across many platforms.

Of course, Wikipedia has been actively attacking this kind of information for ages. The pages on any form of alternative medicine, including popular ones like chiropractic, are essentially hit pieces on those subjects. If you try to edit any of this information, your changes are attacked and removed by an army of watch-dog “editors”. It would be a full-time job to fend them off and in the end, you’d fail. They are essentially the thought police. 

I gave up on Wikipedia years ago. There used to be a short page about me and my work in both computer science and homeopathy. Ultimately, so much content was “removed” from my Wikipedia page (despite an effort to defend it by a top Wikipedia editor) that it essentially became content free and was unilaterally removed. To tell you the truth, I was relieved. I truly don’t trust Wikipedia at all anymore, and certainly not if it’s about a subject that’s controversial in any way. You shouldn’t either!

For years, I’ve accepted the censorship and unfair degradation of homeopathy because homeopathy has always suffered these kinds of attacks. The mantra that there is “no scientific evidence for homeopathy” is repeated by the media ad nauseum, despite hundreds of positive studies, including ones on animals and even cell cultures. Homeopaths have always been resigned to it. They just sigh and carry on. It’s kind of like how women have always had to grin and bear the sexism they experience. We just sigh and carry on. But the lies and censorship have become more widespread and extreme, and it’s not just about homeopathy anymore. It’s not even just about vaccines anymore. And I keep asking myself — why is this happening?

Is it because Google is greedy and is now actively invested in the pharmaceutical industry? Is it truly a plot by people like Bill Gates who want to control us and make money off of us? In general, I chalk such things up to a series of random events that people decide to take advantage of — like the government establishing the surveillance state after 9-11. Was 9-11 a false flag operation created to allow for this, or just an opportunity for those who wanted to seize more control in the name of security? Was COVID hatched up by drug companies in order to exert more control over our health and track us, or just a great opportunity to do so?

I don’t know the answer to this, but I suspect that serendipity, human stupidity and error, greed, and shortsightedness are the usual reasons. And things can certainly get very bad — until enough of us find out about it (if we can) or are personally affected by it and rebel.

The essential point of this article is that the most important thing we need to do right now is to loosen the censorship that has taken hold of us. One form of censorship is blocking information. But another form is skewing it; in particular, the information presented to us is deliberately “curated” so that it is ostensibly more of “interest” to us. Outlets like Google and Facebook are actively doing both and it has definitely contributed to the silo-ing and polarization of our world. 

Yes, Google and Facebook are private companies and therefore can claim the “right” to do what they want. Or do they have this right? Have these companies essentially become utilities, like the phone company? Can they legally skew our access? That is the essential question, and that’s why I’m so glad that courageous people like RFK, Jr. are finally mounting law suits to question this kind of power.  In fact, just after I wrote this article, I watched a new video by RFK, Jr. on this very subject. I recommend you check it out and watch this brave man in action (before Youtube decides to remove it!)

In summary, I believe that if we don’t loosen this censorship in its many forms, things will continue to get more and more oppressive until the only solution is outright revolution. I hope it doesn’t come to that! But revolution can take many forms, not necessarily violence in the street. One form of revolt is taking hold of your own awareness and your own mind and refusing to participate in the madness as best you can. We can be like the Russians who learned to block the surveillance bugs in their apartment by playing loud music, or who passed around bootlegged copies of forbidden Beatles music. For goodness sake, remove all those various “dots” around your house! I can’t fathom how people have been cajoled into buying and placing listening devices into their homes.

As for me, I’ve always refused to keep my email in the cloud (I still download it “old style” onto my computer and do all the backing up myself), nor do I use a smart phone except for emergencies. Did you know that Google reads the contents of all gmail, supposedly for neutral “advertising” purposes?  And that your cell phone is tracked at all times when it’s on? 

While today’s surveillance has become much more insidious and difficult to avoid, your resistance is possible. And if the lessons of the past are still applicable, eventually the tide will shift, one way or another.

Personally, I tend to be an optimist and believe that things will progress in the right direction in the long term. We are awakening, as a global community, with respect to many things — LGBTQ rights, the BLM and “Me Too” movements, and more. Things certainly have improved in many areas in my own lifetime. And soon there will be a greater awareness of what I’m calling the “techno-pharma cabal” too. We need to take the long view, putting things in historical context. As Ken Wilber has stressed, things tend to evolve, not devolve. It’s just not a straight line as it happens. Two steps forward, one step back.

Finally, I  tend to have a spiritual view of what’s going on, trusting in what Great Spirit has in store for us. That doesn’t mean I don’t have days when I’m depressed, scared, and need to take a swig of wine to get to sleep. But I also believe that the ultimate goodness of the human soul will win the day. I also know that my thoughts and beliefs do have an impact on the greater whole, so I try to visualize the future I want, not dwell on apocalyptic scenarios.

What do you think?