Tag: Bichara Sahely

Is pathogenic human interference the cause of our social and planetary woes?

“Life creates conditions conducive to life.” – Janine Benyus

As many of you who follow my blog articles may have realised, I have become captivated by Professor John McMurtry’s life work. His book, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure, has provided a unifying framework of meaning and understanding of all of the degenerative trends of our time. What you may not know, is that for over a year, I have been trying desperately to translate the medical concepts from my training from the level of the individual life host up to the social and planetary levels of life organisation. And by trying to do so, it was hoped that we would be better able to understand the pathogenesis of these degenerate trends, and be able to convince our policy and decision makers on what steps need to be taken at the local, regional and international levels so as to prevent and rehabilitate the social and planetary pathologies in our midst.

What I have just come to realise is that the difficulties I was having in accomplishing this goal had to do with a preconceived assumption that was a major mental block in going forward. That concept has to do with what we in the profession call, the natural history of disease. Read More

Embracing the paradigm shift – from the principalities of darkness to the principles that value life

I am a seeker of truth, a lover of wisdom and a crusader for social justice; three life assets in great demand but now in very short supply. There is a hefty price we are paying for this state of affairs in terms of life destroyed at all levels of discernment, including the life support systems of the planet and society that nourish us, sustain us and allow us to grow, develop and flourish.

This scarcity of truth, wisdom and social justice is not natural in the sense that it was not preordained by the physical laws of the universe or the workings of nature. This scarcity was manufactured by the hubris of a small group of people hell-bent on dominating and controlling the planet’s resources by using the methods and technologies of distraction, deception and deprivation to destroy the essentials needed to live a flourishing life.

As Professor John McMurtry laments:

The air, soil and water cumulatively degrade and disappear; the climates and oceans destabilize without connection; species become extinct at a spasm rate across continents; pollution cycles and volumes rise endangering life systems on all planes in synergistic despoliation; the world’s forests, meadows and fisheries are cumulatively destroyed by the profit drivers of globalization; food pollinators, songbirds, coral reefs and large animals crash in unconnected response; public sectors and services are defunded and privatized as tax evasion by the rich multiplies; the global food system produces more and more disabling junk and wastes; non-contagious diseases multiply to the world’s biggest killer; the global financial system issues money out of control while collapsing in productive investment; the vocational future of the next generations is erased across the world; official lies and corruption are normalized as public relations. All the trends are one-way, degenerate, and undeniable. – Winning the War of the World | Global Research – Centre for Research on Globalization by Prof John McMurtry

McMurtry has diagnosed this global systemic disorder as a cancer that invades its social life host without resistance from its social immune system, a causal explanation that moved me to study and take seriously given my expertise as a life-care provider. I see all too frequently the effect of cancer growth on individual patient’s lives as the life support systems within their bodies are systematically destroyed by the invading and metastasing cancer until the demise of the life host that “feeds” the cancer.

At the base of this global systemic disorder is a systemic value disorder. McMurtry goes into more detail in his books Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System (1998), The Cancer Stage of Capitalism First Edition (1999), Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy (2002), and The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure Second Edition. Basically he shows in pains-taking detail why the life predicaments we are in are fundamentally because money-value has trumped life-value in almost all of our deliberations and until we wake up to this realisation and put in life-value above money-value, the one-way degenerate and undeniable trend of life despoilation will not mend.

In trying to come to a better understanding of the root of this life injustice, a verse from Scriptures come readily to mind:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms…Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. – NIV Ephesians 6:12, 14-16

What I have learnt over the years in interpreting the scriptures in my pursuit for truth, wisdom and social justice, is that “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” are not without but exist deep within our psyche, within our individual and collective unconscious. Synchronistically, a few days ago, I came across an article by Paul Levy that connected McMurtry’s global cancer system with the unrecognised cancer within our psyche.

Read More

Let’s make our youth great again!

I was honoured to be invited and to attend the “Uprooting Crime and Violence” National Crime Reduction Symposium today. The keynote speaker – Dr Neals J Chitan, PhD – a Crime Reduction Specialist, introduced us to the twelve psychosocial roots that feed prevalent crimes. Also in the breakout sessions, I was in the company of several esteemed ladies and gentlemen where several fundamental issues were raised and discussed.

Although Dr Chitan hinted that almost all of these psychosocial roots centered around disrespect, I had a nagging feeling that something more fundamental lay hidden in plain sight among and under these roots crying out for identification. Although one would have thought that this disrespect originated from the troubled youth onto themselves and society at large, I have come to realize that this disrespect has been projected onto our youth by our dysfunctional economic and political policies and players of that same society.

Let me explain!!

Read More

Unthinkable, unspeakable and untouchable? Coming to terms with the fake “realities” of our time!

Over the past year, I have been trying to come to terms with the fake “realities” of our time. It appears that we now live in an age of deception and illusions and in an age of insanity on a global scale. We are beginning to appreciate that many of our chronic physical, mental, and social diseases are “normal” adaptations to abnormal circumstances, be they due to mutagenic genetic inheritances, life-despoiling environmental exposures or unhealthy lifestyle choices forced upon us by life-disabling social determinants. Unbelievably, most of these “abnormalities” have been enabled and sustained by our institutions of governance that have put the primacy of money-value over and above that of life value! As a result of this perpetual war on the value of life, we end up legitimizing and normalizing dysfunctional and pathological thinking and behaviour, and as a result we are oblivious to the damage we are doing to ourselves, our communities and our planet, even when the evidence of our maladaptive behaviours are “hidden” right there in plain sight. Even worse, we end up celebrating the “wisdom” of psychopaths whom we chose as stewards of our institutions. These “wise psychopaths” have maintained their priviledge by mastering the science and art of perception managment as they have endeavoured and continue to do so by cognitively framing our collective false perceptions into their “true reality”.

Read More

On Life-Value Onto-Axiology, Neuroscience and the Self

This blog article was initially composed in July 2016 and completed in August 2016. It was not posted then as I sensed that doing so would have been premature. Given the recent spate of local, regional and international events, I sense the time is now right and ripe to bring Prof John McMurtry’s life’s work to a more general audience in a less sterile and more engaging conversational format based on email communications between myself and Prof McMurtry.

Hopefully, this missive would help open up avenues for a better understanding of the human condition, the challenges we face in understanding the brain, consciousness, the self, the mind, all of our social constructs, and would serve as the foundation for follow-up posts that would attempt to build a fully-life coherent account of our past blunders and hubris, and how we can better learn from the errors of our past, to help to consciously and coherently create a more socially-shared and participatory-prosperous future based on peace and harmony for people and planet.

Read More

It’s NOT the economy, but human and community development, stupid!

There is an unholy alliance between our money system, business management practices and our politics. I have come to this conclusion recently based on the happenings here at home and in the wider global arena.

All three, based on credit creation, vocational management, and public policy creation and implementation, respectively, revolve around a monoculture of ideas that reinforce each other in self-serving ways. They manufacture dysfunctional disorderly behaviours at all levels from the individual up to our institutions, be they local, regional or international. These initial public goods and services have been captured by private-money vested interests, and are manipulated for self-serving wants out of greed and fear of scarcity, not out of love for human and community development and self-sufficiency.

Read More

Why are our institutions no longer beacons of light and why have they become shadows of darkness?

I have lost faith in the institutions of our society, be they our schools, churches, businesses and as of late our government. Instead of being beacons of enlightenment, they have become shadows of endarkenment. We have heard recently from an economist that about 88% of our students are being left behind. Our churches are failing in reaching out to the spiritually sick and are now only preaching to the choir. Our businesses are more concerned about profit and the bottom line, rather than the social and environmental consequences of their lack of engagement in their communities. And a government of national unity appears to be united in name only.

How is it that these institutions which are supposed to mold our minds, hearts, hands and policies, are failing miserably in their fiduciary duty to provide the highest standard of care and stewardship for the people they serve? And why instead of seeing progress on these fronts, are we seeing uncertain days ahead? And finally, why instead of seeing the protection of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, we are in fact in the majority witnessing disease and death, mental and debt enslavement, and the production and distribution of misery?

Read More

Adam Smith’s Invisible Hands Revealed!!

Professor Richard A. Werner has conclusively shown that the invisible hands of the modern market are commercial banks which create money out of nothing!! (Can banks individually create money out of nothing? — The theories and the empirical evidence, How do banks create money, and why can other firms not do the same? An explanation for the… Read More

“Be Still, and Know…” – From Breakdown TO Breakthrough

It all started exactly two weeks ago with a flat tyre. I had been preparing to go to Church when I realised that my left back tyre was flat and that a screw was lodged in the rubber. So I had resolved to replace the tyre with a spare, go to Church and have it fixed… Read More

The socioeconomic and geopolitical determinants of crime in the Federation of St Kitts-Nevis

About two years ago, a patient was gunned down by an assailant in the emergency room at the Joseph N France General Hospital an hour after I had seen and examined a patient in that very same room. Yesterday, there was a police chase and the firing of some shots on the street several yards from my home of abode. And three days ago, two security guards were gunned down and one succumbed to her wounds outside of a shopping mall in the heart of town. What these three incidents in particular, and violent crime in general, have taught me, is that no one of us is safe, as stray bullets could have affected me or my family or my friends if ever we were in the wrong place or at the wrong time, at work, at home or even at the shopping mall.

What I endeavour to do in this article is to share with you some insights I have gained from trying to come to terms with the social determinants of health and to show you that we are not just dealing with a criminal justice system, but in truth and in fact we are dealing with a public health and mental health issue that calls for immediate, short-, medium- and long-term strategies, that use the practices of prevention and rehabilitation in its full armament of action. We have to now accept that law and police enforcement, prosecutions in courts and incarcerations in prison do not deal with the upstream determinants and root of these antisocial behaviours, and that a holistic approach by all sectors, be they governmental, business and civil society, have to be implemented if we are going to make a dent in the tsunami of criminal activity that is hijacking our nation and has the potential to derail the social and economic growth and development of our people in the Federation.

Read More