Reason and unreason. Living with the outcomes of secularism

One of the perplexing features of our day to day existance is the way so many people who have had access to education persist in treating the irrational as though it were fact and truth while that which is rationally determined is despised as lies. So we have murder committed daily in the name of that which cannot be proven to exist while the evidence we collect to rationalise the way we alleviate pain is discarded as mere conjecture. This has been the curious experience of the "HIV is an Illusion" debate that took place on my blog over the past month...for those who missed the debate the conclusion follows.

In my blog Manto vs de Lille i set out to defend the rational basis for Manto's unpopular position while accepting the horror implied by the ANC's choice to deny huge numbers access to ARV's. I anticipated that some would consider my support cruel or even unusual...i did not expect to encounter denial that there is even a problem...

To my amazement my blog uncovered a wealth of so-called dissidents [denialists] who are unable to accept the reasoned outcomes of thousands of researchers preferring instead to "believe" the fantasies of irrational response. Eventually i wrote what follows. The original blog Manto 1 de Lille 0 can be found through the search engine on blogmark

You are ducking the point Johan. response to a response 1 Oct 2006


I know that there was a time not too long ago when there was no funeral parlour on so many street corners. I see them daily as I drive around this megacity of ours. Johan you would have me believe that they are an illusion.

There is a place where we stopped once on our way to shoot a forgettable movie at the then newly opened Sun City where I was accidentally assigned to the dressing room of a lady I later saw decorously decorating the pages of Playboy. She was enraged and we certainly didn't 'hit it off'.

On our way to my failed assignation with Ms Kriel we had to collect a load of extras at that place where we stopped, and there was much excitement amongst the citizens of that place. We parked in a huge open space between two civic entities: a space big enough for a few football fields and change. We were between old and new: a relatively new village that was grafted onto an old village as part of the development programme for the region.

I went that way again recently: perhaps the first time in a decade. To my horror, those open fields where we had parked the bus and stretched our legs back in '80 were now a wall-to-wall graveyard filled to overflowing. How could such a small place acquire such a vast cemetery in such a short space of time?

Had there been war in this place? I asked.
They all became thin and died-Johan, they all became thin, wasted away, lost the use of their faculties and died. Had they all been murdered then we could have evaluated the bullet holes checked the cartridge remains and concluded that they had been shot. The same process applies when people grow thin and die. The broader world has concluded that there is a virus a large-you are suggesting these people died of cell' phone poisoning or having been uprooted from their homes and moved around-My ancestors were dispossessed of their commonage holdings back in the sixteenth century and have moved every generation since-We haven't all rolled over and died.

I have worked with people who were the scions of the newly emergent funeral business. I have read in appalled horror the regular Friday editions of the Sowetan with their page upon page of micro photos of the dead about to be buried. The numbers who are not living to a 'ripe old age' is statistically abnormal. The young are outnumbering the old on those pages. That is abnormal. It is the common sign of sickness in the tribe.

We humans have a need to invent gods and now that we know the ancient God of our historical consciousness is dead-'we have killed 'him' you and I' we seek to create new gods. Attributing godlike powers to empty corporations called collectively 'The Media', 'Big Pharma' the CIA and the general range of other alleged co-conspirators in this our 'Grande Illusion' is a symptom of this 'will to order' that is affecting you, Johan, by the looks of it..

This is the stuff of fiction. It is not the stuff of science.

The bottom line is this Johan. There is an overwhelming body of conclusive evidence that people are dying in unprecedented numbers in particular places on the planet. The broadly accepted culprit seems to be an entity which rigorous scientific evaluation functioning in the tyrannical world of peer assessment has chosen to call HIV.

There is also an overwhelming body of evidence ranging from the basic scientific stuff to the body counts, that suggests that a specific commonly accepted battery of symptoms is associated with the condition known as full blown AIDS, one of these is the presence of identifiable particles in the blood [see early blogs 'Manto 1 de Lille 0' for details].

Taking anti-retrovirals does seem to help a great many people notwithstanding their chemical side effects. Our issue in giving them to people on-masse, and the source of my support for Manto's position is the real problem of multi-drug resistance allied to cost. We know that almost all chemically based drugs have unwanted side effects: it is part of the problem of managing life under a drug regime.

This historic failure of the chemical based part of the wellness industry has been something of an Achilles heel [to the industry] and has spurred its own response, as evidenced by fairly wholesale firing of top executives recently for failing to be up to speed with latest trends- hardly bold conspirators here. The Economist [Sept' 16th 2006 p77] quotes Viren Mehta a pharmaceutical industry analyst and commentator who says that' The pharmaceutical industry is in the midst of a journey from 'old science' to 'new science'. The industry's traditional model based chiefly on chemistry and basic biology is giving way to a new approach based on biotechnology, computing [ aka bio-informatics][and] advanced chemistry-' Molecular medicine promises the possibility of personal design drugs for specific persons and ailments. Holistic chemical healthcare lies ahead.

Nonetheless overt and objective evidence suggests that ARV's prolong life. Like all products in competitive markets if they fail to perform the opposition overwhelms them. So they must work. Why there are alleged discrepancies in reports between Canada and the USA could be as much due to differences in the health care regimes between the two places as to any bureaucratic conspiracy-as if Bureaucrats actually had the imagination to engage in conspiracies at the level of complexity implied by you.

Then there is the rise of the funeral industry, in our country; the rising sales of coffins above century trend lines-There's customers there Johan, not some inchoate conspiracy.

So Johan, there is broadly all this evidence, which I, an interested layperson, can observe around me.

Against this I must place your battery of conspiracy language: beautiful stuff in something like the Da Vinci Code, but ultimately fiction. The fiction writer is literally god and can mould the plot to suit the given objective of the story, which typically has a finite climax and denouement. We are not living in a movie or a literary plot unless we choose to be. This is real. As the Buddhists put it 'all life is suffering'.

Maybe there is a denouement here-pending. Except as I said: this is real. There are no conspiracies. There is only random chaos to which we desperately seek to ascribe meaning. You seek meaning by pretending that a dysfunctional world in which we encounter nothing in our day to day lives that can remotely be called competent or even enthusiastic, can contain people of such superhuman foresight, ingenuity and adroitness, not to mention social cohesion, that they can mould and put together some unspeakably 'grande plan' for global domination-this is the world of 'Pinky and the Brain' Johan. This is John Gault in Ayn Rand's glorious confection 'Atlas Shrugged'. Empires come and go - and as Thomas could have suggested 'They no longer speak of Michaelangelo. We could as easily argue that we humans are the deadly virus that has overrun our planet and rendered its resources dysfunctional and that this disease is nature fighting back- burning off those superfluous human entities who cannot cope,

According to your notes you have decided after reading Orwell's 1984 that there is a plot afoot, and now find masses of wonderfully plausible evidence to reinforce your 'belief'-BELIEF IS NOT SCIENCE IT IS THE MURDER OF SCIENCE. Science is concerned with the provable. If it can't be proved it isn't science. The medical profession says they have proof that HIV exists and works its deadly way. They claim there is a flood of evidence available to satisfy a serious researcher. You say they are all lying and are part of a plot to do who knows what.

What you are presenting in your vast cornucopian collection of activist anti-HIV data is the speculation you accused me of. You mix Fiction writers and their fantasies with your own anxieties and 'create proof' of a conspiracy. You find legal disclaimers and create conspiracies. You are an immensely clever person with an obvious interest in alternate health remedies and yet you are in danger of becoming the 'crackpot theorist' you fear being labelled.

To avoid this you have to prove your contention. This wonderfully oratorical and random concatenation of curious facts and earnest observations you have cobbled together by judges and advocates and other non-medical wellness wannabees is gloriously persuasive in a Goebbels-ish kind of way, and reminds me of the character, Dorfling that I created in my new book: ' 7 Ways to get your money'.

HIV is an illusion! You say. To simply assert this over and over again backed up with poorly substantiated, low credibility sources does not equal a valid argument. You are losing on points.Your argument consists of simple unsupported salesmanship. Claiming that some advocate-some legal practitioner, says that HIV does not exists is not, frankly, particularly credible as a source of reference for an entire philosophy. Implying that a reputable magazine like, say, Nature, is deliberately part of a plot to publish screeds of documentation substantiating the existence of a viral pandemic is an irrational act. You're suggesting that only morons read the journal. Next you will be telling us that their groundbreaking publication of the DNA story some fifty years ago was also an imaginary act about an imaginary concept, and that Watson and Crick got the Nobel prize for fraudulent research.

You are further suggesting that every AIDS researcher, worker and medical practitioner world wide is covertly participating in a giant hoax to trick the gullible poor into believing they are dying in unprecedented numbers and voila on cue-they die-Presumably you also consider that the Bubonic Plague, the so called 'Black death', that wiped out about one third of the population of Europe in the late medieval era was also an illusion- What about the 'holocaust'? Where did all those people go if that was also an illusion?

You are presenting a curious and provocative critique to our interrogation of this great national calamity we are experiencing: with real and tangible and widespread grief. Ignoring this you are hoping to be Hegel's anti-thesis to the Medical profession's thesis-for your plot to now retain credibility you must give us scientific proof not literary flummery.

If you are right and HIV is an illusion, then tell us what is killing all these people. And I don't want anymore of this random conspiracy crap that you are chucking around; and all this 'conditions of life ' bullshit- these are invalid arguments and do not withstand rational scrutiny and have been disproved by the evidence of day-to-day life all over the planet. Do the work, take a few hundred people and test them. Do the comparative testing and all the other scientific stuff with controls and blinds and so on-and don't whine about someone not giving you a chance as part of your conspiracy profile, that's a game-find an experimental venue. And find out what it is-prove it's not that HIV, find out what it is.

In his book 'The H factor' Patrick Holford tells the remarkable story of Dr Killmer Mc Cully and his decades long journey through the medical wilderness to prove his revolutionary breakthrough theory about the role of homocysteine in health care management. The edition of the Economist to which I referred above also contains a provocative review in its literary section into the way Quantum String theory may be inhibiting the development of Physics. Undoubtedly indifference and complacency can create the illusion of conspiracy but determined people have triumphed over such adversity on innumerable previous occasions, Galileo being one of the pre-emptive early examples.. If you believe there is some other cause of all these deaths, and you obviously do, then prove it using the tools of science not the mechanics of populist appeal.

In my world as a social scientist I have always believed that a number of credible sources add up to reasonable evidence. You are quoting as your core source an obscure Canadian backwoods website that functions in a country where by your own admission this 'thins' disease is hardly known and probably kills fewer people than there are murders in that country. I am told by my medical contacts that the battery of credible sources for the proof of HIV are legion and are accessible by any sufficiently interested party. You need to provide your own credible proof to substantiate your hypothesis Johan-otherwise stop wasting your life.

Find out and tell us what is it Johan that is killing all these people, because they are definitely dying?