Allow me to open this piece with a snippet from Frederic Bastiat’s great pro-freedom treatise The Law:
[A celebrated traveler] arrived one day in the midst of a tribe of savages, where a child had just been born. A crowd of soothsayers, magicians, and quacks — armed with rings, hooks, and cords — surrounded it. One said: "This child will never smell the perfume of a peace-pipe unless I stretch his nostrils." Another said: "He will never be able to hear unless I draw his ear-lobes down to his shoulders." A third said: "He will never see the sunshine unless I slant his eyes." Another said: "He will never stand upright unless I bend his legs." A fifth said: "He will never learn to think unless I flatten his skull."
"Stop," cried the traveler. "What God does is well done. Do not claim to know more than He. God has given organs to this frail creature; let them develop and grow strong by exercise, use, experience, and liberty."
Give that a moment to sink in while I start a second pot of coffee.
The patterns that run through human history are of many kinds. Some are distinct and easy to trace; others are less so, even if they’re equally critical to the understanding of Mankind and his societies. I’ve harped on the political ones frequently enough to be sick of them... as you might be too, Gentle Reader. But there are others that require more patience and more perspicacity to tease out. One of them is exemplified in the Bastiat snippet above.
Virtually all societies recognize a class of experts,distinct from other members. The expert is conceded certain privileges, even if they’re never publicly specified. One of those privileges manifests as a social predisposition in favor of letting him have his way, at least on subjects where his expertise is acknowledged.
What’s insufficiently discussed in this regard is the expert’s predisposition toward intervention: his active insertion into the affairs of others, often contrary to those others’ preferences. In modern societies, the law has been shaped to put many experts’ prerogatives over those of the others. He gets to intervene in their affairs whether they like it or not.
In some cases, private, non-expert citizens manage to resist the intrusions of even the most assertive experts. But they must fight a strong, socially reinforced current – the presumption that the expert knows best – to pull it off.
Courtesy of N.C. Renegade, we have this instructive tale:
The midwife's words hang in the delivery room air like a casual afterthought: "We'll just give baby the vitamin K shot now." Just a vitamin. Nothing more than what you'd find in your morning orange juice. The language itself is the first deception - calling a synthetic blood-clotting agent manufactured by Pfizer's subsidiary Hospira a "vitamin" transforms an industrial pharmaceutical intervention into something as wholesome as sunshine.
In those first raw hours after birth, when parents are overwhelmed by the miracle of new life, the medical system strikes with practiced precision. The entire infrastructure - from the delivery nurse to the pediatrician, from the hospital protocols to the documentation systems - has been calibrated for this moment. Every medical professional in that room has been trained, not in the science of whether a newborn needs synthetic phytonadione, but in the art of securing compliance. They've learned to frame it as routine, to present it as universal, to make refusal seem like dangerous eccentricity.
Murphy's father, one of the few who came prepared, discovered what awaits those who dare say no. After his daughter was delivered using vacuum extraction five times - creating a visible blood-filled sac on her head - the red-shirted pediatrician entered within three minutes. Not to examine the baby. Not to celebrate the birth. But to begin the assault. When Murphy's father cited the Australian Paediatric Surveillance Unit study showing only six deaths from vitamin K deficiency bleeding in five million babies over 25 years, with none occurring in hospital births where vitamin K was refused, the doctor didn't engage with the data. Instead, he turned to the mother: "Do you feel differently?"
The pattern revealed itself through escalation. First the doctor. Then the nurse lecturing about irresponsibility. Then the NICU admission - not for medical necessity, but for "monitoring" a baby whose parents had refused the injection. Then the failed attempts to insert cannulas, the repeated heel pricks for blood tests. Strange behavior for medical professionals who claim the baby cannot clot blood properly. If she truly couldn't clot, why were they so eager to make her bleed?
Please read it all.
My purpose in citing this upsetting piece is to underscore the exercise of “medical authority,” to which we have been conditioned to defer. The physician is an expert: specifically, in neonatal care. He only wants “what’s best” for the baby, right? No physician would deliberately harm a newborn, would he? Surely we should let him do as he pleases!
Maybe not. Quite a lot of “routine” medical interventions are anything but good for the patient. When the patient is a helpless infant, the odds of an uncorrectable error are much higher than otherwise.
But as the cited article indicates, physicians and the like dislike to be balked. They become officious. They strive to convince you that if you don’t defer to their judgment, you’re committing a sin against your child. Sometimes they invoke the weight of the law. At other times, they perform what amounts to a kidnapping to get their way without your interference. They seldom suffer any penalty for any such action, while the parents of the newborn are often subjected to humiliating interrogations by “child welfare” bureaucrats.
Fighting the pressure to defer can take everything a parent has. Should the law become involved, it could destroy the family. Their newborn might be taken from them, to disappear into “supervised foster care.” It happens more often than most people are aware.
That’s just the medical aspect of things. Arrogant, brutally assertive experts are everywhere today. They all expect deference from the rest of us. Many are capable of enforcing their will with police assistance. And we, trained from birth to defer to “authority,” more often than not tend to go along as the easiest course.
Give this a long think, Gentle Reader. How many kinds of “expert” have tried to contravene your will? Did you resist successfully? What were the consequences? I’d like to hear about it.
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