“A soldier does not have a role; he’s a bureaucrat in uniform. A general has a role. A general has a role, but a soldier doesn’t. [...] The fragmented guy doing a specialist job has no role; a role is total. That’s what you’re looking for. When you get shoved into a schoolroom, you get turned into a little fragmented thing instead of having a total role.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUnac67arZE

“There was a reason why the Ihalmiut had never learned to make and to use nets; for they were perfectly well aware of the fish that could be had for the taking. But they also knew that the results of fishing on a large scale are simply not the kind of results that can support human life in the Barrens. It all comes back again to the problem of fat. No inland fish, and this applies equally to hares and ptarmigan, can supply even a fraction of the fat requirements of the People. Fish are fine in summer as a dietary supplement when there is plenty of food in any case. In winter, a prolonged diet of fish would be as disastrous as poison to the People, and starvation in the form of fatal deficiencies would smite those whose bellies are distended with fish as violently as it smites those whose bellies are empty. Later I will tell you of a race of Northern natives who were weaned over from deer meat to fish. It is evident that the tragedy which resulted did not make its mark upon the official minds of men in high quarters.

“The deer must feed the People, and the deer alone can give the People life. In the years to come the Ihalmiut will eat deer meat as they have done for countless centuries and as their bodies demand that they continue to do so. If, and when, the time comes that there are no more deer, then the last Ihalmiut will die in their igloos and the problems tht they pose to us as their guardians will not be problems any longer. The fish nets will fray and whiten on the rocks by the shores of the Little Lakes, but there will be none to use them. They will remain for a while as symbols of the type of aid that we gave to the People in their extremity.”

Farley Mowat is better known for his 1963 book, Never Cry Wolf, in which he is told, “But dogs can’t work good on fish — get weak and sick and can’t haul no loads. Caribou is better.”

Ivan Illich (Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, 1975) wrote …

“The pain, dysfunction, disability, and anguish resulting from technical medical intervention now rival the morbidity due to traffic and industrial accidents and even war-related activities, and make the impact of medicine one of the most rapidly spreading epidemics of our time.”

We the People should have put the brakes on the Assassins In White way back in 1975 — 41 years ago — when Ivan Illich’s book was first published.

According to the same source …

“In 1971, between 12,000 and 15,000 malpractice suits were lodged in United States courts. Less than half of all malpractice claims were settled in less than eighteen months, and more than 10 percent of such claims remain unsettled for over six years. Between 16 and 20 percent of every dollar paid in malpractice insurance went to compensate the victim; the rest was paid to lawyers and medical experts. In such cases, doctors are vulnerable only to the charge of having acted against the medical code, of the incompetent performance of prescribed treatment, or of dereliction out of greed or laziness. The problem, however, is that most of the damage inflicted by the modern doctor does not fall into any of these categories. It occurs in the ordinary practice of well-trained men and women who have learned to bow to prevailing professional judgment and procedure, even though they know (or could and should know) what damage they do.”

In short, medical competence kills MILLIONS more people than medical incompetence.