The biggest 20th century one killed millions. An outbreak in the mid-20th century killed far less. ’68 was the last big one, but back in the ’90s, a flu bug supposedly from birds caused a panic for awhile in Toronto. I was affected by that one, but not by fever or other tell-tale symptoms. Nope. The Rolling Stones canceled back then … and I had box seats.
Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, let’s take a critical look at the Swine Flu.
We’re very impacted by inverted science, as we’ve explored many times on this program. Scientists since Pasteur see all sorts of nefarious things in the microbes swimming in their Petri dishes. We have vaccines for this, medicines for that, radical radiation treatments to kill this and that disease. But we miss a key point when we look down at the microbic level to find the source of our maladies, and that is that disease doesn’t really come from that level.
Our materialistic philosophy introduced by Aristotle’s great inversion that we understand reality through the senses has led us deeper and deeper into the quirks and quarks, and further and further from the universal understanding that Aristotle’s master, Plato, suggested was inside us. “Infused science” he called it, saying we were born with it. Brazilian psychoanalyst and social scientist, Norberto Keppe, agrees with that. He talks about the universal concepts we possess. “Divine concepts inside the human being,” is how he puts it. And this corrects Aristotle’s metaphysical error: the lesser things don’t create the greater, we could say. Meaning tiny viruses could never really CAUSE our maladies. They’re there many times, but what lets them take hold is something bigger – the state of our psychological lives, which directly affects our immune system.
Dr. Roberto Giraldo is a Colombian doctor, a specialist in internal medicine with a major in infectious diseases and clinical tropical medicine, and he’s perhaps a perfect guy to talk about this. He works with AIDS and cancer patients all over the world, and he doesn’t believe much in the Swine Flu scare.