The big business of the mediatic lies

  25.3.2018

          I remember how in the second half of the 70’s, when I lived in Zurich, the Club of Rome suddenly appeared on the scene, announcing with great fanfare that at that time the natural resources were running out, such as oil, coal, fish in the sea due to overfishing, oxygen in the air etc. etc.  Today we know that there was never more oil to be extracted, that coal is practically endless and that half of the fish we eat come from fish farms. And long before that, Malthus has shaken the weak spirits with his theory that in the future there would be excessive population growth against a food production that could not keep up with such an increase. The facts today are such that reading Malthus today is a profound lesson in the fallibility of human reasoning.

          We should therefore ask ourselves who would benefit from this kind of pseudo-scientific terrorism. I leave the answer to the reader: in any case, the strong economic interests of large business and political groups, as if they were united in a kind of manipulative world summit, provoke and continue to provoke today a brutal manipulation of data that serves their interests, and therefore enslaves the economic consumer masses, directing them to preferences, attitudes and ways of thinking remarkably uniform according to previously established patterns.

          Professor Gerd Gigerenzer, who since 1997 has directed the prestigious Max Planch-Institute, which is dedicated to research on the formation of man. Since 2009 he has also been director of the Harding Centrum for Risk Assessment, which is financed by the British foundation of the same name. Prof. Gigerenzer has published the results of his research in 2013 in the form of a book entitled ‘The Risk’: How the right decisions should be made’.

Examples of manipulation

          The World Health Organization states that the 50 grams of sausage consumed by Germans on average every day increases the risk of intestinal cancer by 20%. Anyone would immediately think that out of 100 Germans, 20 are doomed to this disease. But it turns out that the 5% of people who don’t eat sausages also end up suffering from this cancer, which among sausage eaters rises to 6%.  With this small difference you can’t scare anyone, but the relative difference between 5 and 6% makes the 20% that do cause panic. This means that people today must be prepared to correctly evaluate the statistics, the background to which is often hidden behind pseudo-scientific claims.

          Another case: the impetus of terrorism has caused excessive fear of these attacks, even though it kills far more  tobacco or road accidents. The explanation is clear: terrorism has been presented as a shock, creating a psychology of fear before this much stronger risk than the continuous deaths in car accidents, or when a plane crash. And this fear is precisely what suits the Islamic terrorist organization IS, in order to destabilize our European society and make us gradually give up our rights. In other words, the citizen today has to completely abandon the assumption that his own state will protect him, because this attitude would be to grant him a paternalistic status from someone who feels alienated, like a minor.

Early detection of breast cancer

          Propaganda for this control makes women think that early detection decreases the likelihood of this type of cancer. But the reality is that early detection can only uncover a disease that is already underway.  The point here is not to dissuade women from this test, but to make them understand that out of 1000 women between the ages of 50 and 69 who have not gone through early detection screening, 5 have died from this disease. And the other 1000 women who have undergone mammography screening, 4 have died of cancer. The percentage difference between 4 and 5 is 20%, and this figure has been taken up by pseudoscience to spread the word that early detection reduces breast cancer mortality by 20%.

         95% of women in Europe attach too much importance to prophylactic screening.  Needless to say, the amount of work involved in this mistake, which in the end is paid for by the health insurance company or the person concerned, is not known. What is more, today, for example, in Germany and Switzerland, doctors recommend this screening, knowing full well what we have just said, because they fear that they could be accused of culpable negligence if they do not recommend it. In the USA, the same situation exists, but even more inflexible to the point that if an honest doctor did not recommend early detection, he would end up earning much less fees.  And everything said here applies equally to the early detection of prostate cancer in men.

The excess of publicity, information seduction and misinformation

          It is important for the media to counteract this kind of brainwashing, which manifests itself in a daze of the citizen, under the continuous shooting of half-truths, of seductions to consumption and of disinformation, which is perhaps the worst of all, because man can take as true what is false, thus losing in part his freedom. A good therapy is, therefore, to put a certain distance between oneself and the spouting of data with which the media fetters us. Specifically, the first step is to purify the e-mails that arrive, not to watch so much television, to read good books and to dedicate oneself more to family and friends. It is essential not to let yourself be dominated, even by the mobile phone, when, like a tyrant, it rings at the wrong time.  We must be very clear that the average citizen is the one who, through his purchases of totally superfluous and even bad things, feeds companies that the only thing they care about is making money. And we are talking about businesses of many billions and billions.

Sources indicated in the text and NZZ, Switzerland .Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)