In Bob Marley’s words, “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds.”
Dr. Hassan, your story of freeing your mind reminded me of the story Anthony Fauci told on The Rachel Maddow Show in June 2024. He was part of a community that believed in an incredibly harmful delusion, and with his community, he responded to the truth as if it was an imminent threat. In describing his response to when the truthtellers managed to connect with his true self, he said, “Probably one of the best things I’ve ever done in my career was I just started listening … and what they were saying was making absolutely perfect sense.”
The story is in the mid to late 1980s after he was appointed the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The harmful delusion the members of his scientific community believed in involved “the rigidity of the clinical trial, the inclusion and exclusion criteria, the extraordinary amount of time, understandably, that the FDA took to approve a drug without any basis at all for getting drugs to people who needed a compassionate use for it.”
He describes his community’s harmful response to the truth by saying, “The scientific community, myself included at the time, and the regulatory community, … pulled back from” the gay community’s ideas about how to be more compassionate in terms of getting drugs faster to people with HIV AIDS.
For years, leading AIDS activist Larry Kramer referred to Fauci as an “incompetent idiot” and a “pill-pushing” tool of the medical establishment. After Fauci “just started listening,” Kramer called Fauci “the only true and great hero” among government officials during the AIDS crisis.
Maybe what happened to you is different than what happened to Fauci, but I think the same underlying cognitive process occurred. What do you think?
I understand the security of having subscribers pay and also having a little funding to offset costs. Still, I think this diminishes your and any experts’ messages a bit. I really wish this didn’t have to be.
In Bob Marley’s words, “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds.”
Dr. Hassan, your story of freeing your mind reminded me of the story Anthony Fauci told on The Rachel Maddow Show in June 2024. He was part of a community that believed in an incredibly harmful delusion, and with his community, he responded to the truth as if it was an imminent threat. In describing his response to when the truthtellers managed to connect with his true self, he said, “Probably one of the best things I’ve ever done in my career was I just started listening … and what they were saying was making absolutely perfect sense.”
The story is in the mid to late 1980s after he was appointed the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The harmful delusion the members of his scientific community believed in involved “the rigidity of the clinical trial, the inclusion and exclusion criteria, the extraordinary amount of time, understandably, that the FDA took to approve a drug without any basis at all for getting drugs to people who needed a compassionate use for it.”
He describes his community’s harmful response to the truth by saying, “The scientific community, myself included at the time, and the regulatory community, … pulled back from” the gay community’s ideas about how to be more compassionate in terms of getting drugs faster to people with HIV AIDS.
For years, leading AIDS activist Larry Kramer referred to Fauci as an “incompetent idiot” and a “pill-pushing” tool of the medical establishment. After Fauci “just started listening,” Kramer called Fauci “the only true and great hero” among government officials during the AIDS crisis.
Maybe what happened to you is different than what happened to Fauci, but I think the same underlying cognitive process occurred. What do you think?
I understand the security of having subscribers pay and also having a little funding to offset costs. Still, I think this diminishes your and any experts’ messages a bit. I really wish this didn’t have to be.
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Happy Holidays to you:) Thanks for all your good advice for the Substack community.