21 April 2018

Caring Corrupted


"The perpetrators were scholars, doctors, nurses, justice officials, the police and the health and workers’ administration.

The victims were poor, desperate, rebellious or in need of help. They came from psychiatric clinics and childrens hospitals, from old age homes and welfare institutions, from military hospitals and internment camps.

The number of victims is huge, the number of offenders who were sentenced, small."

Commemorative Tablet, Tiergartenstraße 4, Berlin


"But as Solomon said, wisdom enters not into a malicious mind, and science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul."

François Rabelais


"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people.

What is called 'fellow traveling' (collaboration) was primarily business interest: one pursues one’s own advantage before all else and, simply not to endanger oneself, does not talk too much. That is a general law of the status quo."

Theodor Adorno


"The U.S. has the most dysfunctional healthcare system in the industrial world, has about twice the per capita costs, and some of the worst outcomes."

Noam Chomsky


"The system continues unchanged since what dominates are the dynamics of an economy and a finance that are lacking in ethics.  It is no longer man who commands, but money, money, cash commands.  Men and women are sacrificed to the idols of profit and consumption...In this way people are thrown aside as if they were trash."

Francis I

Power and money have been the two great corrupting influences on mankind throughout history.  We are not immune to this, although we like to think that we are just that much different, and better.

Competency without conscience is especially pernicious in the professional classes, which can come to consider themselves above the conventional restraints suitable only for the common people.

They thereby become more vulnerable to pride, and privileged judgement, and greed made virulent by indifference, and all the evils that thereby follow.