The Institutions Are Killing Us
Never, ever trust bureaucracies to do right by you.
I try to keep as cool and calm a head as I can here, but sometimes, you have to let it out. So if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to rage for a bit.
Have you heard about the ongoing saga of Indi Gregory?
Here’s a summary from Sky News [emphasis mine]:
A critically ill baby's life support will not allowed to be ended at home, a High Court judge has ruled.
Indi Gregory was born in February with mitochondrial disease, a genetic condition that saps energy.
Dean Gregory and Claire Staniforth, Indi's parents, have continually fought to overturn multiple rulings by UK courts to keep their daughter on life support.
Last weekend, the couple lost an appeal to overturn a ruling by Mr Justice Peel, who had concluded that it would not be in Indi's best interests to travel to Bambino Gesu Paediatric Hospital in Rome, where she had been offered treatment and Italian citizenship.
On Wednesday, Mr Justice Peel ruled Indi should not be “extubated” at home, and instead should remain in hospital or move to a hospice, during a private online hearing.
In case you’re not following, the British government, with consensus from the National Health Service (NHS), the institution providing universal healthcare for the United Kingdom, first prevented Indi Gregory from traveling to Italy to receive treatment for her condition. As if that wasn’t enough, the government is now condemning her to her fate and won’t even allow her to pass away in the comfort of her home.
Why? From the Sky News article:
“There are a number of factors which render extubation and palliative care at the family home all but impossible, and certainly contrary to [Indi's] best interests,” the judge said.
“It is too dangerous to do so given the clinical complications.”
Too dangerous? Please. Spare me the false concern for the baby’s well-being. If you’re going to deny her care even in a losing attempt to save her life, why does the judge care where she dies or how? Maybe he’s drunk on power, I don’t know. But I do know he doesn’t really care about the baby’s well-being, nor does he sympathize with the parents in the least bit.
I don’t know how accurate this is, but if true, then it ought to convince anyone on the fence to conclude the government is 100% in the wrong here:
It doesn’t seem like Indi’s going to die comfortably, either way. So why not let her parents get one last crack at saving her life? That’d make too much sense and be too humane, right?
So we can bring a heated debate into focus, let’s understand what the real problem here is. It’s not that Indi’s being denied potentially life-saving treatment (though that’s definitely what’s happening). It’s that her parents are being forced to cease their attempts at saving their daughter’s life under the threat of violence.
Some of you might read that last sentence and regard me as hyperbolic. Ask yourself: if Indi’s parents defied the judge and attempted to fly Indi to Italy to receive treatment in a last-ditch attempt to save her life, what do you think would happen? You think the same state that has people arrested for criticizing the extent of Palestinian support in his neighborhood or will arrest an autistic child for calling a police officer a “lesbian” (yes, this really happened!) would sit idly by and allow anyone else to defy the will of the state?
It’d be one thing if this was just a matter of the NHS deciding they’re no longer going to provide care for Indi on the justification that there’s no hope for her survival. That, too, is repugnant, but it’s to be expected when it comes to socialized medicine. But they’re not even allowing her parents to opt out of the system. Healthcare might be too expensive and you may find it a moral affront to force people to pay a price for their lives. So is imprisoning people within a bureaucracy that makes life or death decisions without a care for what you think.
How could they dare do such a thing? If you’re still asking this question with respect to the government, I’m not sure what else needs to happen for you to understand. Maybe the government coming after you? Even that might not be enough. You might end up simply blaming yourself for being a bad subject.
The thing that so many people have difficult coming to terms with is that the state isn’t a person. It’s an institution. It’s a bureaucracy. As an entity, it’s like a robot. To quote the character of Kyle Reese from the movie The Terminator:
“It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead!”
Yes. Until you’re dead. I’m not in the business of scaring people, but really, I don’t know how else to say it. If the government decides you must die, you will, come Hell or high water. And maybe that’s the way it ought to be. After all, I believe death is both a morally and legally appropriate outcome for criminals.
But Indi nor her parents have committed any crime. When something that’s supposed to save lives ends up taking innocent life, then the state is no longer acting in the public interest. In these spaces, I usually speak with respect to anarcho-tyranny and how many lives it costs daily to enforce. All tyrannies are the same at the end of the day, though. It’s a state that’ll have you die just to prove that it’s the supreme authority in our lives. There’s literally no other reason for the British government to do this aside from asserting its dominance.
Through violence. Governance is violence.
Some readers, especially the Americans, will recall the story of Terri Schiavo. A resident of Florida, Schiavo died in 2005 at the age of 41 after she was removed from life support at the request of her husband. She had been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years up to that point. The case became a national controversy because it ultimately came down to a dispute between her husband and Schiavo’s family, who didn’t want to end her life.
The reason I bring up the Schiavo case is that the government became extensively involved, at one point drawing President George W. Bush into the dispute. In researching the case for this piece, I was shocked to learn that had the dispute gone any longer, a confrontation between state and local authorities could’ve occurred, leading to a constitutional crisis.
Hours after a judge ordered that Terri Schiavo wasn't to be removed from her hospice, a team of Florida law enforcement agents was en route to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted -- but they stopped short when local police told them they would enforce the judge's order, the Miami Herald has learned.
…
In the end, the state agents and the Department of Children and Families backed down, apparently concerned about confronting local police outside the hospice.
”We told them that unless they had the judge with them when they came, they were not going to get in,” said a source with the local police.
”The FDLE called to say they were en route to the scene,” said an official with the city police who requested anonymity. “When the Sheriff’s department, and our department, told them they could not enforce their order, they backed off.”
The incident, known only to a few, underscores the intense emotion and murky legal terrain that the Schiavo case has created.
It also shows that agencies answering directly to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush had planned to use a wrinkle in state law that would have allowed them to legally get around the judge's order. The exception in the law allows public agencies to freeze a judge's order whenever an agency appeals it.
Participants in the high-stakes test of wills, who spoke with The Herald on the condition of anonymity, said they believed the standoff could ultimately have led to a constitutional crisis -- and a confrontation between dueling lawmen.
”There were two sets of law enforcement officers facing off, waiting for the other to blink,” said one official with knowledge of Thursday morning’s activities. In jest, one official said local police discussed “whether we had enough officers to hold off the National Guard.”
”It was kind of a showdown on the part of the locals and the state police,” the official said. “It was not too long after that Jeb Bush was on TV saying that, evidently, he doesn't have as much authority as people think.”
I don’t know whether the right thing, legally or morally, happened in the end. What I do know is that government involvement didn’t help all that much in terms of settling the dispute. When it comes to the authorities, it’s less of a question of what the right thing to do is and more about who’s in charge in a given situation.
In America, we have our own example of how the government is a most imperfect adjudicator when it comes to matters of life and death. I suppose the government was always meant to get involved when it comes to intractable disputes like the one between Terri Schiavo’s husband and her parents, but we shouldn’t ever delude ourselves into thinking the government will render the right judgment. It’s just that, unlike you and I, the government has the ability to enforce its will.
But one thing that absolutely didn’t happen in the case of Schiavo is the state condemning an innocent person to death. They upheld the right of her husband to make the decision on her behalf, but in no way did the state unilaterally determine what should happen to Schiavo. That’s what’s happening to Indi Gregory.
I don’t want to turn this into an argument against universal healthcare, but I’d also be remiss if I didn’t note that what’s happening to Indi is exactly why so many, especially in the U.S., are against it. Healthcare under any system is rationed to a degree, since we’re dealing with finite levels of labor and resources. In a government-run system, the rationing takes place to a greater degree, since the government has full control of the pursestrings, regardless of how much you pay in taxes. It’s like what I was saying about legal insurance a few posts back - the people who decide whether to pay on your behalf hold all the cards.
“Free” healthcare sounds nice until you realize you’re not in control of your healthcare. I’ll be the first to say healthcare is unreasonably expensive and I’m sure we can get into that at a later point, but one bad experience with a public system and you’re wishing you could just pay for your own care. Back in 2009, former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was derided for saying that ObamaCare would result in “death panels” that decided your fate. A full-court press was launched to demolish her claim, but what Palin said was, in principle, true. Whether a literal panel of bureaucrats would be established to decide whether you received care or not, the fact is decisions are ultimately made by those who cover the cost of care whether to spend that money or not. If that’s not a death panel, then what is? If what’s happening to Indi Gregory isn’t bureaucrats consigning and, more critically, enforcing an eight-month old to her fate, then what is?
Sometimes, people like Sarah Palin are labeled “crazy” only because they dare to be so blunt.
The great irony is that this is happening at a time when we, that’s to say those of us in the West, worship safety, as Jonathan Pageau recently put it. I’d add we worship “experts” to an unhealthy degree also, though I sense that to be fading. On the matter of safety, I’m specifically referring to the belief that state and society have a responsibility to remove all risk, assure benefits, and maximize personal liberty to the highest degree. It clearly makes no sense and leads to bizarre, destructive outcomes. We saw this in 2020 during COVID - after weeks of enforcing social distancing, that went totally out the window the moment protests kicked off following the death of George Floyd.
I devote much of this blog to talking about personal safety, but that’s just it - I place the burden of safety on the individual, not the state. Should the state do more to assure our safety? Absolutely, especially when it comes to crime, since we as individuals cannot control the behavior of others. But those who worship safety regard it as license and an abdication of responsibility to self, family, and society. Those who abdicate responsibility are ultimately relinquishing control of their own fate, whether they know it or not.
This is ultimately how we arrive at tyranny. We’re probably in the early stages of it already, with Britain most definitely well into it. The problem with giving it all to the state to handle is we make the mistake of thinking they answer to us. Do they, really? How could they, when you’ve bestowed upon them all control in the foolish hopes they can make life cost-free for you?
It’s an order that ultimately takes more than it gives. It’s not as if it’s underpinned by any higher values, either. A society is comprised of people and should honor its people and the values they live by, but increasingly, Western civilization honors its bureaucratic institutions above all else. Look at these children singing “Happy Birthday” to the NHS earlier this year. This is in Britain, a country that barely lets its people express pride in being British out of fear of offending those who don’t identify as British:
https://twitter.com/BBCNewsnight/status/1673769575698268161
This is state-worship. This is tyranny. The NHS and the “British” state may convincingly argue that it saves more people than not, but it’ll gladly accept your sacrifice if it means they get to remain viable. It means nothing to say the institutions ultimately behaved lawfully, because as I’ve repeated ad nauseum, law that isn’t underpinned by morality ultimately ends up becoming a means of oppression. If you need more proof, well, there’s plenty more on the way.
Does the story of Indi Gregory and her parents have any preparedness application? Absolutely. Institutional failure is both a cause and byproduct of civilizational decline, and so is institutional depravity. As they lose legitimacy due to their inability arrest decline, their only hope of remaining in charge is to exercise power in the most vulgar ways imaginable. If that means criminalizing defensive actions, so be it. If that means preventing an eight-month-old baby from receiving any further medical treatment because she’s probably going to die anyway, so be it. The objective, which is to remind all of us who’s in charge, has been met.
Staying outside the state’s crosshairs is good advice in the best of times, but it’ll become a literal survival strategy in the bad times. I’m not sure the British have any recourse, but in the U.S., relying as little as possible on public institutions is an absolute must. That’s easier said than done, obviously - if you’re poor, you may not have much choice but to rely on public institutions. If you can help it, however, opt out where you can. The simplest way to do this is through preparedness. Don’t rely on the government to do right by you in times of crisis, personal or public. Remember the wildfires in Hawaii earlier this year? People were prevented by police from leaving affected areas due to “safety concerns.”
Guess what - the people who obeyed the government turned around and ended up getting engulfed by flames. Those who disobeyed the government were the ones who survived. You see how the government ends up getting people killed? The state isn’t a person and, to quote Kyle Reese from The Terminator one more time, they cannot be reasoned with. You can’t reason with a body whose ultimate objective is to remain in total control.
Never, ever trust bureaucracies to do right by you.
What do you think? Is there a moral argument to be made to keep the parents of Indi Gregory from pursuing further attempts at saving her life, even in a losing effort? Let’s discuss in the comments section below.
UPDATE: It appears as though Indi Gregory has had her feeding tube removed:
She remains alive for now, but how much longer? I can’t imagine what it’d must be like to be her parents. It’s bad enough losing your child, it’s an indignity on top of it all for the state to behave so oppressively in this manner. If it were happening to me, I’d make it my mission in life to demolish the personal character of everyone in the British government and NHS who played a role in this tragedy. I’d drag their names through excrement. There’s no other justice to be had. This sort of thing is radicalizing and, if you want me to be perfectly frank, I hope it radicalizes many, many more. You’re not voting your way out of this. One thing all bureaucracies have in common is that they’re virtually untouchable.
If you’re the praying type, say one for Indi and her family. I hope I speak for us all when I say that we’re with them at this difficult moment.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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If Indi Gregory goes to Italy and survives, that would imply that all the other times the NHS has pulled the plug on "terminally ill" children, it has simply murdered them. And that's why Indi cannot be allowed to get treatment in Italy.
Very accurately stated. Here in Canada there’s very little fog hiding the death panels. MAID has been suggested and proposed for even depressed people. Yes, it is inevitable in every institutionalized universal healthcare system. No one has ever shown compassion for a number.