By Marty Gibson

As New Zealand inches uninspiringly nearer to the October 14th general election, many of us are still reeling from the collapse of medical and political ethics that politicians and mainstream media refuse to discuss.

I have a theory that Western democracy and Western medicine have a lot in common. 

Our current system of government seems to make us more dependent and sick as a society, just as Western medicine can make us physically sick and more dependent on ever-increasing intervention. 

“Dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies.” as Columbian writer and sage Nicolás Gómez Dávila observed.

Both Western medicine and central government democracies favour quick, measurable, short-term solutions. 

Both see mostly symptoms rather than individuals and families with the capacity to heal ourselves and maintain our own health. There is heavy emphasis on intervention rather than personal responsibility. The overall agenda is often controlled by vested interests rather than the interests of those affected by these interventions. 

Western medicine excels at treating acute problems like broken bones, but it is not so good at helping people to avoid and recover from chronic health conditions. Governments are similarly useful for defence and large-scale research, but they are terrible at building functional and independent communities.

Western medicine prizes pharmaceuticals with a narrow effect in the same way government departments focus on issues via ministerial silos. Now and again, you’ll hear about an inter-departmental initiative in the same way as there are multi-drug regimes, but “side-effects” are seen as an unwelcome complication. 

Both are reductive in their thinking. This contrasts with Eastern medicine, which sees the body as a whole and prizes things like ginseng, which are thought to have a broad effect on many different bodily functions all at once.

In both Western medicine and democracy, there is a readiness to add interventions but little in the way of a corresponding process to remove them. In New Zealand, one-third of people over 75 years old take at least six medicines, with over a million people taking eight or more medicines daily. Over 630,000 New Zealanders receive some form of welfare payment each year (excluding superannuation).

As any drug dealer can tell you, dependency is good for business, and it is naive to think that either the government or the pharmaceutical industry (and the medical establishment it controls) prioritises helping us to achieve optimal health. 

In the same way that “Big Pharma” loves anything that makes people sicker and more dependent on expensive ongoing medication, “Big Government” loves anything that makes people demand less freedom and more government. Fatherless kids, non-reforming prisons, ineffective schools, incompatible immigrants, racial conflict, unrestrained criminal gangs, kids being taught they can be any gender they choose … great for government departments hungry for tax, but a disaster for ordinary folks.

With both Western democracy and Western medicine, the cure can be worse than the disease. Interventionist solutions are favoured over addressing the behaviours that landed us in the mess we find ourselves in. 

And both are sending us broke as a nation.

But …  good news! This gloomy assessment lights a path away from many of our problems —  mostly in the opposite direction to the one we’re currently headed.

We could instead move away from centralisation toward maximised personal responsibility — decentralisation to the smallest possible level of action and decision-making. That means taking power back from the bankers, the neofeudalists in the UN, WHO, WEF and their WEF “Young Global Leader” puppets who have penetrated ze cabinets here and throughout the West.

Just as we need medical intervention when we break a leg or develop appendicitis, we need some form of central government, but we need a whole lot less than we have. Currently, the ratio of revenue between central and local governments is about 10:1, and Labour has increased spending by 80 per cent over six years of relentless autocratic centralisation.

Rather than voting for representatives of Wellington’s political cliques, it would be healthier for our democracy if we could vote for our best representatives to take our regions’ plans and concerns to Wellington and then tell them what we need from them and have them monitor best practice. 

Each region, city, neighbourhood, each family and individual could make their own customised plan, rather than us all using the same plan — implemented via puppet strings pulled by Wellington’s bureaucrats. 

Each region should identify a few “ginseng” projects to improve as many things as possible at once — health, education, food production, economic growth, employment, the environment, tourism, etc. Such a plan could function as a trellis upon which locals could build businesses, with a national body keeping a keen eye on which actions seem to deliver the best results. This can be partly measured (as it is in Switzerland) by people and capital wanting to move to places that are performing the best. 

This would foster long-term thinking and value-driven public spending in a way our current system fails to do. Like the aim of good health, a healthier society that places more value on personal responsibility requires a better education system than the one we have. Currently, more than half of the young people who spend ten years at public schools emerge functionally illiterate and innumerate. 

In decile one schools, that figure rises to over 95 per cent. The most common vocation among New Zealand’s parliamentarians at the moment is … “teacher”.

In some ways, these contrasting Eastern-Western modes of thinking overlap with the dichotomy of Maori and Western worldviews. 

A more Eastern way of thinking would, in many ways, be a more traditional Maori direction for New Zealand to travel.

The current Labour government has used their pretence of embracing all things Maori as a wedge to divide and rule us. That has ironically further trapped Maori in a Western system of government dependency rather than freeing them to practice true personal tino rangatiratanga. 

Rent-seeking tribal leaders have made a poor show of playing at Rangatira (chiefs) ruling over Tūtūā (uneducated commoners with little to show for Treaty settlements and billions “spent on Maori”), and of course, there are the slaves (non-Maori taxpayers). 

Women thought the CIA and the Rockefellers were uplifting them by funding and promoting feminism, but what they were actually funding was division and demoralisation of their most likely opponents. And now that same niche of psychopaths is apparently urgently wanting to uplift indigenous people, probably for the same reasons.

A more “Eastern” way of thinking need not be divisive if it is a balancing philosophy rather than a race-based divide-and-rule tactic. 

Isn’t that a more “Treaty-based approach”?

It would allow Maori to return to a more traditional hapu-based system of organising themselves, in harmony with their neighbours, and competing with neighbouring regions as they did when my great great great grandparents moved to Turanganui-a-Kiwa (later named Gisborne) 180 years ago. 

Rather than ruling over us, the government could become more like a traditional runanga — a repository of best-practice with surprisingly little compulsion.

Perhaps we could give our children — especially our boys — a heroic mission rather than traumatising them with meaninglessness and shame. We need to confront the likely impact of telling them the world is about to boil, then leaving them to soothe their anxiety with sugar porn and vaping. 

We’re allowed to drink alcohol despite its manifest harm as a drug because it numbs us to reality and our own anxiety and so allows us to better ignore reality.

Maybe we could actually restore the health of our environment by fixing our rivers, for example, or reducing waste. Better that, than borrowing money to send overseas to corrupt developing nations via corrupt carbon markets as a banker-sanctioned sacrifice to the climate fairies. 

We could make power cheaper for families rather than following Germany into 500 per cent hikes in electricity prices, as Blackrock virtue signals with uneconomic, unreliable and inefficient bird-killing wind farms and profits from shivering children and pensioners.

Maybe instead of holding people to account for things that happened a century before they were born, we could hold people accountable for the terrible things they’re doing right now.

Now, that would be an election to get excited about.