Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: a short essay based on a Joe Rogan podcast in which the examinee is interviewed.

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: a short essay based on a Joe Rogan podcast in which the examinee is interviewed.

 

RFKJ seems to aim at a comprehensive and exhaustive theory of all medical reality which would account for all of the high chronic disease burden (including specific conditions like autism) that is indeed very regrettably observable in the world today, and do so by proposing vaccines in all their various forms as the single and truly integrating cause. This would be an astonishing intellectual achievement if true, for if there are fields of study that seem to be beyond the capability of single minds to wholly grasp, one of them surely is that which deals with the utter intricacy and complexity of the part of us that is biomechanical, and even more so in terms of how this also, in so many ways, relates to various contexts, such as with what is mental, personal, social, physical, pharmacological, etc. Regrettably indeed there is much chronic disease about, and yet mainstream opinion would on the whole be much more cautious and far less confident in attributing to a single and simple factor the cause of it all. Moreover, it seems that a rather notable feature of the particular grand theory being examined is it seems not only the proposed truth of particular medical or biological propositions, such as a link between vaccines and autism, but that it seems to necessarily include propositions that also concern the alleged bad faith of most of society, especially those who lead the technically difficult and specialised fields of it, being those people who are granted the role of expertise and who expect to be trusted on such matters on account of their rather long and arduous study of such areas. Indeed, it seems that RFKJ’s view on these matters requires a lot of malevolent agency which acts against the acceptance of his views on vaccines, autism, and chronic diseases, since what he advocates is so clearcut, uncomplicated, and if true so radically efficacious in treating not only some disease, but basically all, that the only reason why scientists and public officials, who have long done their apprenticeships, could still possibly disagree with him and people like him would be if they were wholly corrupted in important ways, being such that the medical and regulatory fields would be staffed with those who are completely in hock to people and corporate entities of profoundly bad faith.

 

For sure, the broader scientific community does not regard such claims with much favour at all, and considers that their proponents are not only invariably wrong, but very much not worth the attention which they seem to be most eager to acquire, indeed scientific communities will go out of their way to actively make them feel ignored, such is their vexed indignation. That these unconventional people operate outside of recognised scientific peer groups is itself the most concerning matter, and would alone constitute a serious objection to not only the truth of the particular claims that RFKJ advances, but also the likelihood in principle that RFKJ and lone theorists like him could generate epistemologically robust claims to empirical knowledge. For it seems that the general practice of the natural sciences does and must occur in a cooperative context, on account of the complexity of each field and sub-field, the technical equipment and staffing necessary, but also in terms of the need for peer review of claimed empirical findings and crucially the replication of claimed results by actually independent labs. The latter conditions seem to be exceptionally important since the various scientific communities have long since learned, from very unpleasant experience, of the tendency of various cranks and attention seekers to pop up from time to time who typically make big claims and have them reported in the media, but when subjected to the slightest professional rigour find that they quickly buckle and wholly collapse, only for these charlatans to usually then declare various conspiracy theories about how the ‘establishment ‘ is trying to suppress the ‘truth’. Indeed, there has been a serious problem of believing even extremely eminent scientists for longer than the scientific community should have, in that many were later uncovered as having misrepresented a lot of their work as genuine when it was actually wholly fraudulent. From such unpleasant experience the various sciences all now insist on robust peer review and an exacting replications of results in independent labs, and that short of this a single scientist or single paper of unknown quality published in a journal of uncertain standing does not at all constitute a contribution of scientific knowledge, and in fact amounts to nothing at all. In this space, it was noted in the course of the interview that a number of scientific paper front pages were briefly displayed on screen, yet it was not possible to ascertain the quality of these documents, in that no sense was given of whether these documents underwent things like peer review, and whether their claimed findings had already been replicated. Perhaps these papers were in fact quality contributions to scientific knowledge, yet my impression of their use in the course of this interview, in just being briefly flashed, was rather that they served as but stage props, in the sense of trying to invoke the prestige and authority of the sciences by the use of scientific-like paraphernalia, much like other stereotypical pieces of scientific equipment like a test tube or stethoscope would function similarly. That is, the sense that I got from this interview was that the brief display of these unknown papers served to, from RFKJ’s perspective, hopefully bring to the viewer’s mind associations of scientific rigour and authority, and to then expect that some of that scientific brand might rub off onto him as well, so as to gain greater credence for his views than actual scholarship might provide.

 

Of course scientific communities do not always get things right all of the time, but they have a much better success rate than ‘mavericks’ or self-declared Cassandras, where many of the latter clearly have a psychological need to go about their lives with a ‘great purpose’ and who seem to actually like having most of the world be against them and so have as their main task to get attention even though, or perhaps for the reason that, it be negative. For sure, different scientific communities and peer groups have got things wrong in terms of high theory before, and will do so again, but as said they have a much higher chance of being right about empirical matters, than any other social possibility. Examples of this include the role of microorganisms in causing stomach ulcers, that we only had a one galaxy universe, and that there was an Ether, indeed there are paradigm changes every so often. Yet this is not at all a cause of concern, as it is not reasonable to expect that particular humans in their often messy communities will perfectly and gracefully ascend up what seems to be a ladder of natural knowledge, given that the kind of reality it studies is so opaque to our meagre faculties. Rather it seems that where smoother scientific progress might made this will be more visible over the longer term, and that rather in advancing in more immediate contexts the scientific community will often find instead itself slipping back a bit at times, and as then trying different approaches with hopefully better footing and indeed making some progress at that point, and so in general the actual practice of natural science as it works in a more everyday way will tend to look rather circuitous or even convolved, and indeed will often feel very frustrating such as to require quite an amount of persistence. However, there is more of a problem where, though it be rare, such intellectual estates have got things wrong at times in not being sufficiently fulsome in terms of representing their field and their practices accurately to a non-technical audience in terms of risks as well as gains, such as to policy makers and the wider public, or in terms of practices that were not at at all ethically robust. This seems to have occurred in the excessively speedy rollout of nuclear power in the United States in the 1960s and ‘70s, where the relevant scientific community seems to have downplayed to some extent some of the risks and long-term effects, such as the storage of long-term radioactive waste, reasoning it seems that it was they who best understood such things and that rather the public and politicians might not weigh all matters in a fully rational and balanced way, and in who were also in part ultimately motivated out of an enthusiasm for the advent of a kind of techno-utopian atomic age. Similarly, there have also, for example, been times when some researchers held onto human tissue without the consent of the next of kin, for the reason that research into medical treatments might progress better, and this is such as to have in some jurisdictions included even matter from deceased children whose parents were mislead into thinking that the whole of the remains was delivered for funeral services. Even more seriously, there were in the past quite horrifying examples of profound breaches of trust and research programmes that completely contradicted any sense of ethics, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which a population of poor black men infected with syphilis were deceived about being treated, indeed where effective treatment was withheld so as to chart this disease’s effects until death. Yet it can be seen that on the whole that scientific communities are worthy of trust, since incidents like the foregoing are truly rare, and in most cases arise from misjudged aspirations and so are not actually evil. Indeed researchers from scientific fields can be said to have exhibited a much higher level of professional honesty than perhaps many other professions, in that variously the legal profession, the banking sector and the construction industry have on occasion fallen short of a standard of perfect honesty for example, yet whose professional judgement and claims are not wholly thrown out as with babies and bathwater, and so mutatis mutandis it should be with our scientific communities.

 

In general then, it can be said that the wider scientific community is worthy of a general public trust, and further that it is in the context of each discipline’s community that empirical claims are best generated and also for sure verified. Equally it can be said that those who shrilly denounce such communities as but venal gangs of treacherous wonks, and moreover who, in tandem with this, advocate wild and yet simplistic natural knowledge claims wholly outside of respected scholarly circles, should not really be treated as offering anything interesting to engage with, or as even offering anything worthy of any attention at all. Indeed, RFKJ’s claim regarding a putative link between vaccines and autism is especially worthy of contempt, and it is irritating to many people that essays such as this might still be necessary and so to give attention to claims that are not worthy of these efforts or for sure any other. Yet it is clear that there is a rather serious problem in the contemporary world regarding the regrettable condition of our, what might be called, socio-epistemology, in that the necessarily decentralised character of our specialised knowledge production and verification practices, given the impossibly vast scope involved,  has become impugned by the societal instability that is actually outside of these academic domains themselves, but which necessarily has damaged them anyway. That is, the various culture wars, senses of political grievance and forms of disrespect, and the failure of mainstream politics to fix long standing problems, is such that the basic social contract that had operated well in the West has suffered very serious damage of late, and which altogether has sapped at the root the social trust which is the basis of any society, and be such as to have undermined not only the sciences, but equally many other important institutions of our democracy in addition. The result of this social distress has been a profusion of malignant forms of our culture, whether it be populist demagoguery, conspiracy-theory nuttery, or the prominence of anti-science enthusiasts that dare masquerade as intellectually serious people.

 

RFKJ is already there with the latter two, and if per even more bizarre counterfactual universe he were elected president of the US, he would then impressively display a perfect trifecta of all that is hateful in our present age. Indeed, in addition to his great contributions to general immunological research, he has offered such amazing thoughts as: that there is much danger in “Wifi radiation”, with that only consisting of simple radio waves of the kind that has suffused our universe in every direction for nearly all of our universe’s existence; that “Spanish flu was vaccine induced” and that people actually died of bacterial pneumonia, yet there was no vaccine at all for that post WWI influenza pandemic, and the results showed this in many millions of people dying horribly; and most particularly that there has been an “autism explosion” since the advent of widespread vaccine taking and offering as evidence for this that there were no autistic people in his youth, though it might be more reasonable to state that basically anyone who was not ‘presentable’ in the past tended to be institutionalised, like intellectually disabled people or generally those who were a bit too much of a ‘nuisance’, and moreover obviously more functional neurodiverse people nowadays have the vocabulary and even identities with which to better articulate their particular difficulties and strengths, and so to be more visibly present in the culture of this age. To these farcical opinions must be added much general conspiracy-theoresque silliness, like of course how the assassination of his uncle JFK involved a whole menu of elaborate goings-on far beyond the facts, how his father Robert F. Kennedy was actually assassinated by the CIA in such a similar way, and that the CIA and other parts of the US government exist solely to create a continuous pipeline of wars that will ever fund the American military-industrial complex, as if they were that amazingly effective and so cartoonish in villainy. But of course too, RFKJ states that he is a marked man in terms of such deep state machinations and intrigues, since by his own reckoning he is such an important and significant personage by being such a great threat to them inasmuch as he has joined all the dots between perhaps all of the events of the world so as to create the classic conspiracy grand theory where everything in the world is linked, nothing happens by chance, and in which the proponent gets to feel as though they were part of a select and privileged intellectual elite, being the special minority who has extraordinary insight into the true and actual nature of the world and so are, because of this, people who are actually amazingly successful in life, given that in fact a dry description of the facts pertaining to such people’s lives would more normally not indicate anything much of special mention. While RFKJ had an amount of worthy success as an environmental lawyer, and this should be acknowledged and of course respected, yet it seems that this is gravely insufficient for the heights to which RFKJ’s sense of himself would like to actually go. For sure, RFKJ makes a big play about being a martyr for his cause, about stating that he is altruistically motivated by thinking of how so many autistic people are a burden to their parents in that this might have been avoided, and he compares himself to Sisyphus, as fated to perhaps forever roll alone a boulder up a hill to no effect at all, given the lineup of powerful forces that seemingly oppose him. Yet the sense that I get from this man is that he rather likes the very special role that this fruity quest gives him in that he gets to feature in it as being the very one with a chance of ‘saving the world’, and that inasmuch as he faces an extraordinary array of formidable powers standing against him, that he thinks that he has a good chance of success against them shows in truth how highly he thinks of himself, indeed of how highly he needs to think of himself, being such as what seems to be required to maintain stability in his unusual internal psychology. Indeed such are the heights of his unconvincing delusions that when imagining himself elected President of the USA, he with a faux and contrived formulation of himself, as so brave and courageous, said that the CIA will probably dispatch him, but that out of a great heroism he would bear any cost so as to advance his ‘saving the world’ personal narrative.

 

Of course, RFKJ points out obvious facts from time to time that everyone can well see, such as that in the United States the pharmaceutical sector there is exceptionally powerful and quite unscrupulous, in that it gouges people there relentlessly, that it is allowed to push and advertise a vast amount of medicinal products onto the populace far in excess of any real medical need, and that indeed it exploits the lax rules in that country in terms of lobbying and is in general it seems too powerful in relation to any regulator there. Yet RFKJ may have an excessively parochial view of the matter, in that in the EU drugs prices are far more reasonable, prescription drugs advertising is illegal and the amount of prescription medicines taken is lower, and here it is rather hard to influence public policy no matter the size of a company’s lobbying budget, and our regulators seem quite robust. He mentioned other things that surely would not be bad to implement, such as that it might be better if the rest of the world associated the image of United States more with the likes of a USAID volunteer rather than with a soldier with a gun. That said, it can hardly be surprising if fundamentally deluded people occasionally do make some sense and manage to address themselves to some matters in an actually factual way, for it is implausible to consider that people who are not actually institutionalised could be so crackbrained as that they would not be capable of making at least occasional sense.

 

In conclusion then, RFKJ demonstrates much loquacity, yet his mouth seems to be attached to at best a moderate intellect, and so his wittering does not ever seem capable of becoming aware of when it has gone seriously out of its depth, or when all pretence of it being taken as a serious voice have long been met with the likes of eye-rolls and such. Accordingly, he deserves to be ignored and wholly forgotten, yet his farcical type does speak to our distressed culture as a symptom of what happens when a sufficient level of societal trust is quite lost. For this reason, the more effective way to not have to deal with people like the subject of this essay is not to argue with them directly but rather to advance the bigger project of getting our societies and their populations to like and respect each other more, something which has obviously been lacking of late.