Oxford professor Julian Savulescu says fluoridation demonstrates how populations of the future could be mass-medicated through pharmacological ‘cognitive enhancements’ added to the water supply.
Aaron Dykes
In a 2008 paper titled, “Fluoride and the Future: Population Level Cognitive Enhancement,” Oxford bioethics professor Julian Savulescu claims that water fluoridation may be key to the “future of humanity.” He argues that “fluoridation may not merely be about tooth decay… [but] the drive to be better.”
Drugging the population’s water supply, Savulescu claims, is a form of “enhancement” that can pave the way to a future where mental abilities and other functions could be improved with drugs. Savulescu writes:
“Fluoridation is the tip of the enhancement iceberg. Science is progressing fast to develop safe and effective cognitive enhancers, drugs which will improve our mental abilities. For years, people have used crude enhancers, usually to promote wakefulness, like nicotine, caffeine and amphetamines. A new generation of more effective enhancers is emerging modafenil, ritalin, Adderral and ampakines and the piracetam family of memory improvers.”
But once highly safe and effective cognitive enhancers are developed – as they almost surely will be – the question will arise whether they should be added to the water, like fluoride, or our cereals, like folate. It seems likely that widespread population level cognitive enhancement will be irresistible.
The dream Savulescu argues for is based upon the lie that fluoridation of the public water supply has been a tremendous human advancement. Supporting that lie is the boasted claim by the Center for Disease Control that water fluoridation ranks among the top 10 public health achievements of the 20th Century. Instead, fluoride has been linked with neurological effects, thyroid problems, bone cancer and even crippling-blindness. What’s more, much of it is not even the common-but-toxic sodium fluoride, but an industrial waste derivative known as hydrofluosilicic acid– in an estimated 2/3 of the fluoridated public water in the U.S. and known to be very deadly.
Savulescu is flawed to hope fluoride can pave the way to an alchemically-”improved” society, especially where forced-medication is involved. The vision is distinctly like that of Brave New World, wherein author Aldous Huxley predicts a future dictatorship where people “learn to love their servitude.” What Huxley terms in the novel “Soma” would most likely come in reality in the form of numerous drugs that would tackle individual happiness, and the larger complacency of the masses at large. Solidified by a Scientific Dictatorship, a pharmacologically-treated population would be rendered very unlikely to ever revolt against the regime in power.
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
A ‘scientific’ form of control doesn’t necessarily imply the rise of enlightenment or technological innovation, but rather the guaranteed control of its population through a tested understanding of human behavior– including breaking point, resistance, anger– and the the ability to systematically stay one-step or many more ahead of what anyone might do.
DRUGS AND CHEMICALS ALREADY IN OUR FOOD & WATER
So could “cognitive enhancers” like Ritalin, Prozac and other chemically-engineered drugs be added to the water supply in the future to make humans better, smarter or faster? Or could they make humans docile, complacent and dangerously subservient?
Such proposals are already underway, and what’s more, whether intentional or not, spiked water supplies are already affecting populations in the U.S. and across the globe.
Huxley stated:
Kurt Nimmo reported in December 2009 on a newspiece advocating adding lithium to the water supply as a mood stabilizer:
Japanese researchers, according to Georgiou, are “investigating whether trace amounts of lithium can just change the mood in a community enough — in a really positive way without having the bad effects of lithium — to really affect the mood and decrease the suicide rate.”
Moreover, the AP exposed in 2008 that pharmaceutical drugs were found in the majority of the United States’ water supply. According to the AP, at least 46 million people are affected by the issue.
The New York Times sums in ‘There are drugs in the drinking water. Now what?‘ that: “There are traces of sedatives in New York City’s water. Ibuprofen and naproxen in Washington, D.C. Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety drugs in southern California… But how bad is it, exactly?”
The U.S. Geological Survey lists the “emerging contaminants in the environment” and specifically notes what is affecting the water supply. Contaminating compounds range from herbicides to pharmaceuticals, endocrine disruptors and household chemicals.
New research has also uncovered the presence of chemicals known as Antiandrogens that are finding their way into the water supply. Paul Joseph Watson writes:
Antiandrogens used in pesticides sprayed on our food have also been identified as “endocrine disruptors” that have been “demonstrated to induce demasculinization in rats.”
More shockingly, population control advocates like White House Science Advisor John P. Holdren have advocated adding sterilants to the water supply. He wrote about it alongside Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich in their 1977 book Ecoscience.
“Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control.”
“It must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.”
Spreading disease, like “enhancements” or sterilization, could be the intention of food or water additives. In 2002, The Melbourne Age reported on Nobel Peace Prize winning microbiologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet’s plan to help the Australian government develop biological weapons for use against Indonesia and other “overpopulated” countries of South-East Asia. From the article:
Sir Macfarlane recommended in a secret report in 1947 that biological and chemical weapons should be developed to target food crops and spread infectious diseases. His key advisory role on biological warfare was uncovered by Canberra historian Philip Dorling in the National Archives in 1998.
“Specifically to the Australian situation, the most effective counter-offensive to threatened invasion by overpopulated Asiatic countries would be directed towards the destruction by biological or chemical means of tropical food crops and the dissemination of infectious disease capable of spreading in tropical but not under Australian conditions,” Sir Macfarlane said.
Alex Jones recently exposed the fact that all the adulterated and dangerous chemical additives in our food and water are put there intentionally as put of a larger eugenics program.
The potential to use food and water as a weapon of mass-medication has long been used in times of war, under the principle of attrition and destabilization. Lord Bertrand Russell has underscored this concept rather bluntly in how it applies to societies living under the scientific age:
“Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy. . . It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries. Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.” - The Impact of Science on Society, 1953
“Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play.“ - Education in a Scientific Society p.251
CHEMICAL LOBOTOMY: ENLIGHTENMENT IN A BRAVE NEW WORLD
It’s a brave new world indeed where Oxford professor Julian Savulescu argues for the “Ethics of Enhancement.” In his 2002 paper, “Genetic interventions and the ethics of enhancement of human beings,” Savulesco argues for using gene therapy and drug therapy to make “happier, healthier people.” It could mean adding both mental-boosting and mood-enhancing chemicals to the things everyone eats or drinks.
It is interesting that Savulescu mentions fluoride alongside “cognitive enhancements,” as many critics have pointed towards the use of fluoride in Nazi concentration camps to keep the inmates passive, and questioned whether a docile population is a hidden purpose of the water fluoridation campaigns in the United States and post-war Western world. Further, fluoride is a basic ingredient in both Prozac, which is the leading brand-name for Fluoxetine (FLUoxetene Hydrochloride) as well as Sarin nerve gas (Isopropyl-Methyl-Phosphoryl FLUoride), which are fundamentally mind-altering substances.
Fluoride isn’t the only controversial substance Savulescu terms as an advance in human civilization. He touts the widespread use of Prozac and points to the use of Modafenil, an amphetamine, to keep Air Force pilots alert during missions in Iraq. Savulescu is also a proponent of most types of genetic-enhancement that have been proposed. He sees experiments like the genetically-engineered “supermouse” as a model for the potential supermen of the future.
However, all of these “enhancements” come with risks. Genetically-engineered foods have proved deadly and dangerous; gene-splicing has proved to have unforeseeable consequences; fluorides and pharmaceutical chemicals pose dangers of addiction, brain damage, cancer or other problems.
Savulescu poses the potential to “enhance” a.k.a. “control” behavior: “If the results of recent animal studies into hard work and monogamy apply to humans, it may be possible in the future to genetically change how we are predisposed to behave. This raises a new question: should we try to engineer better, happier people?” p. 7-8
NOT UTILIZING ENHANCEMENTS COULD BE ‘WRONG’
He goes on to argue that while many have raised questions about the moral and ethical dilemmas of biological enhancement, NOT enhancing could be most wrong. In this scenario, not feeding offspring “enhanced” food additives could be considered as an offense:
“First Argument for Enhancement: Choosing Not to Enhance Is Wrong – Consider the case of the Neglectful Parents. The Neglectful parents give birth to a child with a special condition. The child has a stunning intellect but requires a simple, readily available, cheap dietary supplement to sustain his intellect. But they neglect the diet of this child and this results in a child with a stunning intellect becoming normal. This is clearly wrong.”
“But now consider the case of the Lazy Parents. They have a child who has a normal intellect but if they introduced the same dietary supplement, the child’s intellect would rise to the same level as the child of the Neglectful Parent. They can’t be bothered with improving the child’s diet so the child remains with a normal intellect. Failure to institute dietary supplementation means a normal child fails to achieve a stunning intellect. The inaction of the Lazy Parents is as wrong as the inaction of the Neglectful parents. It has exactly the same consequence: a child exists who could have had a stunning intellect but is instead normal. Some argue that it is not wrong to fail to bring about” p. 10
Savulescu’s vision is distinctly “transhumanist” a branch of the eugenics movement which seeks to improve the human species to the point that highly-gifted individuals would transcend into a new & improved proto-human species– becoming godlike creatures with unique creative potential and abilities. Transhumanism was first termed by UNESCO founder Julian Huxley in 1952, the grandson of Charles Darwin’s partner at the Royal Society of Science, T.H. Huxley.
“I believe in transhumanism”: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Pekin man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.
-Julian Huxley, 1957
LIBERAL EUGENICS: “VOLUNTARY” ENHANCEMENTS THROUGH MASS-MEDICATED WATER
That philosophy of Transhumanism, moreover, is necessarily rooted in the Eugenics movement of the early 20th Century that was led by the scientific elite of the Royal Society, which included Charles Darwin, his cousin Francis Galton and Thomas H. Huxley. This circle and their allies floated Utopian visions for a scientifically- and eugenically- engineered society that would be progressive and even transformative, theoretically producing a ‘better’, albeit tightly-authoritarian society (science demands control, in that sense).
Savulescu identifies with much of this “liberal Eugenics,” defensibly separate from Nazi eugenics because there is ‘no belief in only one gene-type’ and because its measures remain “voluntary.”
“What was objectionable about the eugenics movement, besides its shoddy scientific basis, was that it involved the imposition of a State vision for a healthy population and aimed to achieve this through coercion.” p. 21
However, proposals to add medication to the population’s water supply are involuntary, and would violate individual rights. It would be mass-medication, and avoiding the substances treated with it would be costly, burdensome and difficult to do with any finality. Savulescu apparently views compulsory water treatment in the same vein as compulsory vaccinations, and anything else that can be justified on a public health care basis, even when such treatments prove not to be healthy at all.
“Some interventions, however, may still be clearly enhancements for our children and so just like vaccinations or other preventative health care.” p. 27
Additionally, while the figures of “liberal eugenics” which Savulescu looked up to often espoused semi-tolerant “voluntary” proposals, it was always clear that the long-term vision encompassed measures of control ‘for the betterment of all’ that could not function under voluntary or ‘democratic’ conditions. What’s more, eugenical laws passed in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States and Britain– some of which weren’t repealed until the late 1970s– gave the State authority over forcible sterilization and beyond. Thus, these “voluntary” enhancement-visionaries have already crossed the line of trust and betrayed the fact that they mean to control with force.
Advancements and innovations in science, technology and health have obvious potential benefits, but with kind of dangerous ideology driving the science policy, public health is at a serious risk. Worse still, driving the population into that system has been an intentional scheme by certain ideologues. We cannot flirt with ushering a Brave New World knowing its sweet poison is certain despotism.
