When I talk about the importance of individual change—such as healing emotional trauma, discovering inner peace and clarity, becoming more loving and compassionate, or making more ethical and environmentally friendly consumption choices—some people are quick to dismiss it as pointless. They argue that the only way to create truly impactful and lasting change is by transforming the social systems in place, since individuals are largely shaped by those systems, and attempts at direct individual change will therefore be negligible in the grand scheme of things.

Yet when I talk about the importance of systemic change—such as pointing out our exploitative and destructive social, economic, and political systems, or suggesting ways we could radically transform them—others tell me that this approach will achieve little to nothing. They claim that society—with its systems and institutions—is run by individuals, and unless those individuals change first, society will remain the same. “Society,” after all, is just a word—an abstraction; it doesn’t truly exist, but individuals do, and hence they should be our focus.

The people who focus solely on individual change are often found in “spiritual” or “self-help” circles, immersed in the work of authors, coaches, and gurus who speak almost exclusively about personal transformation. To those who advocate for large-scale change, they respond with something along these lines: “What’s the point of trying to change the world when you yourself have not changed? You can’t create heaven while carrying hell within you, nor can you change the world by force. You can only change yourself—and that change will have ripple effects on the world, too.”

On the other hand, those who focus solely on systemic change tend to be involved in social activism, believing it to be the only meaningful way to improve the material conditions we live in. To the spiritually minded, they ask: “What’s the point of practicing self-forgiveness or sitting cross-legged for hours, silently observing your breath? Will it help feed starving children or stop rainforests from being cut down? Or what’s the point of consuming ‘sustainable’ products when the economic system is based on the overextraction of Earth’s resources? It’s ridiculous—a complete waste of time that allows suffering and destruction to perpetuate.”

To me, both approaches are one-sided and partially mistaken. Hence, I take a third approach—one that bridges them or allows them to complement each other.

If you have been a long-time follower of my work, you must know that I tend to talk about both individual and systemic change, and more or less to the same extent. The reason for that is that I consider them deeply interdependent and equally important. Sometimes, based on the topic at hand, I might focus on inner work and individual change, while other times on social activism and systemic change. But I see them as two sides of the same coin—different yet mutually reinforcing layers of reality.

Yes, it’s certainly true that if we want lasting, large-scale societal change, the systems that incentivize—and, in fact, depend on—destructive behavior must be changed. However, it is also true that changing those systems first requires a shift in our thinking and values, for ultimately our social systems are a product and mirror reflection of our collective consciousness. In the words of Albert Einstein, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Through individual change, we can create a field of change that might eventually lead to a critical mass of people adopting healthier values and desiring systemic transformation. For example, individuals who choose to abstain from meat for ethical reasons might inspire many around them to do the same, who in turn inspire others, and so on and so forth, until a social movement emerges that advocates for banning the meat industry. Similarly, experienced meditators may spread peace and compassion as a result of their practice—qualities necessary for challenging the warlike mentality embedded in many of our social systems.

Conversely, through systemic change, our individual lives can change significantly as well. Imagine, for instance, designing an economic system based on collaboration and sharing instead of competition and hoarding. A system that incentivizes people to contribute to the world’s well-being rather than to its destruction and suffering. In such a system, individuals would be able to live a healthy and purpose-driven life, instead of wasting most of it engaged in meaningless and oppressive work.

And we can start making systemic change right now. We don’t need to wait until everyone becomes fully “enlightened”—it will never happen—or expect that individual behavioral change can substitute for systemic change. No matter our efforts in making positive change through our individual choices, those choices will be severely limited by the harmful systems in place. Hence, it’s important that we try to change those systems, or at least raise awareness about them.

Ultimately, the question of whether individual or systemic change is more effective stems from a fundamental misunderstanding: the assumption that they can be separated. In reality, they are intrinsically connected, and both are necessary for meaningful progress. So even though some of us might choose to focus on one rather than the other, we need to be careful not to dismiss or downplay either.

The post Individual vs Systemic Change — Which is More Effective? appeared first on Sofo Archon.

Is Israel’s war on Gaza self-defense—or genocide against Palestinians?

Watch the video to find out.

Transcript

This is Rafah—a city in southern Gaza—reduced to rubble by Israeli bombs, all in the name of “peace” and “justice.”

Tell me, is this what self-defense looks like?

Were all these destroyed homes Hamas strongholds?

Were the 30,000 women and children killed members of Hamas too?

Now ask yourself: Does the killing of 1,000 Israelis justify the slaughter of 60,000 Palestinians?

What about the deep emotional scars this one-sided war has carved—and the lasting hatred it’s fueling?

Will that not ignite even more conflict for generations?

This isn’t a pursuit of peace or justice—it’s the erasure of a people and the seizure of their land.

This is not defense. This is domination.

This is genocide.

The post This is NOT defense. This is GENOCIDE. appeared first on Sofo Archon.

School is supposed to be about learning. But for most of us, it’s really about obedience. And that lesson sticks longer than any textbook.

To learn more, watch the video below.

Transcript

School is a prison.

When I say “school,” I mean conventional school—school as it commonly exists in most places around the world. Because there are alternative schools—schools that actually respect children’s freedom. But conventional school is pretty much like a prison. Not a maximum-security prison, but more like a minimum-security one.

In our society, children from a very young age—usually around five or six—are forced to go to school. Whether they want to or not does not matter. They have to go. It is demanded by law. If a child does not go to school, that is considered a crime. In other words, we have criminalized children’s freedom.

Let’s see what children do at school. Every weekday—for five, six, seven, sometimes eight hours—they are confined within four walls, in a small classroom where they are told to stay seated in a particular way and pay attention to their teacher. They are not allowed to do pretty much anything on their own. They are not allowed to stand up. They are not allowed to sit how they want. They are not allowed to speak when they want. They are not allowed to communicate with their peers—their classmates.

Anything they want to do, they must first be given permission. If they want to speak, they have to raise their hand and ask for permission from their teacher—the authority figure of the class. If they want to go to the bathroom to satisfy a basic biological need, they must ask for permission first. So, from a very young age, children begin to learn that they are not free, that they have no autonomy, that their lives—for the most part—do not belong to them.

At school, children are also forced to learn things they don’t care about learning—things they find boring or uninteresting. Children might want to paint, dance, spend time in nature—in the great outdoors—climb trees, play sports with their friends, have fun, or observe and explore the world around them. But school does not like those things. It doesn’t allow time for them, or it allows only a very limited amount.

At school, children learn history, math, and all sorts of subjects that, for the most part, they don’t care about. But they have to learn them in order to do well on exams, pass their classes, or get good grades. If they don’t, they’re going to be punished. They might be mocked sometimes, but usually they just get bad grades—which means they might have to repeat the class or be looked down upon by their teachers and parents. Sometimes, parents even punish their children for not getting good grades.

So, children learn to do as they are taught in order to avoid punishment. They memorize information that they regurgitate during exams so they can get good grades or pass those exams. But most of the things they learn, they don’t even truly learn. They forget them very quickly. They memorize the information necessary for an exam, and then they delete it from their memory so they can memorize the next thing—and so on and so forth. By the time they finish school, they have forgotten almost everything they learned—or thought they had learned. Perhaps 90% of what they memorized is gone. It’s vanished into thin air.

Another thing children learn at school is to see their peers as competitors, because school pits students against one another. You have the “good” students—those who are great at obeying, conforming, and doing well on exams—and the “bad” students, who do the opposite. If one student helps another pass an exam, that’s considered “cheating.” So collaboration at school—seeing others as partners, as people to work with rather than compete against—is discouraged.

Children learn through this conditioning that we live in a very competitive world—that it’s a dog-eat-dog world. And of course, that idea is reinforced later on when they see how competitive business can be.

Children are told that school is the best years of one’s life. I remember being told that by my parents and teachers. They would say, “Enjoy life now, because later on it will be way, way worse.” And they were right, in a sense. Adults have so many more responsibilities and obligations. They have to strive to make ends meet—most of them, at least. But that doesn’t mean school is good, that it is a positive experience. It is just better—or it just doesn’t suck as much as adult life.

Children hate school because their spirit wants freedom. It does not want confinement. But as they grow older, the system breaks their spirit, and they begin to accept slavery as normal. That’s why, once they become adults, they are willing to do work they hate, obey rules and authority figures, not talk back, not rebel against oppression, live only for the weekend or holidays, or look forward to getting old and becoming a pensioner. They accept living a life that is not truly theirs. This is exactly what the system wants, and it is exactly why school is designed the way it is.

But if we don’t want children to suffer; if we don’t want them to turn into mindless, obedient conformists; if we don’t want people to be exploited by one another, constantly competing, and living a life that feels meaningless—a life that brings no fulfillment but only misery—then we need to seriously rethink our education system.

The post School Isn’t About Learning — It’s About Obedience appeared first on Sofo Archon.

Do science and religion have to clash, or could they peacefully coexist?

Watch this video to find out.

Transcript

For thousands of years, science and religion have been viewed as antithetical to each other. As a result, science and religion have been constantly fighting against each other. But I don’t think that has to be the case. In fact, I think that science and religion can harmoniously coexist, or even complement and enrich each other.

The reason I’m saying this is that, ultimately, at their very core, both science and religion share the same goal: to find truth.

Science is outwardly oriented. It helps us discover truth about the “outside” world—what scientists tend to call the material world. And it does so through the use of the scientific method: through analysis, experimentation, observation, reasoning, control, and so on and so forth. It is because of the scientific method that science has allowed us, as a civilization, to make tremendous progress when it comes to our understanding of the world.

Religion, on the other hand, is inwardly oriented. It helps us find truth about the world within us, so to speak. It helps us understand who we truly are, the nature of our consciousness, the nature of our being, and how it relates to the greater being we are a part of—the cosmic being. And hence how we can best relate to it—how we can live at peace with each other, and in harmony with nature.

The methods religion uses are primarily practices and rituals. One such practice is meditation, which allows us to dive deep within ourselves and shed light on parts of our being that we were previously unaware of.

The problem starts when religion becomes organized, institutionalized, and dogmatic—when it claims to contain the absolute truth. When it tells you, “This is the truth; you just need to believe it. You don’t need to question it or look elsewhere. You don’t need science.”

For example, some religions believe in the cosmologies offered in their scriptures. They view them not symbolically, but literally, and they say, ” This is how the world was created, or this is when the world was created.”

In other words, when religion starts making scientific claims, it forgets its domain. And when that happens, conflict between science and religion is bound to arise.

Science can also become dogmatic. At its core, science is humble. It says, “I don’t know, and I’m willing to learn. I don’t have all the answers, and I’m willing to ask new questions.” True science—even if it has found truth—never claims that it is absolute. Even the theories it holds are open to examination, questioning, and revision. This is how scientific progress is made.

But when science—or I should say, scientists—call everything that is found in religion “superstition,” when they reject anything related to consciousness or spirit as silly, and when they view the scientific method as the only path to truth, then science becomes dogmatic too.

In other words, when either science or religion forgets its domain and becomes closed off to the other, conflicts are bound to arise. And when that happens, humanity suffers. Because religion has so much to give to science, and science has so much to give to religion. I think it was Einstein who said, “Science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind.”

Science without religion is not going to benefit humanity. Science can give us tremendous power. But if we are not wise, loving, and compassionate, if we don’t view the world as sacred—things that religion helps us do—then we risk using that power destructively.

And we have been doing that so much. Look at the world around you, and you will understand what I’m talking about. We have so much knowledge in our hands that we could live in abundance, at peace, joyfully, happily. Yet look at how we’re living. Look at the poverty that exists in the world. Look at the environmental destruction we are causing.

Religion without science, on the other hand, is blind. Because religion without science means ignorance. It means blind belief. It means claiming to know things that we don’t really know, or doing things without knowing whether they serve our well-being. This is why so many religious people suppress themselves or are afraid to seek truth outside their religion.

Religions are also constantly fight with each other because each claims to know the absolute truth. Science and religion are fighting with each other, but religions among themselves are fighting way, way more. But this does not have to remain the case—if we view science and religion for what they truly are.

The post Can Science and Religion Coexist? appeared first on Sofo Archon.

One of the most frequent questions I receive is whether I believe in God.

Watch this video to hear my answer.

Transcript

People often ask me if I believe in God.

My answer changes depending on what each person means by “God.” But generally speaking, what those people mean by that word is: someone who is somewhere in space, who we cannot see but who can see us, and who is constantly observing us every single moment of our lives, trying to see if we are following his orders, if we are living according to how he wants us to live, so that he can eventually judge us and send us to heaven as a reward if we were good people, or punish us in hell if we were bad people.

To those people, I say, “No, I do not believe in this kind of God. Why should I? There is no proof that such a God exists. There is absolutely no evidence. I don’t have any personal experience that such a God exists. So why would I?”

And then they tell me, “Well, because it is written in this or that scripture. It is written in the Bible. Read that scripture and you will see why.”

And I say, “How do you know that the Bible is the Word of God?”

Then they tell me, “Well, because God says so,” which is circular logic. It’s crazy if you think about it. But most people believe such things. Most people think this way because they have been indoctrinated from a very young age to do so.

So, no—I don’t want to believe in something I don’t know, that there’s no evidence for, or that I haven’t somehow experienced in my own life. And I’m not going to believe it—to fill myself with shame, guilt, and fear— just because someone said the Bible is the Word of God, or because tradition passed those beliefs down to me. I’m not going to accept it. I’m going to question it—and not just personally, but publicly.

So if I sometimes speak against the world’s religions, it’s because I’m against dogmatic, close-minded thinking. I think it’s doing so much harm. It’s keeping us ignorant. It’s creating conflict between people. It is, partly, the cause of war. And I want people to see through that.

But I’m not fully against religion. I think that religion, at its core, is great. The spiritual core of religion is about connection, love, compassion. It’s about good things. Most of the world’s religions have tremendous insights to share—great, profound truths and wisdom that can help us live more joyfully, peacefully, and harmoniously.

But religions also contain so much bullshit that we need to identify. We need to question it—not just personally, but publicly—so that people start waking up, so that we can eventually start really following and embodying the spiritual core that pretty much every major religion teaches.

The post This is Why I Don’t Believe in God appeared first on Sofo Archon.

Consumerism can’t be ethical.

Why? Watch this video to find out.

Transcript

Consumerism can never be ethical because it is inherently exploitative and destructive. However, many of us who care about people and the planet have been led to believe that so-called ethical consumerism is the best solution to our problems.

We are being made to believe that, by buying the right product—the more “ethical” one—we are going to positively affect the market. We are going to positively affect corporations. We are going to positively affect governments.

But that is all bullshit. And it is a bullshit that corporations want us to believe so that they can keep on exploiting us, or so that they can keep on destroying the world—selling their products without us doing anything about the systemic causes of labor exploitation and environmental destruction.

The problem is systemic at its root. Yes, we can make better consumer choices. We can buy the ethical, fair-trade coffee. We can buy the organic fruits. We can buy the sustainable cloth. But all those products involve exploitation. Yes, the people who worked to produce the fair-trade coffee might be paid a little bit better, or they might work in slightly better conditions—but they are still heavily exploited by the corporations that are selling the products at way higher prices than those products were made, in order to make profit.

And those products, although mostly produced in the Global South—where corporations heavily exploit workers—are being sold in the Global North, where people can afford them. Because, you see, “ethical consumerism” targets wealthy people. Wealthy people are the target demographic of corporations that are selling us ethical products. The poor cannot afford them. It is almost impossible for them to afford them. Which shows that the conditions we are living in—conditions produced by the socioeconomic system we are living in—are limiting our choices. In fact, they are limiting the choices of most people so heavily that me or you making the more ethical choice, when it comes to consumption, does not make a big difference.

Now, I’m not saying that we should not try to make the more ethical choice. We should. But to think that this is going to change the world is foolish. It is not going to. There is one exception that I want to quickly mention here, and that is buying plant-based foods. This is the only exception that everyone can do. If we don’t want to see a hundred or more billion land animals being slaughtered and treated tremendously cruelly each and every year, then we can switch to a plant-based diet—which is not more expensive than a meat-based diet.

But when it comes to most of our choices, so-called ethical consumption is just a way to distract us from the real roots of the problems. It’s a way to make us feel morally superior, or to remove our guilt—and thus continue maintaining a sick, violent, exploitative, and destructive system—while thinking that we can create a better system with how we are spending our money; that we can shop our way out of our problems; that we can vote with our wallet.

Another example of how our consumer choices do not really affect the systems that we’re living in is that of buying organic foods. Although it is better for the environment and better for our health, it does not address the policies that make conventional farming possible.

So, if we want to make big, lasting change, we need to address the systems that limit our choices—the systems that coerce most people to participate in exploitative, violent, and destructive practices. And we can do that by learning more about the systems; by understanding how our economy works, which is fundamentally based on endless growth and consumption.

In this system, people have to be constantly consuming. Products have to be constantly bought and sold in the markets. Money has to be circulating all the time. And the more it is, the better. Because this way, companies earn more money, and more people are employed. Therefore, more people can earn a living.

In this system, obviously, we cannot survive without making money. And we can make money only by selling stuff. And the best way to convince people to buy stuff is advertising—which is another thing that limits our choices. If people are, from the day they’re born, constantly being bombarded with advertisements that create artificial needs, how can this system of exploitation and destruction end? It’s impossible.

So we need to read, study, think, and understand how our socioeconomic system works. And then we need to try to change that system so that it does not depend on growth and consumption. We need to create a system wherein people do not take more than Earth can offer us. A system where products are designed to last. A system where people repair things instead of constantly buying new ones. Systems that see people with respect and dignity. Systems where people work together collaboratively, using technology and sharing resources—where one does not profit from the exploitation of someone else. Systems, in other words, that are not profit-driven.

And we can do that. We have the know-how. We have the technology. The Earth is abundant. Everyone could live in it happily and peacefully, in harmony with nature. We just need a change of mind and a change of heart—a change in how we relate to the world. But it is possible. It has been done in small-scale communities. It has been done in pockets of civilization.

So let’s not fall into the trap of “ethical consumerism.” It is bullshit. Yes, try to make better consumption choices as much as you can—but at the same time, try to focus on resolving the root causes of the problems that we are currently faced with.

The post The Lie of Ethical Consumerism appeared first on Sofo Archon.

This is the transcript of a spontaneous talk.

The Olympic Games are way worse than you think, and that’s due to several reasons.

The first one is that, although the Olympic Games are celebrated as a symbol of international unity and sportsmanship, in reality they emphasize division and promote national rivalry.

You see, the athletes that compete in the Olympic Games represent their country. And the medals that they win are tallied by country. So in the Olympics, you essentially have different nations competing against each other via those athletes. So most of the people who are watching the Olympic Games identify with the athletes of their own nation, and they wish that they beat the athletes of other nations. In other words, the Olympic Games reinforce this nationalistic competitive spirit and ethic that underlies most of the conflict and violence and war that we see in the world today.

Now, I’m not against competition per se, especially when it comes to sports, but when you have that nationalistic framework, competition becomes perverted and sick. So where is the international unity that the Olympic Games supposedly promote?

As far as sportsmanship is concerned, the Olympic Games are in a sense quite unfair. The athletes might be fair, the rules of the Games might be fair, but have you ever noticed that the athletes that tend to perform the best in the Olympic Games are those who come from wealthier nations? Now why is that? Is it because those athletes are more talented or genetically superior? Not really. It is because they have access to better facilities, or they receive more funding and have access to more social support systems that athletes from poorer countries lack.

So the outcomes of the Olympic Games are a reflection of the economic disparities that exist between nations. But they also reinforce to some extent those disparities, because the winner athletes and the winner countries tend to receive more fame and more money in turn.

The second biggest problem associated with the Olympic Games is the economic and social costs that they have. To carry out the Olympic Games, tremendous amounts of money have to be spent. Now we are talking about billions of dollars — sometimes three, sometimes five, sometimes ten or even more. Money that could be better spent, that could be spent to actually enrich and benefit humanity, instead of creating this spectacle of competition between nations.

The money spent in the Olympics is wasted money. That money could instead go, let’s say, to poor people in order to help pull them out of poverty. That money could go to education, it could go to healthcare, it could go to sustainable agriculture, it could go to so many other things that could actually make the world a better place to live in. But no! The Olympics are obviously more important.

The third big problem associated with the Olympics, and perhaps the biggest one, is the environmental costs of the Olympic Games. To create the venues and the infrastructure and the security systems, and to transport the athletes and the officials and the spectators to and from the city where the Olympic Games take place, requires so much resource and energy consumption, and results in so much waste and pollution in a world that is already environmentally messed up due to human activity.

This only shows how much of an insane world we are living in. In a sane world, this would not happen. People would not allow this to happen. So it’s important to know about the reality behind the Olympics and to raise awareness about it, as well as to do something to help change it.

The post The Ugly Truth Behind The Olympics appeared first on Sofo Archon.

This is the transcript of a spontaneous talk.

Doctors, who are there to help us stay healthy, actually have a very limited understanding of health and disease.

You see, doctors tend to view the human body as a complex machine, and their job as that of a mechanic who is there to fix that machine when it breaks down or when it stops functioning normally. So when a patient goes to a doctor, the doctor tries to find out what is the part of the patient’s bodily machine that is problematic, and tries to address the problem on that level by fixing that part. And he or she usually does that by giving the patient a pharmaceutical, chemical drug.

That approach is very effective when it comes to treating acute conditions—conditions that are sudden and severe, such as infections or injuries or surgical emergencies. But when it comes to treating chronic conditions, that approach is quite ineffective and often immensely dangerous.

Despite the tremendous medical progress that has been made over the last 100 years or so, chronic conditions such as hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune conditions, and depression are all on the rise and are the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. So why is that? The reason for that is that chronic diseases are multifactorial. They have a lot of different causes, not just biological. Hence, a drug alone cannot treat them.

Let’s say that a patient who is suffering from type 2 diabetes visits a doctor to ask for help. That doctor might provide the patient with chemical drugs that help manage blood sugar levels. Now the patient might find some relief from that, and be able to more or less manage their condition, but they will not be able to get rid of it. They will not be able to heal from that condition because that condition usually involves other factors in its development, such as psychological factors or social factors or factors that have to do with one’s lifestyle and habits.

For instance, a person who is suffering from type 2 diabetes might be obese. A lot of people who suffer from that condition suffer as a result of their obesity. Now, that obesity could be the result of one’s unresolved emotional traumas. It has been documented; a lot of studies have been done that show that people who are traumatized might end up overeating. Another reason why a person might be obese is that that person might come from very low socioeconomic backgrounds. That person might be poor, so poor in fact that they do not have the money to buy healthy foods. Or that person might not be educated enough to know what kind of foods are healthy. So by giving that person a drug, that drug is not going to do much in the long run. The condition will keep on existing and possibly getting worse over time.

To give you another example, let’s say that a person goes to a doctor due to suffering from depression. That doctor might give that person antidepressants, and those antidepressants might provide that person with some temporary relief. But they’re also not going to get rid of depression because depression is also multifactorial. It has more causes than just biological. Depression is often the result of psychological trauma. People who were severely emotionally traumatized tend to experience depression the most. Or a person might be experiencing depression because he or she has to, day in, day out, undergo tremendous pain and stress, working in highly exploitative, inhumane conditions, doing a job that he or she hates—a meaningless job that does not provide that person any joy and purpose in his or her life. How can a drug alone heal such a person? It is impossible.

Now, I’m not saying that drugs are necessarily bad and that they have no role to play in healing. But when they alone are used to heal complex conditions, they are usually doing more harm than good. For example, antidepressants have severe side effects. So for doctors to help their patients heal, they need to stop seeing them as biological machines and start seeing them in their wholeness. In fact, the word wholeness and the word health share a common root: The Greek word ὅλος, which means whole.

So doctors need to attend to and acknowledge all the aspects that make us human. They need to see humans in all of their dimensions—not just the biological one, but also the psychological and the social and the natural or environmental. Only then will they be able to treat chronic diseases. And only then will their patients feel understood and be able to take an active role in their healing.

How things are now, patients feel that they are not being understood by their doctors. They feel that they’re just seen as a set of symptoms or diseases, not as persons. And because of that—because of this lack of empathy between the doctor and the patient—the patients don’t truly feel supported or cared for, which is a crucial element in the healing process. And that, of course, is not just because doctors tend to view the human body as a machine, but also because of the economic conditions that the doctors themselves are living in. Because doctors too are engaged in a system that forces them to be as efficient as possible, to see as many patients as possible, or to generate as much profit as possible.

So most doctors view their patients for just 15 minutes or so every time a patient visits them. So how can they have the time to understand a person’s background, a person’s story? How can they know where that person is coming from? And hence, how can they address the condition that they are suffering from?

Over two and a half thousand years ago, the famous Greek physician Hippocrates said that, for a doctor, it is more important to know what sort of person is suffering from a disease than what sort of disease that person is suffering from. In the past, even just a few decades ago, a lot of doctors used to still visit their patients in their houses and to know their history—to know their family history, to know the tragic events that their patients have gone through, to know the socioeconomic circumstances that they are living in. And this way they were more able to effectively treat their patients. Nowadays, doctors just give their patients drugs and that’s it. The patient does not even understand why they are suffering from the disease that they are suffering from, nor do they take any active role in their healing process. The patient just patiently waits, just ingests a drug and that’s it.

But for healing to happen, especially when it comes to chronic conditions, the patient needs to take an active role in his or her healing process. The patient needs to feel empowered to take action through self-awareness and lifestyle choices to make change in his or her life. So for doctors to be great healers, they need to be educated about the many factors that lead to disease.

Nowadays, most doctors are not aware of those factors. For example, most doctors are not taught at university anything about nutrition. They don’t understand the relationship between nutrition and disease, or they are not taught anything about the impacts of emotional trauma on our health. But I think most importantly, doctors should learn not just how to treat disease, but also how to prevent disease. And for that a holistic approach is required.

But of course, doctors themselves are not enough to significantly improve public health unless wider social and economic changes are being made. As long as people live in a competitive environment where inevitably some people end up in poverty, or where most people are forced to do work that they hate and hence experience stress day in and day out, unless the environment stops being polluted, unless unhealthy foods stop being advertised as good, unless so many things happen, people will remain in a big number unhealthy.

So the change does not have to be focused only on the individuals, but on the systems, on the society, on the culture that we are living in. And now we are living in a sick society, in a sick culture that is inundated with systems that structurally produce disease. So we have to think what changes do we need to make as people, as a collective, to foster an environment that results in healthy individuals and does not produce sickness on a mass scale.

The post What Doctors Get Wrong About Health appeared first on Sofo Archon.

This is the transcript of a spontaneous talk.

A lot of people worship science. They blindly trust and follow it, as if it is God. But the reality is that science is corrupted.

When I speak of “science,” I refer to science as an institution. Because science as a method is great. Despite its flaws, it’s an amazing, systematic way of discovering truth through observation, experimentation, and reasoning. But science as an institution — and when I say “institution,” I mean the scientific organizations, the funding bodies, the research journals, even the scientists themselves — is very, very corrupted.

There are many ways science is being corrupted. One of them is through corporate influence. A lot of corporations invest tremendous amounts of money into hiring scientists to conduct fake research in order to show the world how good their products are. They pay scientists to conduct research through fraudulent tactics — through using what is called p-hacking, for example, which is a way of manipulating the analysis of a study in order to reach the results that they want.

Another tactic that they use is selective publishing. So they might do several studies on a subject, and they might only publish those studies that align with their interests.

Examples of scientific corruption through corporate influence include the tobacco industry, which for decades hired scientists to downplay the risks of cigarette smoking, which did immense harm because people, being misinformed about cigarette smoking, died by the millions smoking cigarettes while thinking that they are not doing any harm to them. Another example includes pharmaceutical companies, which also have conducted a lot of fake research in order to exaggerate the benefits of the products that they are selling.

Yet another way that science is being corrupted is through what is called publication bias. Most of the science that we know about was first published in peer-reviewed journals. But those journals are a very big industry — an industry worth tens of billions of dollars worldwide. And in order for those working for that industry to make a lot of money, they have to find ways to make their journals very appealing to the public. And one of the ways they do so is by only publishing studies that find positive results, thus skewing our understanding of the scientific findings.

Science is also being corrupted is through what in academic circles call publish or perish. People working for academic or research institutions are feeling coerced to publish as many research papers as they can every year. Usually the minimum amount of them is two or three. So by doing that, they sacrifice the quality of their research. And a lot of them have been caught conducting fraudulent research in order to discover findings that can help them advance their career.

Still another problem in science is peer-review bias. A lot of the scientists that review the scientific papers that will or will not be published in scientific journals have their own vested interests. They are often so attached to their views because their career depends on those views. So when they see scientific studies that challenge their views and hence threaten their careers, they don’t approve those studies.

And then you have governments, which fund a lot of the studies — and governments have their own political agendas, so they can control a lot of the research that is being done and how the findings of that research is being interpreted and utilized. And, of course, let’s not forget that governments are being influenced by corporations too. A lot of people in politics are being supported by the money given to them by corporations, so they often do not present us the truth about scientific findings that might go against those corporations. Or they might reveal “truth” that is actually fake.

So, don’t blindly trust science. Now, I’m not saying that you should not trust science at all. I’m saying, “Don’t trust it blindly.” Rather, try to understand it, to understand what the scientific method is, and to try to critically evaluate the scientific papers yourself.

Many of us have been made to believe that we cannot read the scientific papers ourselves. We see scientists as the high priests of society. And we are just irrelevant, foolish, ignorant peasants who cannot read the science ourselves. And we just need to bow down to scientists and blindly accept what they’re telling us. But the truth is, unless a study is on a very complicated and complex subject, it is quite easy to read a research paper if one invests some time in learning how to do so.

The other thing that we need to do is to see if a research paper has any conflicts of interest. If a research paper, for example, is about the benefits of dairy, and that research paper is funded by the dairy industry, then we need to be highly suspicious of such research.

Lastly, it is important to not trust the media. The media misrepresents and oversimplifies scientific research. So much so that sometimes journalists report research findings that are actually the exact opposite of what a scientific study found.

Now, collectively, as a society, there are also things that we need to do to protect science from corruption. One of them is to educate the youth about the scientific method and how one can critically think about it.

We can also advocate for open access and transparent peer-reviewed journals. Nowadays, most journals are behind the payroll, and many of them are not so transparent when it comes to the data and the design and the analysis used in many of the scientific papers contained in them. So if an open access platform was created where everyone could submit a research paper and everyone could have access to it, scientists could read those papers, evaluate them and openly critique them. This way, so many flawed and fraudulent research papers could be easily detected and brought onto light.

Another thing worth advocating for is the pre-registration of studies where scientists explicitly mention how the data of their studies is going to be used before their studies have even started, so that they cannot later on manipulate their data to come to the results that they want.

It’s also important that we encourage the replication of studies. Nowadays, in psychology, social scientists and medicine, about half of the studies that have been published cannot be replicated, which shows that half of the studies might be flawed or fraudulent.

These are only a few ways that we could improve science, but I think that the most important one is by removing money from science. Like, a lot of people say that money needs to be removed from politics or from journalism, in the same way money needs to be removed from science. But of course, to do that, our entire economic system needs to change from its very foundations, because in this system, money rules the world. Money controls pretty much everything, including science.

A lot of the misconduct that is being done by scientists is profit-driven. Scientists conduct fraudulent research because of money, because they want to advance their careers. Corporations are corrupting science because of money — to sell their products. Science is very profit-oriented, very competitive. And unless people stop competing for money, unless people start to work together, to collaborate, to be transparent, to share their findings, for the common good, for the benefit of humanity, science will always remain to one degree or another corrupted. Yes, we can manage science, we can control how corrupted it is, but only up to a certain point. Beyond that, money always finds a way to corrupt pretty much everything.

So again, don’t blindly trust science. Read it, study it, but always critically analyze and evaluate it. And if you want to see science as an institution, improve, do what you can to help deal with the systemic corruption of it.

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This is the transcript of a spontaneous talk.

Are the poor just lazy?

Well, that’s what quite a few people believe. They believe that poor people, in a sense, deserve to live in poverty because they are unmotivated, lazy, and unwilling to work. They prefer to sit around chilling, doing nothing. If people in poverty, such people believe, would work hard, then they would soon be out of poverty. Because, as the saying goes, hard work pays off.

But people who hold such beliefs do not understand how our economic system works. They don’t understand that our economic system is a competitive zero-sum game. They don’t understand that in the competitive game of our economy, some people inevitably win while others lose. They don’t understand that, in fact, the success of some people depends on the failure of others.

They also don’t understand that people who are in poverty actually are those who often work the most.  They are those who often have to engage in two or three different jobs on a daily basis in order to make ends meet, in order to be able to provide for themselves and their families. And if we see things globally, people who live in poorer countries are often the ones who work harder and longer than those of us living in wealthier countries.

Also, people who are living in poverty have a tremendously difficult time getting out of poverty because they cannot compete with the rich. They don’t have the capital and the resources necessary to do so, nor do they have access to education, healthcare, and so on. At least, they don’t have equal access to those things.

So this system is unfair; it is rigged. Therefore, we need to stop blaming poor people for being poor and blame that system, blame the conditions that inevitably produce poverty. But for some people, it is convenient to blame the poor because then they don’t have to feel empathy for the poor, and therefore they don’t have to share in their pain, in their suffering, nor do they have to take any responsibility. They don’t have to, for example, fight against this rigged economic system that rewards them and punishes the poor. No, everything is fine. It’s not the system that is the problem; it’s the poor.

But if we truly care about the poor, if we truly want to see a world where there is no poverty, where people are healthy and happy and peaceful, then we need to be honest with ourselves. And we need to take a look at reality, eye to eye. We need to admit that it’s not the poor that are to blame, but the conditions that result in poverty. We need to stop seeing the poor as a failure, but see our society as a failure. And as part of that society, we need to understand the responsibility that we have for the poverty that exists and do something, take action in whatever way we can to raise awareness about the true causes of poverty and try to make change in order to end it.

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