Ultimately, what’s more important than teaching people nutritional knowledge is teaching people the skills of thinking for themselves. A population of independent thinkers would naturally embrace knowledge of nutritional remedies and natural cures. They would naturally resist the FDA’s pro-drug health care reform propaganda, and they would be able to more readily recognize the value of safe, effective and low-cost natural medicine. The reason why this isn’t happening right now in modern society is obvious when you realize that people are not trained to THINK – think about mercury fillings or vaccines – they are trained to follow orders.

This is especially true with doctors, where the art and craft of medicine has been stolen away from well-meaning physicians by state and federal bureaucrats who wish to centralize all the medical decision making. They want doctors to be robotic enforcers of a centrally-planned medical agenda, not local decision-makers operating with autonomy.

In today’s health care reform debate, for example, all the big players want to dictate to doctors how they should make their decisions — insurance companies, drug companies, state governments and the federal government. Nobody wants to empower doctors with the ability to make reasonable decisions based on human compassion and necessary medical care, because that would cost too much (and it might not involve monopoly-priced pharmaceuticals).

But it isn’t only doctors who are taught to abandon independent thinking: It’s all of us. Through our conformist, dictatorial public education system and incessant televisionprogramming, we are all taught to cast away independent thought and conform with the masses, especially regarding health care reform, mercury fillings and vaccines.

Why we are genetically programmed to follow the herd

This tendency, in fact, is genetically programmed behavior among not just humans, but many other species. It’s actually a shortcut survival strategy for quick decision making. If you’re standing in a forest, for example, and a stampede of 100 people run towards you, screaming in fear, you may not know what they are afraid of, but in the back of your mind, your brain concludes “Well, one hundred people can’t all be wrong. I’m gonna run too!” And you turn around and run in the same direction they are running, oblivious to any reason why.

Following the masses as a decision-making shortcut pays off much of the time, but it misleads us when the masses have been misdirected. And the masses, it turns out, are incredibly easy to misdirect through propaganda, advertising and deliberate disinfo health care reform campaigns.

In fact, I would say that on all the big issues of our modern society — health, economics, the environment, politics, etc. — the masses have been deliberately misdirected to pursue beliefs and actions that serve only the interests of those who covet profits and power. Thus, using the convenient mental shortcut of following the masses in modern society is a sure recipe for engaging in actions that betray your own personal interests. Much of modern advertising, for example, could be accurately described as a health care reform campaign to convince individual consumers to make purchasing decisions that go against their own self interest. (This is especially true in the banking and credit card industries.)

The situation has become so strained that it could even be argued the smartest strategy is to do the OPPOSITE of what the masses are doing. In the stock market, this earns great dividends for many “counter investors” whose profits are extracted from the predictable investment decisions of the easily-swayed masses.

In terms of health care reform, when the masses are lining up for swine flu vaccines, the informed critical thinkers are skipping those lines and heading for the health food stores to stock up on anti-viral herbs and immune-boosting superfoods.

In the grocery stores, while the impressionable masses are committing a slow processed-food suicide by purchasing toxic processed foods, the critical thinkers are heading straight to the fresh produce section and loading up on unpopular, health-enhancing natural foods.

In this way, doing what’s intelligent is very often unpopular. Going with the (ignorant) flow of the masses, however, is easy. It takes no courage, nor thought, nor intelligence to simply do what everybody else is already doing. What really requires some gumption is the pursuit of precisely those well-informed actions that are unpopular with the masses — or even derided by them. “What do you mean you’re not going to get a vaccine shot? Everybody’s getting a vaccine shot!”

False rationality

Many doctors, scientists and medical researchers like to imagine they are the sole protectors of truly rational thought. And yet, upon closer inspection, it turns they merely follow the same “group think” process while hiding behind a scientific-sounding linguistic jargon used as cover. Underneath the mumbo-jumbo, they are the same as the rest of the masses: They go along with what the (scientific) group thinks for no other reason than the group thinks it.

This is the reason why mercury fillings have persisted for so long in modern dentistry, by the way. There’s no sense to putting toxic heavy metals in the mouth of a child, but it’s just been done that way for so long that few dentists bother to question it. Same story with chemotherapy: It makes no sense to poison a patient and harm their vital organs as a “healing therapy,” but it’s been done for so long that it’s simply accepted as medical fact.

The layers of this false rationality go far deeper than you might suspect:

• At one level, some individuals may believe that a false fact is real (such as mercury fillings be safe).

• At another level, there exists the meta-belief that the person’s beliefs are based in fact rather than fiction.

• At a deeper level still, there exists the meta-meta-belief that the person expressing the belief is an individual who exists separate from the other people or elements in the universe. (The myth of the id.)

• At a deeper esoteric level, there rests another persistent that the universe in which all this takes place is “real” and not merely illusion. (The “persistent reality” myth.)

And yet, the person subscribing to the false beliefs about mercury fillings is, in reality, invoking a cascade of falsehoods about what they believe, how they believe it, who is the container of that belief and the very nature of reality itself.

As such myths are arranged in layers, dispelling them is often best accomplished through a layers approach as well:

• First, it may be useful to show them evidence that convincingly disproves their top-level incorrect belief. (At this point, most people will simply reject the contradictory evidence, but some will have their curiosity raised enough to consider more questions…)

• Second, by showing the mistake of their first belief, you can invite them to question the accuracy of their entire belief system. This is essentially inviting them to ask “Wow, how could I have ever believed that before? There must be something wrong with the process I previously used to conclude that was true…”

• If you wish to take it further you can even invite the person to begin to question who the vessel is that held those false beliefs, and you can begin to peel away the false layers of the id and its obsession with separateness and ego.

For those who make it that far, they can then gain a perspective from which belief systems in the material world can be reconstructed or rearranged from the core.

This is all pretty advanced stuff, admittedly. We can’t reasonably expect the masses to transform themselves into self-reflective enlightened beings as a strategy for health care reform. Those who understand these concepts, however, can at the very least strive for a persistent and gradual uplifting of the consciousness of the human race as a worthy pursuit.

Because, let’s face it: At its core, nutritionally illiteracy is not merely about a lack of facts, especially about mercury fillings and vaccines. It’s actually a symptom of theunrealized potential of human consciousness.

With greater consciousness comes deeper independent thought, and with independent thought comes the natural tendency to recognize and value knowledge while casting away falsehoods. This is the true pathway to wisdom, and this is the corridor through which the human race must now pass if it wishes to coexist with Mother Nature as a viable form of life on our planet.

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