Intellectual Honesty @ MindSay

A culture of corruption exists in America that is both extensive and profoundly pervasive. It afflicts all of America’s institutions and is responsible for both the low esteem in which those institutions are held by the American people and this nation’s inability to solve its social and political problems. This culture is so entrenched that it considers itself invulnerable to criticism. When corruption is discovered and publicized, rarely is a mea culpa issued; the publication is usually ignored by the guilty who continue to act as though the discovery were never made. Oddly enough, the low esteem in which the institutions’ are held is rarely transferred to the individuals who manage those institutions; thus, although only 14 percent of the people approve of the Congress as a whole, the same individual Congressmen get elected over and over again and are still addressed and considered as honorable. While the members of a criminal institution are considered criminals, the members of corrupt public institutions are not generally considered to be corrupt even though an institution of any kind can only be corrupted by corrupting its individual members. That fact, perhaps, explains why corrupt public institutions endure and cannot be reformed, and perhaps the only way to reform such institutions is to begin calling the spades that comprise these institutions black.

There is one corrupt institution in America that has so far avoided this disapproval–America’s institutions of higher education, especially their post graduate, their Ph.D. granting, departments. The corruption of these departments is subtle; it is exposed only by the actions of their graduates who are rarely linked to the institutions that granted their degrees. Many of these graduates engage in careers that consist of publishing propaganda in the name of research, and even when their “research” is subjected to devastating critiques, these critiques are completely disregarded as though they never existed. Such disregard displays an almost total degree of intellectual dishonesty and a complete antipathy to truth, and academic institutions that do not instill a devotion to both intellectual honesty and truth in their post-graduate are corrupt to the core, for the traditional purpose of the Ph.D. degree is to educate people for the advancement of knowledge. Without a devotion to intellectual honesty and truth, such advancement is impossible.

I have been a devout critic of such people for some time, and I have not only posted my critiques for public examination, I have always sent courtesy copies to the individuals involved. All of these posts can be read in this blog (http://johnkozy.mindsay.com), but what recently provoked this reaction is an piece written by John C. Goodman (what a misnomer!) that was published in the Dallas Morning News on July 16, 2007 under the headline, “Film buffs may praise Moore’s ‘Sicko,’ but policy buffs can see all its defects.”

Now I am not a defender of Moore or his movie. I have not seen it, and since I’m not much of a movie-goer, I am not likely to see it. But one doesn’t need to see or even know anything about the movie to understand how nonsensical Mr. Goodman piece is. Right from the start, in the second paragraph to be exact, he locks himself into a contradiction. He writes, “Sicko isn’t a movie about health care and how to fix it. It is a one-sided attempt to drive a very specific agenda–single-payer, government-run health care.” But John, single-payer, government-run health care is proposed as a way of fixing our broken health care system. So if the movie is about single-payer, government-run health care, it is about health care and how to fix it; it can’t be any other way.

But it’s Mr. Goodman’s arrogance that is grating. He writes, “A majority of movie reviewers and columnists have praised Mr. Moore’s filmmaking and lauded him for “raising the important questions. The problem is, few of them can speak to the policy issues. . . .”  And then, “Why . . . is national health insurance in other countries as popular as Mr. Moore says it is? One reason is that people do not realize how much they pay for it in taxes.” Now how could Mr. Goodman know that either of these statements is true? What evidence could he ever bring to bear to support them? Has he tested people on their knowledge of policy issues? Has he objectively surveyed the citizens of other countries to determine what their knowledge of where their tax contributions go? Of course not. Mr. Goodman’s claims are the claims of a scoundrel. He also writes, “If you have never tried to see a doctor in Britain or Canada, you might even believe it.” Well, how many times has Mr. Goodman tried to see a doctor in these countries? Is his knowledge of the national healthcare systems of these countries based on personal experience or hearsay? These statements and others are not only unsubstantiated claims, many of them are unsubstantiatable.

But what’s even worse, the criticisms he levels at the healthcare systems of these countries apply even more so to the American system.

He says that in Britain, about 1,000,000 are on waiting lists, in Canada, more than 876,000, and in New Zealand, more than 90,000. But he neglects to point out that in America more than 47,000,000 can’t even put their names on a waiting list. Put these numbers in a list and compare them:

1,000,000

876,000

90,000

47,000,000

So even if his numbers are true, the criticism is absurd. And then he writes, “In fact, people in other countries often have to pay out of pocket for care that has been denied them by the government.” This claim may very well be true, but in America, the insured have to pay out of pocket even for insured procedures. Hasn’t Mr. Goodman ever heard of co-pays and partially covered procedures. An American with health insurance goes into a hospital for even a minor procedure and comes out owing thousands of dollars on top of what his insurance has paid. That never happens to a Canadian or Britain or a New Zealander.

The real “in fact” is that Mr. Goodman is a shill for a corrupt, inefficient, and mediocre healthcare system. Within the past year, the New England Journal of Medicine published a piece showing that Americans of all income levels are being subjected to sub-par medical care and we’re paying more for it, as much as one and a half times more, than the people in any of the countries whose healthcare systems Mr. Goodman criticizes.

And there is example in Mr. Goodman’s piece that utterly baffles me. , “Why . . . is national health insurance in other countries as popular as Mr. Moore says it is? . . . A third reason is that most people are healthy.” Why so, I wonder? Is it because they have better healthcare?

Finally, the worst thing about Mr. Goodman’s piece is that not an iota of it is original. Robert Weissman has a piece on the web at http://www.counterpunch.org/weissman07182007.html titled “More Humane and More Efficient National Health Insurance” which contains the following paragraphs:

“The health insurance industry and its allies have worked hard to respond to SiCKO by promulgating a series of deceptions. It's awfully hard to defend the current U.S. system, so their emphasis is on criticizing other countries' healthcare systems.

They have a lot of practice at this stuff. Get on a call with people like Sarah Berk of Health Care America and Sally Pipes and John Graham of the Pacific Research Institute, and they will compellingly recite three key misleading arguments:

    * People in other countries have to suffer through long waiting periods before seeing a doctor or getting treatment.

    * National health plans ration care.

"Government-controlled healthcare" or "government monopoly healthcare" is inherently of inferior quality.”

Mr. Goodman not only lacks a devotion to intellectual honesty and truth, he even has to copy other people’s stuff. He is a spade that surely should be called black.

Intellectual Dishonesty—Bane of the American Intellect

Much is disseminated about the prevalence of dishonesty in America: dishonesty in advertising (often euphemistically called puffery), dishonesty is politics, dishonesty in accounting, dishonest financial planners, counterfeit or pirated products, plagiarism, even cheating in the classroom. But there is one kind of dishonesty that is rarely mentioned—intellectual dishonesty, which is not only prevalent, it is subversive.

What is intellectual honesty? It is an attribute of scholars and scientists that is usually defined as the willingness to follow an argument or evidence wherever it leads, regardless of one’s personal inclinations. As such, it is usually associated with researchers.

The word, ‘research,’ when used by discriminating writers, has a distinct meaning. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Synonyms places the word into the following group of words with similar but not identical meanings: inquiry, inquisition, investigation, inquest, and probe. It states that these words “are here compared as meaning a search for truth, knowledge, or information. The meanings of these words, while similar, differ in important ways. For instance, “probe . . . applies to an investigation that searches deeply and extensively with the intent to detect wrongdoing. . . .” while “research . . . is restricted to inquiries or investigations carried on . . . especially for the sake of uncovering new knowledge, or getting at the facts when these are not known, or of discovering laws of nature. . . .”

America is cursed with a lot of entities that pass themselves off as research institutes, most of which were founded to propagate a specific philosophical, religious, political, or economic view. The word “research,” when applied to these institutes is a misuse of language that amounts to prevarication, dishonesty in every sense. One cannot be engaged in “uncovering new knowledge, or getting at the facts when these are not known, or of discovering laws of nature” if the thesis to be advocated is assumed to be known from the beginning. What these institutes do is not research.

These institutions, if correct usage be applied, are described by a different group of words: publicity, propaganda, promotion, and ballyhoo. We all know what publicity is, and we may even think we know what propaganda is. But some knowledge of this term’s history is revealing. “It was originally used as a short term for the Congregation for the Propagation of Faith,” which is a Papal department. Its purpose was to convince people to accept the absolute truth of Christianity regardless of any evidence or argument to the contrary. In time, “the term came to be applied to the concerted or systematic efforts of any group that tries to convert others to its way of thinking,” which, of course, is exactly what these prevaricating institutes do. If they were named correctly, i.e., in accordance with recognized standard English usage, they would properly be called Propaganda Pushers.

The insidious aspect of these institutes is their abject intellectual dishonesty. Like any religious institution that holds “the absolute truth,” the people in these institutes reject any evidence to the contrary, not by argument, but by merely ignoring it. In that way, they can never be dissuaded. They are not merely liars, not merely inveterate liars, but absolute liars. The only way these institutes can be stopped is to label them honestly, i.e., by referring to them as propagandists.

The list of such institutes is long; to list them is not practical. However, whenever you come across an article or news release attributed to an institute, before believing its content, go to http://www.prwatch.org/ and search for the institute by name. Prwatch will tell you if the institute in question was established to promote a specific point of view. Exercise a hefty degree of skepticism when reading such articles and news releases.