The Razor’s Edge: Perilous Pilgrimage of Pursuing Social Justice

Columnists

The Razor’s Edge: Perilous Pilgrimage of Pursuing Social Justice

Paul H. LeMay, Vancouver

Volume 34  Issue 7, 8 & 9 | Posted: October 11, 2020

       Moral principles can sometimes seem like a gossamer-thin veil when compared to the cold hard reality where cash is king. Nowhere is this more apparent than in many of this world’s developing nations where the desperations to find clean water, sufficient food and adequate shelter so easily outstrip many moral constraints. 
       But in Canada, where desperations of this kind are less prevalent, one would think the defence of moral principles should be less of a matter of concern, especially when it comes to folks blessed with a greater measure of material abundance. 

       Moral principles can sometimes seem like a gossamer-thin veil when compared to the cold hard reality where cash is king. Nowhere is this more apparent than in many of this world’s developing nations where the desperations to find clean water, sufficient food and adequate shelter so easily outstrip many moral constraints. 
       But in Canada, where desperations of this kind are less prevalent, one would think the defence of moral principles should be less of a matter of concern, especially when it comes to folks blessed with a greater measure of material abundance. 
       Yet in our more “developed” world, where creature comforts are seen as so many merit badges emblematic of having attained a material version of blessedness among one’s peers, the veil of moral principles that keeps our society on a more virtuous course sometimes seems like a ship’s torn sail, one ripped and tattered by the merciless wind feeding our culture’s ceaseless appetite for material splendour, no matter the cost.
       The situation is captured by an aphorism intent on settling the purpose of modern life once and for all, one that became a bumper-sticker in the 1980s: He who dies with the most toys wins. (According to Wikipedia, the quip was coined by Malcolm Forbes, one of America’s late evangelists of capitalism.)
       Now here comes the hard part: While pointing a critical finger toward the more affluent in our culture has long been easy among morally-inclined progressives, some of Jesus’s teachings actually muddy the water a tad here. Remember “judge not lest ye be judged?” Or “Love Thy Neighbour as Thyself?” Or hardest of all: “Love one’s enemies?”  
       Of course Jesus is also remembered for having toppled the tables of the money changers at the temple in Jerusalem mere days before his crucifixion, and for suggesting that his teachings would bring about divisions between brothers, and for questioning many of the prevailing orthodoxies of his times, including how men treated women. 
       And therein lay the razor’s edge when it comes to pursuing social justice for all, and in proclaiming the truth in any forthright way. Even in the light of George Floyd’s recent death, and the huge anger it unleashed worldwide toward racism, the importance of such paradoxes shouldn’t escape us for when fighting for social justice, it is all too easy to excuse one’s own anger while blaming the perpetrators of a given injustice. 
       I know this temptation only too well when I consider the contempt I feel for the big telecom companies who’ve foisted a scientific fraud on the population at large about the “safety” of their super profitable wireless technology. And after successfully capturing regulatory authorities such as Health Canada and the FDA in the USA, and their political masters years ago so they might “think” along similar non-thinking lines, people are having to face an incredible measure of cognitive dissonance when processing the possibility that we have not been given the full truth on this particular file, and that our governments cannot be trusted when it comes to safeguarding the health and safety of its citizens. 
       For example, long-term 24/7 exposures to WiFi in the workplace, at home, in coffee shops, while out shopping, in hospitals, in many seniors’ care homes, and in schools will in the course of time contribute to, and/or exacerbate a number of ill-health conditions, i.e. heart arrhythmias, dementia, and sleep disruption to name just three (Pall, M. 2018) Here I can attest about the first of these effects from firsthand experience. 
       Not only are the harms currently being caused unconscionable, but with the promise of ten to one hundred times more irradiation to come with 5G, without industry or government first conducting proper non-thermal biological safety testing or obtaining prior informed consent from the wider population, we are not only about to witness the commission of an unprecedented corporate crime against all of humanity, but an all-out assault on all the other living creatures that walk or fly over the Earth. 
       (Among the most vulnerable on this score are pollinating insects and birds owing to their much smaller size.)  Naturally, the foregoing would anger any conscientious person. [Incidentally, according to the Dictionary of Word Origins, the word anger originally meant grief.]
       Yet as a catholic, I also recognize that to foment my own grief/anger, and that of others, represents a hazardous spiritual course as it can feed feelings of hatred – the opposite of love – toward those responsible. And for those disinclined to consider their own measure of responsibility in this emergent crime, when the energy of such feelings is openly directed at them, it can psychologically arouse a whole host of less-than-charitable egoïc defences. After all, imagine what’s at stake? One day, one might have to give up texting one’s friends about the latest gossip or what you had for lunch today. Quelle tragédie!
       Granted, some folks may legitimately feel that concerns over the safety of wireless technology are a little over-blown. After all, they say, government would never allow a product to come to market that was unsafe. While the logic of this view certainly sounds reasonable, it makes a couple of shaky trust assumptions. First it assumes that the safety criteria set by government regulators are solely based on sound science and are beyond the influence of corporate lobbyists. The late Health Canada whistleblower scientist Shiv Chopra and what he revealed in his book Corrupt to the Core showed that that wasn’t always true, as did a recent CBC-aired documentary about the cosmetics industry called Toxic Beauty. Second, it assumes the government’s current safety guidelines are scientifically up-to-date. However many non-corporately funded scientists have for years been decrying that Canada’s current thermal effects only guidelines have been out-of-date for decades, and that they still fail to reflect other equally important non-thermal effects on biology.     
       But that’s not all. The widespread deployment of 5G technology and the massive data streams it would involve, not only raises a whole host of privacy breach concerns, it would also facilitate setting the foundation for what could one day become a corporately-controlled police state. 
       So why aren’t more us connecting these dots? Could it be that our use of near effortless push-button wireless technology actually blinds us to the fact we are collectively feeding the beast of our kind’s own undoing? Or are we just too damned busy to notice what's actually going on beneath the surface?
       While Covid-19 has captured the lion’s share of news attention in recent months, and conspiracy theories abound on almost every topic, including 5G, it is important to be dutiful to the scientific truth in such matters rather than to one’s personal lifestyle preferences. Sadly, most folks have little time to directly investigate the scientific literature on this topic (as I have as a science writer) and by default are forced to rely on other supposedly trustworthy sources. Of course, such reliance comes with its own risks. For example, in recent days I learned of a catholic cleric who had forwarded an e-mail to friends and colleagues asking them to endorse an appeal made by a number of reputable scientists to the Canadian government aimed at halting the deployment of 5G. Yet days later this same cleric apparently recanted his previous science-related views after reading an May 13th article published in The Atlantic, entitled “The Great 5G Conspiracy”. Penned by that magazine’s technology staff writer rather than an independent research scientist, this rather one-sided account of the issue certainly aroused all sorts of conflict of interest questions in me, one being the provenance of The Atlantic’s advertising dollars? Indeed, as a matter of ethical transparency, it is worth noting that scientists writing in genuine peer-reviewed science journal are expected to declare all potential conflicts of interest as part of their submission. But not so with The Atlantic.  
       But here again we come to the razor’s edge of our own discernment processes in the pursuit of social justice… Like any razor, it not only relies on making some very fine distinctions, it relies on maintaining a loving state of mind which can help to both honestly address injustices while also hopefully healing all concerned. 
 
Paul H. LeMay, BA (Psych) is the co-author of two Primal Mind, Primal Games books; and the co-author of two peer-reviewed articles appearing in the scientific press.

   

Paul H. LeMay, Vancouver